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.