Once



“And so consume this kiss that I lay upon your hand and take it with you to another day. My days are running thin, but my memory swells within your fists.’

‘I can feel you. Have I before? Only faint memories sow themselves over these restless thoughts. A memory so fickle it surpasses reality.’

‘Tell me now, have I felt you before?”

She speaks: “Only in your fears have you embraced me. Only in your shallow desperations have you remembered me.”

“Then forgive my fears! Have they made me not human? Have they not scorched the flesh with passions, with memories, with resurrected love?”

And she stood
In awe.
Her tenders skin mocking the touch.
How long it has been since that forgotten day! I had searched to quench these ignited years that have burnt to ash all emotion. Woe is that day I fell in love! This fiendish visitor twists my heart:

		Mrs. Sarah. Mrs. Sarah Royster.
		Widowed Mrs. Sarah Royster Shelton.
		My beloved Mrs. Royster.

Hand by hand we cupped our fear and in sprinting years we head forth to our destiny. 

“Three years of misery had succumbed within my head; still, wandered fast, seeping through my pores. The memory of you, oh Lenore, left me desolate in my sunken truths”.

“You felt a love that was more than love.”
“Yes, indeed. It was anger and pain and guilt!”
“Then woe is she. Woe is she, your new love!”

I ran. I had to run…but as this disdain slowly dissolves, I feel now what time is lost. 
“Then drink. Drink and forget! Here it is safe from such putrid thoughts.”
I take the cold numb glass to my lips. As it pierces my throat, a soothing thoughts comes to mind, lost in these words and conversation:

“My Mrs. Royster! How have you reached me here?”
“Your trail of thought has lead me to you. Tell me now, why have you run from me?”

Her wedding dress drips in tears, blood, and broken promises. 
White and red…
White and red. 
Roses I gave to her once; Roses and kisses of lust and love that once were the wine of this heart’s lament.  

I live in a memory:
She lays on the bed, sinking her fingers in me. Her breath caresses my bones. They quiver; shiver as broken hearts are being sowed. As my heart pumps, pumps venom into my veins, a sound an elegy screeches in my head. A memory, ah yes! A deeper memory of the days of yore. I used to dream of this very dream in my innocence; those days lost by the pounding of this heart. 

Her name resonates:

Sarah. She feels the same as I once remembered her, but now her lips are sore with red veloptiuicity* and tempting smiles now adorn her once pure skin, ravished by the year’s burn. Oh how lovely you look, my fantasy. How I miss this dream! Could you be? My salvation… My eulogy?!

“What am I, then?”
“Lenore. Please, what was ours is now dispersed
“How dare you sin against our love?!”
“Quoth the raven:”
“Nevermore.”

In a gasp, it hits me. How could I deny my weakness?

“Don’t leave me, my lovely. Don’t leave me trapped in these memories.”
“You have cursed me to leave, so I part”
“Deny me then!” I yell, “Deny my words!”
“No…. keep her in remembrance” she swore and continued to torment, “You have not come to meet me. I found you on the way.”
“So then was my soul a rogue. I frenzied of your flesh, and of your life was my breath.”
“Lies!”
My heart is strangled.
“Then were must my soul live if you are not my home?”
“Somewhere cold with memories of old.”

She turns away and peers down the window. A cold chill enters the room. It creeks the wood as it swells with my dying tears. This place reminds me of my house, where it used to be. England aches with the rain, as does my heart. The old streets smell like work and sweat chilled by the cruel and frightful breeze. My house was not a home. The dissipated memory of my parents rots in corners. My foster parents, John Allen and Frances, took me as their own. John was saturated in the smell of strong, worn tobacco.  I dream:

As he takes me into his arms, my head becomes dull and causes me to drift in sleep. What I dream repeats in numbers:

My private school flooded with blood and sweat of men working in the halls. As I roam, almost floating on my tiptoes, I am pulled into the arms of my Sarah, Mrs. Royster. My garments are soaked in blood, in such a heavy life, I leak down, down; slowly, heavily under the flow, and drown. I reawaken in love. What a fool! I weep, oh how I weep! Tears of blood that flood these memories! Still, there is a dearth inside of me that was once filled by my exquisite, Virginia.

“Die! Let her DIE!”
“Be quiet, Sarah! You will not grasp the scar she has left in me.”
‘How deep do her lips slander? Obviously not profoundly.” She shrieks. 
How could she? She has stabbed me further than what this poor flesh could endure.
She has wakened unforgiving guilt.
She has wounded unforgotten pain. 
My dear first love, my cousin, my wife, Virginia Clemm. What beauty had she that surpassed every single creation of God! What labyrinth was she that had trapped me for so long! Now, even in her death I remain finding my way out of this hopeless love. The guilt…the agony lead me here. The shame…the weight upon me so heavily lead me to come so far away…to Baltimore, where I thought my love might dwell. 
Once:
I had been reaching my mid life, while she had barely received her first scarlet seal. 14 years and still her bosom had not yet matured with the agony of her prepubescent years. Lovely smiles became tainted by age. At her peak, they became into breathless fronds and violent tears. At her 20 years, doctors shrieked: tuberculosis. 5 years of illness, 5 years of intolerable sorrow, 5 years of death. Then 2 more years of lonesome disdain. Deep, deep pain that could not be expressed. So I swallowed it, choked on it, and kept in buried within…until you came. 

