Jeff Buckley - Ulalume

Freakshow: Crying Amaterasu

She had 63 tattoos on her flesh, a cobweb of memories carved over her skin by needles and blades.  The first one had been made the day she placed a change of clothes inside her backpack and left her home.  It had been done in a tiny parlor painted bright red, close to the bus station and aptly called “The Runaway”.  She had always wanted to get a tattoo done, but whenever she mentioned it to her relatives and friends she found nothing but their disapproval. Why would she want to ruin her skin? , they always asked. It was so pretty the way it was.

They didn´t get that what she wanted had nothing to do with how pretty or not her skin was but with the need to have a visible proof of her feeling of misplacement. She was not there, nor was theirs.

So her first tattoo was both a commemoration and a farewell. This was her, the one that was an alien to them.

She hadn’t planned for a second one, regardless of what myths on luck and lack of could be said about it. But on the next large city she arrived to, she found herself guided by powers beyond her comprehension into a shitty shop with a neon sign that was malfunctioning, the buzzing of the bulbs mixed with the sound of the machine calling her out like a spell. Bzzzzzz.

Bees and honey.

She felt loved.

From then on, it became Tradition, and the tattoos grew with her travelling, a reflection of her Great Path of Getting Away.

 It was a pleasurable Path, as there was something about the whole procedure that she found both poetic and utterly sensual. The girl in her had been shocked at first by the way her body reacted, and had tried to deny it, hurting herself with shame. The woman knew better and soon she allowed herself to enjoy each new ritual to its fullest, taking into her surroundings, the scents, the burning of the needle.

Just the buzz already was enough to fill her with a sense of anticipation that was utterly delightful.

63.

A long path away from home, but not far enough. Not yet.

Somewhere on the way she had stumbled with the Freakshow, where an autistic man named Istvan led her by the hand to his wagon and made the 13^th tattoo on her chest. He was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen, with shades of ink all over his self. He had kissed the heart-shaped mark when he finished, then left the place for good, breaking the spell of poetry by unceremoniously turning his back to her and leaving through the narrow door, never to be seen again.

Some said they saw him whistling on his way. Others that he was crying and laughing, both at the same time. She, on the other hand, could only remember the figure on his back as he walked away, the smiling goddess with slanted eyes, filled with a million secrets and everlasting warmth.

It was her name that she took for her first show, and she cemented it by tracing the same figure over her own back. The girl that had left home had disappeared and lovely Amaterasu, the Illustrated Woman, had been born in her flesh.

It was her, that new being made of past memories, the one that caught the eye of the Ringleader as none had done before.

 He didn’t know when or where she had got her first tattoo, nor the reasons behind it. He didn’t know about her Great Path, nor remembered how many she had had when she first joined the troupe. The Ringleader was a man of good memory, but who seldom paid attention to others, especially to those who wouldn’t make a dent on his daily life. New members were not a rarity in the Freakshow, but most of them left in a couple of days, running back to their sad sad lives devoid of meaning.

The ones that stayed were few, but those were the ones that mattered to him. Shiny little things, with new names and new lives to embrace.

Amaterasu, despite her name, was far from shining. Her wagon reminded him of the cages they kept the beasts in, a large dark room almost empty but for a futon and a large chest. Sounds of something crawling under the wheels and cats meowing their heat into the night were the things he associated with her. That and something sticky and uncomfortable that he couldn’t quite wash away.

They weren’t pleasant memories, as she wasn’t a pleasant woman. But somehow along the way, as the months went by and the cities were left behind, he had noticed the new tattoos over her skin, and had found himself marveling at them.

It didn’t take him long to notice a new one always appeared when they visited a large city. She would disappear for some days, while they were busy preparing the tent and getting set for the show, and return later on, with her skin sore and a scabbed artwork hidden under a piece of bloodied film.

He grew fascinated by her, by the way the days of the Freakshow turned to life over her body. He could trace the path they had walked through on her, all the capitals and applauses. The gasps caught in the throats of the visitors, the tense excitement, ready to be unleashed. He could re-live it all through the little figures and colours that made her.

 He wanted to touch it, that path which was rightfully his. Scratch her skin to make the tattooed parts swell under his fingertips so he could feel them in the dark and make his own body remember them, too. Remember the cities, remember himself.

