Untitled Nihilism

Heft it to your lips this pitcher of bitterness

Taste in it the bile

Let it wash all over your tongue

Its ichor thick, its bouquet vile

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A taste of sacrifice so futile

The tang of fallen dreams

The smoke of burning pyres stings the eye

The biers heaped round the House of Delight

Treasures lusted but never freed

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Delusions craft of salt and ashes

Blaze swiftly in the night

The taste of false hopes gone up in smoke

Razed, the fraud of the House of Delight

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Heft it to your lips this pitcher of bitterness

Taste in it the bile

Sit and watch the embers glow

Wait here and waste a while.

Penthink

I’ve been pondering a pen today. Yes, a pen. I wonder if its use, or the use of a different one, should influence my writing and my thoughts. After all, it’s a well-known fact that touch and texture can affect an individual’s sense of ownership, at least in relation to an object. How often have you held the thing you desire – or the person – and loved it all the more?

Do you think touch might change penmanship, the current of thought?

Would having a comfortable pen induce me to write warm, uninteresting things? Would using a difficult pen – like this one – render harsh and cold narratives? Would it instead, perhaps, prod me to ever greater cunning and inventiveness, as harsh and stressful living tends to do to human beings?

Fine points for delicate thoughts? Thick nibs for the vulgar? “Sex is a whiteboard marker.”

I guess my fundamental question is: where do these thoughts that coalesce in my mind until they reach such criticality as to over-spill and spew all over the page originate? Are they internally generated, a byproduct of a self-contained intellectual and physiological fusion reactor, an imagination-tokamak, that births them in a flash of light and heat?

Or are they externally created, absorbed via syncretic osmosis, ideas-as-missiles that my mind and fingers conduct as lightning rods conduct the wrath of the sky? And, if this is the case, where do these externalities themselves originate? What was the first thought?

One final… thought, to bring us back to the beginning: if the latter is the case, as I suspect it is… then just how mighty this pen I wield?

Aphorism

The flowers have a different perfume at night, as if there are secret messages they wish to pass to one another that cannot see the light of day.

A Love Poem, Sung in Martial Tones

Some say love is a war, a game of maimed hearts

A battle to watch but not to take part

That even winners are wounded

And all players scarred.

But I pity such fools, with their guns in their fort,

Their trenches too deep, their wires too taut;

Their hearts cast in steel and their passions in bone,

Their nights spent in fear-sweat, their days spent alone.

For some wars are won, some fights end in success

But only for those who risk the bloodshed.

Only for those who let passions flower

Only for us, in our finest hour

So fear bullets not; fight here, girl, by my side

Take up love’s sword, be my warrior-bride

To the others the fox-hole, the wall and the hide,

But the love that they fear shall our deaths not elide.

Us

Do you remember a time before us? Before the world entire could be found in each other’s arms and in each other’s hearts, in the space between our reaching fingertips?

I can, but with each passing night beside you, each fulgent Moonrise, it becomes dimmer and dimmer, a gloomy, distant tower shrouded in thickening mist or a tangled garden falling into shadow as the rays of the Sun pass from that valley into the next. I stand at the portal to such a garden, round and barred by Chinese gates, my hands against the cold stone and I smile to watch those grey eras recede, to watch them drown in the depths of memory. Those times are photographs behind a pane of glass now, one-snap postcards from lands long since redrawn on the map. The imprints they have left in the dust have long since blown wither and where on the wind.

One day, ten years or ten thousand hence, we shall once again climb the stony path to that gate and peer through at the Potemkin village beyond, at the buildings we had once believed were those of a magical city, before we found each other. We shall laugh and shake our heads at how they have crumbled now, at how their golden coat was always just veneer, at how that paint has peeled and their colours have run. And when others see us arm-in-arm and heart-in-heart, and they ask when we became, I hope we shall smile and say: “Us? Oh, we always have been.”

Journeys by Sea

I was a boat without a helmsman

Adrift on tepid waves

No wind to grace my empty sails

Just silence and disease

The journey thus had been rocky so

Shoals, deep currents and the doldrums

With fits, false starts and circling sharks

No beats for broken drums

The world seemed waste on that awful sea

As if time had bid good-bye

Twas a cruellest mare of apathy

Without smiles nor tears to cry

I do not know for what I searched

Or where my ship it went

Didn’t think I’d find it then

Forever hopeful, always spent

Then you, the wind, you blew a gale

You came to me cloud-black

A welcome breeze with emerald hues

To whip up seas gone flat

At first I was awed yet frightened still

Your force of nature wrought

I struggled and thrashed though I loved you so

For love itself, is fraught

And inertia had me in iron grip

Its fingers locked and tightening

The world beyond the sea it beckoned

But the span itself seemed frightening

Yet you, my breeze, you swept me up

You billowed out my sails

Such power, such passion, such energy

No fear left for travails

I couldn’t help but hurtle ‘long

I couldn’t help but laugh

A’feared? Not I, for I’d been wrong

For you I’d sought, my draught!

