alliteration-dissidence part 2

"Had any of that actually happened?" The man wondered at the fringes of sleep.

A trio of hooded sisters extended their hands unto him to beckon him deeper...

Further away from solace, and closer to the truth.

The pale, bloated body that had been raised on a hook from the sea...

The countless other corpses that had made landfall with the tide all those years ago.

How many years had it already been?

Six.

Six years since the man's dear friend and mentor, Billings, had been identified among the dead that had washed ashore that night from the Aegean.

He shuffled over onto his side in hopes that the haunting would turn away from him and relent unto encroaching dawn.

A circle of words haloes his sleeping aspect in that freezing bed...

In that distant hotel.

"Still, one wonders why one wishfully wails at the wistful world. One wonders why."

And in response the man's own voice mutters...

"For want..."

And then laughter.

"Yes, of course." Whispered the first voice whimsically.

"For want."

The man had fallen asleep with the spectre of war reeling to form in that inexorably nearing distance.

The resonant woman with whom Xavier Cross had spent the evening had asked whether he had wanted or needed her to stay.

"Need would be a strong word, and I have early rising meetings," he had told her.

It was a lie, of course.

And very likely she had merely been polite in having asked.

None of it matters, anyway.

He actually may have said those words aloud...

Through a circle of smoke.

No...

He doesn't smoke.

It was his breath...

His warm breath...

On cold air.

"I could get used to this," she offered almost as a lifeline.

He said nothing.

So, she left.

As if she was ever there...

As if she had ever existed beyond and free of the parameters of war and oppression.

And now he is still replaying everything in dream as if he were watching it on the silver screen in some anxious cinema circa 1942, when the whole world was at war and dreams were as ever, but in times of war somehow even more starkly and fervently, rendered and realised in the few things that people can do for one another.

And in 2021, very little has changed.

Here it comes again.

And the bitter cold streaming in through the window that Cross has forgotten to close, perhaps in slavish hopes that perhaps even a single wish might succeed in fluttering out and up unto the sky.

What would it be?

The one wish, if only one could manage the journey...

That he would truly wish...

To be?

Would he wish for an end to war in the wayward, wistful world?

For rarest love that lasts?

A sea of coloured stars that swirl?

And conjure up the past...

In which old friends could laugh above the wailing world...

And revel in the frivolous exercise of uttering alliterative phrases...

As armies wake and coloured warring flags unfurl...

Or just a salve to see us through these endless phases...

In which we invent, conjure, and loose hells...

Upon one another.

Cross stares off into the distance, growing nearer through the frosty window...

Some dank hotel...

December, 2021...

Zaporizha...

There's a writer that he must meet...

A dissident...

With whom he must reunite...

To try to make some sense of his old friend's death...

Billings...

And some sense of how all this global/social rift has brought us...

Here...

Again.

advent-dissidence

advent-dissidence

1. Advent

Circa 2015-The Aegean Coast of Greece

The floodlight from the dock groaned as the workers struggled to rotate it on its mount. 

The floodlight sat upon a wrought iron base, and it cost a lot of effort to turn the wheel. 

Mostly, it was considered to be a waste of time and energy.

Afterall, one could always wait until morning to regard the corpses either floating in the sea or washed-up on the shore. 

What was the sense in disrupting a good night’s worth of keeping warm within the shelter, playing cards, drinking Ouzo, and boasting of imagined conquests in long dead days?

The two workers on duty, Tassos and Giles, had been notified by the magistrate that there was some pressure being placed upon the harbour master to search for the corpses of any Westerners who may have washed up with the others.

Apparently there is also a hierarchy among the dead.

Of course, Tassos and Giles had heard the cries from the Aegean. 

That had been hours earlier.

They had been warm within the shelter.

But, despite the ancient stone walls of the structure, the two men had heard those sounds at the same time that, had they cared to look unto the horizon, they would have beheld the suggestion of doom as some vast but inexorably nearing distance strangled usable light from the sky and replaced it with a crimson, insipid hew.

Of course, there might have been a chance to save at least a few of the desperate women, children, and men who had been swept up in the storm, separated from their rafts or dinghies, and had come unto that shoreline clinging to little more than some faint hope after having fled the desperate and tumultuous circumstances from which they had fled.

