Butterflies

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
Aldous Huxley

~

It’s crazy, isn’t it?

It’s crazy how everyone’s insane, how they keep pretending not to be.
The night is devoid of comets and stars. And I have three cigarettes left. It’s funny how I try to silence the pain with toxins, though I know poison could never be a cure. But I’m well-acquainted with the easy way out and I’m tired. I tried to convince her why she shouldn’t kill herself. And I saw my failure reflected in her eyes.

My fingers tremble because I’m overwhelmed by all the pain I see around me - not because they’re typing intense words. What I let out is nothing compared to the world my eyes perceive. All I see is hurt; a world of dying butterflies slowly crashing to the ground like multicolored leaves. The night is devoid of color and soul. And I have two cigarettes left.

How can they not see the patterns? The path to perdition is set. The road to self-destruction is paved with broken smiles and desperate lies. The confusion is deafening. And I can’t listen to the cosmic melody because all I see is the blood on their hands as they play their instruments. Someone once said that we become what we lose. He was wrong. We become what we want to become.
The night is devoid of moonlit words. And I have one cigarette left.

She couldn’t unzip her dress. So he helped her. And her skin was like that of a flower unfolding the beauty of the universe behind all the smoke streaming through his lips. There’s the universal, the particular and the veil we’re trying to pierce. There’s the actor, the audience and the curtain closing as we speak. Then there’s you and me, and the mystical unity we fail to breathe. And this night is devoid of love and sanity. And I’m all out of cigarettes. And I’m all out of love.

This smoke is as real as the grand delusion. And it mixes well with all the words I could never say. So take this secondhand ramification of endeavors that never made it out of my head. Take it even though words will never be actions. Take it because I’m out of breath and out of smoke. And I can borrow the latter but does anyone have a breath to spare?
The night is devoid of light. And I wish that I could say that 'there is a light and it never goes out.'

But not tonight.

Tonight we die. But tomorrow, we live again. 

~

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
Victor Hugo

Phoenix

"Dusk is just an illusion, because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are; there cannot be one without the other, yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it feel to be always together, yet forever apart?"

Nicholas Sparks

~

Free your mind. Regain stability. There is nothing here for you.

This barrier is weak and broken.

They're all fighting shadows. And I'm fighting with this pen. And it's unable to salvage what's left of me. My senses fail to capture the music. And my heart fails to feel it. Doubt is all-encompassing. And I am not here. I'm that gap between the heartbeats, the forgotten leaves in the wind - a fragment of torn silence that couldn't make it through life's blind spot. We are who we are, failing, fading and forsaken. We're that broken down dust at the beat of dusk, deluded by the bruised colors of sky and sea, drowning in their symphony.

And now the drugs don't work. And all the stars are out. And there is nothing to look away from. The world is ugly and this blackness is bliss. So let there be light, and many, many shadows to shelter us from sight. And, you, dear weakened soul, go back to sleep, for this wand you hold, it bleeds but fraudulent magic. And I... I am here. I'm this damp gaze suspended in breathless vacuity, the infinite horizon that never was... that never will be - a loveless shadow in a deserted darkness.

Now, listen close, dear ruptured heart for now, it is time to go. Listen close and act at once so we can leave, so we can run, so we can row, so we can breathe [...] Now, go and sever that faithless bond and crush those picture-frames. And burn them. Burn them all. Burn them and build yourself great wintry walls of atonement from their residual ash. Have our new citadel of seclusion rise above perfidious pain, above tainted clouds and forlorn rain. The stars are dead and you will never see them again. The stars are dead. The stars are dead and their theoretical story is bitter sorrow - impeccably unwritten, eternally unread.

So let there be light, and many, many shadows, and I'll be that shadow that never lets you hit the ground.

Let there be light, and many, many shadows, and may the phoenix and the blackbird never again resound.

~

“My breaking heart and I agree, that you and I could never be, so with my best...my very best, I set you free” 
Rachel Yamagata

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

Resolution

"All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle." 
St. Francis of Assisi

~

Where to start?

Unbent horizons and hollow cigarettes. Broken ties and eye-tearing smoke. Imaginary bonds and colorless daydreams. Dramatic plot twists and star-gazing epiphanies. Time-twirling questions and good music. Guest appearances and starring roles. Comfort zones and -

A new year comes with new promises and new surprises, a new you and a new me.