He felt time swallowing him the first time he tried. The Freakshow became a city at night, one with its inner codes and secret rules, and also one he was not fond of walking through. It was the tent which he loved and the tent where he spent most of his time, as a priest caring for his church. Whatever the faithful did at night, in their little rooms, was not something he wanted to waste time thinking about.

But he had caught her in the corner of his eyes, arriving after one of her escapades, film wrapped tightly around her thigh.

A new one, a new place, more. What did this one say of them? Of him?

So he left his church in reticence and walked through the small paths that took shape between the caravans, guided by the flickering light of the hanging gas lamps. Hers was far away, in the borders. He found it oddly proper, that she would stand in the frontier between their world and the one of those that saw them, like a messenger. It was the same place Istvan had chosen, last in the caravan and far from the crowd. But that was because Istvan spent his time in his mystical land, tattooing himself when the voices told him to and singing bullshit into the night.

The woman was different, her eyes were alive and cunning, her steps certain, the traces on her body done ritualistically, not as much guided by powers outside herself but from an inner drive that puzzled him.

What would they say of him, those marks that grew at his pace on her call?

In all honesty, part of him didn’t want to find out, nor wanted to have anything to do with it. He still remembered that reticence, even when it was years from that first walk, remembered the feeling of disgust at having to touch the door to her place. He remembered not wanting to enter the damn wagon, so lonely and foreboding it felt. He didn´t. But he wanted to see it.

What was it this time? A fish? Some strange nightmarish creature? Or was it a symbol, something she had somehow felt related to the place they were in, to the situations they were living through?

He didn´t want to enter but the damn thing had been covered and what could be under it was eating him alive. He wanted to enter, and wanted to take that bandage off and scratch that skin and remember.

He wanted to see it, see it all like none had done before. He really wanted to see it.

 So in the end he did.

And she was waiting for him, laying on her futon, a human map of his own life, breathing beyond his control. Dark eyes fixed on his and he was certain she knew; knew what he was there for and knew what he was thinking, feeling, and was dying to sense. There was that damn film.

She knew, and moved her thighs apart to let him take it away.

63 were the ones she had so far, and he had no idea how many more there would be, nor what would happen when her skin would be thoroughly covered. It was a mystery that would remain unsolved, till the time came. Meanwhile, he was able to go through the memory of each one of them, the shape embedded on his fingertips like fire.

He would have to find another large city to go to, soon, somewhere they hadn’t been to before. Somewhere that would give him a new reason of why he took that long path every night, between wagons owned by sad people, towards that lonely corner between worlds that stood far, far away from the Tent. A justification of why he sunk, every night, in that warm bundle of flesh covered in colorful figures of gods and monsters; deeply touched by the goddess on her back who, while wearing a perennial smile, cried salty tears whenever he fucked her.

untitled

You've disfigured her.

Slowly dismembered her for two years, leaving the pieces to the vultures.

And they ate her while she stared in confusion, alien to the names you had given her.

Ferrets came and go, gnawing at her sides, hiding in her shade. Sharp teeth in weak bodies.

There she remained, insides showing. Bright red and the whisper of death in her ears.

Words lost, self lost, her eyes look at the sky, blue and clear.

Blood hits the ground, and for the first time, she stares at herself, open stomach.

Her lips return and in the silence of her mind she finds her name.

"Prometheus"

Freakshow: Social Animal

Maybe he had had a name, before he became what he had become. Maybe that had been the case with all of them, before their roles had been assigned.

Mary, John, Robert, Lucia, Paul, maybe they all had had a life they could attach to such names, a self that had been born at a regular, middle-class family, then gone to school, suffered through high school, married the guy or girl they liked but not the one they loved, and eventually had landed a job that was close to the dream one but not quite it.

Maybe they had all been caught by their early thirties depression in the midst of conformity and had felt the dissatisfaction of routine and normality rotting their proper and unparticular insides.

It was perhaps that way that Mary, John, Robert, Lucia and Paul, with a little bit of imagination, had become what they had become. They had all somehow communally reached a moment of enlightenment and had tossed their selves and names aside to take to roles that fitted their frames more tightly.