Drunken was I, but only two glasses had I consumed. You came to me when all was gone.

“And I sang to you that broken song.”
“Oh Lenore…”
“You sung to my name the death of another love. 
The spirit anew came forth in me and from pen and paper was born passion and lust.”
“And we danced, oh how we danced!”
“As if in our own art.”
“But you came to me only at times when I was being consumed!” I demanded.
“Luckily I did not live with you in your wife’s dead spirit.”
“Then are you skin and bone.” I asked in hopes of feeling her.
“My flesh has decayed with the tone of your forgetfulness.”

After two years with her, I fell for another name. Two years, heh, all I needed to forget my first and only love. What shame!

Now, I drink to you, my love. The essence of death lives in you.
“Best said in your letters forevermore”
Ah yes, my words, my poems, my stories, my novels. Recollections of fear and love. Such powerful emotions that in my breath life. Beauty before time. My thoughts remain. My emotions are concrete. In them, what is death? Lessons of life are immortalized. Philadelphia and New York: The cradles of my inspiration. Before the death of my wife, I had the most wonderful years of my life (1837-1845). I knew you, Lenore, in my poems. Your death was my new life.

“My love, still in poverty your death bed lie.”
“I was an artist, passions bring no bread and wine. They bring love, and new life.
And death and lies.”
“Why must you stop me with these truths?”
“Don’t let your mind wander. You might lose your way home.”
“Home, where is my home?”

Silence reaps all emotions, body and soul, one dwells in lonely places… My life. What happened with my life? Since I attended the University of Virginia, had started my downfall. Father barely sent me enough money to live. I gambled to try and win money for books and clothes: All I needed. Books comforted me in their fantasies, they were my home. 
I quarreled with my father, he wanted me to follow such shallow profession (law). I had been born to write. I left home for Boston and enlisted in the army: “Edgar A. Perry”. When I was honorably discharged I received the title of sergeant major.
“And all for nothing, this was a worthless past.”
“But time had to be filled, though it seems it would have been as long.”
“Then go on. Fill your empty spaces.”

I moved to Baltimore to live with my aunt, Miss Clemm. There, I met Virginia. She was but seven years old.
“Where is Miss Clemm?”
I answer “In the car… I walked a long way to get here, but she is loyal and will wait.”
“The wedding was almost three days ago”
“Three days? Then time has left my side. Emptiness has filled these seconds.”
“Then fill, fill the voids!”
“Oh, my dear Lenore, I cannot love in these moments of anguish”
“Then fill… fill them up with dissolved pain.”

My father… I tried to regain his good will by joining the US Military Academy. Then I discovered my mother had died, and he had decided to remarry. That fool! I am left orphaned once again, and now he takes a strange woman as my new mother. He killed her soul with the touch of another! I deliberately broke regulations to force my dismissal from west point in Virginia. I desired no association with that man. Such rage… poison memories…
…
…
Have I slept?

“Your whole life my dear.”
“Then I have lived a nightmare. My weakness allowed the poison to seep quick.”
“Then take this and do not awake from this dream.”
“Would you try to poison me?”
“Let love decay.”
“Then I will die an honorable death.”

I take the container in my hand and rest it upon the table. I gaze up and Lenore is gone, along with my hopes, my dreams, and my fantasies. Woe is this love that has murdered me! I have lived in poverty as an artist, in hunger and shame! I lived through death and sorrow! Through drunkenness and unemployment. Through love and guilt and agony and failure! What life have I?! What children, what legacy? Everything I have lived these forty years has led me to nothing. Oh… what love… other than the love writ on paper. What children other than my creations, my characters, my fears, my friends. What life other than my stories, fantasies, my nightmares. I take the container to my lips as in a last kiss of parting. I partake of this death that my wife has left me. It burns my throat, smoothing the way for my redeemer to come. And I hear, how could I not? The throbbing of my iron bells. How could I help but quiver, for every sound that floats from the rust within their throats is a groan, they keep this time, time, time… Virginia, Sarah, Lenore. The tolling of the bells, homes of old, and this night’s scorn. All toll the bells. I walk, swaying with the bells, the collapsing bells, and I fall. This place, an unknown door, real in these flooded memories, allusions to my past. I can feel time slipping as the bells roll. Hours as seconds, I hear the days, the suns, come and they slip, whither, and go. I walk and skid through doors. My thoughts, like nightmares, they form. They leave me, this skin so worn. My lips but thorns, they yell. The cuts may spell how this aching soul fell at the moaning and groaning of my bells.