give me something to believe in; any, wallace

[Pollock]

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

Ahhhhh, yes. That beast, Anger.

He knows it intimately. It never served him well. It is an unruly, wild, base thing that rumbles like a monster chained in his belly; that gnaws and gnaws but, he finds, can never be sated, really. It is untamed – an ancient pool in which everyone is baptized as a babe, unfurling itself like an instinct in all.

Even in those who fancy themselves tempered souls. It’s in them, too.

For so long, it had been the tide that pulled him; pushed through his veins like a drug he did not want by his mother, who would rather see him soothed by its company than to be in need of hers. 
(A funny thought, that – to be in need of her. For her to have been any use to him.)
But the anger she had given to him had been his darkest passenger as he grew into a young man, seething. Seething with anger and with resentment; with the toxicity, like black smoke, that these things breath. 

Spoiled.

He was spoiled by it. Ruined. Made to be a worm writhing in mud, senseless and overwhelmed. Made to be an ignoble bastard, shackled by his weaknesses and by the stories of her wrong doing painted on his skin with marks – lipstick and burns; tooth’s bite an hooves’ touch – that could not be seen, for they were his and hers alone.

It never served him well, though he did not discard it entirely. (Cannot.)
Fear, he finds, is a much better emotion to subsume to; a much better sword to die by.

Besides, he had decided years past, to cast off (or bury deeply) the moorings of his mother’s influence. Anger, in its uncontrolled form; weakness, and the sensation of needing; the idea of home, for she had wrecked that, too. This, perhaps, is why he comes to the dragon-stallion like two alien organisms meeting on the moon’s surface.

He feels too much, right now, this stranger. He is hot with it – laden with it.
Pollock has shed it like a snake in the rocks of his waste, he comes to him bare-eyed and straight-lipped, spent empty by his labors over the oasis and by his searching for answers in the sea. He is wet up to his knees with holy water, fresh and clean; salt flakes off his horns from the northern ocean. His wing was momentarily cleansed by the pool in his scantum, but it is thick with a paste of dust and grime, now. 
“Can I help you?” he drawls, low and weary, and there is no sharpness on his tongue now, nor is there welcome in the words or an indication that his question is an earnest one.

the gift-giver