Long ago in the territory of the kingdom of green heights arose a war that devastated the land, the god of this kingdom looked upon the carnage and weeded and form their tears sprang seeds of primordial life, the god created a forest on the scale of giants with plants so high they obscure the sky itself.
The god then created trees of true might that sprang towards the heavens and on them they rebuilt their kingdom, safe, forever more.
However, war had changed them and so they cried tears of flowers that sprang mighty beasts to defend their kingdom from the forest floor.
These beast roam the forest and while they are a sight to behold, beware, for if you come a warrior or a god they will come, and they will kill.
A theory I always had about hollow knight is that greenpath and unn could've been a lot more powerful if they could be above ground since that's where the sun is (in my au at least) so I thought why not make a kingdom like that but with megafauna made from plants and this was the result.
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Here’s one I’m submitting to a few lit journals and will almost certainly be in my chapbook, it’s called Muscle Memory.
I listen to your songs on repeat. I even learn to play a few. I pretend the ones you wrote for other people are about me. Are you singing to me?
Everyone I pass on the street smells like your cologne. There’s no way I’m passing a hundred people a day that wear Dior Sauvage. I’m just thinking of the way you smell when I bury my face in your neck. Are you thinking of me?
Every poem I try to write lately comes out dead upon delivery, their twisted little corpses bloody and rubbery translucent. They weren’t made to last. Made but not alive. Just like me. At least this one feels like something. Do you feel anything when you read it?
Words feel like a tiny legion of enemies recently. They sting like fire ants when they drip from my mouth and fingers. They bite me on the way up my throat and leave slick trails of venom in their wake. I don’t like talking these days because what I mean and what I say become doppelgängers in a mirror. One waves and presses its face against the glass, the other grins to reveal sharp and jagged teeth, blood running down its chin. They’re two sides of a Janus coin, doomed to tug and trip over each other, never really in alignment. Well, not these days anyway.
I write when I’m angry and they come out rusty and ragged, and that’s good. When I’m sad they cling and grasp at one another like wet snow coming down with crackles and spatters, the ends of a million used cotton swabs. Soggy little lumps that desperately reach out and say ‘please take my hand before I get lost and can’t find my way back to you.’ But that’s the terrible secret of my words on word on words, isn’t it? They never pour out the way they do for you.
I feel like the victim of a stroke learning to ride a bike again, to walk again. You’re never supposed to forget those things, memory lives in our muscles. My useless body was never any good at remembering. I struggle with the words, barely walking, hardly standing, frustrated, screaming at my legs to move. At my fingers to type. Why can’t I do what I’ve done before? I feel it inside but I just can’t push my limp foot forward. My muscles have deja vu at best, not enough to remember how to flex and stretch, to dance. The only thing my flesh truly remembers is the way you feel when our bodies touch.
When I can’t define the feeling how do I trap it on the page? You need to know the true names of demons to banish them, so I flounder as dozens of talons tear away at me till I’m ribbons, a pile of scraps blowing away in the wind. And when I think of you it’s the worst it gets.
I think of you on the stage. I think of you at the bar. I think of you waiting for years and years and years for someone to see you the way I waited for someone to see me. I see you; a lonely planet, orbiting a star with no name in a vast, inky blackness, the only thing in your solar system. And me? I’m lonely all the time. I’ve spent so much of my life looking at the patterns that the shadows of windowsills make on buildings. At graffiti with something to say long worn away. At plants that grow out of cracks. Into warm, golden windows with glowing halos against the blue of twilight. I stand outside the house across the street from the playground and I hear the fiddle and the piano and the singing and laughter every night. Could you be in that house? No, you’re standing out on the street with me wishing you were inside, too. If only we’d turned and looked at each other, then maybe we would’ve realized we’d been in the house with the music and the laughter the whole time.
You’re the only thing that’s ever felt familiar in this world. When you leave, a massive ship breaks and sinks. The suction pulls me under so deep I can’t breath and no amount of kicking will ever get me to the surface. I just have to wait for you to show up again and pull me out. Soaking wet, I vomit brackish water onto your shoes. Is it alright? I’m sorry.
But when you stay… when you stay it’s almost harder. I used to float so untethered to the ground with you, sitting on our little cloud, playing games and singing songs. I’m touching your skin and you’re kissing my hand. When we have to come back down to the ground, back to life, I can feel the water underneath me, lapping at my feet, a threat of what I already know is coming.
Nowadays there is no cloud. There is no water. It’s just you and me on the edge of a cliff, looking down into a chasm with no bottom. You give me a brick. “Do you want this?” And you give me a stone. “Can you carry this?” And you give me a bag of sand and a chunk of ice and a ball of iron ore the size of your fist. They say your fist is roughly the size of your heart. “Just for a second” you say. Just for a minute. But my arms are tired and I tremble under the weight. Do my muscles remember this? Remember the strain?
But if you asked for them back I’d bite and snarl and bark, I’d snap at your hands as you try and pry them away. These are mine now. They’re my precious little gems, my brick and my stone and my fistfuls of pebbles and metal fragments. They make lifting my feet so hard that I stay rooted to the ground, I won’t tip over the edge of the cliff that way. But if I lose my balance they’ll pull me straight down, so much faster than I would’ve dropped without them.
How am I supposed to hold all of these? How am I supposed to gather them up and hold them?
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