Tomorrow

The time is now, or perhaps it is yesterday, or possibly even tomorrow. No. Not tomorrow. For I promised myself I would feel better tomorrow, but at the moment I feel nothing at all. I remember when I was young the first time I incurred anger. But I do not remember the second or third or even the seventieth. They have all rolled into one cantankerous memory that swells inside my brain with shallow pride – refusing to be forgotten. How soon we flee from childhood. How soon we lose a treasured innocence and learn the art of hatred and revenge, sacrificing love for bitterness. The games we play, hitting one another’s feelings like a tennis ball from player to player. But things will change tomorrow.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror but couldn’t return the stare. I doubt I ever will again. Too much pain lies behind the familiar eyes that look more strangely on me day by day. Layers of dust have settled throughout the house like snow. Every moment causes choking clouds of bad housekeeping and womanly neglect. Dust is but the carpet of the poor. But tomorrow I shall be rich.

It is getting late. The gentle heartbeat of the clock reminds me of the seconds that are passing, the minutes that are lost, the years that have been wasted. It chimes. Another hour is reached.

And then comes night -  a creeping sort of darkness that drifts aimlessly into every nook and cranny. A darkness filled with dreams and thoughts of love. I dreamt of love when I was young and thought that love would last forever. Nothing kills your childhood fantasies so heartlessly as life.

And mirrors do not reflect, but expand. The enlarge the world we live in, send image after image of glassy reality as far as the eye can see – if the eye can see at all. We do not live by hope, we live by mirrors, always seeing more than we can ever touch. Then someone takes the hope away and no one’s there to pick the pieces up. But tomorrow I shall not hunger for the realms of life that I can never know.

The bloodless pain of life still drips in my mind. It is not clouded by dust nor hidden by night. It is always there, life, ceaselessly festering in the gutters of the earth; breeding multiplying, growing, oozing out of drains and into air that once was pure. Life – spreading it s ugly black cloud over all that is beautiful, poisoning the good that may once have existed, as a parasite to death. And life – finally – to consume itself within the evil flames of bitterness that it exudes, and screams curses at the world with stolen breath.

Life shall be no more with time. The time is tomorrow. Time that drags the weary life out of us all, and the song still plays though the record’s stopped turning.

And soon dawn will crack the impenetrable darkness of the night with spears of sun. And run to hold the vision, throw yourself in one last bid from freedom from the world’s dizzy heights to land in the cradle of dawn, the arms of death, the caress of tomorrow.

And Then ...

What is death –

A final goal,
A gasp of breath.

And what are lies –

But kinds of truth
To close your eyes.

They are combined –

The ultimatum
In our mind.

We disbelieve

The power of love
That we conceive.

And all alone

Begin the lonely
Walk back home.

 

Omega

A whole life can go wrong

Before things turn out right,
When you’re staking your heart
In a love given fight.

Is there reason in life?

Is there living in death?
Is there much to be gained
From the story we left?

With the devil inside you

You dream of the past,
Remember old loves
And the hatred they masked.

So you think this is it,

He’s the love of your life.
But it’s always like that
And there’s no one who’s right.

You may re-live the nightmare

In another new land –
A new life, a new dream
But not a new man.

 

For Motives of Mercy

Night has begun its claim; spreading dark fingers around the world of human lives.

Within a house deserted by love a figure moves slowly among the shuttered shadows. Someone moves from room to room, searching for an answer among the remnants of a painfully remembered past.

He tried to see it the way it was, attempted rationality. Mirrors show us what we want to see; but sometimes we look into the living, human mirrors and then briefly the fantasising has to stop.

Once again, he had reached their bedroom. He smiled bitterly as the memories of the love nest it had been swarmed around his mind, refusing to be forgotten, pushed away.

She lay there sleeping, in semi-darkness; half dead, half dying. Before the affair he had believed in love; now he only believed in death because to him it was the only thing that existed with the promise of being fulfilled by every life; surer than life and fictional gods.

And if he let her have the baby it would be to him a lifelong reminder of wife’s painful unfaithfulness.

He wanted to destroy that part of her which had turned away, and to hold on more desperately than before to the woman who had a place in her life for him.

