Perpendicular

Perpendicular

i.

in the sea of amaranthine
flame-birds soar and
rose
burns; fire
bright.

You smell sex in the nautical air, even through a dog’s nose. Saline and putrid scent of dying fishes and brine; rotting seaweed buried in the sand. And suddenly it becomes unbearable, the way the sea rolls and winds away — it makes you sick; so does the crying gulls that hover over you and the overwhelming expanse of grey-blue. But when the light tower and conch-cries guide you for long enough, you can’t live without it — the ocean — the way it is exotic. You can’t quite put your fingers on the sounds and sight of endlessness, or how that vastness can silence anything, and all you can say is that it’s completely different from the rain of Azkaban or the cold of Scotland in January. It feels like sex. Alkaline like semen and thick.

So you turn away from it for a second to allow admittance. And when you reach ashore, you are shaking in cold and panting and you care just that much less now, because even though you try not to, you’re lethargic and are drifting asleep.

When you open your eyes the next day, the first thing you remember is the coldness of morning, and then your own blind senses search for warmth in the damp sand. For the first time, you become aware of the sound of motion compared to your own, canine, negligible breaths, and when it saddens you to think that way, it registers that you are still covered deeply in the sand.

Arises the sun red.

Not red exactly, you realise as you blink for the second time. It is worse; it is coagulated and bloody. And when the thought of blood stirs something akin to hunger in you, you pick yourself up from the beach to wonder just where the hell you are —

— oh dear, you’re lost.

ii.

like ice; like water
kissing the clouds of combustible nature
and endlessness.

You stand alone on the beach for long awhile, feeling like it’s the first time you’ve ever seen the clouds of a rainy day. You then remember that it must be summer, it must be long past the autumn that you last remembered — so clearly remembered.

But you remind yourself, it isn’t autumn anymore, it is summer. Sweet summer.

“Daddy!”

Your ears perk up to the innocent voice.

“Look, daddy! Look!” says the girl and points your way. “A puppy!”

You growl instinctively and she yelps, so the next thing you know, you’re running away from the safety of the ocean into the harbour town where the roads are dangerous and people are cruel.

But there you are, walking down the dark galleries, shadows chasing you and memories do dream. Alley after alley, house after house, scenes become blurry and you are still cold. Night falls soft and muted overhead, and the only coherent sound is the echo of your own paddling. Therefore you transform into a man to hear something different — sound of flesh on stone — but after a while you change back into a dog because paranoia grows heavy. Licking the black fur smooth, you collapse on top of a rancid-scenting heap of trash in some disused junkyard.

iii.

in pits of murky-green
streams run
mice-like
and end in nowhere

When you are out there long enough, you start to remember things other than cold-winded autumn. About strangeness that no one ever talked of — of scorched marks and utter silence at the family dinning table. But every time you passed Bellatrix and Narcissa in the stoned hallways, you said nothing — you remember — oh, and even righteous anger burnt dark afterwards. You were forced to play alone from early on, in the darkness where no one could hear you scream. And you did scream — those nights — just that no one heard you, no one cared enough to. So you stop walking for a few minutes, and suddenly memories of James’ parents reminds you about something, something imperative —

— Peter.

You run.

After all the years, he is still in Hogwarts. Hogwarts where everything was safe, Hogwarts where you used to run to whenever the ridicule of the silence became unbearable, when the shadowy whispers where too loud and too harsh, and the darkness stretched too long.

Apparently, Peter remembers it. The rat.

You laugh harder now, because you can’t remember whether he was there or not when you passed out from the coldness of Salisbury in drunkenness that day. And it seems weird now that you were ever in Salisbury in the first place.

As you run past a house, you stop for a second because you hear your own name spoken by a glowing Muggle box. “Notorious mass murderer Sirius Black escaped early yesterday morning from the maximum security prison where he was held —” You remember, that the only friend you have now is the darkness. Depthless and so useful to hide.

Run faster, he won’t escape this time, run.

You hear the reassuring echo of your footsteps resonating in the acoustics of the cathedral, and you wonder why no one is here. You certainly did not expect Suger’s lux nova, not even now. And you stare neck-breaking upwards to see the glory of stone tracery and glass and collared light, then realise that in all this grandeur — you remember vaguely from someone else’s Muggle Study notes — colours become forlorn because something fundamental is lost. And it’s no matter now, because this will be your sleeping ground for tonight, maybe tomorrow too.

iv.

truth surging, yellow,
browning, then
watered down

When the ordeal is over and you’re on the run again, you come back to the ocean. The smell of rotten fishes feels better now, even maternal, and the security of the womb comes back to you again. Maybe it’s the notion of drifting, of going off and starting from zero. So you laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Time flits away with the roll of the waves, and you’re now told to go to his place and hide. It isn’t, really, anything at all reminiscent of the way it used to be, but you know what he’s thinking of whenever he has a wistful look about his eyes. And you want to scream at him that it’s over — damn it, it’s over — but you can’t find the voice to because you’re mute and he is deaf and — oh gods — you do make a perfect couple.

