Category: Thoughts

His naked eyes were stripping further into blindness, but not before watching the answer to his call.

His call for help.

As he stood in the middle of the road, the wind seemed to draw in from corners, reaching slowly once, then quickening and ripping toward him from every direction. It ceremonially roared and rotated before touching him, now holding him in an unreal clutch.

The air became forceful to push it’s way out of the crowd, toppling other particles to grasp the sky, reaching reaching. And the storm then deflected. Still with eyes on him.

He was untouched then. But lost. And he heard knocks and sirens, as if he was being divinely crazed alone. Life continued. Without him.

And he stared into the twisting, turning sky, sipping seas, the sun blinking and blazing in flutters of the dawn, as it submarined across the desolation soaked storm.

Uneasy darkness settled but only in him. He could see people flashing torch lights and lanterns around the translucent walls of the wind, chasing after one another. They were speaking of the news, and new apartments, and openings in ozone, and if their was life on Mars. Nobody knew.

A brave design marked his brain. And he crossed his mind with strength, knowing he didn’t have a lot, reading into an existence of his own. Operating in the future, he would be more sure of the unknown, and prepared and repaired for all that has been and will.

Renegade,

Hiding behind the sunrise,

A reflection whose hands stretch to the night,

While the day rests on his chest.

Him and I, we have common comforts.

As he gambles his eyes to shadows to travel into sleep,

I don’t let him leave me behind,

Because everything has darkened into a pitch-black sky,

There’s nothing here for me anymore,

And I don’t want to be on my own.

A promise summersaults on the string to which I have him tied,

And an escape is not flying in the open for him to create or find.

We become runaways,

Running from all the signs,

Searching for warnings on people’s mouths,

Arresting holy war,

Scratching visions of the road on the walls.  

There’s something there for me, places and people,

On these counted cards,

So I shelve him and them on the corner of every chance,

Now, I’ll never be alone.

Over time, real time, life has segmented me in sides and faces with very vague definitions.  I sense that there are things about me that are routinely yet obscurely fed to a vending machine which gives me newer passions, different interests in return. Maybe I can trace it back to “when” but “why” is draped in nights when I lay awake with a dream in mind, and the next morning seems to blur it into a background that slowly fades into wallpaper that needs to be torn down because it’s just not as pretty anymore.

I know what you mean. 
December raises the downy hair of yesterday on the back of my neck. No embrace for the girl of that calendar month, just a sigh of resignation and despair that rustles all the other pages of the calendar. A whole year of good intentions and failed dreams that cling so desperately to that wall and under my skin. It’s like the realisation that last New Year’s hope was just an impulsive mistake and I forgot if I even made any resolutions.

And it becomes an yearly abstraction, a push that plummets fractions, breezeblocks, out of an otherwise linear tower of reality. I look back at the lost pieces, and with what may be an illusion of growth, smile. That ache seems so small, unimportant, and what I have now seems okay for a minute. Maybe longer. Depends on the length of the song I listen to, and the longevity of the setting sun.

I can only say it in a whisper but this year has magnified the aches that have lingered for a lifetime. There’s a desperation in looking for the missing pieces in the fading colours of the sunset. In the hungry chaos of noisy gulls, I try to collect my crowded thoughts into groups of words that might ease my chapped lips and pour my coffee in the morning. I string them into necklaces and charms made of sentences – poems of moonless Septembers and melancholy Sundays. That way I can at least look at the dawn without shielding my eyes.

There is something about words strung together in a sensible philosophy. Its incomparable to have had times in your life that sharpens its blunt edges and cuts into parts of you, refreshes everything somehow, and becomes strange to look at. Like gawking at your reflection on the mirror plated wall of a hair salon, while the barber keeps trimming your hair in a really bad way but all you can do is investigate your face and strike your eyes with a gaze they obviously meet. Just to realize, that it’s all there what needs to be, what isn’t, will grow back with more original strands and fibres. There’s always a road to walk towards everywhere, and since ‘all roads lead to Rome’, why does anybody worry.

As we nudge December I look at the ocean and ask it this question.  Sometimes my catastrophic mind is too primed to see the tragedy in a gust of wind, to tread water when I need to swim more purposefully to my metaphoric Rome.  The sea answers me in soothing syllables of its rolling tides, calmly led by sing-song directions from the moon. And there I see that maybe there is a path for me, that I am connected by gossamer threads to possibilities I have always longed for but never thought I’d find.  Love, even. I just need to dive in and let the wind swallow up my caution and taste the salty water of the dawn.

