Unrest

You leave things in strange places

whenever you visit.

A knife with the spoons,

socks in the fridge,

your voice in my heart.

We said our goodbyes,

you left me a mess,

and now is the time

to clean...

unless?

Cymraeg Comeback

 

We stayed in twos when the cloud caved in. It shouted over walls, crept in the shadows and down to the water where the hiding began.

We dined on the scraps of our past selves, poached them in their oils, seasoned them with the seas.

We ate our words and swallowed our pride until we ran out of space to store our dreams.

We left it all in the dark of night.

And the cloud is what was left.

My Horizon's Curve

Waves tap on the breakwater rocks,

this city, my life,
kept safe from the tide.

I know there lies a curve behind the horizon
that continues back to here.

It beckons me to peer over the edge,
to discover that other shore
and who i've become once i return.

I fear the tide.
The choppy discontinuities
from the plot I had written for my life.

Life is not a story, I suppose,
but a series of episodes
with plotholes a'plenty,
building a world that never quite gets finished.
New season airing Fall of 2018.

Waves

A sail is made to catch the air

and guide it toward our meaning's end.

We drift across the sea without

the ship we build to sail within.

In calmer waters, steady winds

we amble toward the beacon light

the stoics take their stock by day

and count their blessings through the night.

When storms kick up and waves arise

a simple choice will oft appear

to beat our chests and curse the sky

or patiently befriend the fear.

And if we bring the journey to

where water and the ether meet.

'tis better death to leave a mark

than wallow in our own defeat.

It matters not which crew to bring

which lands to claim, which hearts to win.

We drift across the sea without

the ship we build to sail within.

Renaissance for Remnants of a Lost Kingdom

The sounds of hammers echo here.
They're rebuilding what used to be,
A shrine to the ancients;
the ones who got it right.

In retrospect, they taught us a few things.

We learned division,
that we may divide ourselves by every measure
and still find another reason to separate.

And how there is no last wall at the end of all things
Yet still we aim for the next one
in hopes to one day arrive there.

In this, the quiet division of home,
The sunlight knows me only through a mutual friend.
We exchange glances like old friends with bitter grudges
but I still secretly want it to go back
to what we used to have

Cataclysmic Kaleidoscope

The starlights set their oars and mast

To find the future of their past.

And whizzing, whirling to and fro

They bend and buzz and say "hello!"

And through this chaos bit by bit

we piece together all of it.

These treasures in our outstretched eyes

are taken in, eternalized.

Immutable through time and space

These mem'ries all fall into place.

The times we stared up at the sky

it waved hello. We waved goodbye.

Binary Enigma

I see the elusive dead in you.

I see it when your left eyelid starts to jitter 

because you haven't slept a full night in weeks,

or when you lower your eyes and gaze at nothing in particular

"Yea...", you say. Just, "Yea".

When you stare out on the lawn in the afternoon, what do you see?

The wrinkles in their shirts, the stains on their jeans?

And when you look at me,

do you truly see me as the sum of all my parts?

And then, I wonder what you're hiding.

What lies in those unvisited corners in the cellar of your heart?

Is this shell of yours a wall to keep us out

or a cell to keep you in?

Entzünden

"Your kingdom come, your will be done..."
I had to pause at becoming aware of the dull murmurs around me,
and the flatness of the bricks borrowing the voices of centuries past.

This is what great things are built of, I thought.
Thousands of people united in their misery
with a deep sense of the same hope
inspired by someone so miserable
that they spent an entire lifetime
creating something that would make this all worth it and sensible.

To the ones who embraced the chaos:
I long to be as brave as you.

Twenty Two Fourteen

The bombastic symphonies of the market square 

ignite the last drops of my youth.

I yearn for this generation

who takes chaos to the streets

fomenting anarchy against oligarchy.

The greatest experiment of our time goes horribly wrong,

wishes to off itself.

More at 11.

Peace, Freedom, Justice, Free will.

These expired ideas are forever engraved

as words of soldiers freshly forgotten.

Mediterranean metropolis- Catalonia

A thoroughfare, flat and narrow

shoots across the horizon, 

dividing everything in its path

into two.

To be with you has now become an ordered sort of thing.

We no longer bend our backs together, we bend our time apart.

'Til crooked and manicured, our lifelines fit together for just one moment of the year.

But it never fits quite right.

Taroko

The Earth before me,

I ask, "what are we here for?"

There is no answer

From fated love to us imbued

your fill in me, and mine in you.

And in our unclothed skin we feast

Our bloodlines flowing from the East.

I did not find for what I'd come

No loose ends tied, no setting sun.

Instead our love rose from the ash,

binding future to the past.

I let this festered pain in me

spiral out as ecstasy

It twisted through your shattered husk

and stole away my breath to dusk.

The Jiyu Tree

    I wished my old tree good morning as I rustled my way through its branches and set my back down on the slope that its trunk had been building. The sunlight had just begun to lift the dewdrops, slowly making room for the songleaves around them to transform the new morning breeze into the music of the spirits.

   You cannot hear the first note of a jiyu's song. There is no grand entrance or catchy hook. It's more like a choir of thousands of distant voices all entering and exiting at different times with their pre-ordained notes. When you start to hear the song, you realize that it's been singing for a while, only your mind was not clear enough to focus on it. No mind has been or will ever be clear enough to know which of a jiyu's leaves sang first. Only the tree can know, and it will forever keep it secret.

Lost time is never found again...

