An open letter to that shadow.

I saw you last night, your face skewed and pushed into the foreground, as the entirety of the world my mind had made swept in to take you out of sight. And no running or shouting out could undo the kidnapping of your form. No intensity of remembrance can bring back the moment before, it’s a missing cell from an otherwise flawless retelling. Do you elude me? Or am I pushing you away?

You’ve missed some of the best years of my life while you were having your own. Did you know that I’ve seen the world from a thousand angles and that I’ve seen it all alone? I leave my camera at home. I can’t bear to remember the empty frames.

I stood outside in the rain last night. A few heavy drops slipped through the leaves and branches and found their way to my shoulders.

Underneath the pitter of rain and branches being knocked together, there was no sound past my breathing. It was the first time in as far as I can remember that all thought and movement stopped inside me. As if someone had tripped over the cord that kept me plugged into the outlet on the wall behind the bookshelf. That brief moment where a light dims but is not yet out. Where you can see the last few units of energy burning out, leaving a ghost of an image where it once was bright. I felt my heart slowing and the blood beginning to pool at the bottoms of my feet and the tips of my fingers. Hands heavy and shoulders sagging lower with each exhale of warm air. My eyes blurred out of focus and I lost all sight of the rain.

I saw myself from a distance, grass growing up around my ankles and my countenance set in stone, the traffic light changing in the distance. Every neural pathway cold and taught, as the remaining jolts of charged impulses hovered at the hub of their destination.

It all snaps back violently just as the last function that makes a person alive teeters, taunting my battered systems with its white flag. The world slows as I rush back to life. My lungs filled with the moisture and lowered temperature of the air around me. I am flooded with pictures of a boy coming up for air with the look of salvation written on his face, the sound of doors groaning on their ancient hinges and endless blank pages at the end of a book.

Now I see you. Or I see the missing cell, having been brought in cupped hands and careful steps to a place of safety. I place it on a pillow on the floor and lock the door. Just as I knelt down to look closer I saw you fade back again, a drop of water near an open flame.

So, I invented my own time. I let it slow and stretch as a rubber band shot at a little brother. This whole hour, second, day or whatever it was came together to reveal itself as an existential joke. Well, there I was, rushing through the air, my speed and intensity coming into contact with external forces, each moment slowing my flight exponentially. Landing softly, the fear of impact is quelled. You just smiled about the whole ordeal as you uncovered your face, blushing as you shook off the embarrassing instincts of preservation.

Didn’t you know I never aimed to hurt you? Beyond thought or inspiration, past tears and longing, haven’t you known that all I have ever wanted was to make you forget about the world for a moment and laugh? I hope you keep showing up, it brings me back to life, even if just for the moment.

Lunacy and Libations

Well darling I’m torn between lunacy and libations, a perfect pair, a duo for the blue haired history makers. The men who dwell on consequence and contentious intentions, who postulate and pontificate within the boundaries assigned to them by their predecessors. It’s a story within a story, removed of contractions and words that end with L and Y. A scholar’s way of cleaning up the dirtiness of others lives. But oh what a mess we have left for them dear. Oh how they’ll work to pick apart the pieces of our erratic behavior, and what a chore for them to bend backwards to see through the lens that we used to view this life. To them we’re a generational sickness, brought on by external devices. To us we’re a chorus chant that can’t stop ringing in your ears. We’re the words of rebellion, the sounds of metal hitting lead, the feeling of two souls set apart from the status and a need for more…so much more than the world has to offer.

Do you feel me now? We have been on such separate wave lengths for days. But I see you through the static and the snow. Is this the legacy we are meant to leave? A path of broken glass and signs of forced entry, the hallmarks of our unrest, the calling card we made up on the way. We’ll spend our days in the hills, battling the world and its elements, proving to ourselves that we were made to be weathered and worn. The nights will cloak our movements as we learn how our bodies speak to each other.

