thought i heard your heart again
feels like something's there
in deserts lovers must sustain
like promise on the air
streaming on the endless night
unto the other side
i know somewhere there is a light
we'll greet with arms stretched wide
grasping after morning dew
the grace to love as one
it starts as e'er with me and you
we temper our own sun
that warms and heals us
along the bitter way
believe i'm worth your trust
i bleed it everyday
understand
the way of men
like drifting sands
e'en now as then
the hammer falls
the world waits
we build more walls
secure the state
a school of thought
a breath of air
dominion sought
no matter where
like shackled birds
crane unto sky
far from the words
we wonder why
whilst day and night
the sirens wail
for wrong and right
amid the gale
of man's attempts
to understand
our deep contempt
for fellow man
took the sun to someone
lost in need of light
sometimes we fall and then succumb
but we're still in the fight
as driftwood on the waves
as haloes at the head
just a tender, human phase
some ideal for which we've bled
and it makes all this chaos fade
away as waves recede
from the havens hearts have made
the ones our spirits need
feeling for the morning lark
somewhere near to us
there's grace beyond the dark
and substance to our trust
took to someone sun had fled
alighted at the glass
like waves that soothe instead
to know the heart at last
Fled from scene and risen sun for frozen, former stately ruin I had claimed as rooms...
The bird had trailed me...
And then had receded into some tangential shadow to the slanted edifice.
Alone, as a new day in the weary world swirled around me.
I should not have been here at all.
It is not my place...
My time.
But the others at Salzburg had reminded me.
They had...
Compelled me...
With an invocation...
Some sinister conjuring...
An invitation...
To a revisit an old...
Exsanguination...
Body...
Soul...
The same.
I moved on.
In the surreal early morning hours...
The stench of spent ordinance and life lingered like a lattice...
Unseen...
I had made my way...
Away from the rail...
My face tucked into my cloak as I passed men and women...
Children...
On paths that had once been roads or thoroughfares...
A three-legged dog led a litter of kittens out from under a heap of rubble into the sun...
A one-eyed man hobbled with his three malnourished goats in their wake.
But I had a place to go.
A place to secure some shelter...
Such as it exists...
Today.
War begets relative opportunistic commodity acquisition
But once the siege becomes full-blown, people scatter or huddle...
And in such circumstances, things are invariably left...
Behind.
It is when the ruin is effected, and the ashen shroud of devastation hangs low and it's all the people have to breathe that the true face of humanity is revealed.
This thought summoned to my nostalgia another...
A memory or some desperate reverie...
From another war...
In the Balkans.
I had once come unto a village that had been so...
Put asunder...
By man's fervour for mayhem and discord...
For conflict...
That within the pallid parameters of that dark and gothic seeming place...
There remained not a single soul who survived the conflagration who had not lived upon this earth fewer than sixty years...
The lame and mentally absent male elders there had taken to the muddy...
Bloodied, single thoroughfare in the village with whichever musical instruments they could find...
And they played with commensurate fervour...
And persistence...
To that which the others apply to their mayhem and discord...
A tune of undoing...
And of beginning.
It was a tower of song that had no end to its...
Magic.
One of the women sitting at the chicken coop which doubled as the café had said to me in a language which I should not have understood...
But somehow I had...
"They don't play a tune that any of us here has ever heard before...
Such is the lamentation in all our hearts...
That now...
As spirit forms of our former selves...
There music spirals on winds over and over again...
Like a suggestion that...
Never gets old...
It is always becoming...
That whenever they come unto a passage of the melody at which one is compelled to think or say...
'I know this next part,'
The players imagine something new or different on the fly...
That the journey up and out of this...
Disease...
Continues...
And as accompaniment to this tune...
We women of the village hum with our voices in the same way...
Steadfast in our attempts to live and love up...
And out of all of...
This."
I had not slept for at least two days...
Two nights.
I could almost hear that music...
And the sound of those women's voices...
As I made my way through the swirling snow back to my ruin...
My haven...
I must have begun to dream as I walked...
I could almost taste and feel her...
Nadja...
We had stolen away from the town and had come up into the foothills...
And were fell upon one another at the gothic cemetery beyond the outskirts...
With snow and the winds dancing all around our bodies...
Like life...
I should not ever have known her...
Not in any sense.
Nor would I have...
Had it not been for those circumstances...
Those compulsions.
The same as now.
I began to hum along with the lament of those old men and women...
Lifting their hearts on a lament...
Bled together with hope...
In my nostalgia...
As I fade away to sleep...
The constance of the tune made me think...
Of drones...
fall away from wobbling heads, raise a glass to this or that, falling far from soulless dead, it stinks, what all our days begat, as if it ever mattered much, spirit's weight upon the air, something rare we could not touch, without some proof to know it's there, longing lingered at the line, still scraping at the words, sentiments that we defy, ideas fly like birds, far from lands once fraught with form, so enlightened at the start, compulsion seeming sickening norm, to rip the world apart, then glance along continuum, we reap just what we sow, tearing at e pluribus unum, the devil we don't know... yet
looking unto crimson skies
from a longitudinal state
moods we show with words or eyes
with longing mark the days
dawn sings prophesied divergence
or latitudes of hell
but within there is resurgence
as mirrors known so well
come free into the time
and skins we penetrate
for hours sing sublime
reality here obviate
would that it could come and go
again and again
compulsion to live fast or slow
forever here remain
o'er glistening lips and breast
the skies purvey the truth
mired here like all the rest
away from me and you
chorus witness at the gate
please just come again
ring and ring it will not wait
this desperate last refrain
