Poem: I Was Not a Ghost.

CW: toxic friendships, mild gore, religious imagery

 

This is one of those poems that took a lot of re-drafting and editing, however the first scribbled notes (which is how i tend to date poems) were done about 13th January, 2021.

I Was Not a Ghost.:

My howl echoed up to the moon, and you closed

your window against the noise. The week before,

you see, I had run through the rain to heed your

own cry, and on the way home that night the wolf

found me, took me in a single bound and sunk

its teeth. Perhaps you thought merely that my

song belonged to another monster of the night,

but the pitchfork of your text drove me back well

enough: We all have our own problems to deal

with, you can't always demand other people's

emotional energy. Caught in a bear trap on my

way to solve your problem, I cried and cried to

the night, but your dissertation was due so you

turned up your music to drown me out. Alone

again, I gnawed off my own leg to be free.

You claimed the door was open, not trying to

understand that I could not step inside without

invitation, that you had made me unwelcome

with a cross of sharp words above the door. I

was hungry for the one you had with you every

night, drawn by the scent of blood, tried to explain

that you cannot welcome both the bloodsucker

and the priest across your threshold. You made it

clear whose company you preferred, then accused

me of not making an effort, ignoring the five

times in a row you cancelled plans I made. After

promising to love every flaw, you carried stakes

like jewellery, turned them against me every

conversation hidden beneath a falsehood of

insincere texts and blessings that burned my skin.

Knocked from the pedestal you put me on, I

fell into the hellfire below. Feathers became

spines, until my body was its own weapon, until

I could not hold a conversation without trying

to bargain for a soul. Stepping onto the ground

sanctified by your holier-than-thou conviction

to every argument you started ignited my cells,

made a wildfire of my wings that blistered

everyone I cared about. Pacing in the tiny walls

of my flat, I chose to burn down my own church

rather than risk making you taste the hellfire you

cast me into. And after I crawled back to the

surface with the stumps of burned wings cradled

in my arms, you dare to tell me you would have

offered me forgiveness if only I had apologised.

I was a poltergeist, rattling the walls, knocking

books from the shelves, making the record player

jump trying to shake a single apology into being.

I was a zombie, rotting in grief, maggots oozing

from my gums, stumbling after you down the

road desperate to feel warm skin one more time.

I was an abomination, the nuclear fallout of your

temper mutating me into something I did not want

to be, rampaging to another city just to find peace.

I did not go quietly, I did not fade away. I was not

a ghost, I went screaming, tearing myself away

from yet another person who made a monster of

me. Call me what I am. Demon, burning, vampire,

wanting, wolf-man, gnawing off my own leg to be

free, my howl still echoing, unheard, into the night.

Rome

CW: mention of alcohol, trauma, sexual activity

 

I debated about putting this one up before the release of Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise, and decided that I would, kind of as a... little exciting preview, eh? This post will feature a small sneak peak from Vol II which isn't very exciting or contextual, but could constitute spoilers if you're determined to go in completely blind, so consider yourself warned, friend!

 

In the summer of 2019, between finishing uni and actual graduation (and subsequent starting-first-full-time-job), I backpacked Europe and Morocco for two months. I'd wanted to do it for years, made plans with friends who bailed, so in the end, to send off a part of my life that was brilliant in some ways and terrible in many others, I did it by myself. All of my destinations, I chose for a very specific reason - I liked the name of the city, or a film I liked was set there, or I had always wanted to go, or it was just impossible to travel by train around Europe without stopping in Germany at least once (and actually I did love Berlin way more than anticipated). I try not to talk about it much because there is very little more irritating than a "travelling the world changed my life" person, especially in These Times, but I do allow a pass to bring it up when it's relevant. So, now is one of those relevant times: to celebrate the imminent release of Vol II, I am going to talk a little about Rome.

