Choose now, they croon - Malis

[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


(‘They are forgetting about you.’)

He comes not as a reveler ‒ skull-masked, bare-chested, fervor-tongued ‒ but as an undertaker; a death-omen; a shepherd. 

Dutiful and heavy, burdened by the enormity of their agitation ‒ the boy, the North, the youthful bitterness, Mother, the bowed and unending spirit of his hungry, extinct badland. 
The bones ‒ the bones that are gone, whether by time or by the disrupt of earth, eating his kingdom whole. Their whispers, some with his names on their lips like whips and tongues; others with a silence that only he could have made so final. So perfect.
They follow ‒ conniving and raucous ‒ dyeing the air with their disembodiment: green, black, white-and-wild brown, indigo, gold, pale purple; the scents of horsehair and seed, blood, sweat, salt, piney, dust and black earth, overripe fruit, children, breath, stench. His flock of ghostly remains.

Their dominion is night. Fitful, sleepless night, when he can be harried from his bed, sent wild and wakeful into the ghost-thick woodland. Beset upon by the weaknesses freed from their mausoleum, that watery nowhere. That everywhere. That darkness. That absence that binds them during the day to bone and silt-slimy forgetfulness.
He runs from it.
Tears through it, wolven-toothed into babied flesh;

He slips past the material, cold and cruel and inviting, screaming through the night like a ghoul, himself, cracking scars into trees and fear ‒ fear wherever it can be sowed. Wherever he finds fertile ground.

Everywhere.

He runs through the thin and bloodless trees of his greathall, beyond their hold, where some of those ghosts cannot follow. Where some of those ghosts must stay. There is no terminus to this motion ‒ it is perpetual, infinite because his borders have been cracked. Erased. Colonized by a nothingness that had consumed history and sovereignty and spit him back out again.

Purpling like a bruise, pre-dawn comes, and by then he has loosed them from his back, these soul-thin passengers, and the freedom of their vacancy draws him back into sight ‒ skin like old gold, wing like a disease that has no cure, horns like spartan weapons, though tonight they are clean. Eyes as they have always been. As she will have remembered them ‒ bereft.
The gift-giver stops, damp and breathless, near the glassy shoulder of the river. He stretches, his face yawning upward to the battered skin of early hours, night still but for the dim light that will slowly draw out long, edgeless shadows. Those curved, severe horns touching the sweaty angle of his withers. He steps forward, his split toes yielding to the cold, slick rock bed. Though it is bitter in it’s cold, he wades in until the water lips at his forearms and he can lower his head to the surface, wetting his brow. He indulges in this ancient and holy ritual, this baptism. When he lifts his head again, he is purged. Droplets of water pool under his chin (one, two, three, four ‒ those bald, pink knots of scar tissue) and drip.

Freedom only lasts a moment. Because men like him are not free.
They are prisoners and commanders of a bottomless hunger.

A terminal urge.

(‘You have to remind them.’)


POLLOCK
Lone Artist and Phina’s

@[Malis]