Split

“Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. ” 
Ralph Waldo Emerson

~

Lonely wanderers unite in separation, falling in raindrops through your windshield. And as the beautifully broken breaths of rain find gentle rest on your tender skin, I pull you in closer, and I hug you tighter. And, for a split second, all the desperate seekers of the world find home in our embrace.

The road to love is paved with mystery. The colors on the street depend on the clarity of your heart. The surrounding buildings are adorned with perfect pain and breathtaking joy. And we could be walking there now, hand in hand, carrying each other's hearts wherever they want to go.

Some say that everything here has an expiry date. Others believe that some things last as long as eternity.

Stories have been told and re-told. Words have been designed and composed, recycled and sold. And, today, I find myself wanting to write out thoughts and feelings in secondhand wording though I have no story to tell. I thus find myself filling the void with empty metaphors and darkened smoke. But that's okay.

Time flows faster, racing the tides of motion, blazing through space to finish off this bond and the one after. We breathe it in thinking that we have it contained when, in reality, its bullets are already out through our holey skin, setting the scene for our unholy grave.

But there is music in this world, music worth fighting for. It is the kind of music that silently cuts you deep so its tear-perfumed light can pervade the abyss beneath your heart. The music reminds us that there are souls worth the trouble, and that their smiles are infinitely more valuable than our pain-born hatred.

Yet I am tired and out of soul. And every road undertaken holds beside it a thousand roads untraveled and a wealth of unopened neural pathways.  I am tired and out of soul. And there is no one here because the door is locked with a key I lost long, long ago.

Still, I remind myself that change is inevitable, that it is necessary. And like a flock of birds alters its formation, so too must the stars we have enclosed within.

By the fields, near the lake, I once whispered all of my secrets to everyone around me. But I was alone because no one was there. I remember that I told them about the dark side of red, that part they always left unread. And I told them about the violet shade of blue, and how pain always starts in you. I spat out the driest words of dread, with blood clots hanging by a thread. And now I give that thread to you today so that you pull out this wretched heart of clay.

Hidden demons unite in separation, falling in fire-drops onto our skin. And as the beautifully broken ocean lays us to rest, you pull me in closer, and you hug me tighter. And, for a split second, I almost believe that you're here.

~

“Here too it’s masquerade, I find: 
As everywhere, the dance of mind.
I grasped a lovely masked procession,
And caught things from a horror show…
I’d gladly settle for a false impression,
If it would last a little longer, though.” 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Unbroken

“Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.” 

Robert Brault

~

I saw multi-threaded constellations and embroidered stars. They were painted atop the echo of an orchestrated cosmic dance of fire and ice. My heartbeats adopted the God-sent patterns and transcendentally carried me to an unbounded world of wonder. And then you blinked. And I fell back to what is commonly referred to as reality.

But my soul still rushed to seep through this skin, pushing my hand to hold yours. The trance then became enchantment, a mystical power imploring me to be with you in any way possible - for you are me as I am you, and we are one infinity unbroken in two.

The question comes and goes and then returns again. It asks you, love, about and for and out of love, and, still, you fail to answer. It folds itself in-between the broken lines tearing across my face waiting to ask you again: What do you see? Is this you or me, or us or a temporary delusion floating atop fraudulent ink? And what do you feel? Will the demons of melancholy always puppeteer the storms of anxiety? Or will we become that eternal rapture embodied in a two-feathered quill paradoxically re-writing the present? And are you here now, hiding between hand and heart, pressing on my chest in this outward-inward symphony?

The waves continue to crash upon the shore. And identity lingers, still, in liquid hiding as the blue sky of purpose lays its indifferent gaze into the lock of every oceanic treasure chest. The waves continue to crash upon the shore. And I see you lying on the sand, below the colors of a violet dusk. The waves continue to crash upon the shore. And my face is sheltered in the locks of your hair and my lips are pressed against your neck and our eyes are trembling in that heavenly ecstatic half-sleep. The waves continue to crash upon the shore. And our heartbeats continue to crash into unity. The waves continue to crash upon the shore. And the night is a glistening dark. The waves continue to crash upon the shore. And all that remains is the light behind your eyes.

We fight for what we believe in. We fight for the people we love. And if we find the right timing, we can break time's back and drain all those clocks ticking in its arsenal - for our hearts, they tick louder; they beat, when you listen.

Know that lovers do not forsake love. It is rather love that does the forsaking. For at some silent moment, it commits suicide out of respect for the ideal. And the rest is a history that never was.

Walk the world and you may find wonder and awe. Walk with the world and you could murder the art within you. Walk the worlds with me and our soul will lift off at every intersecting line of skin and lips and sight. Love, walk with me in weightless flight, in that world beneath your cosmic blink. And I, too, will walk this life with you. I'll walk with you forever.