Before starting Sylvestus, I had never had any real interest in ancient Rome, or Greece, or Egypt. Like all kids, I dabbled, but I was more about pirates and cavemen when it came to it. Looking back, this is definitely because in Roman history at least, we focus so much on the military, just like in Greek history we focus on the mythology, and those things don't really interest me... but as I've discovered in the past few years, I'm a sucker for slice-of-life history. I want to feel connected. I want to know what the average person did in their day-to-day. I want to know what they used instead of pockets. I want to know what their daily gripes were. I want to know what their bed was made out of. I want to know what their restaurant etiquette was. I want to know how they felt about dogs. I want to know what weird sh*t they used to treat colds. So, once I had done my basic research on Roman military and religious and economic history, enough to create an authentic world that had its own consistent rules (for instance, the military structure described in Sylvestus of optiones, centurions, etc. is loosely accurate but simplified - the important thing is that there's a consistent internal logic that the reader can learn and be certain of), I dove right into writing, and only did research for the very specific pieces of worldbuilding that I wanted. This sparked an interest in ancient Rome that has stuck with me, and I think always will - but more than that... a connection to it.

Visiting Rome was one of the main reasons I had wanted to ~do Europe~ in the first place. And this trip came at a time when... well.

Vol I was pretty much finished. I had dragged my way through it over the past two years, hating most of it and too caught up in Other Problems to dedicate myself to it. In short, I had lost Sylv. For me, losing a character is when you... just grow out of touch with them. They used to be there with you all the time, asking to be penned, commenting on your life and connecting it with their own, and then they just. Fade away.

It was the specific way I had lost Sylv that hurt. I had felt it happening for three years: he was left behind, static, this stalwart steely asexual aromantic who looked down on anyone who felt, much less acted upon, those baser human urges, alcohol-free his whole life, living in the shadow of his trauma while insisting he had run from it. And I imagined I could feel him scowling at me, judgemental, as I drank to numbness three times a week, threw myself into the centre of the party, into dangerous situations, onto dangerous people, became caught up in the circular cat-fighting of toxic groups. I hated what I did, who I let myself be, and I hated that I had lost Sylv. Looking back, I can see that I couldn't write him while I was so distanced from him.

In March 2019, I stood on a stage and talked about the sexual assaults that happened to me in that time to a room full of strangers, friends, and people who had stood by and let them happen, equally caught up in the same circular whirlwinds as I had been. And I found Sylv again. Maybe not exactly there, but he was coming back, in some fashion; I would not have been able to write Vol II if I had not done that, and I would not have been able to do that without a very small group of very good people. There are a lot of shadows of all of that in Vol II; I'll talk about them properly sometime.

For now, suffice to say, in the last few months of my studies, I was quietly and internally setting up for Sylv to return. Making concrete plans to write and edit and publish, yes, but more than that, just emotionally setting the stage. Welcoming him home. Preparing to spend a few wary weeks eyeing each other up, figuring out how the other had changed before we took this final journey together.

In a way, I found a link to Sylv in every city I visited - the bustle of the Marrakech marketplace, the birds at a lake in Copenhagen, the ruins in Split, the quiet of a church in Prague. I was desperate for connections. We were finding each other again.

But of course, when it came down to it, when it was time to open up the door, it had to be Rome. I had spent two years losing Sylv and half a year trying to find him again, and if it was going to happen anywhere, it was going to be here.

I tumbled into Rome with first-degree sunburn, most of my money gone in less than half the trip, the last time I slept 36 hours ago for two hours curled up on a chair on a ferry, knowing more Latin than I did Italian, immediately lost on the metro. I have a distinct memory of almost hitting one of those "fatigued hungry in-pain foreign country" breaking points as I climbed yet another set of stairs in yet another metro station - and seeing, directly in front of me, the Pyramid of Cestius. Which I knew about not because of Sylv, but equally embarrassingly, because of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, the only game of the franchise I have enjoyed playing multiple times. It was enough to ground me and let me know I was on the right track, and I found my AirBnB a half-hour trek later, got not nearly enough sleep, set off again at 8am to find the six-dozen landmarks I had circled on my map... and promptly got heatstroke and slept for two days.

