Tumblr Spells

Serendipity is the phenomenon by which the stubborn heart
nudges itself in the direction of familiarity and attributes it
to the whimsy of some preternatural force.

What have you lost?

A pleasant surprise.
A dissociation of the result from its effort.
A cardiovascular psychosis.

This is the allure of magic.

Who could believe that the late night ritual
of tumblr, sad music, and spiritual hemorrhage
could amount to something real.

What have you lost?

Grave-digging the past
and pulling the skeletons of yesterday
into the present.

Flesh and bone and blood and tendon.

The nerve of you,
the necrotic maniac.
Crazed and obsessive.
Searching through the rifts of time
For the opportunity to say the unsaid.

What have you lost?

Your body of arcane knowledge as atrophied.
The only magic you remember are the bondage spells.
The fetishist predisposition to resurrection that gets you off
on your own ability to imitate life and power.
Juxtaposed against the growing famine of your form.

I have seen you lose weight.
I have seen you refuse meals.
All you drink is mercury now.
So your tongue can move quick-silver and razor-sharp.

As it should when reciting spells.
You only talk in aphorisms now.

Like the relationship between a mage and his magic
is one of trust.

Consequently, trust is like building a bridge from outside in
because building from beginning to end is for charlatans and upstarts.

Yet every time you have brought someone back from the otherside.

They have crumbled to dust.
Grown mad, zombified, and decadent.
Or have simply failed to hear your call in the ether.

Maybe your pentagram was smudged at a crucial energy nexus.
Maybe you were a second too late for the solstice.
Or maybe the virgin you sacrificed was a liar.

Or maybe the magic doesn't trust the mage.
Your past doesn't trust your present.
And it's time to move on.
Get a day job.
Scrub your floor clean of blood and chalk.