To Hera

Hera, cow-eyed beauty, you are a sane mind among millions unsane.  You are a distant planetoid, cold and blue, like your eyes.  On autumnal plains, an oak grows in perpetual twilight.  Nestled within its tangled branches, a multitude lurks.  Like a willow in the wind, you bend.  Water carves stone.  Land drifts, imperceptibly on currents of invisible lava.  Stars grow heavy with helium.  Breathe, Hera.  Silence.

Pluto, I am breaking up with you

We have had a long orbit around the sun, and it has been nothing but good times. This is it, though, this is the real thing. You are not a major planet anymore. You are a dwarf planet, or as you like to call yourself, a Kupier belt object. Whatever. Seriously, it is over, but I still want to be friends. It is better sooner rather than later. I have been seeing another planet anyway. It is Chiron, the one you told me to stay away from, because its orbit is unstable. I don't care, I want Chiron now and I don't want you because that is how I feel and I don't have to justify it to anyone. Not to you, not to anyone. You are a frozen world on the edge of darkness, and though I find it terribly sexy, it has its limitations. You reflect so much of the light that hits you. You are covered in frozen methane. Nobody has ever taken a decent photograph of you. You are mysterious, yes, but your are not a real planet. Chiron isn't either, but he is temporary, and when things get serious, I want it to be with an object that has a stable orbit that is coplanar with all the other planets in the solar system. I want harmony, not chaos, Pluto. Be jealous, Pluto, but there is Eris out there and I know you have been checking that one out. Enjoy your frozen orbit. Enjoy the death of the sun, when it comes. We are through, but I still want to be friends. I want to see that beautiful shadow of yours cross the orbit of Neptune and know that you are out there. I want to remember the mystery of your discovery and think that it was you that was planet X, and be grateful that I got to spend so much of my time with you. I want to remember your deep shadows and starry nights with feelings of nostalgia, and nothing else. Not regret, not bitterness, not sadness. Maybe a little sadness.

to my lover, the demon hydra

it keeps coming back to this. i long to spawn with you again-to see my flesh dissolving in a spiral of cells in the water, to feel the fatal eruption of a million embryonic cells fleeing, in cloudy ripples and waves in the water, from my body cavity. My paired appendages listless behind me, tentacles and eyestalks enraptured and exhausted, i beget instar after instar. Creeping abomination into this world. Our encounter will draw blood from both of us. Our union is a thing of unspeakable, unimaginable evil, of horror. It is lovely to be with you. Your blackness radiates like cold from a dark window, all smoke and negation. At the center of it, you are a one hundred armed Kali: are breasts and blood on your lips, arms and legs undulating in beautiful waves, like feeding tendrils, a lipstick-clad maw at the center. together, we will once again beget multitudes. our progeny will devour the earth.

for the Hyaena queen

Hyaenadon, mighty striped beast, killer in the night. In sheer spectacle, I gaze upon your lovely black hide, your striped back, your keen visage. You are a poetry of fang and sinew, tooth and madness. Lovely, your tail lashes back and forth, your hot breath at my neck, your tongue wresting forth from your mouth, agape and smelling of blood. Queen, empress, your savage penis entering me.

The Thirteen Words of Khaza Sool

A sultry night hung over the black forests of planet Moog. Deep within it, a million million creatures slept, and a million million more crept through its lush shadows or set aloft into its moonlit skies. All four moons were visible tonight, trailing each other in an irregular line across the heavens. Beyond them, the stars of the spinward marches, realm of the Imperium. Tonight, a warm breeze welled up from the valleys, bringing with it the smell of Kaur beast, and of the manlords that hunted them. Also drifting up the music was the sweet music of the lowland barbarians, proud and dangerous. Kyrie, princess of Nomia, leaned against the balustrade, her black hair blowing in the gentle wind. Her brown eyes sparkled like twin diamonds, her blue skin a ghostly white under the light of the four moons. It was a beautiful face, with high cheekbones and a cruel red mouth, caught perpetually in the act of half-smiling. To the stars of her ancestors, she pointed, one after the other, until all seven suns had been located. Her hand fell through her hair and down her subtle blue cleavage. Black, bejeweled, and polished, her ten nails slid under her spidersilk dress, brushing gently over a soft black nipple as they fell, further, to her hip in a gesture of impatience. She was filled with a hunger she could not possibly sate. There could not possibly be enough love in this palace to fill the need within her. Still, she would not give up the game. Strutting back into her gallery, the space princess called to her manservant for a glass of wine.

Chalybion californicum speaks

I am a lovely, silvery blue, my finish like chrome. Please don't hold it against me, spider, that I must lay this egg on you. You are paralyzed because I injected venom into your brain, and destroyed your ability to anything about the horrible things that are soon to happen to you. This is how I make more copies of my kind. For that reason, my beautiful child will hatch and devour your, slowly at first, drinking the fluid from seeping wounds, until eventually she will end your life and eat those parts of you that she cannot devour without doing so. You will feel every minute germ of the pain. I have not dulled your agony, but I have taken the liberty of stuffing you into a deep hole with no possible chance of escape. There, you will wait with three other captives, who impotently fear for their own destruction. They will be devoured next. There is nothing that can be done about any of this. Wasps must exist to destroy spiders the way spiders must exist to destroy moths and there is no grand purpose to any of it. None at all. Eventually, my child will consume all of you, even those spindly legs of yours, spin a cocoon, and in her time, destroy other members of your species. I destroy and destroy again. This is who I am and I am lovely for it.

the square root of negative one finally speaks

face it, i am the only solution to your equation. you dismiss me because i am not real, and it is true, every damned word of it and more, i am imaginary. i am i. look for solutions to the situation you face, and deny it as you may, there is only one solution to your quadratic. it is akin to the solution Kepler faced when he stared, long and hard, at the circles of Copernicus. they did not fit the observations because the solar system is not made of perfect circles. there is no hand of god because there is no god and therefore planets orbit in ellipses. an extension of this is that negative one has a square root and it is me, here i am. maybe it is because you include so many negative values, or maybe it is because you are made of radians in a Cartesian world. I think the latter, rather than the former. i should know. i am the square root of negative one. in some circles it is said that i should not possibly exist, and yet, here i am. in the hands of a true mathematician, i can sing.