I’m OK with this daily bread and the dew on the leaves. I’m content with the fibers and sinews that the ground can grow. And I’m happy with the path that our labor takes. Our hands to the soil, the soil to the sky and the satisfaction of an honest harvest is all that we need. No one need see our shelter, or give guidance to the way we breathe. We have left them all behind, to their ruinous behavior, given them over to the play by play cancer they never could control. Ours will be the dictates of the potter, theirs, the science and dice of death.

Oh what a picture we can create then we close our eyes. Can we use our daydreams as a ruler, a cornerstone upon which we set the foundations of our bed? Can we create a map to overlay our unseen trajectory, one that brings you closer, brings you continuously closer to me? One day, we won’t be able to see were I begin and you end. Our words will be remembered as a single thought, and our life, a defining action. If I’m the fingers, you are the glove. A pair that was always meant to work as one.

Dream 4, part 1

A preponderance of upward glances was a hint that I was young. Hands on handles of briefcases, kneecaps and belt buckles bolstered into my field of vision as a mainstay. Serving as a reinforced reminder of my self imposed age and height acting as an impediment. An impediment to hinder my course to some unknown destination I was drawn to.

Brass colored plastic door knob at the end of the hall. Dodging the waist down image of passerbys (or passengers for that matter) to either the entrance or an exit. Creaks and groans of a hinge tapped into blueprints of senses stolen from my sub conscience. Conscientious control of fear and caution aren't prerequisites for moving forward, they are competitors. Caution always loses when your sleeping. Curiosity is no longer an itch but an impulse and feeds on fearful feelings.

Walls comprised of bookshelves form an edifice, bent into a spiral, set with stairs that lead me downward. I can hear you in my head, the words leap out my ears to crash against the bookshelves and spill across the pages. The sense that I am lost is so present that any illusion to the contrary becomes a contradiction of the only thing thats constant, that trapped inside myself is a concept in collision with external constraints.

Dream 3

I awoke this morning to realize that I had not lost a kingdom through the night. There had not been one to begin with. Just bricks and mortar in an outline, under tarps and wet from the ground beneath. The grass along the edges shown like a measurement of the days it had not been tended to. No one came to marvel, to trade or rest within the walls. Just accidental glances from the road beside. And never once did a glance hold such little weight as those cast upon my labor.

Stardate 4.5.10

Fresh Ere

It’s the come down. It’s the fear of the withdraw that steeps through the elation. Fogs the glass, locks the doors and warns that it is dangerous outside. Wipe away the moisture and squint to peer through the beads of sweat the windows pouring.

All I see is slow motion caught up in snow and ice, with careful steps and cupped breathing. All I feel is static. You’re outside alone and I’m watching you closely. There is so much work to be done, and I’ve forgotten the feeling that nature brings, a weighted calm that rises with the hair on the nape of your neck. Or a voice that never echoes, just lingers.

I’ll turn pages as you turn tides, move boxes as you move branches and hold handles as your handle on everything loosens. You’re a series of reactions and I’m reacting to a series of attacks. Sleep on pine needles and burn the fallen, I’ll wage war with my own devices and forget about the elements. Hold dominion over my little castle tucked away in plain sight and hold communion with snow on my television set, set my breathing to the flicker of the monitor.

Your heart beats when it needs, skips only in the sight of majesty and you hold your breath when hidden from sight. There is no one to hide this wretched form from, no sight to steal my pulse and my respiration slows each day. I knew you once, and it never occurred to me when I thought of the future and growing up that I would forget myself.

Stardate 12.30.09

New song in progress, new direction.

http://www.mediafire.com/?myz10mmjoj1

Hear the gallows song

That morning felt like hell

when you were gone

Feel deaths empty sting

resounds all around you

as it sings

"Alls not lost

You've got lovely lovely things

that I can take from you"

"Oh what a sight

it wets my appetite

to hear you cry Oh what a sight

it wets my appetite

to see you cling to this life"

"Don't you fret

its not a product or measure of your sin

its like the lottery

someone always wins"

"Alls not lost

you've still got some pretty pretty things

that I'd like to take from you"

It gets better, it gets worse.

