Present

Corvid dreams, premonition caws and crows, oneiromancy prophecy in the ilk of tragic Cassandra, and fate can never change even though time flows as a tree, genie perched upon the fulcrum, childlike in his gleeful cruelty. The candied eggs like bullets – skin shed.

And they keep calling me Echis, the snake with sharp scales, soulmate of the beached shark. Hungry, metal lining stomach. Flailing, Rota Fortuna toppled me over and ground me beneath its gears. I am eternity looping, tragedy and history – Hansel and Gretel hand in hand – repeating itself without end.

One day I shall fly; serpentine with my sister the lightning, the one that killed me many years ago. Many, many years. But I will always forgive her, whether because of love or dew-glazed strings or even that I am poison that I swallow down. Horns forming and war blows his dulcet tones.

Although we are all born from dark waters, tepid fortunes, they see me as ice. I am smoke incarnate, and crave a shell for my waning soul. Ephemeral, they do not believe that I can feel love, or indeed anything but the winds that I reluctantly allow to bear me away for, while they are the only thing that I despise – and I as am them – they are the only thing I know. While they do not give me form, with skeletal fingers possessing of them they craft for me planes and contours.

Vulnerable.

To plotting mechanisms.

I seek them out desperately, but save for plastic facsimiles never find them.

And resplendent green limns by stretching shadow, my outline hidden in the cracks of my constructed façade. Peroxide runs through the corridors of the organic labyrinth, and nitrates make me cry heavy fogs yellow and blue in the Nox.