Saturday, July 28, 2012

In Preparation

You see, I have a bag full of things that I hardly ever used, tucked away in all the pockets, waiting, hushed and ever ready. My shoulder aches. My fingers itch. My mind reels. My soul longs and lusts and pulls at my innards, urging me on, into some great unknown. But I tried. I took one step, then two. I could not go on. For, you see, I found I cannot leave until I have you beside me. I am the basket case, lugging along their whole life in the hopes that the moment of leaving will arrive.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

My dear, a letter

To you,

This is a note, a letter of sorts, undelivered, of the kind that brews beneath the surface of your skin, pulling and scratching until it finds a way out. These words spill forth, wanton, brash, untempered, and I could not stop them even if I had the temerity to try; I would be beaten raw, bleeding from the inside. Already my breath comes out ragged, and I could swear my heart is mangled. Yet through this all, a small pulse continues, a tiny nugget of energy, a hope that strings me forward, moving me like I am at the hands of a puppeteer. But this is irrelevant. This is to you.

You who stand so close, yet so inconceivably far away, as out of reach as Tantalus' grapes, as unreadable as the sea. How did you manage to bewitch me with nothing more than the fact of your existence? Never have I been under the thumb of such torturous feelings as I am now, when my thoughts, when my body, when my heart demand you. If I stood close enough to reach out a finger and brush even the tip of it against your skin, I could not do it. If I were within your earshot, my voice would crack and crumble under the weight of your presence. My breath rasps, as though I were an emphysemic old man, and my back hunches like the trunk of an ancient tree, my eyes darting off you as quick as yours find mine, as though I am searching for something lost. In truth, I am, for have I not lost my heart to you? It elicits no surprise then, to find that they are so often drawn towards the place within which I have lost an essential part of myself. You stole from me and I blindly let you.

I would not change that for the world.

I'm forced to wonder whether you have any notion of the fact that I yearn after you like a starved orphan yearns after warmth after years of bone aching cold. Sometimes I think yes, and that you too have let your heart wander to where I might happenchance upon it. I see this, I feel it, when your eyes burn into me, bearing the knowledge that soon enough you'll be forced to retire once more behind glass walls, where the distance between us is even greater. You try to make up the lost time by the intensity of your gaze, and my heart leaps, my hands shake and my resolve melts into oblivion. Why, I believe I am all yours, more so that you do not know it, and I am convinced that I could not shake the feeling even if I were to rub my skin raw and draw out all my old blood and replace it with new. You are ingrained into some shadow part of me, my soul, a hidden corner of my consciousness which cannot be touched. If I should die tomorrow, or in a hundred years, I die with you there.

I need you. Any hope I have for salvation lies in your hands, for I have tried, but found that I myself am no match for you. But it seems glass walls are not as transparent as they seem, and I know you not at all, nor whether this is conjecture, whether this is imagination, or whether it is hallucination. But I would like to find my way to my grave, years hence, with your name still in my heart, your voice in my ear and the taste of you upon my lips.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Nymph

Oh little nymph who flits and flirts in and out of sight, a wraith, a sprite, a million things I could not name or tame, will you not bequeath your little wildling heart to me? Coax with soft spoken words the latent life which lies hid beneath the topmost barren soil in my soul; a beautiful garden is wont to grow, should it be entrusted to your hands. Your voice sounds like the murmuring of a brook over a stony bed, soft, nurturing, sparking to life an oft leashed happiness, and with a few words, you could paint me with a smile that no one else could hope to endeavour to reproduce. Without you, I may seem that I am already smiling, but my hooded self stands with head bowed, cowed by the solitary emptiness which surrounds me. Should our eyes meet across the space between the weeping willow leaves as they billow in the breeze, then I perhaps will cease to fear our distance.

Wonderful water nymph, tree nymph, fire nymph, Goddess of Untouchable Things, we too shall meet Death along his well worn path, cloaked and shadowed in the billions of souls he has claimed, but if we dance along the way and take part in merriment, in joy of each other, could we not say that a sleep is needed?

