he carves me into his skin.

he carves me into his skin

so deeply and perfectly I can never come out.

I'm on the rickety edge of every one of his knives.

I'm the Latin words for all of his curses, forgivable or not, 

words he pronounces but doesn't know the meaning of.

I crawl up his wounds up to his heart.

I don't knock on the door. I rip apart its cage,

I slip through the blood, I–

I'm in his heartbeats more than he is.

I'm in each one of his thoughts

I arrive before he thinks them and I leave

after he speaks them,

after he crushes them with lips of velvet

that brush against my fickle conscience

he holds me hostage against my own ethics

every tenet in my mind speaks with his mermaid voice

(all the sailors in the sea have drowned because of him)

my moral compass doesn't point anywhere that's not him

and so I am left adrift in a deep, tumultuous ocean

not knowing whether I'm the wrecked ship

or the iceberg that made it sink

tom marvolo riddle is

an instigator of logos

a destroyer of ethos

and a murderer of pathos.

I question him, for he is my philosophy.

but I still follow him, for he is

the only religion I learned how to pray to.

tom marvolo riddle is

a tamer of the wild. the foretaste to my natural disaster.

the foreplay before, during and after the killing.

an effect with no cause. an avid performer of Murphy's Law,

and the only exception to Newton's Laws of motion

for when he drops hearts, minds, even souls,

they don't fall towards the center of Earth

but towards the black holes he carries

in the pockets of his ironed robes.

he extends the knife to me and

I wrap my hand around his and help him bury it

a little deeper, a little more, a little softer.

I like the blood when it covers our hands

for it makes them the same shade

carnage is the only stance of life in which we are the same

the only room of love in which we can dance at even pace

so I help him with the knife. 

he spoon feeds me silver with it

and I drink it down as if it's gold.

forgive me father, for I have sinned.

no, actually–

forgive me father, for I like to sin.

no. not quite right.

forgive me father, but if you didn't want people to sin,

if you didn't want me to sin

why would you make sin look like him?

or perhaps he wasn't born from your holy mind

but from the wicked minds of your ancestors

perhaps the reason you force people to read the Bible

is to stop them from wanting to read or be written in his diary

perhaps the reason why you want – why you need –

people to kneel to you

is because you know they would gladly crawl for him

but just like I never kneeled to you

I never crawled for him.

that's why he wants to bend me

instead of breaking me.

tom marvolo riddle needs me. 

he needs the possession of me.

he wants to rule me, consume me, destroy me,

as if I'm just another world for him

another place for him to enter, occupy and burn to the ground.

I'm the cinders that dance between his fingertips

and he's the smoke that clouds my mind

and fills my lungs and stops me from breathing

only I—

mistake it with oxygen, so I inch even closer, to inhale it even more.

now he's in my lungs and he's killing me from within,

with a thousand paper cuts

not perceptible to anyone but the person who has them

I don't notice them, I don't

I mistake them for skin

(skin as slick as silk shrouding razors)

and so my blood drains from me

and gathers in his hands,

the throne to all evil, the shrine to his sin

and my embers still dance between his fingertips

only they don't burn him

because he has already swallowed

all the flames.

he's the phoenix that's reborn from my ashes

and when he wants to set the world on fire,

I'm the one who gives him the matches

perhaps hoping he will drop them not to the ground

but to the figmental wounds that make up my crown

(my soul is only my soul when it's set ablaze

and his fingers are only his fingers if he's the one doing it)

but he won't burn me like he burns everything else

he refuses to as if he'll die if he breaks the vow

the Unbreakable Vow he made when he told me

If you were my world,

I'd burn you down to the ground and step on your ashes.

But you're not worthy. Not even of destruction.

but he didn't understand that

to be reborn, a phoenix must first die

and I'm the one who does it.

I'm the one who kills all the phoenixes.

and his is next.

I can see the feathers in him,

tatters of angel wings, multicolored plumes

that chant to beguiling apocalypses.

he loves the fire, he kissed my flames,

he ignited an inferno in each of my embers

so now I'm saving him a spot on my funeral pyre.

and when he's reborn I'll carve him into my skin.

so the next time a phoenix dies

we can rise together

from the ashes.