To The Ballroom, Bled

Title art by Robin Isely. Click image to visit his studio.

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Loreena McKennitt “The Old Ways”

Under sentient eye of the Raven
The maiden arose from her chamber
A vacant arrangement of wasted carnations of nameless persuasion
Left mostly by strangers
In passing
Glancing the leaves at her feet out of season
Imparting the reason of chance to the breeze
A waltz for the night to the corpses’ delight
From vaults She invited an audience appeased
To see her dancing

I had died so many times for She
This became a game we played
Thus, we chose to name it hide and seek
I would count up to a hundred no less
Under pressing duress not to peek
She would then find a spot not hot but cold
And hope that the floorboards don’t creak
Ever baroque was the air of mystique
And bespoke of declared romantique
Bleak were the shadows that narrowed my search
Only this time, I found her in pride of place perched

With lips undressed
She bled a kiss
Then fed upon my severed wrist
My body’s tears sincerely wept
Four hundred years of retrospect
To slake a thirst
In wake of curse
For centuries She kept
To break the bind of faith confined to sentence shaped by space and time
For She had writhed beneath a sheath of topsoil, clay and lime
Every single night She reawakened

Under sentient eye of the Raven
We danced to the red moon’s delight
Bled together
In tether of arteries severed
Each masterpiece bled through the black heart of never
Then back to forever in rapturous twine
To feast on the rind of the handsomest swine
This decadent banquet a spread for dead eyes
Bled from held hands that fed faith to the blind
To break the bind nowise confined to sentence shaped by space and time
To live
To die
To reunite
Glancing the leaves at our feet out of season
Imparting the reason of chance to the breeze
Immortal our portal to red moon’s delight
Courting a waltz for the night