I now had one day left in Rome, not three, which left me angry and upset and stressed, but to my credit I made the most of it; looking back, I struggle to conceptualise how much I fit into one day.

The one that sticks out to me, though, is the Forum.

I was very hungry. It was maybe mid-afternoon, which meant I had already been dragging myself around a large city for six hours and was planning to go for six more. I saw the Capitoline Wolf, checked that off the list, headed down the street to the Forum.

And ended up on one side of a locked gate. I could see the Forum, but I didn't want to just see it, I wanted to be in it, and no matter how much I walked up and down the extremely long extremely high fence, I couldn't find my way in, and I could see lots of tourists there but I couldn't get in and oh I needed to pee so very badly. I literally walked up and down that fence for an hour before I gave up, squatted and p*ssed in the street, then went back the way I had come.

Aaaand found the entrance and a public toilet.

I was feeling a lot better after peeing, so I found the best in it, made friends with some other tourists, and got into the Forum. This is just kind of setting the scene for how my whole two months went, and that day in particular.

I was already in love with Rome. The vibe of the city, the ruins, the weather that day. But something about the Forum... Rome as we know it is built on top of and through the ruins of Rome as Sylv would have known it, and the streets you walk are twenty feet above where they walked. The parts that are on the same level and well-preserved are mostly cordoned off, to keep them well-preserved, and while the Colosseum and Circus Maximus were amazing from the outside, I couldn't afford the entry fee to either of them, and... neither of them are super relevant to Sylv, the Circus Maximus never being mentioned in either novel and the Colosseum being built three decades after his death. Which is a dumb detail and not relevant to my overall enjoyment of the city, but it wasn't... you know.

But the Forum is a huge open area, twenty feet below the rest of the city, filled with arches and temples and columns and excavation sites, and it was as I walked here that I really felt it. This was the same ground boots thousands of years ago walked over. These were the same stones hands thousands of years ago touched. This was the same statue eyes thousands of years ago looked at. Rome is a rich living history like no other I have known; these ruins were here, already ancient, when Regeane loped between them in 775 in The Silver Wolf, when Ezio climbed them in 1503 in Assassin's Creed, for the two thousand years between and since.

I stood in the middle of the path, looking up at another statue of the Capitoline Wolf. Just ahead was a raised ruin marked out by the guide posts as the temple of the Vestal Virgins. Opposite was a low ruin the guide posts hesitantly suggested may have been a brothel.

And something clicked.

I had been seeing things in loose connections and tenuous fabricated links, the vibe of a song I listened to in a place or the way a bird flew across the path that I noted to use as a metaphor later. But this was something concrete, this was something that I could make real. I was standing in a place of history, in a place Sylv could have stood...

So I made it that he did.

"What do you see, Astutus?"

Sylv's eyes flicked away from their study of the people around them and followed Galerius' nod to the statue.

Moral lessons had very much been Seneca's specialty; while they had greatly frustrated the young Sylvestus Caecidius Astutus, by the time he left the merchant's employ he had learned their predictable patterns enough to glide through any riddle Seneca thought he was putting him through.

Not so, Galerius'. Yet. Much more rarely did the African-born merchant, smuggler, and gambling master deal in ethical or philosophical riddles. The lessons he taught tended to have much more practical applications.

Sylv knew better than to offer petulance or sarcasm, so he settled on frankness.

"I see a lot."

The Forum was bustling, bristling, a disorganised mass of people pushing for templa, shouting, begging, soldiers marching through, lupi laughing from windows, chickens flapping in their cages, carts, mules, horses, templa and beggars and stalls and vendors and pickpockets and people, people, people—

He was learning to know them. Sylvestus Iaiunus Catulus had never seen more than a hundred people gathered together to celebrate; Sylvestus Postumus had done his best to steer clear of anything larger than a small town; but Sylvestus Caecidius Astutus was learning. Ahh, but Jupiter, the Roman Forum was a difficult place to practise...

