The Opiate King

Desolate places the Opiate King reigning full o'er his truncated realm,
Teaching his queen such old words it would seem not been spoken since yoremen bore helm;

High in the hills of the barrenbought land high atop the mount's loneliest spire,
looks on the old crow with a heart full of woe as the king lays himself to retire;

Warm the wind blows as the evening grows staving off with a guilt-ridden hand,
cracked as the earth burns a fire in his hearth as our queen lays her king to expire;

Long does he draw his last breaths, weak and raw as he searches her eyes for his fate,
heavy with tears, on for each of his years does she whisper to sleep her sweet mate;

Long would he sleep long would his mistress weep within mortar as gray as his hair,
and so unto death uttered with his last breath ends the reign of our king with her prayer.

The Mad Diarist

-Day 3-
I can hear them...
...the voices...
It happened again today.
It was three in the afternoon, and I saw his face in the darkened mirror.
I can feel them watching me, and I can smell it. The fear. But it's only anguish to them... it doesn't catalyze into fear until I step into the room...
It's been a year, and I thought it was over... but it's not.
I can smell them again...



-Day 4-
They're here...
...frozen, sitting still like they know they've been seen.
The air literally froze from one second to the next, and I can feel them watching, waiting, trembling...
...it terrifies me, how they move...
The little one has sunk away into the corner again. It tried to scream but the other held its mouth.
WHY WON'T THEY LEAVE ME ALONE?!



-Day 7-
The air is heavier tonight...
.... they're getting smarter.
I tried frightening the little one again, but it didn't work this time.
It just stared at me, clicking its teeth like the others...
I can hear them now, breathing when the lights go out. But it's one long, undulating breath that builds like a cavernous wind until sunrise.
The little one isn't frightened anymore, but it still won't approach the door as long as I keep the mirror there.
I think they can smell my tears... when I cry the big ones stop clicking and I swear I can hear licking sounds.
They'll come for it eventually.
I haven't eaten since I arrived.
I don't know how long it's been for them...



-Day 10-
It broke today...
Well, I woke up and it was already smashed. The mirror. IT looks like they did it last night... but I was right here... how?!
The little one is gone, but he left tracks.
I can hear them in the closet, always chattering, always breathing... they're watching me fix the mirror...
There's a mark on the door, by the handle. It looks like a scratch-mark, but I cant be sure.
The sun is barely down, and already I can see the closet door open just a crack.
I left a shard of glass in the corner, I want him to SEE it.
I hope I don't scream tonight... I think they're starting to understand...

Two Card Shuffle

Carry the water 'round your feet
carry the water 'round your feet
trampl'd roses rushing past
how'd I get o'er you so fast
carry the water 'round your feet
Shine your lantern out into the night
shine your lantern out into the night
listen to the ocean tide
and what it brings from far and wide
shine your lantern out into the night
Remember what they told you when you left
remember what they told you when you left
remember what they told you when
they sacrific'd your only friend
remember what they told you when you left
Keep that promise that you made back home
keep that promise that you made back home
standing on that railway track
you told her one day you'd be back
oh keep that promise that you made back home
Sing this song when you can't run no more
sing this song when you can't run no more
rest your weary bones at night
and like a sacrificial rite
sing this song when you know what it's for

Of Art

It is this very notion of living on the periphery of life. Of making one’s bread and butter out of the spoils of society’s leisure. Where is nobility in that? In waking each day and rather than feeding or building or serving or teaching or policing or healing the world, you provide and take payment merely for your contribution to your countrymen’s decadent obsessions? What’s more, that in doing so you may well enjoy a measure more of infamy in this life and beyond for your aesthetic productions than the healers and farmers and teachers who form the real clockwork of life.

We may claim, as auteurs, to enrich the lives of those we touch either directly or through our productions. We may take solace and indeed defend our course in life by claiming to take the edges off of the world for those struggling to hold it together. We may neither show nor offer any hand in shaping the pattern of incarnate life, though we may just as surely convince ourselves that it is our vision that steadies the secular hand along the seams. Nor may we even pretend ourselves the glue which binds this pattern into a whole.

Art, that ever permeable atmosphere that is invisible to most, yet virtually rapturous to those devout enough to give it berth and accept its omniscience. It is at once the most fallible and sentient of endeavours, subject to all manner of practice and applied effort, and yet entirely unthreatened by any categorical scrutiny toward criticism. It is a pursuit considered chiefly frivolous in the wake of societal pursuits toward the sustenance and betterment of humankind; cast aside for the urgent application of medicine, construction, and public service. It is acknowledged and adored by nearly every member of civilization on a level, and yet still it is cast aside to the fringes of nominal human pursuit. It is considered a luxury of faculty, and yet remains the prime force behind our own creation according to our accepted Scripture – for it had been not science, not study, nor idle play that delivered life into the cradling bosom of the universe grand, but Art that our Father employed in Heaven.

And so it is at that great demarcation of mind and spirit in which we find perhaps the single greatest achievement of Art in all of its storied history – the cataclysm of Science’s own introspection. While it would be folly to debate the precedence of either house against the other, it can not be argued convincingly that without one present to (objectively) antagonize the other, there would arise no need for the definition of either. After all, it is scarcely worth identifying the disdain of any studious Scientist at the mere thought of approaching his work with the same flippancy toward mechanical process as employed (if the manner of pursuit can even be referred to as such!) by the Artist toward his respective craft.

