darling everything's on fire, Pollock

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

It is music to his ears – string quartets and grand symphonies – the sound of her ‘hello’ in this place. It mixes with a many; 
Multitudes of whispers he had caught in secret as a young man, lewd and furtive, as he hid in the shadows like a worm in mud.
Orchestral  ‘hellos’ spoken softly, searchingly. But never searching for him. He is a nasty surprise.
Discord  – thunderous percussion – the kinds of noises that only come in the most intimate of moments; pleasure and pain.

Hallelujah choruses.

He turns to her, his horns pulling away from the wound he has furrowed in the soft birch skin, the silence filled with nothing but his deep breathing and her music. It is a horrible thing to interrupt; he knows his voice will be the thing that stuns the beauty from the air, like yelling at the top of your lungs into night air.
Pollock is no stranger to being the thing that puts quietude down.

He laps it up first. Sips deep of it and feasts until he is full, leaving her standing in the stains of his indulgence – give him but a moment – slipping, softly, closer to her, his cleft, dextrous toes hugging the earth here like an old friend. She is vulnerable. But, of course, she has the pleasure of meeting one of the deluded – one of the egotists. Everyone is prey, to him. Everyone is as senseless as newborn rabbits when they come to him – Pale Death; demi-god – naked and supine. 

His.

“Hello,” he echos, gravelly and stern, his hard, black eyes examining that layer of grisly skin, puckered over where her eyes should be. Too easy. He need not even taste the invisibility – he does, anyway, flickering in and out, like old times, with each passing he steps closer. Closer, till he can better smell her, and doubtless, she him. She, smells like many winds and it is all the same to him. He smells, perhaps, most like old dust and brine.
He can see time’s heavy strokes on her. It annoys him, a little, to think of all the claws that might have sunk to these bones, before him; when he sees the scarring, peeking modestly from behind her hair, he wonders how different she will be from the soft kittens that have mewled him out from the darkness before.

Too easy.

He shifts his weight, leaning against an old, weather-worn tree, considering what he has found today;

“Is it scary, not being able to see?”

He runs his tongue over his crackling lips, the agitated soldiers of fear marching restlessly in his mind, baying for her blood.

the gift-giver