Seneca, for all his faults, had taught Sylv well how to read faces and bodies and voices, judge the weight of a purse, respond in whatever kind was needed to get a man's money - but that had been in the comparatively quiet marketplace of Luceria.

Roma was a different world.

The old merchant had been careful, on the one occasion they had visited; he had wanted Sylv to experience the city, but they had visited the templa only when it was quiet, kept clear of the busiest crowds when possible. When Sylv had "one of his moments" after a heavyset drunken man had called out some crude offer to the slim boy, he had scolded him - but had never pushed him so far again.

Galerius had no such scruples, and quite right too. If Sylv were to stay a lowly honest merchant, then cringing at the first sign of a crowd and shutting down like a war-shy horse was fine - but oh, Mercury, Sylv's ambitions were so much greater than that. It had been made clear that if Sylv could not even function in a heavy crowd, he could not be the infamous Galerius Vitullus' clerk.

So, though his jaw was tense and his fingers knotted in the thick fur of Pterelas' ruff, Sylv coped.

The Templum of Vulcan was busiest today; winter was a cold warning wind away, and the Romans begged the God of Fire to warm them in the long nights to come. The soldiers followed a set route, and so the beggars and vendors moved out of their way. The lupi were distant enough to be ignored, the Vestals closer, demanding a nervous respect from the milling crowds. Lock on the cage of chickens coming loose. Cart would bounce right there where road was rutted. Best to take a neat step away now, before it spooked the chickens and they broke free and wreaked another whirlwind of chaos into the busy - but not patternless, not unpredictable, if one paid attention well enough - scene.

What do you see, Astutus?

He filed all of it into a closed-off box of silver-steel and followed Galerius' nod.

"The She-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, Roma's founders." Sylv sensed his voice was a little dispassionate; a man tripped and shoved into him, and Sylv's mind momentarily flared white panic as he righted himself. He tightened his fist in Pterelas' fur, unclenched his jaw, and continued. "Loathed by peasants and hunted for sport as well as necessity, given to lupa as a symbol of their non-womanhood - yet also credited with ensuring Roma was founded at all. Artist of this particular sculpture unknown, but cast in bronze and matching several others throughout the city and beyond. Not incredibly realistic, so one assumes the artist had never seen a living specim—"

"All right, Astutus. You know your Romans and your history. And your wolves, apparently. But why is the statue relevant?"

A pickpocket drifted closer, caught sight of Pterelas, and drifted further again.

"It's a symbol of Roma's hypocrisy," Sylv grumbled; behind silver-steel, the Vestals prayed and the lupi went to their knees and a hand knotted in his hair and pushed his face into the cold stone floor.

"It certainly seems so to me," rumbled a voice like ice cracking beneath boots. It had been cold in the Forum, winter's threat hovering over like a watchful eagle, but when Sylv next exhaled it was in a cloud of fog.

Galerius, Pterelas, and all of the Forum's occupants disintegrated in a flurry of snow. Sylv reached calmly for his dagger as a blistering wave of cold crashed across the side of his face.

"Vish," he greeted smoothly, turning to face the giant white-grey wolf who now stood beside him in the deserted, ice-wrought Forum.

 

Sylv stands in the exact place in the Forum that I stood, sees what I saw, two thousand years and a universe apart. Because it brings me peace to know that we existed in the same space. A connection.

Me and Sylv found each other again, and as anticipated, we were both changed from the last time we had really known each other. It took some getting used to, but it was for the better for both of us. The Sylv who came to be in Vol II is vastly changed from the Sylv I first imagined, from the Sylv I felt so distanced from those years ago. If I feel shame, it is a shame Sylv has also felt, a shame he has coached me through on long lonesome nights when no-one held us together but ourselves. He does not scowl at me for what I did, what I let be done to me; he knows that pain, that hollowness, knows that we both came to peace with it in the end.

