My letters are disturbing to the Queen.
She reads too much into a mumbler’s toss.
The sentinels along her polished corridor
are famed from throne rooms to frontier,
and boast their loyalty with faded scars,
the privilege of bringing home her loot.
She reads too much into their awful silence
and wishes I were once again unlettered,
written promises being not so easily broken
as the ones that spill off of her perfect tongue.
The surge of a cathedral in torchlight,
snowy background like an artist’s lazy afterthought.
When she was teenaged how life was sweet,
so savage and simple in its coruscated joys.
The stink of stables, the slap of switch on flesh,
‘one of the boys’ stamping in her mud-caked leather.
My letters are disturbing to her now,
and she puzzles at me her cacographic fury.
I watched her brothers (the assassinated ones)
plant their palmprints on the backsides
of a thousand squint-eyed princesses,
their dowries an overflowing trench
of severed heads.
She commands I chronicle lest she forget.
I’ve buttered both sides of the sheet
and by her sideways look she spells
my future in some oracle’s dungeon.
Do you remember? Yes, Your Majesty,
I’m scratching even as you riddle out
the clues which lesser deities would fumble past.
I take no interest in my punishment,
no lessening of my sentence will bribe me
to her enemy’s tent, nor any pleasure
brush me with its animal sigh, to change me
from this state, loyalty bought and paid for
in Medusa’s currency of ice and snow.
We’re bound by an unbeaten pulse,
an orgy sheer by any scale of duration, victims, excess.
The lack of consequence illuminates her soul,
her victory in me, as mine in her,
the scandal which has sealed our lips:
to love each murderer as though he were our own.