Maybe that had been the case and it all came to a forgotten and dismissed persona, but if he had to be truly honest and took the time to compare the cases, it was highly unlikely. Even when their voyeuristic visitors would only refer to them by their defining abnormality when, back in their safety of their homes, they would tell their tales and the wonders they had witnessed to both friends and family; even when it was certain that the part they played was the one that was going to be summoned in those wisps of immortality, most of the god-forgotten freaks that made his reign insisted on having names they could call their own, little fragments of individuality they clung to in all its futility.

Looking back on it, and actually paying attention to all the other cases, the only one who was absolutely lacking of a personal noun was no one but himself. And he highly doubted he had once been a John or Robert. Not even a Mary for that matter. He doubted even more he had ever been unsatisfied with the lot that had been assigned to him, the whole idea of an existential void taking over his life in some distant, faded particle of his past being a completely foreign feeling.

As far as he remembered, and he did take pride in having quite a good memory, he had been nothing but one thing, and had loved his life just as utterly and completely as he loved himself.

As far as his thoughts could go back to, in the dim places of dusted memories of bright colours first seen, he had always been one and the same, and had announced his self to the skies during every single show, his voice deep and commanding bouncing against the curves of the tent: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am The Ringleader, welcome to my Circus”, and all his little freaks had bowed and crawled at his feet while the audience hung eagerly from a twist of his wrist for that electric moment in which, with a flicker and blur, his whip would crack against the arena and, with their awed gasp and a shower of confetti, the show would begin.

So screw Mary, John, Robert, Lucia and Paul, and screw existentialist ramblings. As far as he could tell (and there was no one there able to tell him otherwise) he had no name but what he was.

Just like God.

Wind-up Doll

So you wake up yet another time wishing day was a nightmare. You look around in that disorientation that seems overwhelming; and stare at the face next to yours and wonder when did he become someone you don't know.

You stop again the morning urge to scream and start the ritual by forcing yourself to wake him up, picking yet another part of your soul to throw away. And as you watch it getting chewed and torn and swallowed again you wonder how did you let a black hole take over your bed

___________________________
old, but it still applies XD -for Leviathan Rising-

untitled

It was the night of the Goddess, and she could feel it within her skin.

The first signs had started earlier, with restlessness and a growing rejection towards her surroundings. She wanted to be outside, way beyond the walls she knew and away from the streets that meant her home, far, far into the unknown.

Freedom was calling her like a siren.

Her heart, always so steady, found no satisfaction in her daily rituals and began to sigh in longing. Ah, she desired, that she knew, and it wasn't the things she owned nor the attention she was easily given, it wasn't anything that was at her beck and call. But how she desired it, that unspeakable thing she could not give form to!

She tried to sleep the feeling away, but it only made things worse, the dreams becoming cryptic and full of sensual imagery. She stretched her body, limbs on fire, the unsatisfaction growing unbearable. Rubbing herself against her cushion, she searched for some sort of way to mellow the burning, a release from that chocking feeling that kept her with a moan caught behind her lips.

But all she accomplished was to further the wanting, burning becoming scorching.

It was that night, she knew then, the one she could not escape, the one her mother and her older sisters had told her about, the one their grandmother and their greatgrandmother and all the women of her line, all back to the very first of them, the goddess herself, had given themselves to, a night of celebration and despair.

A night for the senses, and to run, run like the wind.

She waited for everyone in the house to fall asleep, and went out through the back door. She caught herself on the hall's mirror, and was startled by the swollen dry lips and bright stare of the young and lovely lady she had learnt to recognize as her reflection. It was her and it wasn't her all together, centuries of genetic imprints glowing over her skin.

The feeling was liberating, knowing that it wasn't her usual self the one reigning that night, that there was blood and mud as ancient as the world itself running through her veins instead, making her another, the one with the wild stare and wanting lips that had taken over.

The air outside embraced her in a hug that was hot and humid, and she sighed in satisfaction at the welcomed contact with the world, and the way her senses turned and coiled, like a snake. A small part of her still wanted to fight the feelings back, fearing that big unknown and longing for the safety of her own pretty bed in her own cool little room, but the stars were calling her name, and the night was whispering, sending shiver after shiver with each gust of summer wind.

