By Allister Nelson


“Hope is a bird that cuts its wings,” Lucifer told me when I was but a gentle flower, yet no thorns abrush my cheeks.

He lifted me high, so high I could fall from the pinnacle to the dust, then let me go, pinions clipped.

I fell, and hosannas of leaves sprouted from my carapace, tangling vines off the cliff in Paradise. I was ten, and he was eternity, and as we hung suspended in a web of my roses, the angel of illumination touched the petals that clung

In the early morning mist

To my agape form

And he crushed them to ribs of ink.

“Never gaze covetously upon one you would lose so easily – a stray heart is worthless to God,” he said, and I dangled from his collarbone, a violet of early sighs.

When I was fourteen, I bled in his hands, a slit neck lambling – I had become beast after flowers in time – and he cupped the menses and drank, all unruly like Satan at Rachel’s well.

We kissed, then, in estrus, under moonlight, sin the taste of rusted iron. There was a feral look in his eye, like the sorrows of Satan

And Hell was on my mind, and he said:

“Love is the loneliest thing.”

When I was eighteen, he gave me his heart.

I ate it, pith and stone, an apple of demise, I the apple of his eyes. The rosy blush of Lucifer’s aorta were tender morsels.

I have not born since then.

Yesterday, I kissed the moon under his watchful Venusian eyes. When I was nineteen, I burned the house down in the Devil’s name, leaving ash at mouth and silken fragments of what happens to the left behind.

I followed him up mountains, I swam in boiling seas with his Leviathan. Timbrels of Moloch and lutes of Samael called, but I never faltered. And when Peter opened the gates to Yeshua’s pearly feet, in the lap of God, I mourned my Mourning Rose.

So, I cast myself out of Heaven, and I fell

I fell

I fell.

Now, I am still searching. Twenty-six came with rejuvenation, plucked bones, and wretched hells. To make of him a tailor of souls, a fashioner of artifice of grand design. A lover without omens, a steak of rarest caliber –

I eat my gods, after all, Eve always sucked at his zuhama, and if I were his heart

It would be

A dreadful

Thing.

Now, weightless, I circumvent all reason. Poetry left long ago. The Void is a maw agape, licking us up together, Lucifer and I – the Prodigal Sun and the Wayward Daughter. What to make of a clusterfuck, of an Adam ha Belial and his scion Sin? Cavorting and fucking in wolf dens, hale and old.

The edges run red, and the meadows are bleeding. I have seen nothing but dead birds for ten months.

So, I’ll leave this epigraph to his next one: his next pray. His next worshipper.

Gods eat those they love.

And he

Will devour

You

Too.