Focused effort and benign turns of fortune to reach the sphere sought by many a stalwart champion, those having claimed intelligent plans, each proven wrong by excess of faith. It hangs before me now, close enough to touch, dim and spinning, the hinted blue of dawn at midnight, an unrivaled satellite marking boundary of progress, baleful and noble and without lineage by which to gauge some base composition, no gable or gutter to affirm one's perspective as shared. Are we all framed by the hurricane, shouting and ignored, our strivings justified thereby? Does being scorned make us more than vapor, more than dust? The demon enters the sphere as though through ink, leaving me to witness a pulse extending to scattered bones and ideas and by these a universe made, if only to show there is no finish line, only shining, and pain to show for it. How useless lament in the face of this rubicon, when every gnash of teeth ends at the same narrow gate? Is this my role then, to press steel against a threat too vast to fight? In the sphere’s shadow I feel like moth to a star, so I enter as one would jump into the void, ever forward, ever afraid.

Surrounded by distances and solitude, a pall reflecting capacity to doubt and that leaping from image to image to nerve and not stopping, a drumming of which one knows neither source nor end. My eyes adjust to cathedral of travail and here the demon breathes like ice, searing and cracked, like old plaster on older brick, unyielding to analysis or testimonial of some inevitable understanding. Every draw skips the line between range and swell of authority and each exhale plunges me into an obsidian maw outside the reach of adopted theory and prescriptions of behavior. It is a butcher against whom all victories are temporary, none sufficient to quell the taste for those struck dumb by presumed safety of abstraction, no future however finely crafted is enough to prevent comprehension that the last word will not be my own but a price paid in sacrifice where all freedoms are made short-lived by intention. On what cloud might I pawn adjudication of duty, somehow blanching the power of circumstance, this nemesis? Let it come then, I will strive where others failed. So begins the fight of my life.

The demon flows, immune to mace and sword as they meet sheer nothing. Its hands like knives but I feel no pain, the carnage occurring degrees removed, an interval tacked to every strike and their sum devoid of interest. How I had underestimated this reaper, its perfection. Through feral swipe and dull squeeze I hear the sorcerer, he that underlies every madness and mystery, he says, “Someone once told me that hope makes anything possible. I must disagree. Witness your struggle against drain of life, the respect of those you love eroded by familiarity and distance both. I suppose I am somewhat to blame, though all I did was fix the edge. It was you that chose to walk it.” Another barrage, more ground given if only to escape. What subtlety had I intended to deploy, what gossip traded to slow going cheaply in all dimensions, to seal the border between reality and dream? There are no levels here. No higher. No deeper. No radical foray stoked by inspiration or learning. No evolution waiting or wings granted upon discovery. The demon descends like gravity unhinged, a belief out of phase and shrill through the quiet of exhaustion, its final blow coming like the sound of being completely and forever alone. I favor one side, the other, the demon cares not and crushes me still.

How long must I stay between discordant rift and promise of union, every side attuned to the sincerity of wanting to know, the modest means by which I seek to escape propriety? How to win from brooding ground where attempts are just that, a serious man embattled by strain of achieving perfect discipline without the eternity required to accomplish it. Who to speak for me at this separation from life, at final fling from doom-worn cliff? Who but the demon, my oldest companion, my dearest enemy. It says, “What sport to kill without fear? It is I that awaits at the end of roads, what you beg to avoid but must confront. And I will beat you every time. By wit. By force. By any method I choose. Try. Resist. See how it makes me stronger.” I struggle to my knees but that is all, rendered crippled by a childhood converging with absolutes riding ahead and just out of reach by newer and better approximations, unable to care for the heartsick and defeated, those frozen by function served, frantically digging out from under where the full strangeness of circumstance is immobilized, a last refuge wiped clean by that which stands on the horizon and at one's heels, a devil to whom all are hindmost, the only respite a narrow slice of time and that a destiny of ill-fated turns. The walls appear to melt, grained by end times and faces wounded by the insatiable need to escape, moans buckling these mirrors like some ancient wainscot intensified by the flood of those behind and untold legion to come, the countless of apocalyptic origin and rites of passage failed, a front line beaten into the press by boat-hook and oar, and there chewed over by every adjoining man. A gout of masks, a crenellation of faces, each my own. What I would not give for valediction, to touch her lips once more, to become the one I knew was possible. I turn inward, reflection speaking admission of a truth never said aloud, to myself, to you, to any that might listen, that I am not strong enough.

Quiet room lit by curve of anticipation, events that shed expedience on a thing both familiar and mysterious, entwined and hurtling. She sits astride me, every pretense disarmed by how easily she ravels enchantment of courage and what might come, not presented but plucked here from fragile edge of eternity. What conspired to make this perfect creature, rollicking like a song, a rhythm at entrance of shift and momentum, a voracious and vibrant opening merged to sensations revealed and returned, heat, flying, trauma, need, all of these, and so much more. Mind clear, no thought shining brighter than yes, no, yes . . . in the darkness a fading shimmer of well-being tuned by pattering rain like the counterpart of authentic experience in a space where problems cease, where absence of tension is readily found in this equilibrium unto ourselves. In the delicious and laden silence I wish with all my heart that she wait, that I will realize the antidote to borrowed time, this wholeness beyond escape, a primal cache embodied by capsule of tranquility woven together by whispered cry, her body lifting under mine and I absorbed in the temple that she is, no worship enough to honor this unity, our exquisite transience, our speechless love . . .

What but lament entrenches by recrimination and steel, these weapons bringing illusion to life, this moment never to be repeated made silhouette against river of stone as all directions recede to a flicker glimpsed but rarely, that to focus on the trivial is murder, a killing of our most sacred hours. Beware the narrative and its tyranny, the mind focused on time, convinced that all we say becomes regret, and all we do not shall burn inside. Such is to wash blood with blood without seeing that tears carry the same salt, the same seed of conflict if nurtured so. As the sun burns fog we may be freed to dance in the wind, the graveyard sprint transformed to being in time but not of it, at ease in the only moment it may happen. Now or never. In this my heart and mind are one. Cleansed of urgency. A kite yearning to fly the skies of imagination, of wonder. I have been guarding the door, a spectacle concealed by prescription, responding by obligation and threat assumed. No more. My grip relaxes like the hold of a bygone age, I see through memory, through consequence, and in the only move left I let them go, the din of voices melting into a sea, a drop, a pinprick, gone. The faces that once screamed replaced by stars, countless and silent.

I sit hushed in repose beneath sapphire and isolation, byzantine, indestructible, a midnight tent imposing arcane phosphorescence, dark lanes alive and coiling around renewal of serenity, not the short-lived relief of a body gambled but that which shines through singular query, would I choose this life again? On this the stars are quiet, and no matter how I hew to reason the oceans of emotion rage on, our common bond in simple words: be not afraid. A message with heritage in younger seasons, chapter and verse and episodes displaced, polarity seen through delicate turns of phrase. It is here the sorcerer is broken, revealed under stars like symbols of stars, five-pointed and paneling a sky hot and infinite as though simmering remainder of all that is left. He tells me of ambition perfect as the mind’s eye can create, that the world is full and no appointments are required for waiting rooms beyond, that he had a vision to stop time but can no longer fathom my dream as I dare to empty the ocean with a spoon. For this I am sorry, for having waited so long to realize that days are lifetimes, and for those in anguish, longer still. Never did I imagine the cost of fear, a wound that grew with every lie. Even so, this apology is without fault. Life is too complex for blame, and too simple. In those eyes, bright with tears, I see what has not healed, that he too does not want to die, and so I fold him in an embrace forged by the struggle to move mountains. Though we are all connected by cruelty, by expectations and will, we must befriend the mirror, only then can we love each other. I hear a cry of deliverance and bliss, and then he is gone, disappeared like the mist that once haunted me so.

A ladder materializes like some mercurial composite descended to allow my wandering continue, a following brought upon by resonance, the imminence of non-being. I climb through murk and hinterland where birds absorb all compassion in flights of well-worn ellipses, tasting the firmament, their correlates a shimmering niagara, one to each yet not forever as they grow apart across space and time to turn roughest touch into more poetry yet, assimilated and forgotten but woven into legacy nonetheless as a thing occurred can never be undone, atoned for but never changed. In that sky is elongate script put there by hand neither flesh nor attached to glorious movements of these dark and speckled oceans. From my lips to heaven’s door, I read aloud, “The stars coalesce in you, how is that not a miracle? Why act small as you breathe the constellations that fuel your steps, as they churn a surf of possibility, these waves given you in plenty?” A gate appears, a transom slide, a frame of sentiment deemed to radiate welcome with or without my understanding, my presence a damaged wing ready to consume premonition or salience of morality, lionized this road, leading to water by state of abstraction and capacity to err. I could decorate these thoughts with celebration and in retrospect, but what is left aside from agency without evidence, surreptitious and constant in its claims? It could be that nothing is cured through conquest, yet that still leaves the work of letting go, a symbiotic constituent to daring greatly, indifferent to anything other than most tenuous of allegations—that the child is father to the man. If she might be on the other side, if I might love again, then the choice is really no choice at all.

I step through into riot of color replaced by loneliness heralded in vacuum like the sound drained of a room. In that bright and geometric terminus is calamity, the negator, a dragon stitched from words that have long run circles in my mind. It says, “You breathe the very black holes and nebula but do not own the fact. Yet when brought to your limit, the backdrop stands revealed. Listen to the whisper that obscures the bond between brother and sister, where identity is born as you take the world at its face. The only death is that of illusion. Awakening is not to change this but to see the same beauty in fresh blooms and dying friends. The faster you chase your shadow, the quicker it flees. All will take its course, and God is but a word. See your prison, find that which cannot be given by symbol or sound, just as a window does not give the field or ocean outside. Stars are born. They also die. You are made of stars and more. Remember infinity, and be free.”

The spectrum becomes alley, shading funneled and erased. Can ideals shoulder responsibility, do I dare not test the waters? What if the temporal can be reconciled, has it not been said that nothing lasts yet nothing is lost? Might I be destined for continuity yet bound in state across gradient dimensions known by no other name than the source itself? How this consolation beckons, to leap through gulf and limit and see if I might be born again. Skilled serpent, wrapped about the one caught in contradiction, is this the way back, or further into night? How to choose between family and friend, lover and child, enmity and wisdom? Oh, this surface of my attitudes, this bondage to proclivity. My growing doubt hides a secret, a radiance covered from even the most discerning eye. I cannot see why the trivial is celebrated so. Is everyone I love more advanced, or more scared than I? Is the kernel of their deepest being obscured, this same thing I now strive to keep within reach? Should I reveal my compass, point to it relentlessly, or is that a disservice, the attacked become attacker? How has it come to this again?

Soft wash of streetlights reduced to vanishing, strobes and shadows at rest on these walls, this quiet place. She is purity, a tender passion, an opalescent sheen arising from kindness and creativity on fire, equal to the sun, unmoved by force or testimony, a living miracle. Tears well, so full am I of frailty, of goodbyes to come. Her breathing is slow, steady, as if to say all I fear can only be dealt with as it comes. How can any farewell be final if it is only time that stands between us? And death, might it not be beautiful? What if it sees our love made to stretch forever, without illness or lack, misfortune or pain? We must not hedge against the certainty of passing when there is no evidence of destination or state. I forgive myself in our embrace, the ghost and cage dropping away, and while scared to open these wings it is more frightening not to. Such is the beauty of possibility, of freedom and rightness found in all we make together. Death may be our master, but I will not be its slave. I will find the courage to see the gift in every step. For you, for us, now, always.

I set out to end it but found only smoke, an empty seat, vacant ideas. No one is there, and no one is coming. I strove for certainty, some respite from the potential of each new moment, the evil and goodness lying in wait. With all doors open how can one claim joy is their right? What assurance the past is not doomed to repeat, or pledge can be made that it will? The best guesses are lies, and all is granted but promises. Be not afraid. See the secret history of our enemies is the same as our own. If we are to fear it must not be of fate but of not doing right. The fork emerges from paradox, if limitations are not given but accepted at what point may we sacrifice our choice, to let that greatest of responsibilities go? We flow from this, to be led by those claiming to carry our burden costs us everything, the battle lost in that moment, all that moves our spirit brought to heel. Yet, the freedom to choose comes quickly. We need only a single breath before redemption, and in that space can name our purpose and dreams, we can begin again. I refuse to die and meet the one I could have been. No, I welcome life in the shadow of a dying star, striving to be the example that none need persuade of their importance. We will lose it all, some in a blink, and the rest slowly, painfully. I will not deny this through story or ignorance, obsession or distraction, neither will I begrudge these as I too am guilty, having come to know through my own acts they are but final defense, a desperate response to the suffering at every turn. Your pain is mine, your unease. I have also gazed long into the abyss, but when it looked back, I winked, having seen that you and I stand together at the edge. Take my hand and know that everything will not be all right, each of us will end, but it does not matter because we have each other. Words beyond this risk gilding a lily too precious, so I close my eyes and ask, do I want to die? No, but I will, with love in my heart. Until then I choose to live, to say yes, forever yes, to light the world.