The sea has all the answers, it’s like a friend for all seasons. It’s funny to think that whatever is marked by anything doesn’t make sense to anything except the candle and the lighter, or the sea and the rocks it washes away from the shoreline. So, we ramble on and gamble with our hearts, and tear pages, anatomies away from old chapters and our memories become a collage of these broken bones. So, in our search for love and happiness, we see too many disappointment and aches but to not linger on them would be best. At least, that’s what I think.

So maybe as the clock ticks this time, we should linger in that place where soft lanterns and gentle hands light and guide the darkened alleys of our hearts. Maybe it’s in that dim but shimmered glow that we find a stillness and a beauty.  A calm within our storms where there is no pitch black or bright white and there is an infinite wave of connections between all of us. Because surely, it seems that this is where we should linger, in that place where the paths lead us to each other.

---

By Watt and Rachel from In Mind and Out .

May everyone lead 2020 with brilliant direction!

 Vanishing to the last degree, disappearing in the empty streets, 
 Sweeping ashes into angles with his bare feet, 
 He circled the window panes, as he crossed many lanes, 
 And reached a place between the river and the concrete front. 
 The spare colors in the darkness of the hour, 
 In the desperation of his sighs, from the air he devoured, 
 Shone brightly in the direction of the flowers, 
 As memories replayed themselves in between his eyes, 
 And they painted his dreams with stories of the past, 
 Which he then fastened to his mind, then in his veins last, 
 Lies, secrets, and shadows that he crossed with ties, and truth, 
 With all its marriages- 
 To the sea of vast blues, 
 To a stand of the news,
 To the view of the sky, 
 And his last goodbyes.  

If  I lie to the stars,
To wrap up the shit that I've been dealing with, 
And to cover it in smile printed paper,  
Then I knew that in the sorrow of everything, no one can hear you.  

And if I cry in the ruins of a sand castle,
bury me and remain in the flare of the sun.  
Until the night wears on howls of the tiki bars, 
absent in the mind,dull in the body,  
tired state of the fingertips sketching the moon with round Ray Bans,  shadowing the hues of its whitened width.  

As I tie my legs to light bulbs, 
 loosening my eyes,  
breathing down from above,  
hanging from the ceiling, 
separating every fragment of my body until something touches ground, and someone comes around,  
to feel the light of warm life.  

An alleyway stood beside a retail store once, Jim walked toward a glass box. It encased cigarette packs, a Gatorade, a Rolling Stone magazine all set against an Ocean’s Twelve poster backdrop that embraced the back of the box. Jim brought it, and carried on.

As his feet reached curves and corners of market squares, the street came to an end. It was followed by a bridge that led to another street, by this point he felt tired. It was the finale of his enthusiasm or so it seemed. Advertisements wavered on billboards about perfumes, and festivals. Pick-up trucks drove by with all their trashy glory bound to the back. A taxi hammered in from nowhere and escorted him home, the driver twisted his head, cracked his knuckles, crossed his legs, and somehow matched the movements of his vehicle.

Jim placed the box of December on the high shelf, amid stacks of birthday cards that he didn’t give, or maybe he received them, among his prized vinyl records and a lavender scented candle that glowed all it slight in yesterday’s dark, now flickered with a tiny flame on its miniature wick and melted body.

“Another year” he admired, knocking his body down to floor.

In shadows or in skin, he felt he had hungered the gaze of the sea.
At bay, midnight, the day lost the sun to the night.
He mourned, bare chested, with the cold wind clawing at his shoulders,
his heart expanding underneath, eyes level to the fading horizon.

People soared thru the limestone cliffs, splashing feet in the face of the waters.
His head followed the images flashing in the pale fire of moonlight.
Then they receded to a house with a brick bedded ceiling, with thin walls.
Sounds came unstuck in the air, mingling with sweat and grains of burnt rollups.

And from behind those walls, morning hit his feelings,
He bowed in open wind.
His mouth whispered stronger than any word before “And love, be brave”
When the daylight began to flicker, he immersed his body in the sea,
fishing for some days he had before in each bubbling breath.
Then the uprising water delivered him to shore, with a smile hanging from his lips,
and his shivering body clutched in his fingers, heading home, or finding one.