It has been aeons since I bled, and longer since I loved, yet I cannot forget joy and sorrow, those constant companions, their depthless measure. The familiar weight of memory and consequence help to still uncertainty, but seeking their comfort is foolish, and sometimes I know this. As night draws a wolf, yesterday can kill you, wherever you may be. I close my eyes, span and unease shrinking from the burning in my soul. All is clear but for a wish, though if I bleed instead before the end, so be it.

The pool glints in the late summer sun and here I think the truth is that we can only know our place in another's destiny by staring long into their eyes, and longer than they can stand. You smile without mischief, the water is cool, the day is ours. I shake the edges of my mood and tell you I love you, and that I want nothing more than this moment be made able to brave the shoals of existence. I place a seed on your cheek beside another, dangling, and say I even love how you eat like a pig. You throw your head back and laugh, catapulting the stars in wayward arcs, synchronized and beautiful.

The stars freeze and burning metal fills the air. I fall to the ground with my hands over my ears and one thought penetrating above all, get away now, so I stagger and run like the slowest elk realizing the lions have chosen and trip and get up and run and run and fall again with tears streaming and palms gushing blood as I tremble and shake and force my eyes open to fogged glass as sunshine floats on fading blackness with my pulse a slow and unsteady tide and there a flickering form recalls virile gods drawn to humankind like moths to the flame of adventure and sorrow and unlearned lessons and from it seeps a voice like silk or sand or both. It tells me there is a box where running stars remain saved, though off the record it is still dust, and to see what it can show I must look. A veil lifts on a bridge whose strangest feature is not vertigo-slant into oblivion or lack of deterrent to self-destructive whim but the perfect absence of joint or break as though sculpted by some roving and bygone titan, yet it pales next to a horizon so terrible in its otherness that it drowns my every fiber in wonder.

Fevered seas lash the shores of my mind, a cliff's edge meeting summer sky, a dragon, a rose, the abyss between. I prepare to scream, knowing it will end me, the death of sanity not peace but deafening lack of all perceived, and suddenly the onslaught stops, removed as if by surgery. An apparition appears, a sorcerer. He says, “Did you know the most powerful humans are gods and the least of gods are human, and that which waxes and wanes is sovereign to both? Though to be fair, it is often just a matter of reputation. The two things gods share as they fade are an existence transmuting and not knowing why. They crumble to the last against the sheer impossibility of that wall. How it first appeared surmountable I wonder?” I am spellbound, assailed by a symphony gone wrong, the greater evil to be left in silence. The sorcerer glides forward, no taller than I yet a colossus the same. He says, “Alas, I digress, and the time has come. I have been called a coward, a mistake, but you know the truth. I am the strength you wish you had.”

A starless sky supplants the void but not the quiet surrounding this parley, my wind rendered docile, afraid of the world. The sorcerer says, “This is where potential divides, where pain is sacrificed for deference amidst the shifting sands of anonymity. Opulence and famine wash like a wave, advantage earned yet always relinquished. It was so until the tyrant entered the sphere and evolved from ambition to conditioned pursuit of means without end. Now the countless are chained, the tangible appearing more real than a dream. Do you feel their grasping, their hunger for answers?” A glow to mirror speaker and dimension ascends, a black sun filling the chasm as though by rain but instead of drops flying to rejoin their like in remade unity it becomes cascade of souls howling in silence, aggrieved by the weight of connection. The sphere fades and the countless moan in unison. I hope never to hear its like again.

Am I their champion? I am not the strongest or most kind. I excel only in wishing life were otherwise, that I had done better by those I love. The sorcerer says I can cut their chains, put an end to suffering, but not without awareness of the price. I must sacrifice everything I hold dear. After all, one cannot be half slave and half free. In the sky a quicksilver rippling reveals spectrums of blue and evergreen, pale chameleons living in the shadow of greater destinies. Must I trade all I have for all that is? I did not choose starvation, the length of the day, this capacity to hate. Yet they are. Every pondering moment, every wanton act, every bare and transient opportunity leads to steep and newly paved roads that assume the shape of my nightmares. How many must be placed at my feet before I decide? Just one, I know her name.

Human bone meets mystic stone, a disease at the root of being, my hands clenched and striking with each oscillation in savage time. A drop of blood falls and lands next to a tear and there I imagine the perfect sky of her eyes, the dark yielding of mystery. What would it take to return knowing that in exchange for life I bring only time? Silence reigns. The decision made. I look up, and but for cloak on the ground, the sorcerer is gone.

