I'm a Monster, Break Me
He screams at the scavenger in fury.
He howls like a dark prince robbed of his birthright.
His eyes shine mad bright.
She fires up lightsaber to fend off her nemesis.
They fight, clashing sabers, grunting, baring their teeth.
You're a monster, Rey yells in Kylo's face, her spit spraying him.
He flinches not then, not ever, in the face of her rage.
I'm a monster, he shouts back. Break me.
Does he say it or simply slide it through his mind right into hers?
Neatly, without a conscious thought?
Does it hover in space around them, like all things seen and unseen?
Someone turned him; someone hates him.
Someone pulled her; someone loves her.
They fight for ascendency, for monster, for broken one
Each both of each.
Just another in a series of battles they fight
As they chase each other through the galaxy.
Rey always knows where Kylo lays his head at night, if indeed he sleeps.
And he knows if she finds a spot to curl up.
Or if she scratches the wall, singing to herself, to mark another night's passing.
Every so often, they seek each other to skirmish once more,
To remind themselves of their monstrosity,
Of their own separate breaking points.
The mixture of abiding love and dismal hate.
Each time they meet, they grapple like their lives depend on it,
And end up pulling back.
This time is no different.
Is it?
They are on yet another world,
Ships parked near each other,
Sweating, shouting at each other.
Slicing, ducking, running, slashing, kicking.
Break me, he screams out again. I'm a monster.
She beats him with saber and stick.
The saber burns, sizzles him, makes him fall back in agonies.
But the stick, that stick, that stout staff he fears,
So sick and bone-weary from the way it hits him,
once, twice, three times.
He falls, exhausted, crying.
She rises above him.
And then, and then.
She breathes screaming, screaming life into him.
With each dark blow.
And he can feel again.
He breaks and he is whole.
Your Monster Husband
Waits, all red-eyed, with flashes and grunts amid the trees outside your-his-house.
He lurks there, a black-haired hulk, a shadow.
The trees creak a song of fear while he waits for you.
You open the door.
He lopes inside to stand in the shadows so you won't see him.
Beautiful.
He scares himself and others.
Usually not you.
You turn down kitchen lights to a glow from burners alight.
He slides into a seat and growls soft, then louder.
The raw meat he sniffs and then rips.
Later, he rests on the floor, soft shaggy head in your lap.
With pointed teeth nipping your leg, just a scratch and a lick.
Perhaps two.
A little taste of blood for his nourishment.
He loves you.
He raises amber eyes and asks silently for more.
Teeth in your thigh, long finger between your legs.
You groan together as wife and beast.
Your Hideous Thing
Is a wondrous delight of grinning flesh and open mouth.
He loves you so much he could eat you plain with no salt, no sugar, no crispy coating.
And here he is, awake, staring, determined to wake you with sharp edges and feast upon you
Until you scream.
In love? Who knows?
Really.
It's an honest question never settled in the brutality of hope that tomorrow will be better.
What does it take to love him and take his leather-clad hand on your throat?
Your Evil Creep
lies across the entrance to your bedroom door, you realize
He's not always a devil
Except that he is today and perhaps tomorrow.
Always happy to see you trip over him.
You swoon at his feet, time and again.
You love him.
And invite him in when he asks to see you fall down.
You jerk with the rawness of loving evil.
Drop yourself into his thick arms.
He comes out of nowhere with haunted eyes
Watching you collapse again and again.
The Blue Butterfly
It hovered beside her, though she didn't know why.
When she was young, very young.
It floated up one day before she knew who she was.
And she must have swallowed it because it was always there
Fluttering around inside her.
Sweet butterfly, all fuzzy cobalt and azure.
It beat its soft wings against her heart.
Tiny feathers tickled inside her and made her laugh.
She rubbed her nose, twitching away the sensation.
But it would not leave and the laughter stayed.
Until, one day, those wings drooped and stilled.
It hung there but not all there.
She knew it slowly breathed inside
And quietly slid into the background.
The day she couldn't remember.
(Bits and pieces trembled in her dreams sometimes.
She woke screaming.)
That day the butterfly shielded her mind,
With wings of gentle teal and palest blue.
She couldn't remember what happened.
When she woke, she knew nothing but that she lived.
Somewhere. Nowhere.
The small monarch floated softly, quietly, for a moment.
Then a door scraped open somewhere.
She felt a beating fear, his need to fly to her.
Terror in her gut replaced the soft fluttering of wings.
Hatred roared through her-not hers, not hers-and she cried out.
Someone was hurt, someone stopped flying,
Someone wounded deeply.
A great pressure built and then
with a slow sickly pop,
It was gone.
It was all gone.
No background hum, no feathery movements.
Just emptiness.
She soon got used to his absence and forgot the other existence,
The one in which laughter came to her
And she felt cool in the hot air
And warm in the frozen sand.
She named herself and found a place,
Pieced together enough to sustain a living
With hot dirt and sweeping hunger.
Later, much later, when her life caught up to her,
A droid, a man, an old ship.
She-
She felt something.
She ran from it
Or to it?
Something familiar.
But tarred, sticky, and unable to float
Unable to fly
Unable to flutter inside her.
It squatted bitter and wretched
Cyanide blue
Dull and washed out
Pale, mineral, flat
When she woke strapped up to a chair,
She tasted juniper, pointed pine needles and thick blue chalk.
He who had given her cool refreshment
Now brought pain.
She stared.
He found his way in through a crack in her consciousness
That he pushed wider and wider
While she saw sapphire pinpricks behind her eyes.
She knew,
Somehow recognized the slick cobalt glass,
Bubbles that held him so still, pinned, perhaps dead.
Though he felt darker blue, indigo, almost black,
He was there, screaming at her
For help that never came.
She tried to smash the dark glass, to burst those clear frozen bubbles.
But he stared, hard, long, trying to breathe,
As if he began to remember who she was,
Knowing that he'd been with her all those sad years
Until he couldn't fly, couldn't float, couldn't move a feather of his wings.
Until she healed him.
Crying his name, knowing him so deeply
So deeply when he did not know himself.
And he stared, drenched, aching, wishing for her to finish him.
Or love him.
Maybe both.
Monarch and dusty flower,
Cerulean, yellow, rust,
Flutter and rest
Together