In Extremis       Notions of evil bury us deep in views of clouds the same as you. A hot rain of futility weeps for a week rehearsing the scarlet wound. No one sees the fury marring flesh. I am lit from within perfumed with burning vapor. I beat my head distractedly without resurrecting consolation. None prop us up in the furnace of hell's fairytale. The empire reaches black and repeated, warm as blood. Tomorrow finds us grey as grief stubbornly stealing rapture. The earth inverts while I am absent, wearing out the cold moon's obedient grimace like tired eyes in the dark. Poising madness with sanity, armies stand resolute. Mysterious accomplices are everywhere to join the siege: there is no coming to terms with the trespass of malice.   The white lips of stress stretch taut over skin, stirring pools of drowned nerves, cool as grudges we long to leave under the sea. A dreaming skull's cage opens and closes: hello, goodbye, yearning to dismember the past. The whispering clock will not abandon this world beyond ours, the after-life of a heart of black leaves where we voyage now. The future chimes mechanic wishes left unspoken, fluent on the wind. I am terrified by this dark place, yet accustomed to the conjuring moods of irrevocable fate and dread, bearing witness to the workings of human folly.   The naked girl in the mirror escapes the tarnished crucifix where nothing burns. Bodies of saints serve only one master. These candles are the curse of Canaan; slave of slaves, suckling whores, god of graves feasting on strange delights. Madonna nails the hand of exile to bleeding feet lost for all eternity. We are wronged by an ancient curse, proud and victorious, dissecting bodies and breaking bones whose dull relics are the ghost of us rattling on the tongue. I breathe warrior songs in guilty joy, pursued by wounded and timid wing thirsty for my undoing. Promise to forget the devil's word that we heard. This could be fatal: unequal fights annihilate the decades it takes to feed each maniac. A gullible head feeds them honey, yet they are too hungry for anything but animosity. An angry clambering has murdered my heaven and set them free.   The end of everything startles me still, facing dark doorways of lover's gestures. The pale victim's eye empty of all thought unravels your image. You shrink so small that you would forget me, until there is nothing between us anymore. You terrible thing, can you do without me? I could vanish in a day, my grieving black gown exiting loneliness and sorrow, yearning extinction. I am what is lacking in me, sucking a vulnerable wound between crippled teeth. How long will this heart wear shadow's eyesore confounded by love? God knows the origin of the unknown land we'll meet. We depart to walk in wilderness, another way than death, never taking a tedious risk, to lose what we shall not find. We are bound by the secrets we share and the end that betrays us here.       ©2007 Alexis Child