Protection from love and from loving.

When i look into my future, as i often do, i see a dining table with love seated around it. Each person somehow attached to me, through love; through care. It’s the photo i look at in my mind, probably like the photo of a Caribbean island on an inmate’s wall. Hoping… Yearning… Needing…

I realise this future i so long for is almost impossible. I’m struggling for examples of the madness suddenly leaving, and peaceful unity becoming. I think of Sylvia Plath, who had love from her children, but rejection from the one she loved. I worry if God knows my fate. If He’s decided it’s in both my, and other’s best interests to keep it from me.

I work diligently every day to focus on the beautiful future i’m striving for… the future away from the crooked house on the hill, where no visitor will dare approach. I want rid of this wretched place and i have raised it’s curb appeal in hope another parasite will aleive me of it’s burden. Every day i’m a step further away from it’s doors. But, every day i am older. What if He knows?  Does he know i’ll squander it and leave loved ones behind, causing more pain after my greed is fulfilled? What if my fate is written and this is why he is keeping love from me?

And yet here i am, every morning putting on my heavy rain boots to trudge through the mud that sucks me into the ground, in hopes today i may be a little closer to reaching love. I think the road has been long enough, and question that maybe there’s no water in this desert; that maybe i should turn back.

But how far do you search for nourishment ? When should you take cover from the elements? When do you turn back for home because there’s nothing out there but nothingness?

The Wood Bearer

wood, you stare over me,

i’m not sure what it means.

your bark i scratch with nails,

laid out i follow lead.

 

you cave over, a sheet to cover

your brown, porous, weigh down.

we sink together into silence,

sink into the ground.

 

I am cast afloat,  out to sea.

lit torches light the way, they welcome me.

the world asleep, i wait beneath,

this pyre, my friend, dissolves with me.

Sterile Night

He lies in the bed under cold sheets greyed,

in the sterile glow the mute television makes.

Afraid to exhale the sigh he holds in,

in fear she would wake, and for it to begin.

She lies foetal, asleep faced away,

whilst he lie awake with plans of escape.

These quiet moments when the house is still his,

when he can mistake it for the home that was here.

He treads around quietly, the chipped away paint,

all the things he neglected, when she begged him to stay.

He returns to the bedroom, and looks down on her,

crouching to eye level, the love is not there.

The face he sees sleeping, so innocent and sweet,

should be the very thing that makes him rethink.

But he knows he can’t love her anymore than he’s tried,

he walks from the bedroom, downstairs, then outside.

The ring on the table, she’ll find when she wakes,

she knew it would happen from the silence they made.

Woman

And then she awoke in her rickety rocking chair. Her face a thousand years old if a day with hair balding at her crown yet still long past her non-existent asexual breasts. Did she once feed from them? Of course not. For this wench only sapped life from all she touched. Feeding on vitality, warmth and innocence, draining the pleasures of the soul from her host. Her skin like rice paper is too thin to ferry blood, leaving her grey, powdered and rotten. Instead of a mouth, resides a cavernous hole. Her lips eroding into a parched terrain of ravines that lead to a bottomless pit. In fact she is hardly Woman. She is hardly alive but she refuses to expire.

 

She attempts to stand, but her twig like bones cannot carry the decaying skin around her skeleton. Her inability to move is the only solace I have in this room, for I know she cannot stand. She cannot rise and infect me unwillingly today. Neither alive nor dead, breathing in the dust of this decaying wooden shack filled with spores of her evaporating skin, she will lie in wait for eternity. She will cling onto this undignified existence until she inevitably wins my soul and we both know she eventually will. Now she is vulnerable, do I kill her in this instance? I know I could as I tower over her and look into her blackened pinhole eyes, like pressing a painful bruise just to see how it feels. I also know I could turn and walk out of this hell filled place should I choose, but instead I stand to study the ruin that will be my murderer. Either way, knowing that today I will walk free does not leave me victorious. This room evokes a fear as strong as the pain she causes when her gnarled knuckle extends and touches my skin, and this is a thought that haunts me every day.

the sight of breath.

open

When you think of water, what do you think of?..

Do you think of a glass of water? Watching little bubbles settling on the inside of the glass, perhaps one escaping to the surface traveling up the inner tube of the tumbler?..