~

“Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; 

I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” 

Sarah Williams

Snow

“I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.” 
Jonathan Safran Foer

~

The walls were deep dark purple. The door was grey on the inside and it was open. The room was empty. The wooden floor carried the scent of burnt-out stars and I was sitting there by the corner. There were no windows. The ceiling was made of reflective ice and it became blurry whenever I pictured the faces of the people I loved. It was all fiction. It was safe fiction, and so was I.

He could enumerate his complexes in non-alphabetical order and compare the sum of the numerical values, corresponding to each of the starting letters, to the difference in salinity between the left eyelashes and the right ones. He could write this whole damn spectacle in an equation and solve it with his eyes closed but he could never apply the result. He could always tell the difference between arrogance and despair, lurking in the spaces between the lines, trembling in the tells beneath the lies, and sending him back to bed, where all dreams lie broken, dead, unread.

I can't tell you where it all went wrong even I wanted to. I can write it down in patterns and maps across the infinite realm of metaphors. I can't remember when exactly it all broke down and I'm not even sure I want to. I can breathe out smoke and become skin but it seems that I was built to do it the other way around. I can't say that I can do whatever I set my mind to - not anymore. I can tell you how you feel. You can break these chains whenever you want to. You can break them; and timing is key.

But the door is open, remember? How would it feel to be open door to an empty room?

Maybe the truth - the attainable one - lies in the distance between fiction and reality, time and timing, freedom and necessity, hope and despair, between the finite and the infinite, the eternal and the temporal, the sickness and the remedy, and, maybe, between the left eye that reads the lies and the right one that sees through them. And maybe the sum of all these distances will one day become you.

I don't like labels but I think all human beings are delusional. And the grandest delusion of them all is when we make the slightest smile of all, the smile that thinks it understands what it just read, what it just said, though it neither sees beyond the wine nor tastes the heartbroken bread.

The point is that, that there is this veil. The point is right there, right behind the veil. That's why everything you see, everything you see is always asking you the same question, here and here and there: What do you see? What do you see? What do you see?

[...]

Once, there were dreams and then, there were none. Twice and thrice, I faked and faded,

Maybe it's time I take my best shot.

The walls are still the same, though a lot of people have tagged their names and left. The door is maroon-black on the outside and it's closed shut. But it's still fiction out here. And I can't wait till you see the invisible paint I have on my face.

Maybe the truth is in the difference between these colors we exchange and all those we keep to ourselves.

I'm sorry I ran out of colors.

~

“Think of what starlight 
And lamplight would lack 
Diamonds and fireflies 
If they couldn’t lean against Black...” 
Mary O'Neill

Wind

“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns."
Chuch Palahniuk

~

I need to get this out.

This silent wind I breathe in is sharpening its heated nails with my lungs, scraping blackened red paint off the wall that falls for no one. So I light up one more lucky cigarette to fight fire with smoke. We all depend on things to make it through the night.

Whatever truly carries your breath and allows your mind to traverse this multiverse of lies, make sure you're going in the right direction. And whatever you push back onto the world with your lips and feet, go for watery brushstrokes of Art, on the right pages of earth and wind.

It's still there and I can't get it out.

The music fades like a vanishing painting and I don't know the spell to bring it back. What I know is that the rhyme is lost to me because the heart I once knew had its drums punctured over time. So what happens now? We light up one more for the sake of ancient fire.

There are two kinds of people. There are those who write the song title first and those who write the artist's name first. There are those who are busy in the race to become the best slave in the system and those who are busy becoming the best person they can be.

What if nothing comes out?

Ring the doorbell and break the wall. There are no doors beyond this smoke. You fall in the well, the well you sow, the well you sow before you broke. This reddish dawn is drawn with blood. And this rain is the ash of all your drugs. So with flooded lungs and shattered drums, reap the pain on which you choke. Breathe in hell,

The presence of missing links underlines a meaningful absence of coherence. What eventually comes out is thus unsound at best and, at worst, me. But the resounding question remains: Who are you? Perhaps you project what you miss onto the blank spaces I leave between the lines, here, and, in-between words and letters which, there, fail to materialize.

The first rule is to partially respect chaos. The second is to find meaning in the song. The third is to allow yourself to get lost in the melody. The fourth is to let go of the parts that don't belong. The fifth is to stop counting rules that don't make sense. And the last rule is to devote your life to understanding the constituents of the glue that stitches rules onto chaos.

The hazy daze is spraying crazed footprints in my head and the stranded pen is stuck in the shadowy circle it sketched to project and protect itself. And I don't know. I don't know anything. Maybe the way for better days is coded in musical notes. Maybe it's in the key under the blind illiterate mat that reads Hope in Old English Text below the nonexistent door on the wall I couldn't break. And maybe there's nothing here. Maybe there's nothing here.

In a state of chaos, there seems to be neither cause nor purpose. In a state of chaos, there are multiple patterns and a single question. And the question shines in multicolored layers in your eyes:

What do you see in the wind?

~

“Words are wind.” 
George R.R. Martin