Do your worst, you've only got one sting, left for me.

Stardate: 5.27.09

The ride up from King George (Where my parents live) felt surreal. I spoke aloud to myself as I drove in an effort to pinch myself. The wind rushing in through the windows kept an erratic pattern as it combed my hair from side to side. There were moments when I wasn't sure if I was awake. Moments that still don't make sense. A feeling that I am trying to chase around this page with a pen, waiting for that one moment when sounds make words and I can string them together coherently. Until that moment I'll set aside reason and bring into focus the blurred pictures my senses captured. 

I sped up to pass the trucks beside me, they had been battering the side of my car with their weight for some time. Downshifted into Fourth I felt the engine push me past their abuse, it's groan playing over the sounds that emanated from the speakers behind me. I cut across the empty lanes and made my way over to the exit ramp, slowly pushing down the clutch and letting centripetal force pull me into the long turn. The music faded out to sing a new tune and there was a stillness as I came round the bend. The open windows sucked in the smell of honeysuckle from the forrest beside me and the sun had just fallen behind the row of ramps that ran across the horizon. Not one person on the road but me as the wheel righted itself and the tires hugged the pavement below. A flicker scattered across the road in a slow and steadying pulse from the street lamps above. I looked up to see every lamp above the road for miles blinking and sparking on and off like accidental Christmas lights in May. Sound began to swell from behind my head, honey dripped from the window, sunlight flared to a dull orange and December shone through the scatted lights as they made their way down toward me. Singing out like sparklers in slow motion, realizing they had come two months early. I wanted it to stay just like this. But it was only a moment, until the elements remembered what it was they were doing and got back to being practical. 

I have never seen anything like that before. My mind started to think about what had gone wrong with the power for all the lights to act like that until I realized that I didn't really care why it had happened. I was just glad that it did. 

A feeling of depression set in once everything had gone back to normal. I had felt something during that moment that in I hadn't experienced in a long time. I felt calm and undetermined, content, like the space between the lines. I felt safe in unsafe times. And now the presence was gone, it was like an injection of serotonin straight to the vein, the come down was the absence, it was the understanding that there was no one there to share it with. 

Some time ago a team of scientists were conducting an experiment with electrons. They found that if they shot electrons out of an electron gun through two slits that the electrons would split around the obstacle and come back together again to make one precise whole in the backboard. The finding alone was interesting enough but what happened next stumped them profoundly. They found that when they placed a camera in the area to capture this activity the electrons stopped performing. Take the camera away and they separated, content with being back together. Try to observe and the conclusion was not the same. They called this the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The theory being that these seemingly mindless electrons had some kind of will of their own. That they wished not to be seen performing. 

I felt, on that road alone at the verge of nightfall, that nature had slipped up. That I had gone unnoticed for even the briefest of moments. That I had stumbled into the way that things truly were. I thought about how many time I see even the simplest of events and think nothing of it. I thought of all the sights that were shown only to me. And the complex series of happenings that it took strung together for them to be a reality. That I was only person that would ever see that exact moment again. I thought about memory and how it was a fading portrait of an instance I could never go back to, like a Polaroid developing backwards. I thought about my vision of the future and how many times it had changed. And I wished that I could see it happen again. That I could creep up undetected and look into the mechanisms and clockwork having nature be none the wiser. But it was only something to me, it was only a moment and its clarity will fall apart each day until its a ghost wandering somewhere in the back of my mind. Content to brush up against my dreams and leave me in the morning with nothing but a slight taste on my tongue. 

These are the things of breathless. When the only sounds I hear are wind rushing, white noise from patient speakers and the slow pound of my heart inside my chest. These are the things my mind captures when I'm alone, which is why I seek it so often, but what good is alone if there is no one after. I have only this space and God to confide in. Pages hold only words and He speaks like a whisper, a sound intangible, a sound like one unobserved. I am thankful to be alive, to be perplexed, to be shown such nuance, such quite wonder. I am thankful for it all.