Enter the hot dream - any

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

(See? They love him.
They flock to him.)

“Hm,” he grunts, his lip curling in distaste – or the want to taste – as she moves towards. Gathers ‘round. Blue. But not blue-blue. Not like that old ghost – twisted neck and gravid. More like a moon, wan and wild.

(she could be his; he could make her fear and she could make him see and in that orgy – that feast, that conflagration; that overfloweth – ah; they could ritualize over bruised flesh, if that’s what she wanted)

He is tired. Irascible, with weariness, with idleness; he is bursting at the seams, hoggish for the excesses that had once kept him fat and happy on a throne of greyish stone and the twisted scaffolding of bone and teeth and wind-blown, white-mottled hips. He has been blood-letted, drained – but this doesn’t make him weak; too much like a rat, too much like a cockroach – it makes him dangerous. 
A crocodile, having slowed down the speed of his heart and chilled the core of his body, he waits.

Once, he subsumed himself to the labors of his wasteland:
– he made life where it did not belong. He spilled blood like seeds into the earth and that earth had been hungry. That earth had been wanting, parted for him. That earth had bore pink centauries and pale milkvetch, clear water from ancient aquifers – his children, all.
His most beloved get.

And then, that earth had closed around him like a throat and swallowed him whole.

Now he is hound without a job.
(they bay, they scent; fear knows where it has been before)

“You don’t think so?” his voice is as it always has been – gravelly and slithery; there is no warmth in it. There is the choke of dust, the lapping of saltwater; something that sounds like being chased feels like. He turns his head, those great, spartan horns weighting to a tilt, his black, vacated eyes meet hers – blue, distinctly alive.
“I am pained.”

(He wants to feed her. Be fed by her. He wants to slip into that cold – bitterly cold – plain between the material and soak her up, pick at the skin that stretches over her bones. Shoulder
Hip.
Breastbone.
He wants to feel that infiltrated place of hers; that deep-down, that very-dark, where, it turns out, Bruise had been. He wants her to feel the cold precision of him; or the berserk, sloppiness.
He want. He wants. He wants.)

But instead, he stands, calculating her. “Tell me your name, as you seem to already know mine.” Silly woman. Time has only made him godly. Has only cleansed him.

the gift-giver