Recolour

Don't

What are you screaming for. Who is going to hear you.
Your shrieks are going to be eaten up by the dead air’s suffocating density and your howls will be stuck in your throat, throttling you to delirium. Your own cursed ears are the only ones that can pick out the whizzing inaudible frequencies of bone-chilling wordless enunciations. Who in hell told you to open your mouth. 

I know, I know!
Nails are being driven into your skull. From various indefinable orientations, they are boring right through you. The beasts shackled in your lungs are rattling your ribs with enough force to knock you senseless. Your throat is being clawed open from the inside out. Something is tearing your skin fiber from fiber. And your eyes! God have mercy, the inhuman doors are full of frozen fire.

You want yourself to burst open so the sky can fall from the intensity of it. Singing droplets of molten rock can fly up in piercing slivers and embed themselves in the empty spaces between the stars. The universe itself combusts from the implausibly cruel agony of it.

But the heavens, as I have told you countless times, do NOT fall for trifles such as you!

It has all happened before, and it will happen again. And it is all within you, the unbroken thread of repetitive time. All of history and all of future dancing their rituals in you. Don’t you know you are supposed to ignore your own. There isn’t enough room, so keep yours at bay. 

That is what you were made for. To see and be silent and not feel and let everything kill you. Watch it spin and plunge, resurface and drown.
All of it, all the time.

Now what?

And then.

When the minutes have all tumbled past, run their limited lease, barged headlong through a magnificent dry run.

Then what?

Will these meandering paths change course, or will ancient trees alter the songs that wind, that hefty passerby, chimes out on striking the green paper bells? Will cascading waterfalls forget to ricochet off unseemly barricades, or wanton breezes make way for heartbeats not needed?

Haven’t these fleeting whims taught you anything?

Or perhaps this is exactly what they have taught you.

The soft golden down filtering past azure feathers lighted up the etchings. Brought out the subtle engravings revealed through a too-early shroud.

And made you see.
Your own face, a personification of the same question.

And then.
Then what?

Come again some other day

Will this rain do more than fall?

Will it congregate and become a force strong enough to challenge my lack of convictions? Or erase half a word of what I didn’t want to say? Will it wash my questions away, and absorb the incoherent ink blots blossoming on a monolith? Will the silently cascading droplets on the window pane dare to race against the ones of a different type on my face? Will they plop in a puddle somewhere and tell their new neighbors of the strange whispers they heard on their way down? Or at least accept the terrible scenes as the heart of the beautiful ones?

Will the pattering condensation resonate within itself and strike everything with a clamor deafening enough to drown the roaring pandemonium inside my head? Will they dilute my being into something less fatal and more worthwhile? Will the grass hear an elegy in lieu of its rhythmic ticking as a humble acknowledgement of the wonders that razed my wreaks down?

Will this rain be more than my compounded sum?

Will it do more than only just fall?

The ticks and the tocks

One, then the other. Then the former, followed by the latter.
In that order?

It’s okay. You don’t have to decide.
It does not matter anyway.

Which claims you for its own, though? Which do you belong to?
The one heard first? Or the one understood last?
The unnamed spaces between the two, perhaps. Maybe those are the pits it all capitulates into.

The high points stuck in limbo while space and time go at war to deafen the furore stamping its signature. Letting everything run wild, all trapped in the middle of the two.

So busy rehearsing the frantic dances mocking their own selves, in their artful hands they hold all leashes.

Such finesse. Such aplomb.
A round of applause, if you please.
Because yes. Let’s just ignore the turbulent fact that their constant breath is commendation enough in itself.

A rhythm. 

And you, the perpetual slave.

Phoenix Ash

Into flaming pearls of gold
The scarlet feathers burst
With a a lament that breaks a heart apart
The ancient plume begins a new first.
Billowing smoke snakes away
Into swirls of blue and rust
As tongues of fire engross within
A cry from the wild wind's gust.

Maps for Lost Letters

There is a compass.
Where is it, though?

Never mind.
Just hurry on.

A deep sigh.  – (There still isn’t enough air.)
An empty look.  -  (What is this supposed to be?)

Follow the lines on your palm and you will get there.

Where?

Where, indeed..

There is also a labyrinth. And pretty scratches on a paper. Shapes that are supposed to mean something. Old sticks and buried words. Vintage laughter, worn-out bags, the sound of still air.
There are a lot of things.

I hear someone knocking on the door.
But let’s just leave it.

Something green. A dustbin full of crumpled tissues. The ticking of a wristwatch. Long intervals between two nothings. Some unfinished speculations. A new name. Another knock on another door.
Yes, there are in fact a lot of things.

We’ve been there before. But let’s go there again.

When?

When, indeed..