We must begin in, for who but us could take the first steps in replenishing our thirsty, withered selves? One glance is all that is needed to spark a life long encounter, and we have had more than one. Though they have been brief and short lived, no more than a deliberate meeting of the eyes and an embarrassed flickering away, our bodies unable to withstand the conditioning of urban solitude, they showed that there is more than nothing, though something less than a solidity between us, and it is ready to melt away at the barest hint of uncertainty. We - I - cannot let it, for without you, my dearest nymph, I crumble again into dust and ashes, my solidity of self evaporated in the wake of your presence.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Uncleanliness

Sometimes I cannot bear to wash away the dirt at the end of the day. I stare into nothing, soil streaking my face, blackness under my nails. The energy to move has long since left me. And so have you.

I cannot clean away the dirt when it reminds me so of you. If it the last remnant of us that I can keep, then I shall never stir to remove it. Slowly I become a husk of a person, a shell without a soul, with a heart that beats but once a day and each time for you.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Invisible Places

There's a world somewhere, one that is not the one I keep forcing you into, which is perfect for you. You fit it and it fits you, matching pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. But I, looking on the outside at you both, are finding it hard to consolidate you; wherever you look, I see someplace else, like an ill-fitting cloak draped around you, knowing that it is wrong, but unable to find the right piece of clothing to otherwise clad you in. How do I find the right place? How do I alter my perspective to see you in the world you claim to live in? I'm tired of seeing you as I do, all wrong and mismatched for this life.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Judgement Day

This is too easy. Someday, and I feel this in my bones, someday there will be retribution; someday we shall all be called into the pit to explain every little death that we caused. Because every little death is in fact a big death - every cell, every spider, every torturous comment, they will all asked to be accounted for. Who shall survive the judgement? I don't think I shall.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Crumbling Houses

Vague memories, blurry photographs, a hand that reaches out but cannot touch; they all remind me of you. There's a sliver of you, buried where the sunlight cannot burn it away, stabbing my heart with every breath I take, pleasant, sweet, unbearable pain. To dislodge it would be to lie on the surgery table of hours, my insides cut open and revealed to you, gurgling blood, red, blue, pink - black where I am slowly rotting away. You would not see what it is that ails me so, for you are blind to what you can do, unaware that someone could have let their life grow dependent on you. I'm a house on a bank of sand; either the tide will take me out to sea, or the sand will suck me under. As long as I'm alive, as long as you fall on the other side of that uncrossable line, you shall be in my heart, a splinter, a damnation, a blessing - the most beautiful thing I've ever beheld, and the most painful I've ever tried to hold. We're crumbling houses, but I could be content if I crumbled beside you.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Laws of Physics

Hurtling through space at impossible speeds, the gulf between the stars widens. Everything is getting torn apart. Down here, we cling to each other, trying to be closer. But don't you know it's in the nature of the universe to be forever wrenched apart? We tried, but even we can't defy the laws of physics.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Portrait of Me

Pen to paper, poised, waiting, a transmission device. The clock ticks by, the paper remains blank.

This is it, if a portrait of myself were to be painted, that is what I would look like, suspended in a state of thinking, but never doing. My synapses seem to have stopped firing, nerve ends silent, no longer singing with the sound of electricity, thoughts. Everything is ready, except for the mind, which cannot put forth one idea to translate onto paper. A life without a magnum opus, is that a life at all?

But I want to sit there, steady, ready in case something comes cascading down my mind, an avalanche snowballing all my other thoughts, wrapping them up in this one, the one which will put me aside in history, among the greats. Will it arrive? I cannot say. Inspiration has to find you working, but what if the first stroke of the pen is the most impossible?

Complexity; humans are complex, and then there is I, who cannot summon a thought to pen. They flee like a flock of birds disturbed by a laughing child. Perhaps if I sit still long enough, the elements will petrify me, and I shall become a sculpture, entrapped forever, a different great work - not mine but nature's; a joke.