The enormity of my desire disgusts me; pollock

[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


He sees himself in the kid. That is the most dangerous thing of all.
It is beyond his control, of course. Beyond either of their control. It is the violent randomness of recognition and projection. The more Pollock looks over the colt – breaking his gaze, a mistake to be paid for; faintly golden, like himself; unattended to – the more he feels his gut cramp as the rotten, old sediment is churned up into dirty memory. Shadowy investigators, claws raking old parts of him and searching the banks of his brain (a slop of meltwater and pond scum) for the bones of a boy.

The bones of what was and what hope felt like once.
What silence sounds like when stars stare back blankly.
That thing was meant to stay buried.

‘I am never safe.’ He smiles, “smart boy.”

His father is a perpetual irrelevancy.

His mother was a woman made of whore’s things. Painted and pushed up – the night he found his first bit of inner strength (damp and wracked with newborn shakes) was the night she curled off into utter darkness to taste the hips and ribs and groins of excess and had come back many hours later haggard and hollowed out. (At least she had come back?) 
She was leather and bony and wore her wings like old rags (a waste).
She left him to feed herself full on dark little morsels. Not a kind neglect.

If neglect is ever kind.

“She mustn't love you much, hm. Very irresponsible of her to let you off alone. Very uncaring,” his voice feigns a sort of compassion and he clucks his tongue, shaking his head. It has come to be a great pleasure in life for Pollock, the way one can feed animus and sorrow into a child like a Trojan horse through willing gates, ajar. “Mothers are cruel.” His words fall (he hopes) like soft, understanding strokes across his smooth, pliable young body.
Such fun, to make things out of blank nothing. To weave resentment and bitterness and wounds from silks of parental disregard and captive naiveté.

“On second thought, you’re probably lucky to have found me, boy.”

‘What are you?’ The palomino shifts his weight away from the ache leftover from yesterday’s exertion. “I was like you, once.” That was before the invisibility. Before he grew into an errant lunatic. Long before he had been human… “Little and alone. And scared. With a careless, irresponsible mother.” He had been all of these things as if they were all he had been, the cloth he was sewn from; stitch by miserable stitch. “And then I decided to become mighty.” He runs his tongue over his lips, bending his head low to meet his height.

“Would you like me to show you how to do that, too?” He dark eyes fall on the young boy’s face, “it’s not easy. And it takes some time… You will have to trust me. But, then you’ll never need your wicked mother, or anyone, again. Wouldn’t that be nice?” He pulls back a bit, his eyes feverish, “of course, it will only work if you do what I say and prove yourself worthy. In the end, if it does not work, I promise it will only be because you did not try hard enough. That would be a shame.”


POLLOCK
Lone Artist and Phina’s