There once was a king that united the known lands. It had taken war and compromise, but sovereignty was his, and peace did reign. He loved his family and people but was still learning how to be a leader, a husband, a father. He made many mistakes but was never slow to apologize, and his queen and son loved him dearly. There came a festival to celebrate his coronation so they traveled to a seaside village where every building had been transformed into a monument, and every street a marvel of adoration. After days of revelry the king found himself without patience, his body seized by resistance to obligation, to honor and devotion, all cast gray by some split in perspective, a chip in the stone of calm. He left in silence, walking until he was far away and from there he went further still. In time he stopped, slowly becoming aware of his unfit mood, and feeling regret over having gone without a word. He returned and found chaos, every home destroyed, every life extinguished. The sea had unleashed an epic wave, and it spared no one. He tended the wreckage, vacant and numb, the shoreline his only witness, his child and queen dead and cold. Though he lived it was with mortal wound, a need to know the value of tragedy. He wandered through frozen reach and wooded glen, craving to unpeel the sun from its clouds, to glimpse the dynamo that moved and denied. Why had he not voiced his love, taking meeting again for granted in a world where nothing was guaranteed? Had he secretly wished them death in the shadows of his past, some poverty of a future strange? A thought too chilling to own, but if true, it was understood too late. He was evil and weak and there was no redemption for it. They would have forgiven him had they lived, but he could not grant the same to this minim of self that ran wicked through the halls of an impure heart. He traveled with this burden to the only one capable of passing sentence enough, a great mystic that was part mutant and mystery, a dragon of rumor and smoke become man, a being that could grant or erase one's greatest wish. He coveted both, so stood before that power and said, “I have realized there is no progress without others, yet I left those I loved to the whims of providence. I have become a tool of my mind, unable to overcome its clamor, its moods and monkeyshines. If this life is my creation, I am an incompetent god, and conclude that no sense can be made of this world. I do not understand it, and I do not love it anymore. Such is the winter within me. It does not give, it does not take, it remains, forever incalculable, a stain that cannot know its place and thereby acts from singular fault, seeking up devoid of down, a crushing of hope by clutching too tight. I am virtue's image in sunless dissent, choosing love, but too late to matter. I welcome your worst.” The mystic was still, cowled and silent, the reply long coming. When at last it spoke it was with words left behind, words from some other plane now enriched by their lack, it said, “How many plans must go awry before disappointments are rejected and attributions of result no longer hang on those without prescience? Birth is followed by death, failure by success, glorious morning by suicide. None are predictable nor separable, yet logic and rigor determine your vision. How do you know what is necessary, good news or bad, the difference between coincidence and synchronicity? You live blind to emergent contingencies as they arise and arise and keep on just so while not seeing around the bend, let alone the infinity of influence stretching back to before anything was. Which do you want, control or sanity? The question assumes both exist and such is the problem with the young, they have not yet confronted the battle of a lifetime so lack the humility that adds filigree to experience. They think the ending known, but have only seen the barest sliver of our narrative—a minor antagonist, a grudge, some small decrease in satisfaction—and by this they become incapacitated rather than amused. The penance will be done if so desired. I will send you to dungeon of torment, shackled to a wall with no memory of who you are, what you have done, or how you came to be. The only thing you will remember is that freedom exists, and escape can be had if you summon the answer. Yet, it will forever elude your grasp. You will cast about in a place where nothing can be created or destroyed, where tomorrow never comes yet each day begets the next, the sun shining on the strength of your bonds. You will curse the one that put you there, and unknowingly curse yourself, forever sure of the answer's existence, and forever dragged to your knees by chains of your own making. Is this the sentence you seek, is it the one you deserve?”

Mirror alive, quiver and undulate, a lowered bridge from wiser dawns, it asks, “Are you this king? One does not know if they are character or author and from this all troubles follow. What space for love if mystery sets up residence in one's heart? Another story beckons, that the countless cannot be saved. Their hardship called into being by the very master of the game. But such is distillation of hubris, the architecture of bondage perpetuated by those scared of their own power. You have been told to look inside, to assemble armor over a soul attuned to those existing not in their own right but as goading instance of sleep at bay. This is the tyrant’s lifeblood as long as your gaze is elsewhere. Choice is the thing, that basic predicate allowing us to create heaven regardless of circumstance. It is not the story that matters but what you decide it means. Change is inevitable, but is your suffering? Is it birthright and destiny? We cannot ignore the dark hemispheres of experience, but we can choose a light on which to focus, a system of faith crystalline and shimmering with all that is wonderful, and without apology for being alive. However, even in choosing perfect love you may find no one capable of the same, that you are doomed to stare at the gap between what you see and what others will not, and you might die not knowing if anything you did made a difference. Can you be the butterfly that never sees the wave, will you flutter regardless?” . . . “Am I to believe in volition then? That no good deed is wasted, and no compassionate thought misspent?” . . . “What are you to believe or what can you know, other than I exist, and descriptions are beggars? Confidence is a poor medium when impelled by esteem. It becomes moraine of the convinced, clinging to notions of a being spiritual, of a human experienced. What constant in life of the believer but that which chases resonance beyond, cherishing opinions, knowing at some point we must come to terms with never being fully prepared, never finding steadiness in a world where that is its greatest boon. How best to live in view of the fact, what alternatives but opposition or accordance? Forgive yourself. See the clenching of your mind as it confuses tool with maker, as it creates symbols and the hand to wield them. You can have anything, it only depends on what you are willing to give. Tell me, what would you trade hell for?” . . . “To be with her again. Forever.” . . . “Then shed disease and stare into infinity. That is discipline. Not mindless routine but growing awareness. Being the peace that you are, ruthlessly. Why wait? Are you afraid that death might hear and hasten its plans? That the more you care the more you will hurt? Discard your cocoon and let a new breed shine, one disarmed and resolved. You have done nothing wrong but delay love, and you can change that now, and every now. Take solace. It is not a mountain, but a switch.” I nod, a coarse-grained gesture quelling the urge to run. I feel healing hands strip away the mask, a tender touch gliding over an earth rising in possibilities revealed, impoverished no more. The mirror shimmers, says, “Go, head up and chalice empty. You have all the world to see.”

The sorcerer approaches, fickle and lithe, tattoos like koans of intention, unreadable by this or any light as they move just so, reality screaming as winner-takes-all. He looks into the mirror, says, “Don't you know who I am? I could cut your throat without blinking an eye.” The mirror is perfect, clean. It ripples and replies, “And I could let you. All is glory, all is change, eponymous and allowed. There is a man that eats fire but weeps as it burns. With expectation comes ignorance and satisfaction left wanting. Which do you desire, truth, or life?” The sorcerer smiles, “Two can play this game. Who lives so near the stars as those that risk the lion's den? And which do you judge most acceptable, that God knows all but cannot stop our pain, or can, yet refuses? What if we are but aspects of God torn apart, at odds and pulling in discordant directions? Or, what if there is no God, no hope, no salvation? I have tried them all on and found each easily worn through by solemn conversation and history. How frustrated one becomes when conditions change in perpetual motion, when culture and conflict are wheel and clay. Such is fuel for all I command, guaranteed by nothing less than reality.” The mirror ripples again, immediate and bright. It says, “We are both but a trifling bit of the world, and more than everything in it. You seek to understand without feeling, to control without lever by which to carry out your plans. When did the breeze last obey you, the night? Every veil will disappear, and every feint will be seen through in time. Thirst will come regardless of your designs. Our champion will take a risk on love, on treating others as he desires to be treated, laying it all on the line to realize success is the blessing of caring for more beings than he could ever know, and that such is a rich life, knowing one cannot hold on, only take responsibility until the end. You told him battling the tyrant comes at great cost, a phantom debt on both sides of the board, yet forgot when the game is over both king and pawn return to the box. What will you do when you have more yesterdays than tomorrows, when you see we are whistling in the dark with no hand to lead us out? The knell comes, striking facade and prophecy, product and agent transparent to its swing. It poses questions for which there are no answers—to what are you entitled, and why do you deserve?” . . . “You speak of death as though I am afraid, my quest a symptom of lack. Such is nothing but platitude the weak project to rationalize their lot, to sell themselves permission to give in.” The mirror shines, says, “Then let us turn the jewel once more. How likely is your importance given the scale of life, the sheer size of this universe, all you have witnessed?” . . . “Let us speak of witnessing then. See the destiny I have crafted. I am more than what has been given, and I will take what is left. And you—you will die here.” . . . “Then I have but one thing left to say, may you be free.”

The mirror shatters by sleek rupture propelled by promise of flesh made forfeit, the demon fast and treacherous and come through a ground unprepared for such thirst, impulse and rain to fate the unspoiled, a stabbing breach, whipping and sawing, edges devoured, no mourner left, just penalty paid by unfinished business and a religious life, no harsher measure than approval willingly entertained, a slow decline into absolute beginnings and conservation of what has not evolved, collected in slumber by one to whom apologies mean nothing, a child of shadow hunted by phosphor wings fleet in their race to blot out the sun, no coercion but for distance, and there a coastline bruised by the day we gave up hope, freed to act for those suffering on this journey. Who is the beast, the one that preys or those that deny, and who can truly speak the name of their own destruction?

I travel among galaxies spinning in fields manifest of their own failure to influence oblivion. If I were told the ride was over, that I am to trade places with the hungry, what case against such an exchange? Is it not justice for all to despair equally, could I ever be vindicated in refusing their place? No, the cries of the abject drown any legacy that does not ease their pain. I walk on to become stronger, to face my weakness, the pyrrhic victories and sprawling of conditioned response. Before me is a manor of terracotta and granite that splits the desert itself, cut from a distant past and left as warning to the bold that remain, its facade marked by models of nature, some grotesque, others martial in demonstration of what it must be to contemplate extinction in enamel and earth. The doors open like a creature hurtling through beneficence, principles ground fine by speculation that might testify to its fall. I am greeted inside by sundials and clocks gathered in heaps, twisted metal, gilded stone, a lavish warren where stakes are the annihilation of history, no legitimate trade to offer in recompense for the mishap and torment to which none lay claim yet all are heir. What worth the fortunes of a sacked populace that once looked forward, every beautiful moment and lie held dear vanished in strokes of blame. I creep past gardens and chambers empty but for privilege revealed in sculptures of ice, soft-blue and glinting. I round a corner and enter hall of glass depicting battles stained as they are upon my soul by career devoted to spectacle where all is sound and fury from forks in the road to come, from those not taken. Am I the missing link between animal and empathy, standing fast to allow the birth of some higher being? Or are the cries of infants all that remains where evidence lacks and claims are certain, a melody woven and assuaged by none? At the end of the hall is a door leading into crystal and conformity, a gala enjoyed by those grown rich with simple wishes injured by delectation. They cheer like traitors besieged, like children in the woods deaf to testaments of relationship, content in pedestrian affairs and fashions of the day, in debts and balances, in slights made trauma. All together yet each alone. The fringe of the room is decked by hounds lording over reams of understanding, accumulated and untouched but for those set to flame by weight of bureaucracy, a perpetuation without malice both ardent and self-contained, unable to influence but by strength of numbers and those never in doubt. Tomes of virtue and alchemy are stacked and fed into a raging fire by diabolists robed in carmine, abnegating their impotence with apocrypha in hand, their beliefs made catalyst for utopian dreams where obligation fortifies and proclamations intended to churn fall stagnant as each becomes means to an ever-distant end. In this realm nothing can be made of common ground, the quest for friendship finding only slip in perspective, each being an island buffeted by its fragments. I survey this prison of ideas for sword of progress and see only a mongrel holding the neck of one so bold as to imagine the value of direct experience, and that tongue cut out like so much meat. If only slaughter might relieve the pain of loathing, who would not volunteer? Is this where reach exceeds my grasp? What august giant sleeps here, majestic enough to command perdition? The graft of past deeds is rejected by vigor, no side safe from appeal, no bulwark against anger or argent moon. I am swept onward, my audience foretold.

I am brought to field of marble polished with vanity, convention honoring its law, the golem that crushed me enthroned on pedestal and root of cunning, a tribunal of one. What wrathful progeny this hegemon of delusion, bathed in wealth without charity and fog of a mundane world, unconcerned with its affairs and devoid of restraint. Treacherous these shadows, eyes jangled like coins, skin like parchment and armor magnificent in detail, cast in paucity of awareness but not glory, inscriptions shifting like thoughts, symbols refusing to relate a dimension other than their surface, towering yet unable to stand trial for the watcher's crimes, as one might condemn the river for the sea, the unknown spring for cognizance. I am surrounded by a regime enacting symbiosis through absurd conceit and custody of the ordinary, scribes of their regent’s every word, aspirants of dubious honor indifferent to our place in these cosmos, oblivious but for comfort and gain, standing and doctrine, their vision base, their course consumption, those they command paraded like so much pilloried wreckage, subordinated to evidence abandoned and questions leading to certainty shattered by the unknowable stretch of cause and condition, mechanisms that stratify no further than indiscretion perceives. The golem reaches down to one among many and takes a bite without precursor or remorse. Screams abound as it slowly chews and ejects the dread melange to spatter court and values both. On the heel of that bloody enucleation comes a voice afire, born empty and behind walls far from the unity of existence, a place where globes fade and crescendos hang absent, like muslin ornaments on mystery, concords of moratorium the podium from which it speaks.

It says, “I have learned much since we first met. For instance, did you know that pain is an illusion, perceived only by reprisal and objected to for effect? I have found many such rules. Each convincing like soup in famine, like flags in a maze. The masses turn base by creeds, trusting the fidelity of time, the growth of entropy. I know your arguments, the quaint, the narrow, mere shades of my splendor. You think I broke my chains, but how do you know it to be true? Perhaps it was you that set me free, or, was I released by the storm, heedless of your inclination? Do you understand what I long for? Your master is assumption, the burden of proof lay not on what you see but ideas esteemed. So I ask, as I have all that came before, why should I spare your life?” I meet its eyes, and reply, “What you describe is not my experience. Time is tracked in linear increment, why then does it crawl, careen, stop, disappear? Your premise is extant only in the restrictions imposed by misstatement of fact, a dogma papered over by language, a proxy for reality where evidence that unsettles is converted by diet of consensus set at variance with plain sight. Questions are water, your answers mud in it. Why do I need you to know myself? Why are we not divine as is? Your dominance has been long, empathy replaced by reviling our differences, love turned from fabric to object and boundaries placed on what cannot be explained, a steady state where conflict thrives and the tools to sculpt paradise are left to rust. Yet, the countless dance toward the light no matter your claim to judgment, and while you complicate the path through diversion and bias the truth is naked, all but guaranteed by the very delicacy of such veils.” The golem waves a gauntlet, shining with history rewritten by the power to inspire, it says, “Let the masses boil and seethe. They are each but a drop in the ocean. In kingdom of the blind the one-eyed is king. I have two and so see what must be—war prepared for in peace, and thus waged evermore. As is said, if freedom were cheap, no one would buy it. You cannot compete in this game. Heads I win, tails you lose.” It explodes upward, a novae of wings, an angel of ignorance rising from pulpit festooned with all that exists save reconciliation and transcendence, a knot flickering as column and screen fall away to reveal sloth and absence, no weather but mist, no city but shadow, a waste broken only by strands of alder and they tranquil in resignation to battle, to necessities bound by nature of man. What way out when those that rule fire first? My goal is in reach yet impossibly so. I am girded only by will and the gathering few, a rebellion too late as the golem’s forces spread before us, alert to our vendetta, their idol’s demands.

