however bent and badly drawn; malis

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife In the time that she’s grown, birthed children, loved, what has he done? He has drifted and so little else. Fleeting conversations that ended as soon as they began. He has no children, no lovers (there had been the woman, the one who stripped his power, and he might have loved her, but he has not seen her in many years, so all those mights are just that – might). He could disappear tomorrow and no one would mourn it, and though this thought pains him, in a distant way, he does not focus on it overmuch. She does not match his greeting, but she does look upon him. He sees the change in her eyes, the new hardness there, the gravity of hardship that’s been bestowed upon her since they last met. He wonders what’s reflected in his own eyes – while there’s been no real happiness, there’s been no particular despair, either, just the aching cyclical nature of his near-madness. Instead, she asks a question – an impossible one, really. Because even before the events took place, wasn’t he shaped by his father? Knees worn bare from kneeling in prayer, and prayers themselves that were half-remembered, spoken with the faith of a boy who had known no other choice. (A boy who had not known the particular wrongness of his father’s head lain across his back, for too long, and the sharp inhale when he withdrew.) “The choices were never mine,” he says, and this is a coward’s response, as if he does not bear any responsibility for his fate. He considers this, too late. “Even as a boy,” he says, “I was told what to do, how to act. I don’t know how to exist without such things.” Coward. He might have glimpsed bravery, once, but that was in another world. Another delusion. sleaze cancer x garbage