She had called it a childish fling, a meaningless inconsistency which could be forgotten – but for the baby. Yet she must have felt something for him, somewhere deep inside the bottomless pit of her heart. She must have needed, must have wanted, must have loved him. If only for those few brief moments.

And he loathed her honesty. She could have said it was his child. She could have lied to show she cared. Yet she chose to hurt him with her truth. She stabbed him in the heart, then twisted the knife. Her honesty repelled him. He tried to love her, but the more he forced himself, the more intensely repugnance surged through him.

His hand drifted restlessly over her sleeping body and lay on her neck.

A warm glow filled him, a replacement of something lost. He tightened his murderous grip. The warm glow was followed by another.

And then another.

Paradise Mislaid

The curtain rose – acquiring a silent grace of its own – revealing sylph-like, motionless figures cast into passionately constructed movements at the striking of a chord. He watched their frenzied forms gliding in unnatural grace across the stage, like falling snowflakes gently nudged through the air by kisses from the wind.

It was then that he saw her; when forsaken by faith in life, having failed to ever to more than simply exist, to feel his unforgiving past crumble beneath his feet sending his empty world into turmoil; a failure afraid of being found out, who had nothing to show for his pain, and he was struck by the hopelessness of it all in the silent crescendo of one unmerciful moment – he saw her then.

She stood there, lifeless, yet exuding a powerfulness of existence that reached into him and mocked his own unlived life. In a crowd of figures she danced alone, though never took a step; balancing on her toes in silent beauty as an image of infinite motion. Assured of sufficient attention she threw every part of herself into the role she had to lead. There was no element of her body which was not infused with tragic emotion, no proud smile to contradict the far away look in her eyes. Life is made up of light and shade; and as her feet greedily absorbed the floor beneath her she drifted from a shadowy silhouette against histories of snow to the concept of untouched love, which and virginal in a wicked world.

In a silent orb of her own, a universe inhabited totally be her, she drifted; oblivious to the fragments of people and visions of life that lay scattered around her; lighting her lonely path with a waning candle.

The music leapt once more into his ears. The lights blazed and his heart stood still for what was only a second, but seemed like the whole of his life.

With a vigorous intensity of love man formed the first link of the bonding chain to her. The unrequited love between them only emphasised the lovelessness within his own life, the realisation that he had no one left to turn to.

The sleep walking dancer flowed from one movement to another, tormenting her lover. And he felt so alone. He looked along the row of faces beside him, impassively staring at the mode of entertainment before them, indifferent, emotionless, not allowing two dancers to pick out the faults in their lives; or perhaps they had none. Now he felt as tormented as her spurned lover.

We are whole. In loving we become half. You cannot expect to gain unless you give, but who will sacrifice their soul for the sake of a heart they’ll never own. He watched, transfixed, as the two solitudes came nearer, recognised and protected and comforted each other, the heroes of their own story.

Was there nothing else to life but to love and to be loved, love learnt by loving, love that he never received and never felt. His life was not more than an assumed concept upon his soul. It had no meaning, existing in a vacuum – society’s world.

The jealous husband leapt upon the stage and stabbed the young lover. He would die all over again tonight at the next performance. He would live and die for days. She merely stepped over his sleeping body. It is all a part of her dream.

He looked once more down the row of blank staring faces awaiting enlightenment, and saw tears. For what did they cry? For love? The thought stretched itself around his heart, engulfing him, choking his breath. And with one hand he clasped the other because he had no one else to hold. Alone he tried to rediscover the half buried memories of his past.

We go through life looking for someone to make us whole, change and choose partners while dancing  to a silent love song. But somewhere out there it another person who’s looking around for you. He wanted to stop drifting.

And it seemed to fulfil a need in him to go on and on, fighting against all odds in pursuit of a hopeless goal, living beyond death and still forcing himself forward, staggering inexorably onward to the ultimate peak, the finale of his journey, not to be replayed at noon. Weary with existence, existence pushed him forward. Tired of life, life forced him onward.

The curtain dropped.

He felt the void of hell within him as the heavenly fires of his soul were gradually extinguished.

 

The applause died down.

He felt the pain which they pretended and filled with meaning the emptiness in their eyes. In rivers of emotion he suffered alone.

As the lights came on he realised that he would never be able to live for the sake of himself. It was time to cleanse himself of the assumed concept upon his soul that he called life.