Soldiers clash and standards heave as we draw on reverence and the stress of intention. What must the holy know to support hostility, is just cause instantiated in screams, these wounded? What must be gained in return? Is it to reign in heaven, to isolate folly, crushing it with purity of purpose? Let our greater fulfillment begin when no more are left to die, the search for happiness stalled until no more want for food. I swing memory and consequence through reaver and drone in a cleansing that brings more with each one down, conflict breeding in emergent step, and so it goes until the golem’s lines reveal the demon, chaos and claw tearing with a fidelity equal to its task. What to make of this rage I feel on both sides of my flesh? How easily I am ruled by passion and obstructed by a glimpse. Minutes drag in the spray of celestial bodies thrown like shadows on blood, like wheat painted red, the churn of forgotten causes smoothed by battle-smoke. No method to tell companion from foe, all are each, our struggle replaced by stream of condition, an ageless horizon unable to reflect such knowing that none will be first to put down their sword, generations fighting under magnitude of their crimes, powerless to ease the burden of circumstance, or abandon to history such deviant cost, the trappings of trauma and children made men, recruits pieced from collusion and distress, from lives destroyed. Can we be forgiven for murder of trust, for using the young as runners and spies, shields and beggars, their limbs traded for alms? How to relate carnage to order? Adversity turned chronic with spiraling precision, chained by limit yet hotly contested, elide of all that has been expelled. We cannot hide this substrate, this slaughterhouse. Verily, what God would be amused by our plight, how desperate to call this into being, how long on edge of boredom before nothing was sacred? Degenerate creator, venal lord, traitor of silence and peace, my attention is scant, but I will hear you explain why people fight the wars of nations, dying for ideas not their own. I will stay admonishment though we exist in outcome of your labored plan, made alien to our goodness, the perfect love of our fellows forever unknown. So, God, what have you to say?

Standing together in adventure of life's unfolding, pavilion and music, shades of sunset, this enclave of rest supervened by rhythm of you. Ease constituted in sway, a symbol of discovery, of all I worship and adore. You stare into reality without flinching, scarred yet unscared, dealing with it as is yet holding to what could be if goodness ruled, a different kind of faith, the grit-filled optimism of the warrior, the grace to see potential, holding those accountable that would shrift this duty and disarming with a look, one that reflects the only success worth chasing—to increase the well-being of those in our care and doing all we can to expand our reach. You move like a daydream, sensual without measure, all made right in your wake. I am found in your brightness. You allow me to realize that achieving happiness is simple—do not keep for yourself what others need. What anxiety could survive next to you, the sure revelation that all must be treated as rain on a rose, each soul welcomed as worthy expression of everything we do not know. To what can you be compared, sparkling with love, the lives within, what could have come before but the light and heat of a cosmos born? Our fingers entwine as we dance past midnight of an existence suspended by connection, a pact where frailties and complexity are partners in acceptance of paradox. What more have I to learn other than the journey itself is the thing? You are my destiny, so perfect in kindness and friendship. Only in pinching myself does it become real. Though maybe pinching you works too. I do, and you laugh. Yes, this is real. You are real.

It comes swiftly, that wave of antimony, bodies enveloped and torn and the next blast close behind. It hits again, a surge that vanquishes resistance as it bends, mutates, grips and ruins, no courage to be had in polymorphic fire that cares not for valor or vision, this tactic of those with weapons more than what might be opposed by spear and shield. My comrades race to the fore and kneel in wait, giving up their only form to protest an evil none may stop. The few that survive are charred and moaning, littered like so many unwanted toys, palette of bedlam their anguished refrain, related by blood and affection, the former strewn, the latter culled by shared drifting into a dying sun. I seek to end their pain, each prognosis an exercise in misery, no reticence amidst the milieu, no puzzle to solve as ravages of this one-sided dispute abound like some false cleanliness, a land undone by final mercies. My hands were not made for this. In field of death shines diamond paws, a feline shuddering, its last breath polyvalent and broken. I cradle that noble combatant, an ally near whom all conceits are pursued but never attained, and though it dies nothing coheres, no equilibrium gained from leveling of prosperous and poor, just one more story surrendered, its beginning unknown, the ending lost in time. A mist drifts over us, a blanket of flesh divided, a scene of violence I would be ashamed to see again if someone took my eyes and showed me their legacy. As knowledge without empathy lacks understanding, a war to end all wars is fallacy. We are dangerous in relation to the depth of our ignorance, and bring no net to save ourselves from the confluence of ill-timed events or decisions made in haste. In this we must seek perspective, to discuss the strange and troublesome, our beliefs become conviction only when accompanied by evidence sufficient to those claims. Certainty without experience is delusion, a mere groping about what is real beyond doer and deed. What if we are simply the dream of a sleeping god, and upon that one’s awakening all will disappear, be it during our next step, the rise of fork to mouth, or the glorious instant before joining another? What if in that moment we became one with every being, those of skin, of feather and fur, each great love and deceit seen through and lived equally by all? Would we encourage that god to awake, or to keep dreaming? Or, would we wish for both, for a life of play yet feeling our connection all the while? What if this is the state of existence now, how can it not be? Know the darkness. If we are to be together we must see the other's feet of clay, excusing missteps and appreciating the confusion inherent in living but one time and without rehearsal, where escalating stakes and change are constant, and neither attack nor defense protect in the struggle for one more breath, each of us realized not as discrete and subsisting on events but as process that evolves and absorbs, thrives and ends. When we are God together, nothing else matters.

The fight continues. At my feet is a lotus reaching as though for the same vista extended to those living on worlds where each is an island yet all look up to contemplate parallels and kinship, distant yet somehow immediate in the perception of what might be, a sense of common need in language of taste and color and wisdom accreted without assurance, a grounding by what is actual to experience at hand. Sallied thoughts, to commiserate or resist, which fuels our courage? Is it nobler to relate the brutalities of shared circumstance and join each other in wallow, or to meet that urge with conviction, refusing to indulge the injustices of life? Is the former giving in, the latter inhumane? Is it best to hold each in balance, empathy devoid of pity, honoring the other's potential and joined by warm strength, conscious of its own fragility? Let the healing begin with oneself. Acquit the reins on limited sapience and see what precludes this attempt to convey. The fog shifts like thoughtful days and before me appears a stairway, canted and steep and without reference to structure of any kind. There I behold an aphorism carved in the first step of too many: now or never. What have I come for if not this? A final ascent replete with terror, trailed by desperation to escape captivity enchanted by the weak and immeasurable heart of some larger design. Claws collect me to begin the impossible flight to rekindle a promise, the tyrant within reach.

A saying to guide us.

Some blurry detail to wrap around our days.

It was wonderful.

And then it wasn’t.

I became possessed.

Low-level fury and sorrow joined hands.

I tried.

I really did.

Hoped to turn a corner and leave them behind.

Choking in the kicked-up dust.

But they dug in.

Started eating my heart one tender bite at a time.

It gets smaller by the day.

I barely register the doves now.

I used to cry when they rose like paparazzi from the field.

The sky would fill.

I could hold on to that.

The paradox of a thing so empty yet bursting with life.

They say explaining kills the magic.

I’m hoping it does the opposite.

Somehow brings it back into being.

But I know better.

Gone is gone.

They’ve been here for as long as I can remember.

Sometimes I even celebrate the anniversary of their arrival.

It’s a quiet party.

Just shadows and burning.

Get close enough and you might hear it.

A faint crackling.

Like a spark.

The ocean in a shell.

There was a day the wind died.

The crickets paused and you held your breath.

I think you sensed them then.

Their strange weight.

Your eyes widened such that all the words that could have been said spilled into the world at once.

I pretended not to notice and picked up a knife.

Took an apple from the basket and carved it reverse-wise, peeling towards my thumb.

You must have known then that my wounding was not a matter of if.

I wonder what it tastes like, my heart.

Not the meat.

The pent up desire.

They won’t say.

Refusing to speak with their mouths full.

And they’re always full.

I’m amazed by how delicately they bite.

Tiny teeth.

More needle than fang.

I’ll live forever at this rate.

But that’s not true.

This is where I’ll die, on the grass.

It will be one of those days I’ve forgotten to be sad.

I’ll see their wings and know it’s the last time because a tear will alert me to the quiet.

Not the ambient hush of far away seas, but clear, like dawn.

The ash of mornings after.

Once again I’ll see you as you are.

You’ll smile a not-sure-why-I’m-smiling smile and the silence will deafen.

Will be the very cause of my death.

Maybe there’s a chance we’re like the arrow.

Flying true, and forever halving the distance.

Never reaching the end.

I smile back.

Stroke your neck.

And together we watch the sky.

The sun sets.

A distant myth of certainty.

Winding down.

Coming to, dragged, not ungently. Familiar mist brushing my skin like down, distinction hid from energy, from element, forces of the cosmos made. A man pulling me through sand or brush I cannot tell, so dense the haze. Beside me a flash of diamond, a cat of untamed countenance. Its coat colorless and clear, mined from notion, a loping splendor, a tiger made unbreakable. My guide brings me to stand, a man of arrow and earth, notch and curve worn smooth by time. He is blind yet looks through me, taking my measure, saying nothing yet asking what kind of person I am, and how much will I come to understand. A look flaying in its search, vanity brought to light, a wheel on provenance and prestige, on virulence, a rallying call beset by blame, striking conviction and its difference. Eyes that seek to know, who am I to dare? He looks to the cat, says, “Should we keep this one, or will he be like the rest, a disciple of action, a messenger, bringing more mayhem yet?” To me he says, “You want to know why you are here. That’s simple isn’t it? You no longer want to live in a dream. You want to speak your mind, to mark the others. You also want to know what I see. That too is simple. Darkness, and stars.”

He readies his bow, says, “Steady, here they come.” The cat springs into the fog and the man fires at teapot become tempest, a band of drones with single goal and that to end our solitude. We skirmish under pulsing skies, garnet flares that flank and drive, the enemy our medium, aspects of ourselves in flight. “Behind you!” I shout. The man turns and grabs a drone and slams it into battleground. It screeches, bites, again he slams it down. It spasms, and stills. The mist recedes, anomalous, our foes disappeared. The man stuffs his prize into a bag. “I had not been able to catch one,” he says with a smile, “You may be useful yet.” He tightens the string and looks visionless at the firmament, as though perceiving existence there, equity and pathos in song, an ethereal compendium reflecting our world, these attitudes. We go to a tree in the distance, a sign for which there is no road. The cat stretches out and we join suit, our backs to the night, the bag tied fast to hardwood limb. I gauge the branch, “It will hold,” I say. “Famous last words,” the man replies.

The bag rocks and from within comes captured words, “I feel your flaws, ignore them, suppress.” . . . “Silence!” the man says. He turns to me, “Kill it. There is no value in its speech, just ploys designed to claim your mind. Its prattle nurtures compulsion, doubt, the part of us that latches onto grand design and graceless tale, the lurid and spectacular.” . . . “I don’t think I can. What right have I to end its life?” From the bag once more, “Yes, become pious, become until no heat remains.” A knife flies from the man’s hand and into the bag. From it spreads an iris, time-lapsed and crimson. The man says, “To give it quarter is not love but fear. It is harasser of the weak, a huckster of alternatives, sticking like a teasing name. It would turn the present into mere shuffling of the cards, your thoughts polished and reformed. Trust nothing, but trust me in this. I have spent a lifetime being proud of my fellows but not their flags. To side with some excludes the rest. Is patriotism not the celebration of difference? In theory, but tribes remain. I understood and lost my sight, denied the throne by longer view. Even so, it was a gift, to hear what is said yet know what is meant, a language where one cannot lie. A blessing made acute as so few share this agony. Most lose their grip, every step a trap, coping with extinction’s threat by hurting all with even hands. To see this in a friend, hardships held past bearing, is burden unlike any other. I see hope spring forth in every greeting, each a disguised call for love. When verve transforms to manic glee, a roaring need to freeze what grows, we must recall that they are us. You will know them by their confidence, their creeds, a people made caricature by masks of angst and reverence. I have vowed to play with a full deck, to press those that say our nature is a sin, who divide our house thereby. I will not ignore my obligation to experience, nor will I tolerate the propagation of hysteria and slander of the possible. If we do not stand our vote is cast, a right unclaimed is right withdrawn. We were brought here on the shoulders of giants, and if we fail all of life will serve as witness. But take heart my friend, it is not too late, just almost so.”

The stars are few as sunset’s dawn, spare against a jeweler’s cloth. The man builds a fire, says, “I once heard that stars are echoes of light, remnants of long-dead constellations, and if one could journey into that beyond they would not find heaven, but darkness. What do you say?” I consider, reply, “Stars remind me that the rules are not mine. Those I love will suffer, and nothing I do will change the fact.” He smiles, “Be careful, language is true sorcery, whether spoken to others or oneself. Words are the scaffolding upon which we drape the entirety of our experience, select them carefully, and your beliefs more carefully still. Good and evil vie, the currency they seek none other than the weight of our convictions, no difference beheld in writ of God or man aloud. Terror and beauty seen in each, in a people broken by love, and its lack. Heresy, tragedy, testament, all prevail. Tell me, do you believe in God?” I look at the cat, its claws, and say, “I hope for God.” . . . “If one is undecided it simply means they cannot face the accord of their soul, indecision is avoidance of a thing already known. Perhaps you are afraid of being rendered expendable without doubt, the sanctity of life seen for what it is, alien yet familiar, no path to its secrets yet unceasing in tempting us to try. Surrendering to that is to forfeit everything, distanced ever further from one’s companions, from experience in common. As I am sure you have found, people always fear those with less to lose.” I look to the mountains, unattainable as insight, and say, “So, you believe in God then. Do you pray?” The man studies me as though the question demands not only answer but reply that might not be taken to the wrong end of a life. The fire reflects his eyes, more alive than any flame. He says, “How long can one stay in paradise until it is paradise no more? Can one enjoy their favorite dish if eaten for eternity? I pray that God cannot tire of love. But if such is the case, we must find goodness in pain, or all is lost. If you believe the gears grind in unison, a codified and vengeful force, or that all is bare coincidence, a web of caroms with death at its center, then you carry a coin in your pocket and flip it at every turn. One side anger, the other despair. In the meantime love stands waiting, soft and delicate and not in need. I do not pray for pardon or ease of burden. That is the only sin, to make oneself a slave. I pray as I swim, naturally, conversing with the water that is life around us, talking as to a friend, equal and grateful. For those choosing otherwise, their belief shines clear in attempting to keep the world at bay, imagining their doom around every corner, and thinking it a noble act. Rest assured, it is not. Such is living suicide, a path cauterized by fear of a dragon we have by the tail. Are you the least important being in the universe, or the most? Which is more terrifying, knowing either is so, or the surety that this is the choice in every moment?” . . . “I wish I knew.” The man spreads his arms, speaking as much to the stars as to me, “If wishes were horses beggars would ride, and all would be revealed. Belief, prayer, God, do these matter, or is it simple as how we treat each other before the certainty of death?” The fire cools, the question drifts. The mountains do not respond.

