It’s all so simple to me.

But you don’t understand, you can’t see, and you fight the confusion I see in your eyes like a battle you cannot win. Like a battle on unfamiliar ground, to a summit mapped but shrouded.

I can see your instincts fight, desperate to understand, to keep your grip on my slippery blade.

Because it’s mine, isn’t it?

Your bloody fingers are clenched and severed, holding on because it’s all you have left, all that matters. This blade suspended in the kinetic motions. Poised and barricaded from your pulsing heart.

Yet this weapon you arrested in your terror was not pulled by my choice. Your hold is slipping, not on this blade but underneath, and atop these foothills.

Weakening, wakening below your tread is sediment, in veins and traces you are equally desperate to understand. What is this struggle? Man versus nature, man versus man, versus me?

Oh, my innocent, Lleu, my bright one. So naïve. So desperate. You domesticity overrides feral instinct, your grip driven by fear and passion. It’s not your blood, but the very will in your veins that released in my lacerations. Not your own will that is distinguishable but your lifeblood, the conduit.

Your warmth, your kiln, is slowly losing heat, the fire in a dry arid wilderness devoid of direction. Oh, the intricacies of you. You are grasping onto the refuse, because it’s all there is left to you, this pithy inheritance. And what of me?

You terror is fueled by this sparse desert in your stalled ascent. You memories you bleed to me, pleading with me in your thin hope.

You have left the barest of visages. Your resistances, your fingers, so trivial, my love. You will lose so much. What is stranger, my despair or your desperation? My palm, the weapon in hand, trails to the capers of this all, vivid streaks of hypnosis. Your precious prize mutilated without fear. Without question and producing battle.

So gentle you are. So hewn and lacquered, you could never hurt me, your beautiful one. You fear to even trace the imprints of the siren, jaded, bladed piper. You hurt more than I to see your prize persuaded in such a diversion.

Perhaps, my drowning one, that is the battle.