Different Flavors of Suffering And Beauty

By Salem Youngblood

The Moths

The blade cuts silently, slow

A whisper colder than the snow,

And from the vein—no crimson flood,

But wings uncoiling out of blood.

They wake like secrets long denied,

A living swarm where I have died.

No shriek, no cry, no piercing call—

Just fragile bodies, wings so small.

Death’s-head heralds, pale and lean,

Rise from fissures, obscene, unseen.

Their velvet dust, like prayers undone,

Obscures the lamp, obscures the sun.

They thrash against the windowed night,

A frenzy born from inward blight;

Each wing a syllable of grief,

Each flutter granting brief relief.

The pain dissolves into their flight,

A darkened grace, a borrowed light;

I breathe them in, I let them go,

They gather where the shadows grow.

Once my wrists held nothing dear—

Now countless moths assemble here.

No chains, no hymns, no whispered psalm,

Only wings that stitch the calm.

Their bodies clatter, frail, profane,

Like brittle beads against the pane;

Yet in the storm I find release,

A moment carved, a moment’s peace.

The marrow sings, the marrow breaks,

And every fracture something makes—

A creature born of torn apart,

A moth that feeds upon the heart.

What beauty in such rupture lies—

A swarm ascending from demise,

To turn the wound, so raw, so deep,

Into a harvest I may keep.

For they have always been my own,

The moths that nest in marrow, bone;

Their silence kinder than my breath,

Their beauty softer than my death.

And if I fade, then let it be,

A thousand wings escaping me;

No grave, no stone, no memory,

Just moths that rise eternally.

Velvet

The blade obeys in silence,

metal cold, its hunger called.

The skin yields—not gush, not flow,

rupture bleeding out a show.

Flesh rent and open, they crawl—

soggy, chitinous, obscene.

Death’s-head moths, their bodies raw,

slick with blood, with velvet maw.

They bite the air, they bite the bone,

they make the wound their breeding throne.

Their wings beat heavy, clotted, damp,

as if the marrow were their lamp.

The body bled and hollowed, vein by vein,

moth mouths, each one a mouth that feeds on pain.

Their dust, not holy, not sacred,

but bitter, black, and serpentine.

I do not scream, I do not cry.

I watch them gather, climb, and fly.

Each frail, moth thing a testament—

that ruin breeds its sacrament.

And in their myriad, choking flight,

I taste, at last, the edge of night.

Not liberation, not deliverance,

but a violence with elegance.

They eat my silence, drink my breath,

they colonize my lesser death.

And in the swarm, I almost see

that moths have always lived in me.

Blood

The blade descends, the night is still,

a hand compelled by darker will;

And from the vein, no crimson tide,

but spectral wings that open wide.

They rise, they rise, a mournful choir,

Each fragile form a funeral pyre.

Their whisper shakes the midnight gloom,

A hymn of dust, a living tomb.

O mournful moths, O pallid host,

Ye are the things I love the most;

For every flutter, every beat,

Turns sorrow into something sweet.

They circle, circle, endlessly,

Like thoughts I cannot set free.

They haunt the corners of the room,

They are my dirge, they are my doom.

And in their dance, I am released,

A broken soul, a moment’s feast;

Though death attends, though shadows press,

Their flight becomes my blessedness.

O wings, O ash, O spectral breath—

Ye mock the silence known as death;

And if my body fades away,

Your dust shall never know decay.

Forevermore, forever be,

The moths that first escaped from me;

And when I die, let none recall—

The moths shall rise, eclipsing all.

By Salem Youngblood