hold me down [any]

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

In another incarnation of himself, he would have never gone to her.

As a boy her age, he would have stayed away purely out of self-preservation; as a young man he would have found her somewhere quiet with her mother and watched from distant transparency to feed the aching hunger of his ire. If he could not rid himself of it, he could let it grow fat and make him something. Something as opposed to nothing.
Defined by more than just the ghosts of his abuse.

In another incarnation of himself.

Now the golden stallion stands in dull green shade and watches her, unhidden. Baring the hard angles of his hips and shoulders, the enormous curved horns and the sickeningly limp and dirty wing, dragging at his side in the slush and mud. He watches her slip in and out, and he is reminded of himself. Except, he had taken to it completely whilst still in his slick bed of afterbirth and pine needles – natural, as in her. But he had been given one gift at birth nestled alongside the jeers: his anonymity, under his direction with impossible readiness. Because he had needed it, perhaps more than she. The little, broken boy had needed it.

The great gift-giver needs it, but only to feel the cheap thrill of the stalk; only when, in moments of regression, he remembers who he was before he found himself transformed and pink, and he needs to recede and to watch. He shifts his weight away from his bad right hind, and he imagines that this will be like watching nestlings picked from their homes by deer looking to bolster their antler growth – too strange to look away from, too sick and too strange. But the strangers around her are weak, and he is sure they would guard her frail body with their own. No harm will come to her here, or at least, it would not be easy. She is a lucky little bird,

Pollock watches the bright girl tuck herself into the edge of the Meadow, like a fawn waiting for her mother to come collect her. But this fawn is lost, or otherwise too stupid in youth. She grasps walking only tenuously, and that dark core in his chest whines for her. It is too easy. He moves to face her with a confidence that is only too newfound; the feather-bare totem of his disgrace flopping as if boneless entirely to his left.

“This is a bad idea,” his voice is oily and smooth in the way that a panther’s shoulder blades are. He tilts his head, and from that pulsing ornament in his breast, he feeds fear into her young mind.

A valuable lesson. A gift.

“You should not be here alone.”


Pollock,
The gift-giver.