AN OVERT VALENTINE TO NO ONE in SWINBURNE’S STYLE [Double Sestina]

This is my second attempt at a double sestina. Its a bit dense but I think its pretty epic classical form meets dark sentimentalism.

Darkness mirrors the blackness of these eyes

and they smolder two terrible fires.

Fracturing all gloomy cast with their light,

each one reflects the colourless cold skies,

map marking the route to lost desires.

Each one offset by whitened cheeks of frost

contrasting the finite furnace of night.

Rocking atop her blackened sea, her waves,

her eyes, immortal triumphs of the womb,

foreseeing in themselves both of their graves,

both cursed to know their folly and their cost

for peering far enough to see their tomb.

What foolishness drained black pools into tomb?

Whose treason bars in crypt her sooty eyes?

They bring who leers at them the warmth of womb,

without supplication and without cost,

set soft beneath the heft of darkened skies.

Who shuns and hides away their brilliant night?

Who’d snuff barely stoked forgotten fires,

meet heavy smoky flames with icy waves,

saturate and sap their bright warming light,

robbing the simple splendor of those graves,

sealed in the pale unhealthy sheen of frost,

and ravaging them of their desires?

Their safety belongs in all desires,

and a heart within that regretful tomb

lies dark, encased in a frigid glass frost.

It remains hidden from all summer skies,

shaded in the constant winter of night,

envisioning two empty winter eyes,

their pulsating obsidian fires

radiating-hot invisible light.

Shining from out the confines of their graves,

and nourishing thoughts as if in the womb

with no remonstrance, or thought of the cost,

all caution simply sinks below the waves.

Those cultured pearls engulfed in maddened waves

are somber-ed silent by their desires.

Drowning under infinities of night,

freezing into eternities of frost,

from icy-maelstrom crying, wept from skies.

Those frozen flakes find deep ocean as tomb,

en masse flurries swim in salt-frothy graves,

snuffing frozen, snowy, achromic fires.

That symphonic silvery truth, their light,

now swatted with a wetted hand, and cost

the world those subtle, lucid blackened eyes,

and cast them to a time before the womb.

“Approach life-waking moment in the womb!

Ebb-wash your cacophonous, unsure, waves.

Impend them as a masquerading frost,

shelter them from the threat of many graves.”

This hymn creates a soul behind two eyes,

steals about them as slurping tongue fires,

burns rays of Sun in shadow creviced night,

blazing sable across malfeasant skies;

they lay waste world in purities of light,

turning planet to devitalized tomb,

celestially quelling vast desires;

voiding universal value of cost.

Piceous onyx eyes know not the cost

they pay upon leaving protector womb,

pushed forth into bleak skirmishes of frost,

life’s debt dug out in front of them as graves.

Glib pits that frame a wilderness of skies,

tourbillion lace above brackish fires.

Earth rains on them in grim showers of night,

covering all but those stygian eyes.

Each specter sings from out their haunted tomb,

and reaching those framed spider webs in waves,

stains a fatal red on my desires;

their pyres birth a sanctity of light.

Aerial eyes on their flyways of light,

never cognizant of their precious cost,

doomed to be enclosed in the house of night,

striped from all directions by its waves.

The night then, it is their immanent tomb,

a sepulcher trapping her drusy eyes,

smothering their microcosmic fires,

suffocating those most beautiful graves.

Freeing them from hell would melt desires

made manacles by punishing frost;

that feeling that returns us to the womb,

stifling us under flesh magenta skies.

Remnant longing under her blush skies

fountain-ing with warm splashes of her light

turn universe to food within her womb,

removing phantasmal cold from the frost.

I place my own bouquet of desires

forever on her startled still-beat graves,

for endless worlds contained within her eyes

mix smooth sun-paint day & coarse sackcloth night.

And so to liberate them from their tomb,

un-phased by the gravity of that cost,

I comb massive landscapes of ocean waves,

to seek shelter in malachite fires.

Archaic method started her fires,

piled them up to oblivion skies,

and so challenged my own true desires

to nurture back those carefree loving eyes.

Let heart bathe long in that exquisite light,

let longing-love cascade down in brisk waves,

protecting from the prehistoric night,

that buried glowing sent from somber graves.

Make their bright earth resend me to the womb.

For this need there could be no obscene cost;

I’d still myself within that shadowed tomb,

I’ll shroud myself in rags of bitter frost.

But those black stars unlock me from my frost

with inferno dressing world in fires,

they’ll place me in the fragile of their womb,

soak me deep in the knowledge of their light.

I’ll swim in their feathery plush of waves,

quaff till drunk the pleasant wine of those eyes,

drink flames from breathless coals of night,

imbibing their dead ember desires.

And steeping in the shadow of her graves

I’ll cloak myself from vicious wintry skies.

And for this gem there cannot be a cost

keeping me from the solace of that tomb.

To spend forever in receptive tomb,

shielded safe from the unforgiving frost,

a thought that laps my shores with gentle waves.

To throw the chains off battened slaver skies

and dance free from the bondage of their light

does not contest with other desires.

Compare not beauty to that resting womb,

her ardent knowing sent from out those graves,

sustaining on the glow of those fires,

the world would disappear but for those eyes.

To try and find the sum of that bright cost

will just puzzle in multitudes of night.

The capacity of colourless night

a most brilliant, empty, familial tomb,

rendered helpless from its defensive frost

by doubled wall of invincible light,

a new born stare from out the dulcet womb.

Negligent of life’s magnificent cost

and virgin to all the Earth’s desires,

a calming sea of softly tossing waves,

under orange blanketed morning skies,

cradles her marvelous sailing fires.

Those pyres glisten as ritual graves

and burn forever; those furious eyes.

From out the tomb, from out the shallow graves,

in waves resonating from out the womb

in streaming white beams across the night skies,

light frisks and melts the frozen skin of frost,

and fires from the loveliest of eyes

repay the cost of all my desires.

Author's Note

This is super long, enjoy it. If you want to give me notes go for it.