by West Ambrose
I.
There’s a little story on my tongue. It touches men and burns them. touches. dances. twirls a cigarette and laughs. There is no time for being good, it begins. It begins in the dark. It drinks and craves and slashes through greasy, hot blood. the flood of bitter. the bitter reborn. the rebirth of The David into Minotaur. marble to magma. human to beast. red twine bound around ankles before The Flood. There’s a historical inaccuracy to destruction. There’s a destruction that the body inevitably craves. It begins in the dark and it ends with the dark. It begins with the dark and sings with the dark and craves the dark until its throat is raw and sanctified. It begins with the dark. It’s the blazing Dark, electrified.
II.
This is what a kiss means; the wound submerges the wound. the wound is gaping. the wound is a gape. The wound analyzes itself; blister, bludgeon, burgeon. The wound wrestles amidst gauze and uncovers itself. The wound bleeds, begs, and beheads the attempted binding. The wound and the gauze lay between sheets. The tourniquet is solid gold. It evaporates at the press of finger tips. There’s no time left for being good. There’s the sting of spilling. The spilling of an arabesque into pech. The flayed rib of a tsunami to unfurl. The dance of ascesis into sybaritic. The symbiosis of being un(w)hole.
III.
Here’s to always being on the run. Here’s to being the imagined scenario real people touch once or twice and then give up on all together. Here’s to dying in a hail of bullets and waking up somewhere centripetally warm. Here’s to rejecting what’s known for what’s felt (and drunk and swallowed from Beyond). Here’s to the dagger and the lamb. Here’s to isolation in its most divine form. Here to the void and the vicissitude and the swinging pendulum of a voice that disobeys. Here’s to the night where what you’ve always been taught to slay, lays its head on your chest and prays.
West Ambrose is a scrivener and performing artist. Check out his ever queer works at westofcanon.com. If you want anything published in The HLK quarterly or The Crow’s Nest, just ring for the masthead, and let them know.
Emerge Literary Journal 