   "You seem quiet this morning. Thinking about something?"
   "Just thinking about home."
   "Ah. You know, we're soon coming upon two months here-"
   A cold wind rudely interrupted Cal and stirred the soupy fog around them. Kip quickly rushed to the tent and produced a pair of coats.
   "Thank you, Kip"
   "No problem. Don't know If I'll ever get used to how dense this air is. Every gust hits you like a dip in the ocean... Anyway, you were saying?"
   "I was just saying that homesickness usually sets in after a couple months of being away."
   "That what your psychology classes taught you?"
   "Well, were they wrong?"
   "Hah. You got me there."
   She cracked a grin and withdrew a bit into her coat. Kip continued.
   "It's just... I've recently realized that being away has already changed me. It's a small change, almost unnoticeable. But it's happening continuously and it makes me think about what we're doing out here"
   "Every event in our lives changes us. No one can stay the same forever. And besides you're already here. You'd be wasting even more time getting back home."
   "I'm not planning to suddenly up and leave everyone. I'm just worried about what happens after we pack up and go home. We don't get this part of our lives back, you know? At the end of all this, I'm going to look back at all this time I spent working my ass off in this wasteland and think about what kind of person it made me into. And I'll ask myself..."
   He stumbled on a tremor in his throat, but came back after a breath.
   "I'll ask myself if who I am is worth the time I spent here. Right now, I don't know if the answer will be yes, and that's what worries me the most."
   "You worry too much, Kip. You're driving yourself mad over the natural state of things. My people have a saying for your worries: 'One who fears the river shall perish in the flood'."
   "Well that's certainly uplifting"

Ithagrin 1

You told me once that you could feel the exact moment when a tsunami was forming at the bottom of the ocean. There was a sort of unease in the ground, that you could feel it crawling up your legs and filling your lungs with tension. You told me it was some kind of hereditary trait your family developed over countless years of turning the land of our moon. I liked to imagine that I too had supernatural senses. I made believe that my eyes could follow the weaves of a fluttering duskfly or that my head was shaped just right to pick up the alien signals. If your face was telling the truth (and it always was), you never picked up the jealousy behind my weirdness. Mel, on the other hand, could always develop some logical explanation for my weird imagining of the day. I guess intelligence was her hereditary sense. All my parents gave me was a bilingual tongue and a knack for empathy. Though I guess there are always worse situations to be born into.

I dream my painting...and then I paint my dream.

A pixellated dream world

begets a work of paint.

Your simulated mindfulness

turns me into a saint.

Mental image, quantum states,

Our soul becomes collapsed.

My high-pass filters resonate,

With you resounding last.

Jiyu 1

Jiyu... Do you still remember that name? It's the name that You, Mil, and I took on our wedding day 4 years ago. We chose that name after the giant jiyu tree that grew in the fields between our homes on Pangum. None of our parents wanted to bother cutting it down for more farmland, so they gave it to us to play in. I remember chasing leaf mice with you two. Mil would always catch them first, and then I'd pet them while you studied how their breathing rate affected their pulse or whatever it was that day. I remember our first kiss under that tree. How I could suddenly feel what you two were feeling when our cheeks were close together, and my thoughts were suddenly not only my own. I remember the wedding we had beneath that same jiyu tree, and I remember how you looked when you told us you had to ship out for Surien.
It's been 3 years and 24 days since that moment, but I imagine you won't remember that either. It's strange, how amnesia works. When I saw you last, you were fully aware of who you were, but you had no idea of how you came to be that person. It made me sad to think you may never remember us, but I started to see some of the memories flickering back near the end. I am writing to see if I can spark as many of those memories back as I can. Some of them might be hard to relive, some of them you may never recall, but I will try my best at any rate. Mil and I both need you to remember how you became Kip Jiyu. Our own minds depend on it.

    -Lif Jiyu, Surien 5.2, Annum 3157

Eyes of White Elm

Eyes of white elm 

 and marks in black charcoal. 

Her tanned and taut skin, 

 a silver screen marvel.

-

The strength that I thought 

would always persist 

had lost too much hope 

for will to exist.

So when she had offered 

it troubled me so 

that loneliness spoke 

and didn't say no.

-

We butchered the night 

with blades of our silence. 

dysfunction washed filth 

with emotional violence.

And when it was over 

I packed up and flew 

for all we had done 

at once came to view.

-

Eyes of white elm, 

and nothing to trust. 

our bodies abused, 

addicted to lust.

Childhood is the Kingdom of Immortality

They once ruled this body, this mind
the monarchs of immortal kind

They were once the morning dew,
the early birds on days anew

Mettled through ambition's fire,
they sank to earth to toil and tire

By lustful pulls from wealthy forces
they sold their kingdoms for their courses

and learned how they ought sow their seeds
to sate their higher order needs

then millions left their dreaming realms
to wake up next to spears and helms

a kingdom's weight in gold is free
when freedom takes eternity.

It wasn't long ago that humans still longed for adventure. Back then, your endeavours were the most important parts of your life. Your stories became your identity; your mark on time itself.

That's why little trinkets like these are priceless. They're more than just some ornate, nostalgic relics from our past. Each one was at one time a beacon in someone's journey. An enchanted artifact that already knew the time and place of your story's fulfillment. The universe would whisper secrets into the tiniest depths of its workings, and it danced to the rhythm of these truths.

It seems that nowadays these sorts of guides have fallen to antiquity. There are no more questions the electron cannot answer. No more truths to uncover or stories to tell. No more secrets of the universe for these metal spirits to dance to. Journeys have been reduced to weekend getaways where we gaze deeply into our own selves and never find what it is that we're trying to look for.

Now, gaze into this, and look for its questions, not its answers. For its secrets and not its facts. Let it show you the beginning of your adventure, and do not concern yourself with its end. Most often, what you've been looking for is the whole of it.