Or do you think of a refreshing waterfall crashing down as you dip your head under with a loved one, your feet catching balance on the jarring rocks? The water heavily cascading in a steady stream, but as your head breaks the surface it splits, like cold iced curtains being drawn open as they divide at your crown, the parting of the sea, a baptismal stream for every contour of your body, cold and exhilarating. You can almost decipher individual entities of water over your own body but as you try and keep your eyes open to see them, the force of Her crushes your lashes closed. You realise you can see your eyelashes for the first time, as they are are thick and full of water. You fight it, just so they can greedily stay open long enough to glimpse at your lover, standing in front over you, under the same weight of the world, looking back at you through the sheen, fighting the same fight with the smallest hairs on his body, but smiling a smile you will never not remember. The endurance was worth it. And for that moment, you are in paradise…

Or do you think of a still, silent expanse of cold? Azure blue acrylic paint, thick on a canvas? Flat and deep? Where the dark blue pigment splits into horizon, sky and air around it with every hue of blue and grey, that you cannot decipher where one ends and the other begins. But this expanse is not the Ocean. For it sits in time, not moving. Nestled between steeping hills of the greenest pine you picked from a Cezanne, sledging down Gods land like a child running down a hill until it’s legs give way in excitement, tumbling to the lapping shore of this blue silent sleeper below. The green cascading trees are not excited, but omnipotent, steady and existing quietly. The blue sits enveloped by these loving arms, protected from tide, waves and anything that could change it’s living make up on both the surface and underneath. There is no current here. The air surrounding such beauty is yours to touch, grey and round. As mist droplets separate on your skin, you are reminded that you are in fact alive, that this is an existing living moment, that this is today, and you are not an ornament standing inside a stagnant snow globe, unshaken for eternity.

I think of all these things in the split second my eye lid blinks shut. A beautiful painting is lowered into vision ever time this small flap descends like a curtain in a theatre, to rest on my lower lid. And every time, i exhale gratitude into tangible spores around me. As my chest lowers and gas exhales, come the beautiful spheres of air, tearing upwards across my face, rushing for the surface, ascending into heaven. They too remind me of a swarm of children rushing through the gates on the last day of school, rushing towards freedom and away from the solid brick of confinement behind them. Not only do i see these round balls of liquid air escaping, but i take the greatest pleasure in feeling the pitter patter of their tiny invisible feet upwardly pimpeling my skin. The sound that accompanies the fall of my chest is mesmerising. Sullen and round. Hypnotic and baritone. Like the gas from an oven before the flame is ignited. The allure of this sound and these bubbles tempt me to push deeper into myself. To see how much reserve air is hiding within, and to test myself if mere me could push that out of my own accord, so these two sacks are finally empty.

My precious blink is over. My eyes open fully, and yet the world i see around me is not of things and things and things made by man, and i am relieved. In this open blink, i am inside the algae blue green Cezanne showed me; floating but not afloat; suspended and not adrift. My smile is not restricted to the muscles on my mouth, but my whole body is consumed with the serenity and peace that this wonderful painting was created to instil in its viewer. But i am not a viewer. I am inside this painting. I move my arm, and it flows in slow-motion staring back at me hanging within the ink. There is no sky above me and no earth below. I am living inside the sublime, away from the things and things and things atop the surface.

But i realise this cannot last. For these two humble sacks inside will not allow me to stay here long. Their ejector seat will ruin this picture at some point soon.

They close again to show me new images of beauty, of The Devine, but mostly to remind me they are still there in a blink of an eye if i want or need them. But i know these blinks are not as fulfilling nor lengthy upstairs. I know i need to stay here where peace is not an intangible noun to be spoken of, but a vast expanse one can live inside if you know how to get there. Why should i leave? I’ve arrived. I am welcomed. I am blessed. I am happy. Here.

As i breach the surface, harsh and violently, suddenly i am the terrible thing these mountains have eternally protected this lake from. I disturb the beautiful flat silken carpet, and i am the treacherous human that creates the terrifying current for this peaceful sleeping Lady. These bubbles around me are no longer my angelic friends dancing with me below, but angry superiors breaking into waves at my disruption. The sound of my exhalation now is not a joyous male choir within my body, but a rasp, howling gasp. The freezing air outside this pool is determined to annihilate as it rushes forth into my open mouth, attacking the back of my throat with agonising spears of oxygen. The waves crashing into my eyes are no longer those paradisiacal streams from the waterfall with my imagined lover, but forceful and angry, hell bent on blinding me. Those beautiful arms i knew as passive eels floating beside me, flail for buoyancy and survival. Why do they suddenly desert me? Before they were content and grateful, and now they want to survive, relegated to the useless extremities they always were. This cold; this bitter cold brutally carves up every pore on my skin to the point i truly believe that if i snap off my feet, and i’ve no doubt i could, it would be less painful than this cacophony of knives that are fiercely and relentlessly slashing my skin.

Heaven need not be above me. Nor in the clouds. One day it will bury me with weight in gallons, this i am sure of. One day these useless sacks will not eject, and they will be as relieved as I to finally be empty and for the weight to be gone. They will not feel the need to refill, and they will become my ally. They too will know how it feels to dance uninhibited below the celestial surface, dangling hopelessly inside Love. Waiting. They too will be eagerly grateful to feel the final slow breath of life rise and fall within me, escaping my enduring and decrepit soul.