I gather my cloak to augment what gives neither warmth nor comfort, a projecting veil, a blind on the sun. Where can I turn where notion and its very mechanism oppose, where harking to inner realms is but conceit and mind not paid becomes advantage, behind each day an endless night? Could it be the tyrant’s agents are not preachers but pilgrims? Will my stopping them bring further loss, some greater pain, the cast of my bearing warding those that might help, not in quelling unease but in sharing this thin broth of trial? Are these travels leading closer to understanding, or further away? I am torn between knowing my motivation and knowing it too well. Such is the magnificent array embedded where moth and rust consume. I have seen little evidence that the bonfire will feed revenge, yet I scorn the tears of upheaval and shifting goals that engulf this expression, the blaze inside my only measure as I seek to ratify injustice on this side of the shimmering door. I do not fear the impulse, only the jump. Does the man beside me feel the same, or is that a distance too far? What mistakes of perception bead the glass? Try as I might to commune there is no hold strong enough to withstand a run from sentiment to purpose in a world of cruelty and affability by turns. I feel the unseen clock as it tallies the cost of waiting, of keeping change at bay, a karmic witness noting every dalliance as it keeps perfect ledger of rejection and dissent, vanity and pettiness balanced against the fallacy of boundless opportunity. Must I avoid the fringes of consciousness, the tug of spontaneity, the agony of arriving without invitation? How is that worth the spareness of joy, and what say have I in the weighing? Is such a place to be found or decision to be made, and is there time to entertain the alternative—a burning cage holding the soul focused inward, the roasting of its flesh made palatable, so used to the flame—hell recast as dying and meeting there the man I could have been? A synthesis that boils as it comforts by saying all that arises passes away, the leafless tree, this lingering night. If not for those that bear this strain, who is mercy for? We pack up without a word, and together move on.

The sphere follows us, luminous and black and proximity unsure, that object of hunger and root of calling found, celestial revenant never too close, yet hovering like a spell. Wishing it down is spark I cannot coax to passion for fear it will consume. I am well-armed but ill-equipped, it would surely expose my frailty, these hollow threats. I have battled and been broken, warred and been drowned. Having seen the prowess of heroes I know I cannot compare to this master of tides. Is its surface smooth like ideas of hurt, or hedge-mazed and deep, creased and layered like folds in a crown, like schemes lit from behind? Maxims itch like constellations, glittering over travail and gulf, beginning and end, part and whole. We rove on under idyll dome, the silent nebulae, the still and rippling flow, blue-black and rich, imagination revealed in a night autumn sky. The cat circles, its hide holding each twist of heaven in relief, a conflux in shining reflection. The man says, “Our enemy is patient, waiting until our hopes run high by auspicious events latched onto in absence of their corollary, sound without pause, objects without space. Only then will they come in number. But fear not, the task at hand will keep us sane.” He winks, a blind man's habit. The mountains approach, sienna-slate and of a piece. I follow as would sequitur to competence, the sphere fading, attention fused by hazard's truth. A gorge cuts our path, a perfect vacuum with ropes suspending its extent and those fortified by willow and grass, by wagered limits, gestures of perspective lost. I look over the edge and consider infinite fathoms of mind, a universe in parallel, accessible if I only knew where to look, the same as here except all are loved and no army stands, a place where uncertainty is accepted and anguish is but a muse. The cat traverses the rope as though born to it and my guide grabs it next, moving hand over hand, deliberate and strong. It is my turn now. I take a breath and pull, heady with dusk, a floating vision, the distant below indifferent and ready. What meaning in this? No, keep pulling, past pain and introspection, inch along for inch of life. Almost, almost, now, there. My panting meets a humble home, windows open to invite the current of handled tests and sorrow's ordeal, crucible and curse at bay, a freshness conferred by order, by granting of rest. “Welcome,” the man says, “They will come in time. Shall we play a game while we wait?”

We sit, rules plain and board set, pleasure found in thrust and counter. Flank, defend, fortress and flag. “Royalty awaits,” the man says, “it all depends on how badly you want the bishop.” Bruised, rebuilt, sacrifice, advance. “So, it has come to innuendo then,” I say with a smile, “how the mighty have fallen.” He stretches and yawns, says, “Stalemate once again, yet, we have both won. Obstinance and grim resolve are cankers exorcised by play, death cheated in suspension of angst, our mutual revelry a pacifier to misgiving, a dressing that soothes trepidation and wish. Even so, time will not be denied. Let us light the torches of war.” From twilight's end comes pleading sobs, bawling and lament. “Ignore their crocodile tears,” he says, “that is where our footing is lost. Stand fast, they will come. See, there, in the mist. Let’s give them what they came for.” His bow conjured, arrows clear and whistling, my weapons awake, amalgams of ruin sallying forth to meet all manner of nightmare's arrangement. We meet the crush with savagery, that sundry mythos of havoc and beast, agreed in presumption to judge, to assess and balance the enchantments of long ago, of ships and sand and waterfalls. I shift between all and aspect, between glances and winking out. Does destruction castigate our maker's wish, or are the wounds of enemies made ours with every monster cut to size? Are such thoughts worthy or tragic miscalculation, a life wasted in their embrace? Being patient takes so long. The assault rages as we turn from mere companions to friends born of the same undying love that lives to oppose, inspiring to precedent of ferocity and goodness, to sympathetic smiles slitting the throat of reason. A final surge and recess, our victory one of unity in service, communion claimed by what consumes. We chronicle the damage done, weigh our alliance against agents of convention. If veracity endures beyond a sharp tongue, if what we are would cease should guilty parties wane, if narrow escapes and valiant deeds change nothing, the genocide of potential ever-present, what gift prophecy? I lay down and examine the embers for some dark wind to blame, yet all remains, inchoate and wheeling.

...close to the surface but not quite so, weft of light on vestige of a ruin's passing, fleeting glimpse of aged stone, etch and aim awash in haze and meaning soaked in flow waylaid, a henge-work floating, spinning by. How to respond when no tree raps the windowpane, just troubled moons, lean and flickering, soaring where discipline and prowess melt all that is required. A jump to freedom, the way paved smooth as fresh-blown glass, rising higher, a path aired to sweat and favor, to compound eyes, discordant mare of nightshade's weep, small and deadly and light on its feet, like a dream, or a secret. It glistens, pale and gold, thick-tailed sting segmented and swaying, a mocking cure for pangs of existence. Whether hunger is symptom or disease I care not as I tear it in two, eating its velvet underside, drinking it down. A piquing squeal mediates all that cannot be said about these moments, the seam like footsteps on the roof of our souls. If wish becomes mute then all I need is sweetness of pain, it is enough...

...there is a sadness equal to love. It begrimes with residue of endings, imprecise as squalor it layers in sheets of fever and a plight finely tuned, an hourglass acquired by ambition and grief, a chime telling us to witness, flesh and bone, sinew and scar. No cause given to justify until life is extinguished by what I hunt, that which hunts me. I am told to burn the prophets of happiness, that misery is my right, the sphere’s consummation, that cyst on back of beyond, a miracle of embitterment, of all that renders our hearts. What folly to debate its scope, its crests and breaks erected in honor of that which hides the killing blow, a pole star deaf to evidence. What gift sufficient for zodiac of stone, what group when joined could ably turn it away, that fell satellite? I twist and writhe with limbs ungoverned, the past locked in rooms by those I tried befriend, heat and friction taking sides. Would they have brought me closer to heaven than these valleys, these plains? My voice finds strength in recall, in anger at being told of injustice so profound it will never again allow innocence to breathe. I challenge the sky, the descending blackness, when does it stop? The response comes in snaking whips of flaw and ruin, hell's own chains sensing all I dare dream, violent in their scrutiny. They sway and twitch as if to ask, how would I change with one day left? A secret event, a horror gliding at speed, swirling like an allegation, like smoke in a bowl. As before, so now, running at height of fear, a trembling swiftness on stagnant paths, blueprints shown to evanesce, instruments unsound in their surety…

The demon is upon us, clawing at my only friend. He offers protest as one might fend the planet's tilt, breaking against it as bottles on a pier. It hisses and tears and the man falls, tortured by his very skin and the unfamiliar forms that dying might take, those built slow with agony, brick by brick. He is wounded to the core, every gash a carving of realms that one day might have been enjoyed, perspectives lost with each drop of blood, leaking a potentiality never to be realized while our torment stands quivering, its surface an eager mob, a state of discrepancy in the arch of its spine, its existence pejorative to loveliness. It looks at me and through, wet-heeled and mocking, and jumps the wall separating anger from the unknown beyond. The cat pursues it without thought, alternatives sacrificed in a single act, its doubt foregone by devotion. The man looks at me and forms a word, red-flecked and bubbling, “Stay.” A lyric on the rails of serenity traveling byways of kindnesses I have known, but if malice given form leads to my goal it would be blasphemy to remain. I steel and jump and hope the demon has not gone far but far enough that I need not face it. The man strains to stand, mauled yet defiant, a longing there, as if to tell me that companions are our highest expression, the one legitimate form. But his body fails, entrail and passion soaking the sand. I close my heart to his struggle, hanging between love and duty, brother and burden. To leave risks dying, to stay the same. I run, but hear him still, from beyond the cold, beyond the wall, and know I owe him everything, “Brother, I cannot think of what to tell you that is not already, somehow, silently understood. The universe is hardly understood as we apply the human construct of time to an entity that is timeless. It just is. I could never measure or articulate everything you are, everything you mean to me—it just is.”

I search for communion in this wasteland, a derelict hominid passing creek beds and brocades that swallow my trail, the draining years. Legs like pillars stride in the distance, towering and equanimous beings with bellies brushing height of clouds, if clouds there are, for above me swirls only dust. They seem oblivious and bring forth empathy for my exiguous life whose order of existence cannot be known but by relative size to figments of antiquity, for that they must be, what other could survive the complications of history, arising from some latent period having bested the forces at play in a cosmos too large to care, for they to matter. What do they fear, these inhabitants of spectacle? Is fear province of the wild, what of sorrow? Naivete does not bring peace. Even that of which the sleeper is unaware can bite, in quantity destroy. I come upon a field barren as the rest save for statues of titans locked in battle, their foes unseen and purpose one I cannot guess other than its importance to some long ago record of obedience to choices made. Among them are champions clad in no guard but tendon and wit, legends all, olympic in scale. Are they defense, a warning? Or are they warriors come before, failed in my same errand in a realm that admits no bargaining? What blow will not be absorbed by enormity? What can I offer that they have not in crusades beyond counting? I would just as soon close this faucet of emotion, a source rich in sadness and prophetic of defeat, my disgrace bared by savage and knight, gauntlet and mail, horn and plume. All that remains depicted in cinder. This is the riddle, how does one become larger than life when fixed in time? To masquerade may be blasphemy but is the only path to repay misery dispensed by totem and providence. I wish to lessen these footsteps, shrink them conversely to the borders of my mind. Is being small the difference? Is that the power of ideas, seeds, a passing smile? A voice comes, true as breath. It is the demon, the night itself speaking its piece. It says, “You are carrying water to the sea. I am inescapable, prepared in all times and places for the fight you cannot win. Live in defeat and live you will. Renounce your struggle. Join the countless.” If only I could tell my friend how much he was loved, to pour straight the joy that once assailed my heart. Will there be another chance or is harm irrevocable, opportunities left on the table piled high such that the structure of destiny has already sagged, fallen into the never was under tax of occasions taken for granted? Why did I not express these sentiments of admiration, am I corrupt as the tyrant I seek? I step further into the waste, the endings to come.

The demon’s tail weaves dread and confidence, a lightless odium on a dry and wanting stage. Toward it strides the sorcerer, the ghost of fury steaming, the angle of his bearing inviting anguish as if the more he hurts the stronger he will become. He stops in front of the demon, and as though most painful act in deep store of such acts, he says, “You had your chance and let him go, another head start granted. Finish the job, or I will.” The demon stares, meeting flesh with unhurried regard. In time it replies, “You assume much. Seek the cause and vision blurs. On what can you rely to see further than now? What future where you are damned or saved with surety, from where does your conviction come? You conjure weapons to be right for a day, what then? Think of the first to have seen me, death in every mirror, stalked by fading glow. I taste it anew in all beings, and each the same. Your next breath may draw failure of the heart or knife unseen. What then is your greatest treasure, to accept or deny? Explain me and you will stumble, put faith in me and your regret will last forever.” The demon vanishes, yet the sorcerer feels its presence still, the world's very frame, a shiver of elation like a random flaw, unrecognized but by grief and its children. He wonders why death is sacred, carried like some draconic phylactery bestowed by powers unquestioned. Could he not be the first to live forever? He looks at empire of loss and knows to see it as final is to concede defeat, that the price of immortality is for another to take his place. To wield his fate as their own.