But damnit, fucking Merlin, you want the way it used to be too; so you reason out why you’re so sure it can’t ever be that way and remember that you’ve changed. And so has he. Maybe there’s a new scar between the folds of hair, or maybe an awkward bruise in places too covert to notice but you do all the same. And it makes you frown, to see that he isn’t the same person you remember so clearly — inertia. Because the word nearly lacks the precision that you need and always sought for.

So the sex and kisses and touches become something else, totally different from love — delicious like malice and ironic darkness.

But whenever you pause for all too long, you begin to realise you still love him — you really do. You feel it, convinced and shocking. It is just the way envy burnt teary inside and the way silver is caustic to him. Purgation losing definition as weariness grows long. So you tell him just exactly that.

“I love you.”

Except it never passes your own cowardice and you never say it.

v.

in the senses of the present
time lost
the magic; emotions
and so poetry flies away
— much like how birds do —

Your lean bodies gnash into a frightening rhythm; senses and sight taking on a strangely phallic nature. Ardour burns bright and you scream, crimson and black and everything dark. When you lick it, it tastes like blood; everything beautiful in a single drop. So you’re caught pricking your own finger in your room, and when he asks you why, you realise that you can never escape the colour black — O adamant black.

“Because,” you whisper in desperation, but no other explanation can be given.

You go insane whenever he goes away for more than a day, because it means that you’re left to play with your own shadows, silent, eerie shadows. You start to remember the silence that fell around the table whenever you arrived, and the head of a childhood companion of a sort — the only house-elf that heeded you despite your mother’s orders — protruding sadly and gauntly from an aging, impersonal plaque.

You tell him that you need him here, along with you to cope the darkness; he nods but his eyes tell you that he thinks you’re selfish.

And maybe you are, you start to question as this goes on for long enough, maybe you are selfish in dragging him and the Order down when you should probably shut up and be grateful that you’re not remembering the sound of your own laughter on a cool autumn eve.

vi.

in meanings of a word
meaning nothing —
that is everything —
bright like fire
burn;

He tastes a bit like alcohol, but not close enough to make you drunk. He tastes salty, but not as sad as your own blood; the sun rises today red as well, much alike the ocean, but not quite.

Today, you finally discharm his notebook that he’d locked so perfectly. Ah, but he must’ve forgotten that you’re alone in the house with nothing better to do. And as you flip through the pages filled with rushed, barely legible ink marks, you suddenly want to close it shut and never open it again.

Mad poetry — damn him, damn him — damned words, fucking mad poems. Stirring things in you that should have died once, stirring things in you that were never fully alive; conjuring back to life, that musty sense, that silly blood scented passion too close to spite. Damnit all. It was true after all — what they said — that Black never dies in you because you never forget your childhood. Fuck them. You scream now, scream long and hard, forgetting the “Silencio!” you’ve put on yourself to keep the neighbours from noticing the madman.

Scorched marks and cruel laughter fill that night’s nightmares. You no longer wish for the past.

You now wish for his soothing hands on your cheek, the silence he gives you is comforting and different from another, and he kisses you to reassure and you give in, finally, because this is the first time you remember crying since that evening on the street.

vii.

dreams
coming to life
in the seas
that roll away
from us

Tonight, he stays with you in this wretched house that was once your own because he has nowhere else to go. His kisses are crying and salty. Not knowing why, you tell him about the ocean — and the way it is alive — to keep his tears from falling. You stroke his hair in that tight, desperate embrace, and wonder if it was really Voldemort alone that has made this joke out of your relationship.

Oh yes, you’ve never told him that you opened his poetry book but you suspect that he knows.

“I don’t care what you think but Sirius, I love you, and I can’t stand to see you like this,” he tells you as he reads so sharply into your mind.

And the funny thing is that you can’t find anything to say back to him — not even “I love you too” — so you say exactly nothing, and turn away from his stare.

But when he turns away to leave, something weird inside twists and you ask, “Tell me what love is again.”

He looks at you, deciphering each turn of thoughts, and he pushes you over and pins you to the floor, and bites down hard on your lip, staining both blood and promises.

That is your cue to lap up the crimson and say, “I love you too.”

Outside the confines of the windows are the rustles of false autumn warmth, hums of a distant day, and it is weeks before you realise that all senses eventually come back to the deep longing for roaring waves.

viii.

in the falling of snows
coldness encloses,
folds
of fabric and threadbare
scarves.
gloving the eye from the world

so in every sense
we stop thinking
about the value of words;
italics

The falling of yellowing leaves becomes snowy bits, and even the Black House manages to pertain the elegance of Christmas. But there is no spirit here, because he has never understood Christmas and neither did you, so you let the Weasley family do most of the decorations while he and you dismiss it as one of the myriad holidays invented by Muggles to serve as an excuse to get presents.

But secretly, oh very secretly, you both envy them, because you both need the warmth of a family. A blood-bond family.

On Christmas day you are alone yet again — and you hate him for choosing someone else over you — until you hear your own thoughts and see the selfishness.

Eventually, the snow ends and flowers fall once again, and the liveliness of springtime makes you more eager than ever to see the sky. You want to feel it again — the ocean, the smell of sex and brine and waves — and all you ever get is the slight and peculiar smell of London’s fog-scenting air. But it is enough for you.

“Look, a sparrow.”

He mutters something inarticulate about ravens being more beautiful.