Zeus Dreonada | 1 | cb

Her lips always taste like ash against
mine like a burned up cigarette and so
I smoke to keep the ghosts out.

I fucked her on our wedding night just
to see what it would be like but I was
disappointed because it was exactly
how I expected.

Cold and clumsy and cruel, the
little girl in her still there behind
those painted lips and starlit eyes.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
they say but I was never in hers, I was
never in anyone's.

I was an ugly duckling then, the shame of
the Dreonada name, the son quickly wrapped
up in a marriage arrangement to a
completely deranged bitch.

Puberty snatched me, strange in the night
and my lips, always too big, too plump,
grew into me and my skin stretched taught
over a well-toned body built from nights spent
alone and forgotten in the training centre.

But inside there was a twisting
too, a break.

Nobody ever promised to love
me until Hera said it in front of
a church full of people and I
couldn't help my hatred, suddenly
grown and biting, how I hated her
and the way that she had always looked
at me like I was nothing at all.

She was a liar then and now.

I promised to love her
too, words repeated from memory and
I was a liar then and now.

"You do what you do because you're cruel."
"You do what you do because you're a sociopath."
"You do what you do because you don't know any better, blame it on: society."

There are so many explanations
that they dig for, as if one could
explain me, explain the
emptiness that
floods me every spring.

Oh love, oh joy, where
art thou?

Where did you go on
such weak legs?