~

Her eyes, they spoke of words unsaid and torn manuscripts that were never read. They blinked with the sound of the turning pages of an untold tale; eyelashes that could paint fiery courage pale. Yet, the voices recurrently told me that silent songs and buried bones share an eternal friendship, that a breaking heart in a broken home is an open door to an empty room, that there is an infinite light and a single candle staring down all the darkness of the multiverse, that there is a forgotten hourglass beneath the chest with sand that smells of fraudulent heartbeats, sand that shakes to the sound of the fractured violin and its stuttering echo, both jumping the rope of this infinite loop. But when I looked at you, none of this ever came up. When I looked at you, the voices just wanted to listen.

Her eyes, they spoke of stars and constellations, scattered across our interwoven dreams.

Her eyes, they spoke these heart-pressed lines. They sailed the waters of remixed rhymes. But I was taught to trust no one, not even myself. I was taught to notice the invisible, to make long-distance power plays -with people who didn't know the power-play dimension- right before the end of the game, to lose in every damned dreadful way before I land my final strike. Throughout the years, I learned to doubt every line and definition until I forgot my own shape. I learned how to map lies on someone's face and how to lose mine in the frozen shadows of sinful icebergs that bear neither name nor memory. I swam through letters just like these until I lost sight of the shore and I never looked back because home became an array of pixels beyond a screen. There, I pulled three roses up my chest, through my trachea, and I laser-blasted them away from my eyes into 'virtuality' slipping what was left of my dreams into the pockets of blessed fictional characters. Then I filled that cardiac space with songs that wore a perfume similar to that of the crack-ridden petals that fell off.

Her eyes, they spoke of future visions paved inside the hallways of the Grand Design and old childhood swings that unknowingly operated at the frequency of the Golden Ratio.

Where to stop?

The dreamer and the dream. A candle in the mirror. Words in his heart. And music in the dark.
The dreamer and the dream. A play of light and shadow. An addiction to fiction. And a thirst for reality.
The dreamer and the dream. The truth behind the veil. A tale of myth and legend. An empty holy grail.
The dreamer and the dream. The chill upon your skin. The tears that won't come down. The fracture in your crown.
The dreamer and the dream. The broken beat within. The game of love and pain. Rays through your windowpane.
The dreamer and the dream. The mirror in your eyes. And the love in your words.
Listen.

Her eyes, they speak.

So listen to the music sitting behind the countdown.

Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

~

"Either define the moment, or the moment will define you."
Walt Whitman

Star

"And I just wanted you to know."

My Chemical Romance

~

An eternal feeling unhesitatingly and continuously screams in the depth of your dark abyss. Echoes bounce off the walls, fueled by a resentment toward the conditions of time and space. It says that it is unconditionally timeless, boundless yet wonders, under its breath, for how long it's been stuck in this hole. 

Some nights are broken, dead and true. Others are tender shattering dew. 

In the midst of noise, words crawl on a sidewalk. It must be really loud in your head, mockingly whispered the abyss. Even your words know there's no way out of here. Is our truth cold enough to puncture that heavy soul you so terribly wish to abandon? Paint the pain upon the brow, disillusioned by delusions, and punch the rain into your eyes, for this is but the world of lies. Like an inherently divided coin, sailing through the cobblestone, I wonder which side fortune will pretend-bury today, as its brother washes away under this dusty broken loan. Alas! Know that hell is not bounded by the red corners of your eyes. And so you must look further and beyond that gaze you distance yourself from - for the deeper you dwell, the closer your home to hell. 

We're in this together, said Heart to Horizon. 

Light music ensued. 

We're in this together, said Mind to Pattern. 

Mute lights fired through. 

Why is no one dancing? The soul wondered. 

I am, echoed Silence. 

But no one heard it. 

So listen. Listen to the shadow dancing in the rain, singing the praises of creation. Listen to your story and everyone else's, for a single thread can only resonate within its web. Listen to the lines hiding in their retinas, the ones their mirrors forget on the other side. Listen, second-most of all, to your silence. 

Some nights are broken, dead and true. Others just never make it through.

