Mountainside Brides

Scorned Brides of the Mountainside

The mist came rolling in

And we knew

The brides had come to stay.

Wounded women

Diaphanous and transient

Creeping through the fern trees

The veiled brides of the mountainside

They lay low

Biding their time

Seven sisters they were

Some widowed, some spurned

They have come here

To mourn their beloveds,

To make a funeralsite of the mountainside,

To lay ruin to their dreams

Bereaved and betrayed

They lie hysterical across the mountainside

Fawning, fainting

Arching their backs

In physical catastrophe

Heavy with despair

They breathe their darkness

And dormant bitterness

And heave sighs from the sky

They are the mist that clings to the trees

And rises perniciously from the valley

They are the biting wind that howls

The eldest

The stoic spurned

Long ago jilted,

Crawls through the crags

And sequesters in a dank crevice

Like some troll or beast

Plotting her revenge

For one thousand bitter years

The youngest sister

Newly widowed

Weeps soft secret tears

Bereaved for her passed love

Decomposing

She has carried his corpse to this funeral site

And makes a rite of his scattered bones

She will lay with them once more.

She cuts off her golden locks

Weaves them through his hair to create a wreath

They scatter their rings

The sisters, seven

Their golden jewels they leave to the mountainside

Feeding the darkness, the mould,

The growing hunger of the damp

It clings to the rocks as moss

Fertile in its distress

They weave their dresses,

Their white veils

And laced matrimonial finery

Through the trees

Decorating the mountainside

With morbid mist

But they wont stay long

A winter’s season

Or a cold spring morning

They’ll continue to walk

Barefoot and baleful

To haunt another valley

To occupy another mountainside

With malignant mist

a chair

(I set myself a fiction challenge to write about fears)

My bones creak under the weight of my abandoned dreams
I sit in a chair in my kitchen.
it stinks of leather and a heady fragrance of fear.
we are stoic companions
when I lower myself into its arms, it sighs and sags.
It was always meant to do this, to be this. It was created for this moment. To envelop my apathy. To cradle me into endless evenings and endless bottles of wine, endless operas, and the stale and bitter taste of loneliness that I impose on myself.
I fulfill the purpose of the chair.

But for me, it is a symbol of my withering purpose. Long ago turned to embers, to crumbling charcoal. Drained with the bottles of wine, scratched and jumpy like my records. Bitter and dormant like my dreams.

I cant even remember what frightened me so. What paralysed me. How it had such power over me.
how when they called to me softly and fervently in the night, I stayed there in that chair. I furrowed my brow, and tapped my pen and stayed there and dreamt of dreaming.

I created a house around me, bricks and mortar of limitations. I shut people out. People who should have inspired me, I shut out because they represented all I could not be. I even avoided anyone else because they represented the mediocrity I was so afraid of turning into. Now I long for the comfort of ignorant mediocrity. My mediocrity raves and rots inside of me. as I rave and rot in this life, in this chair.
I could not even find their perspective, that comfortable acceptance of a notion of average. I could not impose it on myself or build it within myself if I tried.
If my life depended on it.
And it does.

I became bitter. Secluded.

I used to drink in bars. A silent figure, both familiar and stray. I would catch the eye of someone nascent and dreamy and dark around the edges. I could see them take a deep, staggered breath with anticipation and a deep lust for what i know I exuded. Me with my artistic nonchalance. I would walk up to them and take them silently by the hand and we would leave. I could hear their hearts beating out their chest for the thrill. They were always happy to talk about themselves in cloying excess. Their boyfriends, their girlfriends, their fucking creative desires. I would sit silently, with watching eyes.  People lusted me, people wanted to love me and engage with me. They strangely sought my burdening passion, my desperate self imposed seclusion. We would search eachothers bodies with desperate hands. They would search me for whatever they were mislead to believe I had inherent in me, I would search them for what they saw in me. We would fuck silently, communicating solemnly with our eyes, our hands, our bodies. And then late into the night, even they slept fervently, I would sit furiously, brooding, sucking deep on a cigarette watching the rise and fall of their ribs.
Inside that chest was something alive. Something fresh and fierce.

And then even fucking became too much of a creative burden. I could no longer communicate even desperation to my lovers. Because I was not even sure if that was real anymore. I turned them away.

I laugh to myself. Bitterly. I empty the bottle of wine. It stains my lips, it stings my teeth. I turn over my record and I capitulate into my chair.