But one supposes that life is just a construct of cycles.

Beginnings and endings.

Tides coming in…

And then receding unto some quiet and eternal deep.

No one who had ever known Tassos well would have described him as a pensive, astute, or contemplative man.

More likely, they would have been compelled to impart to anyone seated in a circle by a fire in increasingly boisterous tones on drunken nights that…

Truth be told, it was said that the man had quite a way with the goats in the fields.

And the locals would laugh together with the acquaintances, and they would speak in their own language and continue with the merriment.

To the exclusion of anyone outside of the circle.

Such is the nature of circles.

But on that evening, amid the stygian wail of wind, sea, and death coalesced the suggestion of a thought that had come to Tassos. 

It had occurred to him that the sea always offers up its gifts irrespective of what anyone does or does not do.

Whatever anyone does or does not want… 

Whatever people do or do not choose…

There is balance.

It is as certain as the tides, themselves.

And some people somehow come to feel justified in their indifference to that which occurs around them. 

For instance, earlier when those vague and unknown husks were out in the harbour drowning, Tassos had cringed at the disruptive nuisance of the voices crying out in desperation. 

The evening had begun so well, and now this.

Now, some hours later, the two men strained against the wheel at the base of the floodlight, that was trained upon the flotsam. 

They scanned the vacant eyes and the bloated figures bobbing in the foamy water with only marginal interest or attentiveness. 

They had seen it all so many times.

Nevertheless, one of the corpses stood out from the others for its pallor. 

Tassos and Giles laboured in unison, turning the wheel to train the floodlight down upon the wretch that had become entangled in a morass of seaweed.

The body moved with the tide at first, lightly bumping up against one of the wooden foundations of the dock as if in some soft, innocuous dream of gentle harmony.

But soon, it was unable to recede for the seaweed having bound it to the foundation, and so it smacked again and again with increasing force against the pole. 

The two men released the wheel at the same time… neither bothering to say anything to the other, as scores of other corpses made landfall twenty meters away at the beach, upon the tide in the only condition in which any nation in any age, whether in antiquity or in contemporary times, would truly and without complaint receive them…

Quiet.

Unobtrusive.

Dead.

Finally, Tassos went away from the wheel… taking the long pole with the great, curved hook at the end of it that was leaned up against the side of the ancient stone shelter in which he and Giles had been meticulously anesthetising the burden of days, and he clambered unto the end of the pier.

Giles followed dutifully in his wake.

“We have a winner,” said Giles cynically.

The two worked in tandem, and eventually succeeded in fishing the bloated body from the water.

They panted from the exertion.

Giles threw up a bit into his own mouth for the stench.

A moment or two passed in relative stillness.

Each of them, in some way or other trying to grasp the idea weighing on the sky… 

As if there had never been any substance or relevance to the lives that had preceded any of this…

This…

End.

And then finally…

Absently…

As though he had just emerged, however fleetingly, from beneath some debilitating existential murk, Tassos remarked…

“This doesn’t feel like something that’s going to end anytime soon…

This feels like the start of something…

More.”

in effect

gather sun

or gather trust

the high ideals

just gather dust

in mirrored halls

on carousels

we rise and fall

heaven and hell

the transference

from pain to bliss

the relevance

of all we miss

amid the living

mortal stream

taking or giving

the same it seems

an ancient tome

no words within

adrift or home

we must begin

to glimpse at dawn

amid temporal shift

what's here, not gone

or e'er remain adrift

bereft of all the grace

of those who draw in turn

from smiles upon the face

the will to somehow yearn

to feel a finer state

to bleed out the defect

in hopes we don't abate

all feeling, in effect

mirth

in some obscured way

as time slips through our hands

the living of these days

is all that life demands

enumerating

stars in sky

as ever contemplating

countless reasons why

dream is there

and we are here

as dust on air

so far from near

the cold within the bones

a sigh in silent space

eternal journey home

please help us find our grace

a tone in which to be

so far from patterns formed

a song of reverie

and shelter from the storm

the sequences they propagate

procession is as lore

defy the ills they advocate

and be as something more

a whisper spoken unto earth

projecting vision unto life

in circles we shall bleed the mirth

with which our hearts are rife