Limits of fantasy wrap choice in panoptic layers of half-truth and pretext, inquiry turned to feed on its own. How far have I come since the splintering of universe and aim? Should I go gently, living skin-deep where all exist by dictate of consent? Is that peace? Motion without progress, span without growth, if only distance spoke of gain. A mask appears in my path, travertine metaphor of doctrine and violence, a disguise to harness the hurt I project. It speaks from the root of my mind, it says, “I have been with you from the start, my cloak your shield, my weapons your compass, your aches and tremors are my own.” There is much I do not know, like why intelligence serves dysfunction, and loyalty stifles so. Should they not condition strength, brace becoming? Instead they tire, abstracting ideals. The tension between what is and what could be, that is the worm within, the source of melancholy and control, living the end before it comes, clutching to remorse. How to release it, to understand? The mask answers, “You are not alone. The intolerant are unjust by virtue of conceit, travesty condoned by design, atrocity by conclusion. Yet this is not what the countless desire, to grasp for wholeness in labor and myth. The sphere awaits, that you cannot change. But you have seen the tyrant's devices, and by shattering those tourniquets on tenderness you can ease all burdens. Every act of resistance is one more stone in the base of your legacy, its shape brought into focus. Keep fighting. Lift the veil of maudlin existence. Wear me well, in battle and in victory.” I put it on with shaking hands, and there it tightens, a conflict petrified, a limpet shell, a windswept space separate and diminished, a third eye vandalized. I look toward the angry dawn, the seasons between, the yellow cast of biting suns. My jaw is a distant ache, a rictus grin, tear-blind and callow. Vainglorious these safeguards we chase with our enemies raucous in their hunt. Let no captor ply trade in comfort, let none that oppress find perch or purchase. I go now to fortune, to halt the march of malice and greed.

They stop me cold, repulsion and desire rising as one. The struggle of a spirit turned licentious in charcoal and heat, sex and rotting leaves. A rheum on vision they fill the horizon, loathing and wish in sculpted show, the queen astride leviathan. I stand in the rubble, rooted by invertebrate past, looking into eyes like firebrands, an origin I do not feel. They dissemble in whirlwind of judgments and labels, each a bloom in vase of malignance, contents spilled like stuttering gods, disinterred yet sanctifying nothing, neither soul nor honor venerated by obeisance, postures inciting my heart with waving hands and claims to creation, a masterpiece of control given form in hostility, all in vain. Consequence erupts and memory drifts into being, yet all is pacified by fresh beginnings, fugitive that locus, a composition of honesty and vaporous thereby, the end a new lease waiting if I could but tap into what was forgotten. Such is the paradox of means, strengthening the barbaric by the very fight against it. Still I try. Every move a claim to place, to know and influence, to map infinitude. What can I posit other than the tyrant’s turn to offense? Had I not intervened would they have been content to rest, to let the world turn as it may? What cunning where love is obscured by war, our freedom made fiction? I will not let it be. With mask pulled close the chase is on.

Existence without essence, a ghoulish footing in haunted wilderness, no gentle noticing this, the searching out of discrepancy between position and goal, status and wish, ambition an itch from the shallows, clandestine prism fracturing light from the distance to separate spirit from the thrilling enough. Here I crow, a warlord occupying seat of reverence, no honor in my bearing. Will I create a rock heavier than I might lift? Soon enough. Dealt a weak hand, bedecked by notions unfit yet played with brilliance, singular in knack, the commitment to fight unctuous in its advance, a liqueur tipped by entrance of passion, of sickness, each one wearing prankster's clothes. Portent comes in wisdom ignored, caprice pursued in streets of jeopardy where children chase balls of brightness and allure, the taste for revel sought irrespective of hazard until too late, too real, too soon. Lies successful by the momentum of their fictions, slow-dying shapes of order turned cartel of beauty, rumination and worry to follow, shrill and whistling, freshly born in seduction and loathing. This is shadow's plenty, a dialogue of thirst tongued through net of sophistry. What will that voice say other than wielding of cosmic image, a congerie of methods justified by distress, modest riches, strange contexts, the constituents of reality reared by certainty, an oasis and its palms brought low by skylark sport and flight from harm. Seek to defeat and defer thereby. A night of knives fused to obsession in dyad of hope and fear. Actions in the presence of greatness come to nothing but lethal parting of the ways. Eventually the decision must be made—is being kind to oneself to be cruel to others?

Want and aversion run on, mischief in their step, their feathered touch both sensuous and vile. From what do they fly? What ill is bred by urge and disgust? A nymph and druid chained, struggling against bonds of dim élan that rope each to one, no jailer left to loosen their hold, the operatives of avarice having ranged ahead to replicate the wending strands of indifference. Memory sings and consequence falls, desert flower and iron skies murdering without remorse and love far from my mind—these weapons my world—glittering like ore against bond and honored name, a poison wind uttering forever as though each were the last, as one must be. I grasp for other than sacrifice, a paladin splattered red, cutting for no more reason than it can be done. Dreams once bright curl by christening blows with no time to wish goodbye for the vigor of my affections. Finished, panting, unable to discern through swirling time the ghosts obscured by murmur. I am a passenger, beholding a scene that beggars thought, shelter and character slain, freed yet sundered by neglect, my fear having destroyed that which severs gods from the needs of their souls. I cannot process what my heart has become, this cavity of weakness, a millstone suffocating each new path by measures of hostility, joy diffused in aggregate, the truth of action. Nothing left but the dive into fire. Not long for this life but long enough to force fate's hand, to expose the vacuum of power, the prison where aspect glimpsed is but greater bondage still. At my feet an empire shattered, the sun and moon consigned to oblivion. Yet for this I cannot grieve, not when the shoots of conviction spring. The sorcerer must die.

I awake to orange-petaled ganglia, to a mother evinced by earthbound stars, a lucent field recalling her beauty, the tightrope daring and stories read by snowfall, saved from perdition by trust in my goodness. Saffron trumpets surround, ovate lobes in sun-pocket interval, a fluxing light on unity, texture pierced by song, heroic, untamed, delighting the senses. What supports this source of awe, of what are its borders made? A path ahead, a cardinal direction, a line to one that might let me try again. The brighter the street, the darker the alley. Stand, shake these tremors, these curves of identity, abstractions distinguished by exile, the right track a moving target reflected in silver tides, in soil drained like strength. This too will pass. My progress stops in desert of miracles repeated, in contours fashioned by youth, by faerie ring and slumber's melody. Fluttering wings behind me, sibilant whispers, parrot men with saw-blade grins, what strange papillons. They say they will help, that their queen will see me. Is gulf from word to intent ventured with profit? Garden blooms or dinner bells, from where come the wolves? What of resilience, is it found in frailty, this assurance of decay guided by touch? Ahead is circus of impulse, garish and tangerine, a clock's pinned center pulling like lies, commanding I dream of luxury and dimmed vibration, illusion in judgment and harvest, digesting it all.

Inside the pavilion drones fly high over shuffled colonnades, the countless raising their bonds, as if to say we have so much time, but to whom have we given our souls? The old are dragged, the crying silenced, a studied brood that clings like rags, as though such airs might stall fate's hand. I pass the crazed and worse, my presence a speeding cause. I would hush the din but voice-flung daggers rattle home. Will I cry for those in pain, or for fact that I cannot? A sprawling tract, a vaulted space, here the congress snatch and yearn, candied alms to grant release, eyes rolling like horses. Ahead is a lectern, presided over by hounds, they say, “Brothers and Sisters, why are churches built like castles? Which informs your faith, and which rules mystery? The keys to salvation are in your grasp yet wrong cast vote will hide their ring. Weakness is fault, your suffering an illusion. Behold the world's indifference, the whims of life, your certainty defamed.” They claim I am no different, counting days as guaranteed, adherence feeding hungry ghosts, the routines that keep me sane. Am I to suffer for the other, become ill at heart, or will I let friends climb and fall, under no power but their own?

I am led through velvet halls. Temptation brushing short-breath steps, frontier and inference dispelled. My escorts twitch, what awaits to stir them so, these winged agents, nether sprites? Lament fades as comfort closes corridors. I am funneled into lair of delight, curtains hanging like suns, and from above a longing flute, votive to a better heart. She sits relaxed on pillowed throne, their peerless queen, tender hips to quell dissent and face a puzzle of allure, eyes fey and sly, coal-fired lakes, her skin a veil of subtlety. I feel my hunger posit spans, a sagging will swamped by greed, the need for release, for viscera expunged, secrets in a vessel shared. My heart beats like thunder trapped behind a windowpane, order lost in stillness gone. She coos a melody, an organ grind diffused on air, a poppy breeze, and says, “How did you get here? No matter. Tell me, why do we not speak of dreams? They vibrate so, these gifts from depths. Have you ever wondered if the hungry dream as you, to know the cosmos, or do they simply long not to be left behind? Songs to control, songs of deliverance, all so tiresome. What is true other than desire?”

Dripping walls and harvest floor, trove of savored nutriment, fungal sprouts that call my name. I reach and she says, “No, not these. What is gained by distant sky, a fire burning in your mind? If this were your dream there would be a choice, but what authors such ownership? Does the caged bird sing for captor’s ear, and is the bargain not fair, fear exchanged for harmony? Do not worry, there is always time to act on providence, that scrawling writ in glowing hand, flashing hot like dragging steel. Portent calls but remains just so. To extirpate a state of grace will not avert your deeds, those larcenists of symmetry. If we are made of acts unchanged, then no harm done by giving in.” I see myself in rectitude, a prince gone still, piped with gold, arachnid stings, a cincture wrapped in spangled moods, in animus and trickery. What strange love this is, better not to question why lest such a gift bare crooked fang. Consequence speaks, a glossy dark bewilderment, it tells me to grab what I can, the time for innocence has passed, that to give up wonder found in chance is petty rate for sanctuary. Memory chimes its primrosed voice, a child in ruins, a light by which no rainbow comes. It urges concord, absolution, but is such way-station or artifice where contentment and sloth appease? Can such tides be reversed, or does yielding loop, fold, rush, and scour? That early ape at edge of dawn, was its first word yes or no, and what good these questions when rage and rapture alternate, simple graves and numbered days, the best already lived and the future wanting by its weight? Can we dry our eyes, charred amidst serenity?

The countless waltz a dance prescribed, crank and gear the den alive, lyric steps, a fragile web, somehow safer in the act, eyes to feet and keeping time. Pleasure swells, happiness that only is as distance keeps from what pursues, where decadence settles, like ivy on sacrifice. The room a wheel, flourished beats and polished wood, parts that crack when partners change. Here acuity is bartered for seclusion, for heads hung low, and I wonder what might be too beautiful to keep in one heart, one life? A dancer stands tall, clear of eye and step, back slender, like peace on the wind. The rest regard this breaker of rank, each head cocked like birds to a worm, and in fury they descend, the one that stood is blown apart. Through tooth and bone the throng retreats, each a witness, but not so near to be involved. Loosed by madness the riddle of my life comes like a shiver—I want more than this. The queen turns to me, says, “Where to now? Where you have no face, no name, no fate or redemption? A child of adversity having bid farewell to all you have done, and all you never will? You are welcome to it.” Her eyes flare like candles and I am dragged into a storm that covers tracks as they are made. In time I am abandoned, left to desert of winter where no sign is of friend or beast, nothing but the bitter sheets, and every path an unknown road.

I bend into the moor, the frozen sky. Might I sustain on experience, having been taught all I need to know, to meet absence where the air curves like dunes, to contemplate that which will not yield? The sphere follows, the same black moon, a valkyrie from afar, quiet as a lullaby. What use familiarity that breeds contempt, what then happens close to God? A building rises, dark, abandoned, a structure that has lost its will, though which came first who can say? I enter and the day’s lessons stiffen over lands where refusal plays its secret chord, where empathy would preserve but nothing is or was, silent as this room. If my love is here it is in some nearby dimension where hearts do not change by coercion, where the sun seeks a role undeciphered by its dependents, by longevity and wish that its rays will touch creases carved white by squinted wandering. I dust my hands on a cloak that seems to absorb not just light but toil of history and walk out to commemorate a conscious past eroded but for the mystery it once held, great ideas whose utterance seemed enough to ensure their survival. How wrong we were. The sphere slips away, no reference point remaining in this waste. What I would give for grain of encouragement to outweigh reality, surrounded by husks of daughters marooned, of sons unmoved to help themselves. They turn like heads on conquered land, as if to ask where peace is found. I say nothing, as though a kind word might be wasted, the odds not worth the one saved. A fool's notion in a fool's paradise. I look over those forms and know it is not how I wish to end, hollowed out by wind and sun. I want to know the measure of our bond, and then I want that time again, until eternity has gorged on who I am, all I have experienced, on all I have shaped, all that has shaped me. Too late now. I am laid down among the rest. Why do dreams come true, then this?

She wears lilies and indigo, flowers that play in the blue-gray of her eyes, the blue-green of the sea. I know she carries some measure, some meaning, but cannot guess it, this wonder of life speaking my name. The surf frames her steps, the fragrant air her smile, a concert of radiance among the waves, emerald and shining. She is forged of cosmic filament, sweeping away the desire to look back, to ponder tales gone wrong. What makes dreams less than real? Is it lack of tactile element, the uncertainty of time, or knowing that safety exists behind every door, that to dispel a nightmare one just needs to awake? This is her confidence, the surety that every step is a gift, that darkness can only abide for so long, and even wars must end, their conclusion bringing freshly tilled soil. We pass artisans of every kind, purveyors of lacework and rugs, carvings and beads, watering cans, rings, glassware, and gold. She ducks out of sight, the better to speak with those of her make, of salt and earth and splendor. Who is to say what next farewell is final, is it not then vital to treat all just so, to leave the air clear and brimming with thanks? She returns to the sun, the day grows brighter. I say, “Do you remember when we first met? I saw you and everything changed. In that instant I knew perfection had no boundary, that a thousand stories and a thousand more could not contain you, all you would mean to me.” She places her toes on mine and we kiss. She says, “I could not live without you.” . . . “Banish the thought. In fact, do not banish it, there is no need. It is not a possibility in a universe of possibilities.” . . . “You’re sweet.” . . . “You’re savory.” . . . “You’re funny.” . . . “I have my moments,” I say, as I scrunch my face and sniff the air. She rolls her eyes, says, “Come on, don’t do the rat face.” . . . “I can’t help it, it just happens.” She punches my arm and clasps my hand. We walk on—her talking, laughing, connecting—and I listening, silent and rapt, not interrupting lest my words come between us. There are many things I want to tell her, how she takes my heart to its limit, that I gain strength in our love knowing its inverse exists but cannot be tainted thereby, that to be hers is to be lifted, every detail an exhilaration, the only shame being unable to share this feeling fully, directly. To call it beauty comes close, but lacks the intensity of longing given relief. Mere pleasure is further still, having removed the soul from the equation it started. I look to the fading sun and think about how to control these things, lull them to sleep, but only for a time, to appreciate their nature, how they buck and fight, jump and live, like chaos to stillness, flame to night, you to I. Is everyone able to taste this candy at the center of life, sweeter than suffering? I tell you the only thing I can, that I will love you forever.