As her eyes got used to the darkness around her, she also got used to the knowledge that that moment existed for her, that every little thing, from the air to the sky to the earth beneath her feet and the humming of the insects hidden inside the trees, were there for her, to elate her senses and drive her away from her mortal skin and back to the primeval her, if only for that night.


The fear was washed away when she noticed that, giving way to a sense of being cradled by a world that was completely her own. The heat in her body grew with her acceptance, making her skin flush. She licked her lips, and rubbed her side against the garden's cool iron door as she went out, smiling inside both at her small steps into daring and to the tingling sensations the coolness brought to her body.

It was maddening, and made her feel giddy, and happy, and light as a feather. The night was her own! the world was her own! Not a single soul was outside, all caught in their beds by the summer heat, and she was free, free to be insane and run down the streets, no more a lady but a creature that stretched from her flesh to the road and the trees and everything she could see, with invisible tendrils that sent wave after wave of pleasure to her wanting core.

Her steps were fast and certain, leaving behind her corner of the town and running right into that beckoning darkness, each time her feet touched the ground turning into an extra effort to outrun her need. The shapes around her melted, and all followed suit, her endless body caught on fire. Far, far away, she seemed to hear her own voice, screaming her desire and unsatisfaction to the wind, and even further she managed to caught the doubt of an answer, lost spirits, like her, awakening to her call.

Violence spread through the air, blood spilled on the earth finishing the spell, and she collapsed on the grass, her body tight, as a last call that seemed to come directly from her womb ripped her throat.

Silence followed, broken only by the smallest whimpering when she noticed someone that was not herself enter her world.

He was dark, like her, with eyes that burned into the night, inflamed with passion at her song. Stains of blood and the marks of raw wounds covered his skin. Here was her victor, her champion! Not her, but hers.

Their gazes met, holding for an instant that lasted forever, hers measuring him, his searching for acceptance. Approach if you dare, her eyes told him, and he did, kissing her face and licking her skin. There was no more running for her, no more active despair but passive abandon, and the urge to be finally devoured by that which had possessed her. Leaving a maddening path, his tongue found the cleft between her legs and her voice returned, pleasure turning into strength, abandon becoming demand

She opened her eyes wide when he penetrated her from behind, and enthralled, meowed to the Moon.

_________________________________________
submission for leviathan rising's dare VIII: erotica

Slave

He stirs.
A thousand cities fall.
Leviathan has nightmares and the world breaks.

He stirs.
Alive but his end is writ
he dreams of God

Alive and kept to be put on show

He fears
his flesh is food to an uncaring brood
his God is murder
Leviathan cries.

Monster he was made, monster he was called.
They will drink his blood and sink their teeth upon his chest
They will celebrate his fall
Woe and fear, the monster weeps.

Alive but already dead
alone

the breathing corpse stirs



_________________________________
submission for leviathan rising's dare VI: the curse of the leviathan

An Ode to the Cannibalism of She We Have Enthroned

They ate chunks of her and with bloodied faces and puzzled eyes they stared whenever she whimpered, as if her pain at their ravaging was something impossible.

Gloating, they shed crocodile tears when confronted and sent words full of bullshit to the heavens; about poor them, about their good intentions.

About how everything they had done, they had done for her.

They weren't eating her, of course! They weren't crying like babies because they were scared to death of being stopped, and then what? Loneliness and the dreaded oh my god what would they do without her flesh to fuel the fire. No,no,no.

They weren't eating her! Licking their lips and teeth clean and going for another bite.

Ñam.

Chorus of the Nunnery of Denial:
(it was all her fault, it was all her fault)

They had tied her to a cross and made her their Victim and Saviour, but how dare she complain? How dare she tell them to stop, when they worshiped her and showed her their love by cannibalizing her flesh?

If she loved them back, she should stay silent and let them do as they pleased.

Chorus of the Nunnery of Denial:
(stupid fucker, all proud and mighty all the time, filling them with longing and shame and...and...how dare she! the egotistical whore!)

They would eat, eat, eat and when they were done, they would burn the bones and pretend she never existed, that's what they would do.


Living with her clothes and her skin poorly wrapped around their excuse of a body.

Chorus of the Nunnery of Denial:
(hallowed be! she should be thankful, she wasn't that much of a big deal)
Praying in their guilty deathbeds, lying in their waking hours, terrorized in their sleep by dreams of rotten teeth.