[Here's a short piece from some number of years ago. I've tried on many voices over the years, and hardly ever sought feedback to see which voice was mine. I really like writing things like this, even as I hear dry choruses of hisses about being overwrought and unapproachable. In another life, I think I could have enjoyed writing the flavor text for Magic cards.]
The Dragon King sits draped in staves and rods, in tsunami grass and the moon in shadow.
Immediately: Correct your heresy: The overgrown British lizard you see before you, and which I can read in your seeing. His Roarship is not the false-god greed-beast of common parlor games and CGI-spectacle flame breath; He is of the lineage of River and Sky, the Dragons barely-visible, only ineptly described by that word "Dragon" and its overtime dilution. His is a wordless dominance, and it is only we who must struggle to speak of Him in the approximate. Neither is "King" sufficient; He is one who reigns not over some human domain of land or exploited serfs, nor over locked rooms of misbegotten metals. His is the breath of all trees. His is the beard of the wooliest lion. His are the robes of every silkworm's wettest dream, his belt the envy of the nineteen planets.
The Dragon King cradles in crossed arms a sword which cannot be forged or faked, on a heat-lightning seat of greenleaf curve, a contemplative cut-free head in his lap.
What does a Dragon King consider in his bended night? From one angle does his crepe paper mane give a vision of Dante's devil, and yet from another the impression of one child's best cotton friend?
Pyramids of possibility drift in and out of view. A cycle of old forest growth is brief-eaten by flames, speed-grown from complete char, to seedpod infancy, into even thicker twists. The face of the beheaded is turned toward Him, and we will never know its gaze.
What does this Dragon King desire, when He can feed and be full on mere stray wisps of any creature's emanated need? The heat of love either matched or unengaged; the hot-tar waver of any cricket's plaintive lust-hunger warble. When the plain rush of a certain crossbreeze meets His unlanguaged requirements completely? What use is a separate human head to His Mawjesty, and what ethic or anger made its separation sure?
One can count on the head of an imagined enemy as a favor-seeking gore prize from some dumb village cretin. That humans often and with pleasure think the death of another will improve their wicked lot. What use is a bloodless noggin to the vigorous nowness of the Dragon King, and why would He tolerate or reflect upon such a tasteless gift at all?
These are just some of the questions that wither before the Dragon King's whorled attention on this graphite-glossy, monochrome-lunelit, regret-stained night.