Supine under ancient skies, that vault of prejudice, sprawling trench and hills brought low, a blanket of uncertainty, no leeward side or recess, no crest or slope, the inner gusts reminding me of being alive, the outer taking it back. Reflections on a heart of glass, untamed passions, goals aligned and souls that wish to be. The wind persists where I cannot, so laden with winter, these cold wanderings, distant fires become smoke, and always the storm. Am I hero or criminal, on bold frontier, or jailed for some heinous crime? Perhaps I am just one more looking for comfort from a creator I have every reason to forfeit. How to find mercy, and when is enough? Humbled by this great unrest, providing pause but never space to fly. Can tears be shed by those beyond? What fact, if known, would stop the flow? Not just once, but for all time? Love never dies. Yes, that is such alchemy. It is in martyring ourselves to anger that love is lost, to sarcasm and misery, to cunning proclaiming wasted time and the widening well of possession. Here I understand that life is a sculpture destined to crumble, and the question is not of states or legacies but of how well one can make each breath an expression of truth, our very existence a mandala of sand, given each other, given the world. Our depth may be equaled by the extent of our grief but must never be outweighed by it. Chaos is a paper tiger we ride unalterable by attack or slight, carried by the wave and wetness at beginning and end, the wrapping and reality. The storm continues tinsel-gray, not attuned to plan devised, burying these thoughts and vapor trails, a brume to the west, a driving beat that has a name.

No more. Just all as it is. A cold and beautiful life. Simple, hard. Giving in but not giving up. A rock far below the current come to terms with goodbyes, knowing the assault will never stop and shining just the same. My vision weaves for distant mountains, cramped with chill, but worry goes in salience, to show concern is arrow for which there is no shooter. All in good time, of which none is left. Humbled in seeing these thoughts are not mine, that ownership is the dream. I would have let go that deadly praxis given time, that encroachment of sacristy, the deepest cut an arterial coup of images made word, maps redrawn as if the movement of lines would set them alight. I would have started fresh, all accounts settled in dust and snow, that which weighs on blinking eyes, a calling soft like cultist’s sleep: know the darkness. I consume it like a creature enchanted, setting peat to fire and stoking compromise, prodding neglect and servile destiny. What I wouldn’t trade for a friend to share in dying, but the street echoes empty, a crucible on winds of change. There, a light, swinging casual through the fog, through winter’s burn and shadow, a garden caring not for its confines, aspect or all it will exist. Brighter now, a hand to wipe these tears.

Whispers echo, chimes from long dark province, a lighted sea bright and vying, each breath a rhythm pondering orbits outside of sleep, at height of pleasure, holding sway on what might come. A galleon appears on the horizon, black and lacquered and gliding, a vessel shaped by spectral trade, by smiths and cutters, joiners and journeymen, crook and claw, talon and nail. A plume of smoke serves for wake as tack and jet sear the gloom, mainsail whipping, a crimson flag like death's own banner. On the breeze comes a sigh, beauty returned like birds of spring, corsairs in a line, worn and warm as temple stones, simple and wonderful. They flit and fan, playful as butterflies, each a song. The galleon banks and discord rings with each lift of its prow, surety marred like prospects in twilight, like decisions bled by past mistakes. It groans in fury, towering, crashing, wanting its due. With final flaunt it charges, sails drawn fast like skin too tight, a trial absent of evidence and conviction of experience. I urge conciliation but space and madness close the door, unheard over need, hurtling as down a mountain. The armada yields in the instant before sanctity undone, the great ship allowed into their midst where it churns and hacks, the gentle boats slipping without effort in grace-soaked weave, kittens toying with head of their pride. If given a choice between short life brimming, or one long and steeped in misery, which have I asked for? And if in contrast to the plan I see, what if brevity lingers? What wisdom then in tempered joy, a lid on vigor? The current sweeps me on as though by heeding such thoughts I have been taken seriously in turn, but vision falters, stalled in chains of cause and effect, my absorption turned impediment, a spotlight swung to dash the spell, the audience become aware. The scene flickers and fades and all is as before. Before hope's return, before connection. In my heart yet out of reach.

Sitting on pins, estranged from lover and illusion both, dread in place of thirst. What to do but rail against the myriad things, wish this world to sweet release? A shadow slides, blasphemed spawn no home in scale, a serpent train, a fable scorned, repulsion come. What match I to ancient ease where oceans whorl transparent green? Am I these fish, dumb of plans inviolate? Do all the answers fall about, obvious but not to me? Fast-dark clouds provoke hatred, anger, relief in waves, and then remorse, blood dripping like wax, red and slow. Tempting bait it meets the sea, the shadow’s rise.

The mass shatters and teems, a pinwheeling mottle discrepant with sire, the one become many to strike from all sides, like scissors through silk, or love's demise by thoughts unbidden. Each a regret come to face me again. Tiger-black hands grip the raft, jagged, sheen, simian clutches lifting host from below. They climb onto the deck, feral chimeras having flowered too soon, plagued by abscess, acrid and blank, rasping and jaundiced. Memory whispers and consequence cares not if I die on my feet or live on my knees. The creatures sniff the air and come, reavers unerring. I swing in seismic arcs, lives taken by score, but still their kindred swarm, nothing to lose but my escape. Hundreds fall and hundreds more, the storm a mirror of glory and fame, newfound strength in tales of the fallen. The downpour masks my gain, the willed ignorance of all that stands between us, a sacred agreement spun by pride. Lightning flashes to reveal bodies slicked by struggle, by flood of hostility, and in that picture my commitment rings cold, an inexorable gap between right and decision, a chasm filled by empathy's end. The creatures raise their heads as though hearing a voice, and like clutter of spiders flee each and at once. They merge in the sea, the circling quiet. No errantry left to ward such a fiend.

It breaks the surface, a mammoth hunter between color and sound, pigment and music. If I wondered what is feared beyond devil and depth this leviathan serves answer, soaring like waterfalls and crashing like ice, my raft destroyed. A fin cuts through the chaff and around me as though I am shrine for imaginings patient and close, a nocturne in wait. It is under me, then behind. What good instinct with this my predator? Every rash and negligent act a taunt unheard by fate? I steel myself for slice of teeth, the end of suffering, yet nothing comes, no glimpse of plot or design, just liquid wild and further than I dare dream. This ocean will claim me, each stitch soaked in promises made, a caress seeking vitality, an erosion to cool avarice, grinding my very spirit. If no one here gets out alive then how to con the ferryman? To not fear death is to die but once, yet, without means of escape, how to redress this burden of being, what star true north to transcendence? Beauty is faint restitution, the quest for awe my sole oar remaining, the next sunset or smile a reminder of what cannot be, these layered roads and paths paved over, the sea a garden of anemone, enlivened and reaching, soft in the current. I know their tongueless swell, those stalagmites of genocide, marching to a lich's drum. I struggle against the silence between words, the radiant gloom. To whom can I look for more time when the caretaker of my soul betrays innocence? And what if death is but more lives yet, each worse than the last, our best behind us and naught ahead but a web where every cry tightens its grip, where all we could have been is shown only in dying? How then to avoid regret? Must I live in parallel with some final understanding, tying every moment to that ideal? Questions weigh heavy as water fills my mouth and I cough and swallow more. I speak to the vastness inside for to say it aloud is the only defeat, an echo on walls dictating the same governing line, the elegant destroyer, that which says I do not want to die.

I cherish the sun, the waves, the seabirds at play, soaring high and diving, luster's change reeling them down. Far-flung clouds no match for this handful of sand, the gentle current, gratitude honed by slow crawling day. You move with sweet precision, my symbiote in repose on crest of life, the sea bright as nature rejoices in its creation, a staying call on early grave. You clasp my neck, the water turquoise and perfect, a chrysalis reflecting warmth, pupal layers ensconcing from harm. I touch your breast, the beading water, a soothing pet on liquid grace as we move together through the nectar found in shared experience, in love of each other. You lean in the flow, hair spread in vital wreath, and I bring you up to see your eyes, too beautiful to understand. How to divine this goddess, to know your perfection? You speak and set my heart at ease, “We went in with our rings on. Be careful not to lose them, we would have to search an ocean.” I smile, say, “I would search an ocean for you.” . . . “You’re the best.” . . . “Never, always you. You collapse the divide between me and the man I can be, the ten thousand things made to sing. The path to joy is being with you now, not a now naked of adoration but one that shines by our journey’s very depths and drivings. Your kiss takes everything that is sad from me, makes my skin comfortable, lets me be part of this world.” You squeeze my arms, cock your head and grin, “Just don't give me those bird eyes.” I widen them, hold them unblinking. You laugh and say, “Stop it, bird! And don’t you dare try to escape. I'll taxidermy you. You'll have bird eyes forever!” . . . “My heart's desire, how could I ever want to get away? In you I realize the happiness that defies, the splendor of my potential and all that is sacred, your voice the very echo of my soul.” You put your head on my shoulder, breathing slowly, the sinking sun bronzing your back, pebbled light imbuing with gold. You are proof the gulf can be breached, a master key to maze of secrets, an island of purity where longing melts to tender antidote, melancholy a memory, the whole I had hidden brought into focus. Do you feel this way? I hope so.

The moon is ablaze, the distant heavens a scentless limbo, reverence consumed yet animate still, a necromancy exposed, dead, heaving, abstracting us, the last living things in a fluid-filled space, accompanied by grudge and foreboding, the pools of home forever away. The sea sets schemes in motion and my every fiber fights the bottom, pushed and blunted by tendency, sight set firm, head dipping, above, below, above, and one last time I see the horizon, a vision of patina and green, white-capped and rising. Thought comes clear as meadow's call, this liquid now. To die awake, what greater accord with transience? What vote more urgent when ground one treads plans death by star? What is needed other than to be one's utmost, to glow and gleam? Loss is yours, a notion avoided by islands annexed from assent, yet here I yield, no longer counting the burden, no future found in grievance, a soul agreed with all that is. Ready now, slipping under. My love an ocean pouring in.

Falling leaf without a net, through seesaw leagues and solar winds, the spinning quiet. Bathed, distilled, a faint cascade, a comet kept in lighthouse deep, rolling soft down spiral stairs. A writhing mass arrayed below, the latticed floor of a sea where twilight sways with bedlam, limbs twisting like vines, like signal fires. I count one for every blessing but bring no tithe to make them whole. Where do they stop, and I begin? A shared predicament, our happiness tied to scope of endurance, to gentle hold and forgiveness, to hearts born anew. Let us pray that grief be outweighed by love, for wisdom in our darkest hours, and to know that even as we sow our destruction, we cannot be abandoned. I close my eyes and trauma fades, free of resentment, free to let impermanence ring. I wish to give this gift, to ignore the rules of pressure, but hands are on me now, their grip pearly and veined, a fever that says: love never dies. Timidity spreads in verdict's place, a sunset exit, an open scar. And yet, what bounty without risk? The tether loosed by drunken tears, warmth, then light, falling.

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.

the first thing it said was SIT & BREATHE & BE this was the undercurrent of everything from that point forward it would expand & double back & whisper & speak it with its absence one time it said THIS IS NOT BASIC THIS IS FUNDAMENTAL EXPANDED INSTRUCTIONS TO FOLLOW sit in a relaxed & easy way with your skeleton carrying your weight & your diaphragm free to move in & out & allow thoughts & sensations & phenomena to arise & vanish like watching clouds move through the sky not hurrying them or wishing they weren’t there you're just here being with what is & when you notice you’ve been carried away by a thought or distracted by a sensation reset (not in an uptight way like "i’m going to relax or else" that's not helpful) let the eyes & body soften & become the mirror reflecting all that arises & passes & when you get caught up in a thought or feeling notice that & start again don't try to achieve something or make something happen be relaxed & open & sit with the freshness of the moment i'll repeat keep it simple no need to innovate there’s nothing to do but sit & be so find a comfortable position you don't need a special chair or mat or incense or flowers or lineages or rituals you can even lay down vitruvian style which i might add is a great shoulder stretch for the terminally online take a deep breath or two & let the tension melt away you can focus on something like an object or your breath or you can let your attention relax into watching the coming & going or whatever arises be it thoughts or sounds or sensations & when you notice you’re distracted begin again gently bringing attention back to your chosen object of concentration or to the ceaseless stream of phenomena (whichever you chose before) you'll likely find short sessions to be most helpful marathons work for some but you don't need to be a hero even five minutes can make the difference between a hectic day & being able to bring a more relaxed & balanced perspective to life no this won't solve circumstantial problems this is about giving you some daylight that little bit of extra space to be more loving & kind when it might make all the difference

it said you're quite thick ok this is going to take a while ok ok so LISTEN find a comfortable position your eyes can be open or closed now bring your attention to the present moment & let go of any distractions or conceptual elaborations simply rest in the natural state of mind without trying to alter or fix or change anything & as you rest in this open awareness thoughts & emotions & sensory experiences will arise that's what they do it's their job & instead of getting caught up in them or trying to push them away recognize them as manifestations of the mind’s clarity & let them dissolve on their own they will trust me bro they're like clouds in the sky continue to rest in this awareness & get up when you feel like you're done there's no schedule or expectations or abstract notion of perfection thinking that way only sets you up for guilt & suffering this is what you do in many areas of life whether it’s stressing over financial stability or the quality of your relationships that first move of believing in Should Be is putting a stick in our own spokes don't do that bro it's going to hurt

it said did you get that hmm i'm not convinced alright here we go i don't mean we're going anywhere i mean we're starting again just rest here with any & all phenomena that comes through & don't worry i know sometimes it feels like entire sessions go by & you're daydreaming or wrapped up in thoughts the whole time there’s nothing wrong with that you're not bad at this it's not like you choose when to be distracted & for how long it simply happens our aim is not to achieve a certain stable state but to relax & accept things as they are ceaselessly changing & entirely unpredictable one thing you should know we're literally doing nothing not trying to do nothing it sounds strange but is what the people call a Distinction With A Difference think of it this way you’re relaxing into receiving whatever comes like a radio antenna it has no interest in filtering the signal it takes what comes whereas the active antennae of an insect reaches out to interact with the environment searching & honing in on specific phenomena in its surroundings to help it survive when we’re sitting we’re the radio not the insect got it ok this is the time to be completely open & resting in the moment & letting whatever comes to come you might find it helpful to relax the muscles of the forehead & eyes & jaw when you realize you've made the subtle move from Radio Receiving to Insect Inspecting but really you can forget about this analogy altogether this isn't work you're resting in the natural state of mind & observing whatever arises it's very practical that way there’s nothing to learn & no method to master just SIT & BREATHE & BE (which reminds me of a funny story one time i typed meditation & autocorrect changed it to detonation which makes sense in that the not-so hidden agenda behind all of this is to explode your sense of self by loosening the hold of habitual identification with the ceaseless stream of thoughts & sensations)

i didn't quite follow what this was all for to be honest so i asked What's it all for & it said once there was this guy named Alan he said this doesn't have a reason it doesn't have a purpose in this respect it's unlike all other things that we do except perhaps making music & dancing in music we don't do it to reach a certain point such as the end of the composition if getting to the end of the piece were the purpose of music then the fastest players would be the best in dancing we're not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor when we dance the dancing itself is the point when we play music the playing itself is the point the same is true in this it's the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment DOES THAT MAKE SENSE it then said sorry that's a condescending & patronizing & frustratingly diffuse & non-actionable way to end a sentence so here's some real tips:

1) SITTING & BREATHING & BEING doesn't need to be bound to a time or place some thing you do & leave behind before getting on with your day it’s a mood it's an ongoing openness irrespective of activity it's a way of being in the world

2) you're not trying to get to The Next Level or A Deeper State (there’s drugs for that bro) you’re just being & enjoying the aliveness of the moment you're not trying to accomplish something or Get 1% Better by doing this you’re not looking to achieve some blissful & stable state you’re simply taking some time to downshift from doing to being so when you’re doing again you can do it with more being mkay

3) distraction WILL occur you’re not trying to reduce the number of times you’re distracted per session as if it were some sort of KPI distraction will occur as anything else occurs it will arise & stay for a time & vanish with or without our permission distraction is equivalent to all other phenomena it's just another passing cloud you’re not worried about counting clouds or trying to hurry them along all you're doing is gently shifting your pov from being focused on & invested in The What that’s arising to watching The How & when you pay attention you'll notice how much is going on it’s a relentless stream it's an itch then a bark in the distance then a thought of what’s for dinner then a gurgle then a tensing then a thought of what day is it then heat then a cough from the next room then a hum of electricity then a passing car & on it goes one thing after another with no break being aware of this display is the heart of life it's like becoming aware of the ocean for what it is a wave making machine & instead of trying to track & label wave after wave after wave you're just being with the ceaseless & wonderful rhythm of it all now granted some sessions feel "worse" than others you'll be distracted many times by various thoughts & feelings but that isn't a bad thing it's simply the flavor of that particular series of moments some skies are crystal clear not a cloud in sight & some are filled with impressive storms & thunder & lightning it's all beautiful & perfect there’s no winning or losing in this

4) don't worry about timers & all that nonsense just do this when you get the urge & as long as feels organic & natural when a thought comes that says Now Would Be A Great Time To Be it's usually quickly followed by But I Have So Much To Do LISTEN TO THE FIRST ONE it can sometimes feel like a workout the hardest part is starting but once you’re in the groove it’s the best & when you’re finished you're so glad you did it but if you must time yourself keep it short like 5-10 minutes but remember if you're always on a timer this can feel like one more thing to check off the to-do list whereas not having a hard stop can encourage your appreciation that life is not a schedule of slots being filled with one discrete activity after another but a ceaseless flow with no boundaries between moments try it bro please bro put the smartwatch away trust me bro

5) eyes open or closed it doesn't matter sometime open is good it keeps you engaged with the world & avoids the tendency to start thinking in terms of inner & outer as though there’s some border you're on one side of & everything else is Out There you're being with the flow of all things as they arise in this very moment there's no need to close off from that which you're inseparable from you couldn’t if you tried & eyes closed is wonderful too sometimes the peepers need it after going hard on the internet machines it's good to listen to your body when choosing the mode that makes the most sense at the time sometimes it's sitting sometimes laying down or walking sometimes eyes open & sometimes closed sometimes focused on an object & sometimes keeping your attention panoramic there’s no wrong way different approaches work for different people at different times (of the day & of life) the common thread is relaxing into the moment & being with what arises & bringing it back to that when distraction occurs anything more is window dressing sometimes you may even fall asleep & they'll say "noooo that’s not it you need to be awake & alert & paying attention” well forget that if you fall asleep enjoy the rest you probably needed it the same can be said for an itch that demands to be scratched you should go ahead & if you need to roll your shoulders because you’re getting stiff go ahead we're past "this is the only way to do it you must be a statue" we attune to the moment at hand & meet its needs as it happens

6) treat all phenomena the same whether loud or soft sounds insistent thoughts or barely-there thoughts intense itches or little tingles bright colors or subdued hues dramatic shapes or gentle lines all are dynamically interdependent in ceaseless relationship with everything else our job is to DO NOTHING to make space for seeing the ceaseless coming & going of absolutely everything & the how of what’s always happening & that there’s no stable center on which to stand just a perfectly clear & infinite sky through which the clouds of all forms of experience coalesce & fade

it said all these things in those 40 days & also that SITTING & BREATHING & BEING is but a means to an end not an end in itself since whatever is established with effort will succumb to the force of change i still didn't really understand so it said OK FORGET WHAT I TOLD YOU SINCE YOU LIKE CATS SO MUCH TRY THIS so i did & i must say i like it very much (meow):

I learned things from him. Colors and shapes. The truth of the river. That I was born in a hospital for aged men, one of those large converted factories with an entrance like a barn door. It had a hallway running end to end and big open rooms in which the senile and worse counted and lost track of days. "You came home the next day" he said, "and just lay there and let mother rock you and sing. Same way she'd done with so many before."

In rooms of armchairs thick with yellowing newspapers and something always ticking he taught me how to count by the fear in his voice. He would go into the night and the next morning I would take the bus to pick him up and take him to the dam for a swim where we would eat little sandwiches and drink thick drinks that looked like soup. When I got up to leave I wasn’t sure he even knew I was there.

I would listen for the car crash, the one he got out of alive even though the roof was ripped off. When I got to the hospital they had put him in a chair and the doctor asked me if I wanted to hear a joke about his funeral. No, I said, but I’ll see you there. Sometimes I would get a call saying his body was found, that he was dead. I would walk back to the bus stop to pick him up and we would go to the inn I was working at and the sun would rise through the window of the dining room while we drank black coffee.

He gave me money every week but what I really wanted was his secret. The one he said could only be found by digging. I did not understand. Now I’ll likely never know.

He sits up and I feed him more ice. I say, “Do you remember when I couldn’t go home because the guy that sold pencils for a living would follow me in the street?” We sit in silence, the drifting lamplight. This cocktail of memories and smoke. Are you still there? Testing me?

At the top of the hill are buildings that make up the furthest part of the city. At dawn they appear almost white. Gleaming. “Ever been up there?", he says.
“I used to know kids that lived there.”
“We used to smoke in the mines by flashlight.”
I'm pretty sure he’s never smoked. I drive him back and park under the streetlamp and watch a car crawl past. We go inside and I open a bottle and pour us a drink.
“You’ll never have anyone else.” he says and leaves the glass on the table and goes to bed.

I have another drink and go into the lounge to write. I sit on the couch in the dark and put my head in my hands and cry. He's a heavy sleeper so I don't care. Or maybe I'm hoping he'll hear and come in and put his arms around me and kiss me on the forehead. When we were kids my sister and I thought he was the most wonderful person in the world. Perhaps it was because he told us so. I spend the night looking for deals on old video games. I can always write tomorrow.

I'm on the road a lot. My van carries panel ads for some new show called Best Decorated Spouses. Not a bad gig to get paid for touring my own city. At least I don't have to look at the ad.

I'm supposed to be meeting my sister at the restaurant. I park the van and fight the sadness. I see my sister all the time but I wouldn't call it a relationship. I make nice, she doesn't mention him, we eat, we leave. I go in and sit at a booth different from our usual booth. The change of scenery is like being on location. The people look like stock photos on a dating website. Painfully happy. Even the kids. There's no AC and the radio is playing a talk show "--do you miss being editor of one of the few newspapers left in the country? Well Jim, I've gotta be honest--" and the door opens and she finds me without missing a beat and sits as if this table were no different than the one we've sat in for years.

"Waiting long?”, she says. “Oh, hi. Can I get a coffee. Three sugars? Great, thanks."
"Not long."
"Did I tell you I was waiting in line yesterday at the diner down the street from my house and the woman ahead of me asked what I did for a living? She looked at me like a mother who just spotted a hitchhiker. You know? I didn't feel like telling her. Not that she really cared. She had this pink money clip--" Do you remember him? Listening to jazz, reading poems, telling us about Dick Cavett and Doris Day? "--and I thought maybe I could do that. They make a shitload of money. I could have an ice machine installed in my house--"

There are these people. Men for the most part. They have husbands and wives. Kids. Their own businesses. Money and toys. Everything they ever wanted, and they're not unhappy. Just, dissatisfied. So they start searching. Looking for something. But it can't be found so they begin to believe in grace, that there's a page or book somewhere where it’s all laid out like plumbing. The problem is they lack realism, an understanding of chaos I mean. Chaos is the punchline to an inside joke. Which sounds good but being a writer I can't be sure that it's true.

"You want to know the secret?", he says again. The question is lost on me, partly because it's rhetorical. Or seems so. Sense doesn't follow so what else to call it? My best answer is to look around the room at the others who make it up as they go along. One day fine, the next not, but never caring too much. What I wouldn't give to dismiss what doesn't come easy. To go softly when called. What answer in sources other than imagination? Physics, religion, pop culture, history. They can have it. Give me one true thing that hasn't been said. A cosmic metaphor. Some evidence of fantasy. Then we'll talk.

He shifts to one side and looks through the smoke like a comedian. An artist baiting the universe. Does he ache? Doubt? Or is he one of those in whom nothing settles. A songbird knowing the notion of fear but too full of melody to let it land. We care for them but do not worry, suicide alien to their fiber.
He raises his voice. "Can you see it? The families lining the field? Dozens of cops. Soldiers even."
The sun has set and the bottle is empty. Time for bed.

I turn on the lights. Something’s missing. I hear his key in the door. He enters in a rush, a haze that implies a complicated name. A complicated life. The combination guaranteed to keep one out of the spotlight. I hug him, eyes pressed closed, and step back to give him space to dress. In the meantime I dance, my body melded to the floor, my arms wrapping around my neck, the song like lips around my ears. No, I don’t want to talk about it yet. I just want to be lost in these moments. The twisting shoes, this dancing rainbow. Yes, I just want to be lost, if only for a while.

It’s over in seconds. A scenario of heart presented and cast away. We walk back to the campsite, a coyote in the distance the only sound aside from our breathing. There’s an aloofness now, not of hate but of distance. An owl settles above and the future whispers of spending too much time being sure. That there be something to fall back on. No. Not yet. Please, not yet.

We wake to perfect snow, the city in my mind, a classic photograph. Reality shows the cliff instead, sends the cicadas thundering, beating like rain. He moans. His legs are broken but he won’t need them soon. Dakota has been telling us Safety First though I’m pretty sure that isn’t her real name. Do they draw straws? “No fair. I want to be Moose.” Or Iceman. Fishbone. Razzleberry. Anything but Nugget. Focus on the buzzing. Ooo-eeeeeeeeeeee. Whoever called it a chirp never heard one. Ooo-eeeeeeeeeeee. I hoist the pack and start walking. Or maybe it’s a song? A screech then. I’d sign off on that.

I never asked when they stopped looking. Young minds need a break from darkness.

“Freedom.”, she says.
“What?”
“Freedom. Look.” She opens her coat and pulls out a gun. “It’s loaded. Now anything can happen.”
I wish to be on the moon. Or lost in an undiscovered patch of jungle. Anywhere but here.
“Come on.”, she says. “Let’s go.”
“Not if you’re bringing that.”
“I can’t leave it here. Let’s go.”

“Here.” He tosses the pills on the table. They clatter like gravel, spinning and sliding. I take one and lay it on my tongue. How best to savor chalk and strange horizons? Hard swallow and gone.
My brain hops a fence and jogs the icy slope, slides switchbacks and chicanes to stand of aspens that become my very bones.
The man winks, “Wee beastie isn’t she?”

The corner is cold and my back aches. Where did that smile go? I search my pockets, hands swollen and heavy. Like buckets of concrete. A face etched into my heart. Did she leave me here? Lay back. Get a grip. I watch them die around me. The men eating winter grass and meadow rue, the women drinking fetus tea, lysergic bliss. A trade of pale bundles. Legs curled, christened like a hat in a hurricane. Where are you? There. Can you see me? Lashes brush a basted sky. Did you take them too? Handfuls of dirty yellow? Is my mouth even moving? The corner is cold and my back aches.

Two lanes cut a ribbon from mining country back to the city. Pick any direction and you’ll end up where you started, even if the surroundings have changed. There’s a color comic on the seat. Something about heroes and halloween. Costumes doing double duty, archetypal touchstone and plot device both. It sits atop a hand-printed chapbook titled Horatio in Heaven (A King’s Regret). Someday I’ll shop it around. Or not. Wasn’t it said to give every man thine ear, but few thy voice? I am certain of one thing. The ghost is real.

Writing seems at cross-purposes with my body. I once told a doctor that it’s just premeditated masturbation. The jester institutionalized. Not crazy I mean, but yoked and tamed. Mischief put to work like everyone else. He agreed, saying there are studies to prove it. Such is the iron law of--
“Who are you talking to?”, she says. “He’s here to see you. Put some clothes on.”
Footfalls. Loud. Louder than should be possible on velvet. Light pings my eyes, their insides blazing like roadmaps. I am new to ghosts. They smell of loss and linoleum and haunt my breath like wall-to-wall tiles.
“Let’s get him up.”

