VANITAS ― Poetry

iv.

he carves me into his skin.

he carves me into his skin

so deeply and perfectly I can never come out.

I'm on the rickety edge of every one of his knives.

I'm the Latin words for all of his curses, forgivable or not, 

words he pronounces but doesn't know the meaning of.

I crawl up his wounds up to his heart.

I don't knock on the door. I rip apart its cage,

I slip through the blood, I–

I'm in his heartbeats more than he is.

I'm in each one of his thoughts

I arrive before he thinks them and I leave

after he speaks them,

after he crushes them with lips of velvet

that brush against my fickle conscience

he holds me hostage against my own ethics

every tenet in my mind speaks with his mermaid voice

(all the sailors in the sea have drowned because of him)

my moral compass doesn't point anywhere that's not him

and so I am left adrift in a deep, tumultuous ocean

not knowing whether I'm the wrecked ship

or the iceberg that made it sink

tom marvolo riddle is

an instigator of logos

a destroyer of ethos

and a murderer of pathos.

I question him, for he is my philosophy.

but I still follow him, for he is

the only religion I learned how to pray to.

tom marvolo riddle is

a tamer of the wild. the foretaste to my natural disaster.

the foreplay before, during and after the killing.

an effect with no cause. an avid performer of Murphy's Law,

and the only exception to Newton's Laws of motion

for when he drops hearts, minds, even souls,

they don't fall towards the center of Earth

but towards the black holes he carries

in the pockets of his ironed robes.

he extends the knife to me and

I wrap my hand around his and help him bury it

a little deeper, a little more, a little softer.

I like the blood when it covers our hands

for it makes them the same shade

carnage is the only stance of life in which we are the same

the only room of love in which we can dance at even pace