Colossus

Tonight I dreamt I was a girl, sired by two grand forces of Nature yet orphaned by the two. What caused the death of these two parents I know not, but surely nothing is eternal. Therefore, I set out to wake Father from his deep slumber.

I conjured him on a wide, empty street, ashen like Pompeii. He was a concoction of life, ghost and past: feeble and mistrustful, his beard occluding his true thoughts when he did speak, a rather sporadic eventuality. Yet I guided him - half convincing, half dragging - to the Hospital where we would carry out our... my purpose. To guide Father through the entrance proved much more demanding than I first reckoned, we only crossed the threshold after I persuaded him that I had brought him here to be restored to his full life. The deserted reception room was wholly formed of moving walls, shaping and reshaping itself, slowly guiding us onward as it diagnosed Father's ailment and readied itself to transmute his weakness into strength.

I remember, quite distinctly, the pictured design that would transform the elder sinews of his brain into a young, spirited hive of thought. But I could have never been prepared for the metamorphosis that would ensue. His force was taken from its withered, fleshy scallop and poured into a golden egg, a round Colossus of heavy, elongated eyes; of ample, frog-like jaw; whose stumpy legs and arms gave him a deceptively endearing aspect, much akin to Humpty-Dumpty. Yet the movement within his heart, an orange sun he literally wore upon his sleeves, suggested it could not be felled nor raised by horses or men.

Thus, Father and I went on along the shifting corridors and stairs of the live building, gaining height as we searched out the fourth floor. The higher we went, the quieter the corridors became, and wilder and broader our urban landscape became, increasingly evidencing that it was built not for the likes of me, but for my Father's kin. It was upon the third floor, I believe, that we chanced upon some respite from the pervasive stillness, as we encountered a nursing mechanism, a marble coloured, smaller and milder replica of my Colossus. Before I knew it, Father turned and deftly pounded upon the dwarf with his paws, cracking his frame like an eggshell.

"Do you think you can do anything?" I shouted in fury at Father.

His deep eyes twisted towards me and his voice, bottomless as mine was high, replied: "Yes."

"Then learn love," I said, now calmly.

The light within his bare heart swirled upon his hands, and now emerged from every opening of his armour, his eyes the searchlights of a lighthouse, roaming the meaning in my request. Suddenly all quietened down, he stood the same and I could not tell if I had dreamed his sudden enlightenment. Time would tell, I told myself.

Soon we found ourselves before the stairs to the fourth floor. As we scaled them, the ambient changed from the gelid precision of the hospital to the warm inhospitality of a great mansion. The now-wooden stairs faced a dining room that, judging from its crude aspect, must have belonged to the servants. Upon the stark oaken table sat two bowls of olive-coloured soup. We could not help but enter, unaware of the unseeable presence of legion spirits in the room, their ruddy auras balancing the green colour of the death realm we had entered. As we consumed the soup, perishing with each spoonful, behind us a window opened within the door-frame revealing to all present but Father and me, the satisfied eyes of Mother.

The anthill in my chest

Ants. Every corner sees their scurrying, their legs as if carried by some current flowing only for them. They run to the sweetness of my fruitful thoughts, and ever more surely as these finish rotting, fertilizing the next harvest. Yes, these adventurous thoughts turn sweet then bitter, as I try to delineate my freedom and trace its future, placing a crystal glass over it and edging it slowly along a heartless path to a breathless end. My torment does not last forever, as I let these mentations loose before they have time to dismember my soul, to let them feed upon the seed of my premonitions: my hopes and, yet more palatable, my frights.

What I see as the ants start crawling all about my skin and underneath it, twirling as lovers do under a duvet, is a landscape where the cobblestones don't know our steps, where the trees don't drink our breaths and where the night, spiderlike, does not spy our kisses with its myriad eyes, nor does it spin our gasps into tiny cocoons to be drunk fully later on. Drink, drink the bitter nectar of my dismay, enjoy it more in knowing its flow shall last only as long as I. I'll feed instead on that interminable vine that grows just out of grasp, let those aureate grapes mature a little more, to sink within reach. Reveal yourself sometime and join me, we'll eat them two by two, letting our ants make hospice in their sainted carcasses, let us exhaust them before we exhaust ourselves.

Firefly night

The wind curled, just as hair does, about the empty, unlit streets I eroded as I roamed under the blind sky. Its orchestra of natural song, so varied in tone and melody, would gain strength for what seemed minutes at a time before subsiding and again start with a whispered tune. Its growth made all the house elements come alive with sound: the creak of ancient wooden gates, the squeak of metal weathercocks, the stuttering of glass, the rasping of vegetation. Even animated life, praying aloud for respite from the touch of angry nature. Yet perhaps what I believed the joint orisons of the metropole of mice had rather different meaning -- nature's gentle way of asking for solitude while it discovered, lived itself alone. I'd not desist, only defy, a nutcracker of flesh and blood.

I pushed deeper into the dark, fashioning myself a mantle out of it, letting it soak up my fears. But my deepest fright remained impassive to the warmth of night: it lived too deep within my marrow, armoured in ivory cataphract and surrounded by red blooded plebs, kept in check by sinewy whip, enacting his every move. I dreaded to never see night again, unpolluted by the light we shine upon it to try see it more clearly. No. It must remain shrouded in itself - to see its mystery we must not violate it.

A hundred more steps brought me face to face with Night's answer, it told me I was wrong. It was the streetlights, those old-fashioned cages of glass and iron, windows to the four corners of the earth for the imprisoned firefly within, motionless, burning a steady flame that sought to illuminate nothing but itself. Its quiet burn made the night about it darker, truer still.

Life quietened about me, and my pace became the metronome of my musings as I found home again. When I set out, I thought I could defeat the night, make it miss me more than I missed it. Instead, I walk it every night, if not in action then in thought.

Patience

More than three years ago began a poem, and never finished. Until tonight.

"There is no fear in love;
but perfect love casteth out fear:
because fear hath torment"
1 John 4:18

I pour my sadness on this page and try to yield to Fate,
but Will is weaker than Desire, so still I clutch the blade
and push it tight against my breast as though it were her hand.
My sorrow drips onto the floor and mixes with my blood;
the grain is made, the seed is sown and now there comes a bud
that springs a flower that can lead my essence to her land.

Where colour cuts all eyes to shreds, the place you call 'a dream',
Where beauty pierces more than pain and silence mutes the scream.
The grass devours the Lion's flesh, the dust erodes its bones;
the Dragon dreads to spread its wings above this fatal trail,
And warns me not with blaze nor burn, but bare abysmal wail,
that those that can't devise its end will perish here alone.

My sight has read a thousand lives, each step a myriad deaths;
The path is paved in carmine light, the dusk of my close breaths.
The citadel waits nigh at hand, its gates bloom to my rhyme,
Within its carcass stark and scourged, mon coeur illumes the pit.
I clasp, reclaim my mortal sin, to weave as I see fit,
To find a match to flame away the very frame of time.