He looks through me. I could kiss him but don’t. He feels it though, when I touch his arm. A bed forms under me. It’s the wrong bed. Or the right bed in the wrong room.
“I think he has it.”
“The season hasn’t even started yet.”, she says.
“I know, but no harm in checking. He’s been living here long enough.”
My heart thumps with warmth and sickness. The bed spins. An arm on my shoulder. I push but it doesn’t move. A panelled ceiling falls into place and from it comes a shadow. Halitosis on wings.
“Where should we put him?”
“Not in the living room. That’s for damn sure.”, she says.
“Basement then?”
“Yep. Basement.”
“Ok.”

No break in the dark but I know this place. Every corner a milestone, familiar as sitcoms. Its objects reach out to me--the treadmill, bar stools, slanted piles of magazines bearing the universe and its mysteries. The house above the perfect blanket for a mind seeking recall of some detail that will forever and at last settle the sloshing pulse of yearning. Careful. Push too far through crossbeams and ductwork and you might find the gaping maw of emptiness. And that my friends cannot be put back in the bag.

A door creaks from on high and light rushes in like it has been waiting a thousand years.
“Ready to come upstairs big man?”, she says.
“Feels like a bear chewed on my nose.”
Silence.
“Yeah. I’m ready.”

I look at the painting again. Ensos like targets sprayed yellow and red. A hot dog deconstructed. The furnace of nuclear winter. Zen Graffiti says the label.
Next is a mirror painted over with Guernica in reverse except for where the viewer might stand. A statement of some kind. I don’t recognize the face staring back. The blankness.
She stands behind me. A halo of auburn.
“What do you think?” she says.
You scare me. Not because you speak your mind. But because you believe it.
“Huh,” I say. “ Interesting.”
She turns on a heel, leaving a wake of horses and light.

“Welcome to my world,” she says, a little drunk and louder than necessary.
An apartment full of art, letters, books. A birdcage next to the bed. No bird. Two paintings on the floor. Stored or displayed. Latecomers behind me arrayed in sugar skull masks though there’s also a woman wearing a tuxedo and a tall man in a Jim Morrison Is Jesus t-shirt.
Jesus Jim leans close and says, “Who are you supposed to be?”
“An inside joke.”
He leans back.

The night takes its course. Candles wink out at a pace and buzz becomes murmur becomes silence. I have not moved and am the only one left. No reason to stay. No reason to go.
“Go to bed,” she says. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. Whatever people talk about.”
“Alright.”

Couch springs vie for nerves. Waffles and coffee from the kitchen. Bustle from the street below.
“Good morning. Ish.”, she says. “Hey, remember the tall guy from last night? Jim something? Anyway, he’s going to do a glow-in-the-dark spider mural on the ceiling for next year. Widows and house spiders. Maybe a recluse or two.”
“Where’s Buddy?”
“Bathroom maybe? He’s got a thing for mirrors--”
SQWAAAAAK
“Yep. Bathroom. Just watch your fingers. He’ll snap them like broomsticks.”

Lemon tiles and a lime head bobbing and turned sideways the better to stare into a single eye shining like the cold eye of God.
“What’s up Buddy.”
bob bob bob bob

The steel doors gently clunk.
“Where’ve you been?”, he says. Sitting there. The world rushing by like rapids.
I sit down across from him, that smile like he’s got life by the tail.
“I saw Buddy.”
“That bird’s gonna outlive me.”
“All of us probably.”
I point at the table to the unopened pack of cigarettes emblazoned with a skull having a smoke over a ribbon that says SMOKING KILLS in decorative script. Tattoo flash turned dire warning. “What’s up with those?”
He tilts his head. A flutter as smile becomes smirk. I wait. I know what’s coming.
"You want to know the secret?"

I.

a flooded gloam • lit from within • hanging from the bottom • written in tongues • all these fallen leaves • artful & arranged • an aching sweetness • gliding the depths • the one you left behind • a crushing fog • the graceful ones • we sat alone • into the arms of destiny • a crowd of sunflowers • how to endure • nourish the bones • because you're beautiful • bent & scarred • endless suffocations • like a ghost • a hollow silence • strangled with words • a vale of hearts • our blood-warm palms • rain-soaked & distant • understanding is not required • before we knew • the sky behind us • the half-life of truth • our last exhale • incense & fire • music & longing • emptying our lungs • we can only listen • promises that overwhelm • a sparkling place • crinkled pools of memory • one day we will sleep • into life our gazes fixed • under bridges, cemeteries • sprawled across our skin • the dreams within my wings • the deep fade of morning • full of time • this side of the spiral • a terrace by the sea • salt & heat • in another lifetime • the curvature of you • this passing thirst • crimson & pink • a line in the sky • more than it is • an effervescent spectacle • circling our secrets • the endless reckoning • a cavalcade of one • elliptic & gray • i'd hold you if i could • it was worth it • violets & marigolds • parched earth, infinite seas • all our strength • my brother’s keeper • awake inside • hemorrhaging beauty • nothing to hold • you who make me feel • from the sky • filled with want • it’s come to this • floating, falling • a soft wind • these slow hands • delicate & blue • wisteria days, firefly nights • a moment of peace • colder than God • the snow, the stars • among the woodland ghosts • the grey men • it wasn't me • we may never know • how to breathe again • doubts & sighs • these vacant scars • we almost made it • silk-lined shadows • diamonds & rust • a new silence • large orange blossoms • too hard, too soon • body like a parade • a chirp, a howl • this dry land • a vague & constant joy • long rivers, fragrant earth • the weight of your voice • sweep it away • a life spent waiting • steep hills, low clouds • a welcome apparition • you know what i’m thinking • absinthe & musk • should have held on • backlit, punch-drunk • candy canes & cigarettes • threadbare hearts • gestures & signs • a face in the dark • all that once was • no one needs to know • i mean many things • in sound, we drown • patches of tranquility • all these plans • first times, old loves • warm echoes, velvet haze • lands without waves • i hope you’re a poet • vivid & shaking • ‪fading away, but slowly‬ • it’s ok, i’m sinking too • soft voices, quiet dreams • one pain of many • covered in need • an empty cage, the magic hour • take me with you • the hidden ones • your eyes, in flames • water & light • ‪so beautiful it hurts‬ • velvet moons • looking away • forged of glass • nestled in a breath • wakened by the crash • ‪the loves we’ll never know • a heady discontent • a quiet corner, mouth to mouth • expected to endure • poems without meaning • tremble & reach • ‪addicted to words‬ • an accelerating pulse • a pleasant malaise • oceans never lie • bedroom mirror, empty chest • soft manes & day-moons • indeterminate & vast • is it too late • blindfolds, bumps & dents • ocelots & aubergine • ‪chariots & end-times‬ • to love & let go • ‪as though we knew the cost‬ • their own scale & meaning • a hug too late • a lovely turn of phrase • the gathering dust • ‪silver lakes, wolves & moons • the fruit of our pain • these twisted lures • timorous creatures • a light touch, ear & neck • the sparrows fall • maybe this is a breakthrough • a rich vein • ‪to be in a body‬ • a novel creature • from web to leaf • that seagull strut • not strong, but stubborn • maybe we’re just tired • i didn't mean to leave • the eyes of generations • a moment of cruelty • lost, in the clouds • the violence of blossoms • a garden, a good death • of all things green • slightly, pixilated • ‪the fantasy of mastery‬ • gently trapped • the needs of our blood • a spark in every breast • ‪asynchronous intimacy‬ • ‪aesthetic ascetic‬ • ‪i have survived many things • an innocent carcass • addicted to regret • it's all too real • a quiet drink • this fragile form • a painted sky • whispers in the mind • the feeling of being, something • pulsatory creatures

II.

desert bones • desolation’s song • through the tears, i see you • seen from inside • a lush certainty • this rain awakened earth • reaching to escape • forgotten mornings • stars without names • distracted from the vertigo • gray lichen, red berries • i’ve seen so much & learned so little • swallowed by the sea • we do not know the hour • a boreal light • a lost plot, returning • the comfort of dirt • these poetic entanglements • what do we have in common • the must of tattered maps • a slumber ignited • ephemera, freshly soaked • a boding sense of underwhelm • tell it again • throat cutting smiles • the gap between pines • attempts of half-hearts • slow, but deliberate • a rustling in the leaves • a curious dusk • betrothed to a mood • the roar of a life gone by • struck silent • us, but in chains • a simple word, not unkind • what is this fullness • inseparable from the bright • the outskirts of infinity • a breath collapsed • an unrequited life • taboo & its contours • there was a time • i forgot why i’m here • we’re going all the way • not a shallow wound • the key is here, somewhere • a tolerance break • angst gets a bad rap • it’s not what you think • our own dark corner • bespoke problems • another thing i didn’t need • tremulous days • no body to be found • the vanity of minor differences • these subtle acts of weakness • we had it all, for a time • i used to be a poet • seduced by shapes • a gentle anger • realized, but too late • the long road home • sweet sweet regret • trading days for hours • some of you will not be happy • this not unpleasant purgatory • do you feel it too • the flux & weft • in the shade of the forest • niched within the infinite • i miss my life, such as it was • robbed of the pleasure • ink-stained love • what would you have me do • it’s night somewhere • silence is preferred • best admired from afar • something within • this heart-shaped rage • on the spectrum of loneliness • he decided to live • misshapen identity • a dreamlike acquiescence • these birds behind glass • we missed our stop • the lie slips through, tender & sweet • it’s not too late, is it? • a pain whose time has come • how real should we get • hunted by demons • done with words • it was not a question • sick with art • no price attached • a world of tastes • the sun, dripping • hills like magic • whispered tales • no one is coming • on the shore, dying of thirst • if only i had known • a twinge in the chest • surprised i made it this far • hard edged lessons • i was happy once

III.

love & open fields • what have i done • is today the day • cloth & steel, flesh & dust • sentimental for a time in which i never lived

Attention Participants,

Gloamswan was a three year experiment conducted by [REDACTED] to examine herd behavior in terminally online degenerate micro-communities. Our study has now concluded.

Thank you for your time.

to whom it may concern,

please accept this as my formal letter of resignation from the glass bead game as i have accepted a new position with the great empty sky

love,

𓆩♡𓆪

nothing is left but crab rangoons who could’ve seen it coming the Chinese or perhaps the neo-extinctionists embroiled as they were in the cataclysm du jour (sir it means “of the day”. sounds delicious i’ll have that.) how could the angels not intervene (or at least leave a note) the memories & the noise i think they accumulate on the walls & the buildings & the sidewalks of the city & by staring at these objects i feel i can commune with the existence of others i put my hand on the bench & i feel your skin i’m hugging the bench do you feel it are you ok pleasure & pain are manifestly different yet they are the same in that both are empty of inherent existence, arising & vanishing with the unique constellation of causes & circumstances of the given moment i love COD bro it’s realistic bro it might as well be military training bro i’m basically a seal this is man shit wait a sec MA WHEN ARE MY PIZZA POCKETS GONNA BE READY like i said bro there are great & thunderous basilisks lurking in the strangest places has anyone seen my murmurration i understand you're confused is okie so is he there comes a point where the fact you’ve made it this far can no longer be attributed to “luck” & there was a time you enjoyed this you can enjoy it again if you want sometimes i pretend like i’m anxious or distressed or that i’m scared but truth is i’ve never felt these things all i know is contentment & joy & beauty but i like to commune with the creatures around me it gives them comfort to know they’re not alone (even tho they are) racing thru the country on a bullet (thinking about you) why you gotta go oedipal bro we coulda had something imagine being muted by the Angel of Abundance couldn’t be me no rules only consequences ascend to realms of purest light! awaken to the harmonies of creation! sing with the choirs of heaven (on earth)! Q for the engagement gurus is it better to post lots of rapid fire thoughts & see what sticks or post less & only your most well considered takes haha ok ya i guess you're rite it doesn't matter we’re all gonna die some of us suddenly & the rest slowly & (prob) painfully lol bless the algo from this day forth i am converted & bow to no other God than silicon

the woods, day 2; the quiet amplifies my mind & the voices fade against the impossible scale of their surroundings, what could possibly traverse this plenum void where everything & nothing are not simply two sides of a coin but the very alloy of its construction, i am at peace, anyway that’s it for now take care take care

poison come to me floating your scarf falls away i see your throat like an angel

paused in the work of daring me to travel thighs of i am here i am flesh

i am that which waves in tidal pools trying to attract you do i have your

attention not yet i am the raft in the wine-stream running down to be

cleansed what better way to die perhaps trapped in legend the breeze

i dream of pines & ripples but you put me under again how is it possible

so far from shore softly do you hear me twist & swirl as you write stories

about wolves & hunger you seem to think them new but no tale can be

invented that hasn’t already been told by the sea it’s like how we’re all afraid of

not finding the words but the more we say the harder it gets because

language is like heroin you think you’re using it but it’s really the other way &

you realize too late but by then you don’t care you’re spellbound & isn’t

it wonderful tapping on the glass of what could have been all the great loves

blow away with each word at least you have the one about the little girl & the

boy & the girl & the boy & on it goes but it doesn’t matter now all this

freezing for future who will listen when the star by whose light you splash page

after page with ink will explode but that’s not true it will fizzle & wink out like a

torch held by the hunter seeking that which guards his soul but he’s too deep

in the maze & all that’s left is flickering & a string of futures he’ll never see if

only he hadn’t listened to the bards & their drunken lies though not ill

intentioned he just didn’t know how much salt to take with each serving being

a simple child & warm like the one he remembers so dimly but yes she

kept him warm at night as his mind sought the wind but it’s not a thing you see that is

what we know here at the bottom it can’t be found because are you ready i mean

really ready alright don’t say i didn’t warn you it’s because mind isn’t a thing but a

capacity to reveal that is why you’ll never find it no matter how many mountains you

climb you won’t find its shape though your head is round & your heart a vague

pear that is the real fruit of the garden oh you thought it was an apple yes it’s a

common mistake made by those swinging through space but there’s nothing i can do

about it & i don’t really want to because you refuse to look & i’ve gotten used to

it & have come to like it in fact as things are much quieter now here in the dark