These throws of rapture, kindly hands caress broken bones, hands that cut through parched soul like a sharpened stone. What is it that we leave in these fitting moments? Sentiment? These curtains fall and wrap us up in our rigor mortis, the nimble fingers of the black one, his majesty of cold, courting me into sweet abeyance. The malign steely touch of needle thorns massing and directing their gaze on my misfiring neurons. The vestiges of my sickening life, of my loves, my crowning glories, the pain and poetry of a spent existence. He coils up inside me now, kissing me and whispering sweet nothings. The words of release, the words I crave as I lose all, as the clotted mass of cumuli nimbus bows his head in salute. As i claw upwards, as i fall back into oblivion and his words speak out amongst the frightening turbulence, those final fleeting words i coax from his abhorrent throat. "Will you join my owsla?"