When time loses meaning, and you feel that you don't belong in this body, or at least that this planet is not your home, it makes you wonder if it's simply all a dream. Yet you can't help but try to make sense of the contents of your existence. Thus as I attempt to hug you, our feet planted at the center of the bottomless rift of our fractured identity, I find that you are as opaque and immaterial as I am, that this open-ended monologue is a meaningless echo that bounced off all the voices in my head.

I believe the main difference between the suffering individual and the individual whose brilliance is widely recognized is identical to the difference between difference and similarity, because empty space is empty, and because Divine Perspective rules them all.

Some nights are broken, dead and true. And the stars align with your suffering because they want you to be you. 

What about me?

What happens to me when the music is gone? 

How bright will the hour of my star shine when I pass?

How short is the breath to failure? And how deep is the road to contentment?

What about you?

What do you see in the horizon?

And how does silence make you feel?

How do you fill the many blanks between these lines?

And which of the seven versions of you is blinking right now?

Some nights are broken, dead and true. Others bless the divine in you.

~

"One who doesn't know how to dance, says the floor is crooked."

Nepali Proverb

Words

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” 
Rudyard Kipling

~

The words can't flow because they're drowning.

And so I hide the cracks in my soul with these whispers of the metaphoric sand that carries your scent.

And they can't flow because people made of sand once lost all their words to the sea. And yet each time you place your hand on my skin, I find my dusty soul floating across the waters, like fireworks melting into constellations because of that slight magical shiver at the edge of your fingers.

And now my eyes are this quill of chaos with waves of heartbeats as their ink. And the words still can't flow because I'm drowning on the surface of this heavenly universe you enclose with a blink, because I fall deeper and deeper every time we lock eyes and I can't look away.

So here, at sunrise, are daydreams, and you, daydreams of you. And there, at the edge of nightfall, I am the night that's falling in love with you.

And thus, the quill, it spirals down the ocean, spelling your name in breathless bubbles, wondering if this is all a hopeless dream. Yet, what are dreams when my soul is building an underwater sandcastle with yours? And what are hopes when I have your hand in mine?

[...]

We build and break and fall, then tell stories to ourselves about the mysterious beauty of it all. But I know that these words are but a distorted memory engraved in the record of skipped beats and words unsaid, swallowed breaths and sighs unread. But next come the words that kill, beyond my darkest corner, in that old pain within me moving still. Next come the words that kill, temporarily scattered in disfigured letters floating atop the sea of untold tragedies I bury in my mind. Next come the words that kill, and I can't arrange those letters and read what they have to say because I know that they'll tell me that my heart is dead. They'll tell me that my heart was nice but now it's dead and that no metaphor in the world can't bring it back.

So what are you doing?
What are you doing and why are you walking next to the sea I never told anyone about?
What are you doing and why are you here?

[...]

In this world, you're either broken, dead or insane. And deep inside, no matter which one - or two - you are, there are words that could change you, words that could tear you apart and words that could bring you back anew. And they usually don't flow because they pity your existence and they don't want to flood it into void. Mine couldn't flow because I hid them in the nonexistent layer between your heart and my empty chest when we first hugged.

But I guess your heart rearranged the letters for me.

So next come the words that kill, faintly beating still,

Some things are meant to be.

~

“We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.” 

Neil Gaiman

Starlight

“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.” 
Rumi

~

The rain was falling softly on the two sides between your nose and your cheeks but you weren't blinking. And the sky was dark and starless because all the light and all the stars had found dwelling in your skin and in your eyes. And there was this moment, this very specific moment, when I was watching you and it made me run out of words. So I closed my eyes and ran after them and made them line up against the wall of my heart:

"You resonate at a frequency so intensely beautiful that it confuses the harmony of the golden ratio."

[...]

