Epistle Kallisti

To the Most Beautiful:

So you take, let's say, the third toke, long and slow; you vaporize, and you take it in, and in, and in....and there is a sound, like the crumpling of a plastic bread wrapper, or the crackling of a flame; and a tone, a tone, a shrieking white-hot tone in the vena cavae, spreading out—the lungs catch fire, and the smoke within—and it billows out like a dragon's plume all over your serenity.  There's cocaine in my nose and MDMA in my fingertips, and the stuttering remains of total craziness, and only you in my eyes.  And your lover, blinded by the night, searching for you, fumbling for cigarettes, as you sit and mumble in my ear all the horrors of everything that's ever gone down in arenas long forgotten and covered in dust; and it washes over me like waves in the diamond sea.  I cannot fight these waves of madness, or suffer myself to drown in them; I hang onto your eyes and stay afloat, still pleading, still writhing.  The sun begins to rise.  Huddled in the lee of a dragon egg, wrapped only in futility, I cannot allow myself to cry; only to watch the parting of your lips in the telling, and the shadows gliding slowly over your arms.  O, the arms that never held mine.  May the gods forgive me, if I do not remember all of your tale, and dwell instead on you, manifest in shadow and dawn, and smoke still rising from the pipe; if I hoist myself from the diamond sea and drown instead in a torrent from my own eyes; if I stumble back to my room, crack the last whippet, and forget for a few moments of glorious vibration how dangerously close you will always bring me to total meltdown.

Hail Eris, and may Aphrodite burn in her own inferno.

So say we all.