How long do I stare at mantle of grit, that flowing bruise, smooth as a lake? I put it on, and from my hands spring urgent glimmers. From my right a nova calling itself consequence, and from my left a wailing sword, a death-dealing flower in perpetual bloom, its voice wavering at great distance, calling itself memory. These are hell's own troubadours, singing in harmony, and I will drain their well to the last. I do not notice the stain in my wake. Nor do I see it grow.

A swelling mass, a shot through the cosmos, the air it touches turning brine and vertigo, unfurling, aberrant, a vermillion membrane freshly skinned, too old for a name and too terrible to erase, worshipped by its opposite, making it stronger. It is opal and glass and sinuous in highlight, razors of intent secreting stale and caustic honey as delirium weeps from its tail, its breast a sun framed by the void. What can it be but scion of demise, a demon feeding on pleasure delayed? It melts into the fog and is followed by long-dead armies rattling spears and hope, clamoring as one but not in time.

I walk through lavender and rust, a marionette fashioned against the grain of reason. I was once told we are strengthened through suffering but do not understand why. Must humor be found in hurricanes, the sun savored only after lightning? What lasting joy when helpless against the malice of power, when dreams have meaning only in the absence of loss, and loss is certain? Eruption slices doubt as I stumble over the precipice and twist and swing, consequence blazing, my mind vacant but for the tentacle rising to condemn as I pull myself back onto the bridge with the exertion left to those without option. Mist comes on an asylum by storm and I stretch into the shroud and disappear, immured by aftermath, the glow of expectation, the air burning like prospects of failure, death below and death behind, run now or run never. I sprint headlong through the blanket escorted by the stalking breath of misstep and faith of the blind in every pore that the next will not be my last as the bridge curves in gradual decline with the groan of every exhale as legs churn and muscles lose feeling but for the throes of my heart I tilt at speed and outside the margins with none for error along this teetering line leaving a trail for all that follow and I think if hell is measured in levels this must be its most expedient conveyance. I break through into a field that stretches for eternity, and what I see there begs the unthinkable, to turn back.

Orchids spread like alien barley, quiet gold drowning the sky, so gold it hurts my eyes. Each bloom tempts the dappling sun, beautiful yet incomplete they trade permanence for yearning, emissaries of light from the edge of the universe. I turn to put the past in its place and find flowers to the horizon, every direction a carpet, the sky betraying no answer. I feel like one of their number, simpatico in plight, the anonymous center of a breathtaking populace. If my heart does not break now, will it ever? Onward, the path behind a quiet canvas, the way ahead an endless invitation. Every trough a sunrise and every crest revealing the same lush perpetuity of surface, the hills rolling on. I relax and traverse both slope and baited promise, a loose stretch and run of fingers through the wild, combing it smooth. One flower rises to outshine the rest and I wonder if I can own such a creature, not just hold heaven in my hand but control it, force it to map my fate that I might write upon it a path home. I grasp the root and pull with care, finding granite beneath, pearl and slate. I have seen this in my dreams, ruins and clouded moons that visited me as a child, striking awe in midnight hours. Why did I not share those contradictions of sobriety? Was I afraid that I was truly alone, or truly not? The cinder is of many in a line and leads to grassy expanse where color gives ground but at cost, patches of resistance among enemy blades. I wade on with hand to the growing wall and though it feels like I have been walking for an age the sun neither rises nor sets but hangs above like judgment's gavel. I look down and see suit of armor empty of remains, abandoned but not in haste. It is green like spring in onyx, slick to the eye and dry to the touch. I kneel to pray but instead just think I do not want to die, and if I must speak this aloud to higher power, to explain the injustice in my heart, what worth that God? I continue following the wall until it meets one greater, polished smooth and taller than could ever be scaled by man or machine, a castle rising from within, spires glittering against the sky and immaculate rhythm of victory, windows like mandalas above parapets so high they seem to warn against some better understanding. I shield the light to better see these symbols of faith, and the horror is not that it could be my task to the end, but that it is so.

