whatever it takes to drown out the noise, dove

[rembrandt]

you and i nursing on a poison that never stung our teeth and lungs are lined with the scum of it The first six months of his life were spent trying to master a thing that he was certain could not be mastered. It happened at random, painfully, at the most inopportune times. He would feel it like a fish hook in his belly as it ripped through him. As he shifted from equine to something else entirely. Something grotesque, horned, the legs and the gut thick. He feels the pull sometimes even now. It stirs at the very center of him but he can fiercely grit his teeth and stave it off. He can fight it now. He is older and stronger and he hates the thick skin and the horn and the sidelong glances. Hates it enough to resist it. He has ventured away from the safety and familiarity of his mother’s side. He left with the understanding that he wouldn’t be back. She had smiled her sad smile and watched him go. He loved her, certainly, but there was no future for him in her shadow. He would always be his mother’s son, though, they shared the cosmos, the nebulas on their skin. He wanders now, uncertain where he should go. He inherently knows that the world is bigger than he realizes, stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction. There are so many places he could go but he does not stray far. He goes instead to the meadow. He has been here before, some time ago, with his mother. He thinks that, for now, it’s as good a place as any. He is proud and grim. He does not smile and there is no delighted glint in his eye as he surveys the bodies that inhabit the meadow, foraging for the grass beneath a blanket of snow. He exhales an impatient sigh, recognizes this as a mistake. Until he sees her and registers the snowflakes on her nose. There is a grin then but it is something dark as he moves through the snow to land himself at her side. “This must be your doing, then,” he muses with a slanted smirk, nodding then to the snow that stretches out as far as the eye can see. stardusted son of despair and astral