her name was inked upon his tongue, but he was forbidden from speaking it aloud, a fine silver spike keeping it firmly held to the roof of his mouth, his lips sewn shut by her silken words and promises of better tomorrows, tied with a gordian knot of desire

his mind painted with her murmured sunrises and the sullen cloudbanks thick with winter rain, the colors subject to running and morphing into visionary glimpses of hell and heaven morphing into one inexplicable beautiful nightmare

his memories unraveling like a frayed old blanket, the yarn that made up his mind gathering and piling across the yard, like his intestines pulled by her prying fingers and looped through the branches of the trees, more if him drooped without than within

and still he clambered after her every whim, the runes etched on his eyelids with the blood of innocents forbade anything but obedience, his servitude all but guaranteed by the pacts formed with this devil in disguise

he was in pieces by design, silenced by whim, fractured and placed together as a tapestry of her manipulative desires, and though seemingly at odds with all he once stood for before his legs were removed and replaced with wrought iron lamp posts, perfectly content