A valley opens of the kind made long and deep by glacial plough, its moraines and glens disappearing in shadows that praise the land with intermittent fire as though lightning were argument of due course on rock and elder path, a flashing beautiful and desperate like radiant prospects probing the ceiling of extinction, their measure not in doubt but in striving they invite contrast all the same. Between valley and castle is a field and in its center stands a pedestal crowded by broken chains like an audience of hangers-on that must be told to seek the vicarious another day. What manner of statue would renounce this perch, and where would it go, carved and freshly born? Had it descended or climbed, and did that contravention of frozen state occur in the long ago or some recent proximity? I am reminded of the sorcerer's words, that to see I must look, and so climb the platform and face the castle. From this vantage I can see ornamentation of avian scores whose ferocity is barely contained by their molding, the ability to fly unable to supplant the draw of more blood. They guard a gate behind which my mind conjures gilded ceilings and curtains that catch still the escapades of overlord and rebellion, each more stunning than the last. How many songs of war have been absorbed here, and what was the first if not mine? I look to the heavens and say, “Am I not your creation? You are lost to me, do you hear? From the ruin of your works I will build a stair to your door, a prodigal son with torch in hand.” By some second nature I hold out my arms and from the left comes steam and from the right a faucet of fire. The blaze spreads and in the flames I think of her and the unfathomable device of my maker. What would have been testament to the sublime in another life is here by glow of ember and flora the same blackened waste I see inside, and for no reason I can comprehend I whisper softly and out loud, “We belong together.”

The sky darkens like a candle snuffed and eldritch clouds assail the day. A black moon beckons from high ellipses as it spins across the vault to exact tidal homage like some nemesis of stellar importance, a harbinger of reason defied. I look up and away as though witness to a kiss, compelling but not for me. Electric flares connect ground and nebula, hydratic heads followed by congregation of booms over pools among willows that stand in flickering relief and appear to want for reaching like spiders of some deciduous antiquity dredging the morass for artifact and remain, frozen to match what lights their work. I glance behind for closing teeth and see nothing, but instead of yielding calm from proof the vacant and smoldering plain becomes touchstone for violence where I conjure pursuit from dust and ether, a power possessed by another of greater appetite and that hunting with a slow and relentless will, not to be bargained with by success or demeanor, peace as alien to it as sated need. A skinny and whirling finger extends from the clouds like a crone bent to probe the earth, and there it swells, a drill gone mad. I leap toward the valley as the gale batters and whips, devastation united by common misery, piles of ash swirling in miniature like a child's parody of the father's craft, dervish prophets of the column's advance come to life and flying apart only to rise again from the scatterings of razed and blackened particulate. The air tastes of charged endings and in turning back I see a seething wall of rock engulf the castle, liberating it for all time from bondage to decay. I am hemmed between fragment and lack, shrinking into myself and finding no room aside the howling of phantoms trumpeting my fall, their timbre mixed and resonant to the veritas of converging force as it drives to the center of a boiling universe, the way I have come rendered impassable by the geometrically divine, that which roars my name and all names. I tear down the hillside to a pledge fading before scarcity of means and the need to avenge, and wonder if there will ever be respite from that carriage drawn by apocalypse unhinged as it gains a hundred steps to my every one. The ground buckles and veers and before I consider purpose or angle I am thrust heavenward. In that moment I swear the trees weep gold and it occurs to me that if calamity exists only in foil to that which does not change must all promises be kept if in turn they take what is most dear?

The earth forms a garrote from which I strain, each gasp chased by spasm and all strength employed in calculating if escape is the greatest mistake. Does every failing accrue in eternal account to be weighed against virtue, and if so, what choice remains but to stare into darkness, each other? Are the mad under oceans of easy roads and feigned ignorance, their spirits petrifying in content? I scrape against the same ground that will absorb me in time, rocks once grand tossed here like chaff, not in their place yet at home as clay on a potter's wheel, unmindful of shape assumed as long as confluent to the process of mesas remade, of excavated seas. The storm above seems like trade of burials, of dirt for crackling sky, though in which life I cannot swear. Trees beckon with boughs presiding over notions of clemency, and flowers once glorious loom black and withered, shuddering like carnivores. If secret scars are acknowledged in greeting I would see myself there but cannot bear to look as if some like malediction might be visited upon me. It is in this undoing the periphery strains. What crimes have I not equaled, in thought at least? If luck is dressing on what we cannot know, from where comes absolution, that gentle miracle? I feel its duty, but not the means to resolve its demand. The goal that once appeared so clear now fluxes in the promise of better ideas to come. A rainbow of birds explodes, dipping and diving as one, swallows and jays shocking in their vitality, a winged array coalescing to form a dragon layered to catch the light and return it transformed, a sermon and reminder of all that is fleeting, every aspect from blasphemy to perfection looking through me, unblinking and calm. From abyss of my mind comes a voice not so much spoken as rained over every inch of my heart, it says, “Listen. For all you are worth, listen. That sierra of riches is more than you dare dream, and all your days will come. Do you hear? The idea waits to unify as air marries land and sea. A formless form and yours to spread, yours if given away.” I do not watch as the dragon lifts into the sky, becoming a speck that yaws and curls. Nor do I watch as it crosses the glade, a plummeting reflection on idyll ground. I do not watch as there are no more surprises, and nothing it has not seen me do.