So wind-spirit, wind-child, wind take me with

I’ll be your loving carraque

For where you go I shall come wither!

Your tempests I shall tack

Another Aphorism

If one doesn’t look directly at a star one can see the others around it, that have hidden in the umbra of its brilliance. When one gazes at the night sky one always gains something, even if it’s just another point of light.

Conjunction

It’s funny, see: I used to have this dream, once upon a time, of a girl like you. I guess when I say dream I mean a fantasy, maybe a wish. Do wishes come true? Nah. Never have. But I wished her all the same. She was so real to me sometimes that I could have reached beyond the veil and touched her.

She’d have hair like a raven or a storm-cloud, I knew, sleek and sable and jet as the gulfs between the stars.

She’d have eyes wide and emerald and deep, so deep that the unwary would lose himself in them, a sailor gazing into the unfathomable sea.

She’d be like fire, my dream; fearless, forever crackling with motion so that she were a sultry, smouldering temptress even sat, still, on a cold morning with coffee. She’d flash a hint of a smile or parry a joke with a sharp and poignant retort, wielded like the slenderest and finest of rapiers (but not too sharp, for like all men I have an ego easily cut when drawn from the right angle).

She’d be like wind, I’d decided, graceful, her every movement a dance of a thousand steps lighter than air. To yearn to dance with her – as if I, clumsy-footed I, even could – would be to know agony.

She’d be like water, I felt, soothing and gentle, rippling with powerful currents. She’d move wither and where without care for fear or obstacle, and if boulders or jams should bar her way she’d slip easily and graciously around them. Her ebbing and flowing would wear down walls, fill empty spaces.

And finally she’d be like the earth, forever with me, forever bringing forth fresh and free and wonderful things as easily as she breathed. Like the earth she would hold me eternal, through sickness or joy or even death, and like a precious gem heat and light could only enhance her beauty.

That was my dream.

Do you think it possible to breathe life into a dream? I would have laughed at that idea, once. Dreams are for the days when the world is as grey as tin; things to hope for, not things to have.

And yet, my dream… my dream, she came to me. She came on the wind with words and eyes like fire, with a laugh as fluid and nourishing as water, with a touch as real and textured as the soft earth. And like the wind and the water she drifted in and out of my life for a time, forever back and forth, and like fire she burned as easily as she warmed. But like the earth, the blessed earth, her gravity was inescapable, the pull of her too strong. And one day, my dream, you sat next to me in that half-lit world, in your top hat with your shoulders bared, your lips as dark as blood and your skin smoother than passion, and you told me that you loved me.

How to describe that night? What words to use to describe such wondrous sensation, such divine revelation? The earth fell from beneath my feet. The fire in my heart burned as ardently as any heaven-flung sun. My mind and my feelings were water, lost in the flow, each thought a distinct and glistening droplet fulgent with refracted light. The wind blew strong and clear with your words.

Ah, that blessed conjunction! It was like yesterday in my memory, but it has been a gift for every day since; every waking moment and, I’m sure, every sleeping one as well. You are the elements and every element of you is the foundation of my joy, my love, my everlasting. And who would have thought all of that could come from one little dream, who slipped into my life like a wish?

A Lament Felt Before Its Time

The one day I need it to work, need it to be swift, and it is not. I’m talking about the system, of course, the computer system; but I might as well be referring to the whole damned thing. The System, capital letters. Does it ever work?

Most days I feel like I’m wasting my life here. Diurn after diurn, eight or nine hours at a time, I engage my brain, hammer my neurons against the anvils of pointless tasks and pathetic paperwork. I worry that with each blow I’m also hammering down my creativity, that I’m diverting precious energy that I may never possess again, my never find renewable sources for, into the fruitless and all-consuming void.

My job can never fulfil me.

It can never love me, can never improve me, can never fertilize my dreams until they bloom and fruit in vivacious glory. As long as I wake each morning and return to this cage of keyboards and corporate jargon I can never find myself waiting for me, can never transcend this fine and obscuring mist.

Bit by bit with bites so tiny that I fail to notice until an entire limb has been devoured, my job is eating me alive.

The worst is that I willingly let it, seduced like Delilah by talents of silver, promising myself that, at the right time, I will push aside the money pouches and make my daring escape from the temple.

But how can a man half-masticated hope to climb the walls to freedom? How can he ever hope to weave his way through the fields of wire without his fingers and toes?

Is the future merely a cell, a cubicle, a fluorescent light flickering down like an accusing finger on a grey old man, a man chewed on and bruised with his remaining flesh hanging loose from his bones, who gazes up through a circle of bars at the turgid blue skies and laments the world that never was?