I Should Think It Like A Fist

I should think it rather like a fist drawing down on a hill of sand, hollow, scattering the fallout imperceptibly amongst a field of grain. It is like that initial taste of frozen fruit, salty to the tongue, the cold numbing the taste buds but for a fleeting moment prior to swallowing when the entire universe explodes within the mouth releasing all of the flavour of the ripest peach, but only for a mere second so fleeting it seems more a function, a trick of the mind than any tangible faculty, and is gone once again scarcely before another frozen pearl can be shovelled into the salivating oven.

It is sound. It is the sound love makes, and it is neither imperceptible not metaphorical. It is the sound of electricity coursing through a thousand copper wires to feed a single bulb. The sound of energy being born and dying and giving its life before it has a chance to exist. Power that dreams itself into oblivion, winking itself in and out of existence like rain pattering against a churning swell. You hear it every day, all of your life screaming within you, tired of its loneliness yet never quite threatening to release itself beyond your own private resolve.

It is language. Language so banal and inarticulate it can only be used to describe your every waking hour every God-damned day of your life. A language that reaches out and touches the world and everybody in it and brings them back to you in a way that you can understand. In a way that allows you to look on them and listen to their electricity without wanting or needing to snuff the life out from under them before they can do any real damage, for that is where life resides – underneath the body that makes it matter. We lourd it under ourselves like some sort of broken servant bent on our greater wishes, held in check by the mere weight of our astronomical netherpotence. This language that sedates us, and then drops like a stone in the wake of anything truly worth expressing.

Love, that silent cooler, shrieking itself forward, echoing outward from behind impenetrable woods and remaining just dark (and swift!) enough to elude any real formal recognition. A fine Sunday breeze and parlour verse over brandy and smoke, but leave the office for matters of the flesh. Leave Love for the diary. There’s the only one who ever believed in it enough not to deny it thrice in the face of any real attention, let alone conviction. Persecution.

It is the mother of all invention, that rewriting of reality that makes yesterday imperfect, today intolerable, and tomorrow unfit for today.

Feed yourself, and whence you are satiated, feed yourself again. Feed yourself to whatsoever may digest your constituent parts into a soil so safely inert that it will bare no fruit nor wheat nor cattle that will ever lead to another molecule within the universe asking, “Why?”

Blood

I awoke again to blood. That sweet-copper smell of blood thick in the air. Pungent, nearly overpowering, threatening to send me back to sleep were it not for the sheer panic burning in my chest.

Dripping. I can hear it dripping, somewhere. Something.

Dripping.

I swing my feet over the side of the bed where they land with a smack on something wet. Flicking on my nightstand lamp I am relieved to find it's just rainwater having leaked in through the open bedroom window. I get up to close the window, and as I'm forcefully jerking the misaligned windowpane loudly along its broken tracks I remember that I hadn't left it open. I never open it at all for this very reason. Still the smell of copper.

Of blood.

I yank my bath towel off of the chair and throw it down angrily onto the sodden floor to do its work. I mop a sloppy trail to the edge of the puddle near the bedroom door and pick up the sopping towel, discarding it into the bathtub with a heavy slap. Rainwater now trickles steadily drown the drain as I step back into the hallway and close the bathroom door. Still the sound of dripping.

Still the smell of copper.

My Girl, Up On Stage

It's still strange seeing her up on that stage, performing for an entire world full of people that want to know her. In a city impossibly large and even more impossibly populated, here was a woman I knew intimately now sharing herself with an auditorium full of people that may or may not give a damn, albeit their greater attention seemed to indicate that they did.

I suppose I ought to have felt flattered, or at least on some level lucky to know her the way I did. But that's not what I felt at all. I had explored every inch of her, and she had done the same. I had seen and felt more of her own body than anybody ought to; the same mouth out of which she was pouring herself unto the crowd had been filled with my own flesh only the night before, and likely would again tonight. And yet here she was sharing it with myriad strangers wishing themselves on her. She was beautiful up there on that stage, where everybody could see.

And I hated it.

Which isn't to say I wasn't immensely proud of her, and secretly bursting with rather juvenile pomp. But for all of my security and confidence in what we had, it would never be quite enough to suppress the primal jealousy I felt each and every time she would showcase herself to a roomful of moribundly amorous men imagining my fiancee into all manner of exploits that I surely would have stamped out in a blind rage had I any direct evidence.

Sure I was going home with her when this was all over. But I don't like sharing a bed with anybody I don't trust, and sometimes as she'd stand up there behind that microphone, eyes closed and spilling herself out into the darkened theatre, I couldn't help but feel like I was just another head on a pillow.

For one hour every Saturday night, I was little more to her than the glassy-eyed bachelor I was when we had met, and on the same level as every other guy in the joint. And I hated it.

For one hour every Saturday night, I drank myself just deep enough to pretend that we hadn't met, and that we still might.

For one hour every Saturday night, she was everybody's baby.