When Vol II is published and I spend a few months creating promotion content then move gradually onto the next thing, I know that he will slowly fade again, and part of me is afraid of that.

But if I need him, I know where he is. Stood in front of the statue of the she-wolf in the Forum in Rome, yes, but also in the way a bird swoops low across the path ahead of me, in the lyrics of a song, in the photograph of a stained glass glow on the floor of a church, in that hollow space in my chest where the sunset lives.

We're home.

[Image ID: a photo of Roman Forum taken from above, looking out over the ruins of columns, arches, and temples. End ID]

 

[Image ID: a photo of the temple of the Vestal Virgins in the Roman Forum, ruins made of brown stone on several floors surrounded by trees and pink flowers. End ID]

 

[Image ID: a photo of the temple of Vulcan in the Roman Forum, a classic Roman temple with steps leading up to columns and a sealed-off grey stone building. End ID]

 

[Image ID: a photo of a carved stone SPQR sign on the wall of a ruin in the Circus Maximus. End ID]

 

[Image ID: a photo of the Colosseum in Rome taken from street level. End ID]

 

[Image ID: a photo of the Capitoline Wolf on Capitoline Hill, a bronze statue of a she-wolf suckling two human babies, Romulus and Remus. End ID]

 

Poem: Shadow

CW: abuse, sexual assault, mental illness, non-explicit animal death

This poem is nearly a year old now but I only just got around to posting it. It is dated 11th April 2020 and makes reference to several of my other poems, A Home in Your Own Skin and Churchyard. Remember to click the "actual poem" tag to see all of the poems I've posted here.

Shadow:

Me and my shadow swap places sometimes,

to see if anyone will notice. My mother

thinks I am just a shadow; she does not

understand how my friends call me funny,

creative, warm, because as I have written

many times before, she cannot love without

shattering, shouted me silent too many times

to hear my best jokes. When she visited my

new flat for the first time - in a city three

hundred miles away - I didn't speak for two

days after. My manager pulled me aside

because my shadow's face did not know

how to smile when a customer asked me

what someone with my qualifications was

doing working here. The first time my best

friend saw my shadow changed my life;

I saw in their eyes their sudden reverent

vow to protect my light at all costs, and I

felt loved for the first time in seventeen

years. They hold me sometimes, and I see

it again. Some people prefer my shadow:

in not knowing a smile, it does not show

crooked front teeth, which many people

have delighted in informing me ruin my

selfies; lacking opinions, it does not offend.

When my shadow takes over, I am another

place, watching a sunset over the ocean at

the end of a pier in my own chest, or else

cradling a dead pigeon to my heart as I

carry it to the churchyard. My shadow

lived my life for three months after he

shushed me enough times that I stopped

saying no - a lesson learned from my

mother's loathing of my attempts at bodily

autonomy. Once, a friend told me that I

was easier to be around "like this"; it was

the most hurtful thing anyone had ever

said to me. A day later, I mumbled my

first half-hearted joke in six weeks, and

my counsellor (who was also my biology

teacher, and also my friend) cried because

it meant I was coming back. He said when

I was me, I glowed the brightest of anyone

he had ever met. I don't hate my shadow

for its silent empty dark; someone needs

to stand and take the abuse while I watch

sunsets and bury dead pigeons. But I hate

the grief in my friend's eyes when she

realises she's talking to my shadow. I hate

losing my sunshine for people who should

have known better than to treat me that

way. I hate grieving days and months lost

to a darkness I can too easily be convinced

I deserved. I don't just want to live in the

sunshine; I want to be the sun warming my

best friend's face as they cry through a gin

and tonic on a Thursday night. I want to

be bright enough that their shadow is just

their shadow. I want to make them feel

loved for the first time in twenty-two years.

I want to hold their hand while our shadows

hold each other, stretching out behind us

over the ocean in the setting sun.