And as she was dancing she drew Metatron's Cube with her hands and that made me want to call back my only two imaginary friends from their endless pursuit of the metaphysical holy grail. And I did. And they instantly came because they knew I wouldn't contact them after so many years unless it was serious. So picture the scene: Michael, the best student in the mythical Pythagorean school and the first friend I ever made, was sitting to my left. He was the one who taught me to see the numbers in people, to visualize their attributes, their potential, and, naturally, their weaknesses. And to my right, sat Socrates' secret disciple, and the closest thing I've ever had to a brother, Gabriel. He was the one who taught me to see to the music in the numbers. Michael and Gabriel were both eternal rivals and best friends. And this whole time, they thought that they'd figured the secret of the universe, that they had nothing more to learn. Michael put it in an equation (6+12+23=20) which he discovered through Sacred Geometry, then he encoded that equation in the Triquetra symbol and convinced me to tattoo it on my forearm. Gabriel said there was an easier way that Michael had missed. And then he showed it to us with his magnificent handwriting. (Gabriel didn't have a voice, as far as I knew, but he could draw words in the air that only Michael and I could see.) And even after so many years, I still remember how the words floated above us:

The secret of the universe is revealed to you right after you honestly smile to a child, and right before they honestly smile back, in the silent music of that split-second-almost-blink-thing the kid always makes to accept your smile.
P.S. You're right, Michael. It's also 6+12+23=20. 

[...]

So as she was dancing she drew Metatron's Cube with her hands and that made me call them back. And I did. And they came, and they saw that they were conquered by what her divine dance drew in and beyond spacetime. And then I smiled at her and she kinda blinked and smiled back.

Then she laughed.

That's when Michael said: "Where are her numbers? Why doesn't she have any numbers? Something's wrong, Gabriel."
Gabriel was smiling ecstatically, which usually only happens when he claims that he can hear the Music of the Spheres, or when Michael attempts to draw the Flower of Life.

"I think she can see us," whispered Gabriel.

~

"The night was dark

And the dark, blue

And I was both,

Split in two.

The stars were bright

And the music, true

And you were the light

That went through."

Unknown

Music

"Inside these pages you just hold me."

Ed Sheeran

~

My dreams are burning in the sky. A part of me calls them stars, the other, dust. And I don't know whether my soul is made of cosmic dust of a star that died, or of one that is not yet born. And while confusion lays its empty weight upon my numb and wasted mind, I secretly pray for cold rain to protect my dreams from the fire. 

My senses fail and I feel no pain. The 'I' I gaze upon inside escapes me and I'm too slow and exhausted to try and catch up with it. My heart keeps failing to materialize. But why?

There must be some explanation for this non-feeling phenomenon. And there must be something more here according to my calculations. Or perhaps I've made some miscalculation. But where?

What is my heart waiting for to show up?

I keep telling myself that I've understood every step in this ancient journey of mine, but have I really? Am I lying to myself like they all do? Aren't we all the same at the end of the day?

Who the hell are you? 

Scratch that and rephrase.

What the hell have you become?

[...]

What are words when you no longer know who you are? The symphony that has been playing in my mind all my life is gone. But where to? 

The chairs of the artist and the composer have disappeared. Oblivion. There is no proper wording to verbalize the situation. Thoughts fade. That is all. Thoughts fade. And like a dying autumn leaf that bears within its patterns the sleepless marks of every season, I fade too. Even the state of spontaneous expression fails to find the crooked path into my soul. Perhaps, the latter has gone out of its way to find another. Or perhaps, it's busy playing hide and seek with a kindred mate. All I have here is a small number of songs that recurrently shape my lips and state of mind. And since all I had has become a forgotten number of ancient memories, I intend on filling that space with whatever comes next. Whatever comes next I hope I earn it. I hope I deserve it.

Meanwhile, blessed be the noble knights of honor that have reflected light upon my broken road.

And blessed be the brave.

[...]

The warm wind hums a long lost melody that loosens life's tight grasp on the heart. And yet the music does not go in. It just takes a numb machine out of its cage for a dance.

And they dance to every sound because they know that everything is music.

It's in the slightly audible whistle in the movement of smoke as it parts ways with my breath to seek a more inspiring partner. It's in the sharp knife in bloodied fingers as it slowly moves against the violin in all my flashbacks until all the strings are torn and I fall asleep. It's the same music that made the metro stop and listen to how a little girl and a very old man were exchanging genuine smiles that transcend ethnicity. It's in the way your nose and my heart wrinkle at the sound of your laugh. And it plays in my blood whenever I imagine all the memories we're never gonna make together. In sad and happy moments alike, the music is there. And it's beautiful.

I wish I could describe the dance but I can't. 

So what do you feel? Is the music really there or am I imagining things? Don't answer that.

Answer this.

Is there music when you close your eyes?

~

"I just wanted you to know."

My Chemical Romance