Wings of flame fluttering high, an unfurling kite, a flash descending to cherish its alter, a pull tugging deeper as I look at last to see the blaze unto which and given time I will succumb, happy to go blind. It floods the air and stands, a golem of stone, adorned by temptation and threat, like a lantern in search of an honest man. I wish to be this thing, a wilderness of capability, yet imagination will not cross the divide. It attacks me and misses by thinnest of lines, that between sinner and saint. What dream to maintain this forever? Amidst the barrage is a porcelain face, a gargoyle from realms once buried now falling upon me with unerring fire. Midnight decorates where I struggle to slake the deluge and fail, attacked by linearity and grand intention. To retreat feels the greater valor, but where could I go inside this skin that such destruction not follow? Flesh against statue, the unwinnable fight its own advice, yet isolation has sprung a well. I hold bludgeon and blade to stave the onslaught, hoping their presence enough to contend. The golem stops and lifts its hands, an orb spitting from each. They spin at speed to form a ring, clacking jaws that echo and ask, “Who will rise and bite, whisper and die? Is such riddle of salvation, or recipe for hate?” The circle squeezes and as I raise my arms in crossed farewell I know the loss of wanting to have loved better. In a light arrested by separateness of my creation I invite the flood, its cleansing, to be crushed by loneliness itself, betrayed not by foe but molten kiss laid at the steps of all I desire. My crumpled limbs seek to absorb the uprush of ground, as if to say it has come too far, and somewhere between pain and remaining will what could have killed is here content to maim, a wickedness plying its trade, a cicada lodged in my mind. I yearn to see my enemy through blooded field and unjust deed but can only feel its stare as it leaves me to the folly of my vow.

A tower of bone knit together as though gate of chance opened on a path divergent from death come fully. Perhaps other dimensions hold lives a hair's difference from this, a final breath in one, escape in another. The seedlings multiply with no break in that country, an unpainted future stopped by ziggurat stretching to edge of latitude, an intractable wall of purpose, a slab of amber cleaving the sky. Would I be so quick to brave its mystery, rigid and preserved to delight in what I have become, what I have let go? What is it I see in light, this sheer and honeyed immensity, love doomed by impotence or destiny run aground? What cure for laziness in resolve when here I remain, sifting for handhold, precipitous as the obstacles I face? Remember this spell as it channels being to a plane where scars are foreign and losses undone, true words clawing the gap, awake to the warning condensed by history, no room for shame aside pulse and spasm. Let me find a drifting thread, some anchor amidst the insanities to come.

My ligature a clarifying meridian, the rigging by which to navigate where meaning abandons its referent frame, a line through the morass turned inside out as the turtle undid the hare. But that was one day, one confluent set of events. In every other its shell lay sundered. What panacea to await destruction where all is relative to shifting flags driven naked and deep? By what means is victory achieved other than casting the first stone, no suffrage of slings or arrows but turning the leaf to show them its meaning? On the wall is a figure, a torchlit shadow, felicity projected like a secret, one not given away in the telling. I marvel at the rigor so thorough as to outlast stand of good, better served to shout at the moon. A mouth appears and curls, pastoral magnificence restored, and so absorbed am I in that smile I do not see parade of doubt, its thick arrest, and from it comes a hand. My eyes water with effort by measure as it wavers behind the veil. What sunless cliff is last goodbye, what bedrock in a world born cold? Cherish the gloaming palsy, our loved ones wasting away, the thousand cuts by grains of sand. In a moment of silence, in a field greater still, there is an epitaph scratched like something written by a child: loss is yours. I clasp the hand and choke a laugh, jagged and pure, anodized by malice, death my offering at altar of disregard for all that makes me whole. If plank must end, then breach I oblige. Memories of salt, whispers of mist, forward and through. The cloak billowing behind until it does not.