cirrus circles

gathered moonlight in your eyes, the clarity it sends, i kiss them closed to bring the sky, near for what it lends, in cirrus circles high and dry, you're dancing like a kite, a curse or prayer e'er born on sighs, that i might rise above my height, when respite is the morning sun, it heals us with a song, and you my love the cirrus one, the one for whom i long, in coloured gasps we move the scene, the only truth i know, the things we do and truly mean, from which the spirit glows, far beyond the pale austere, civilised temporal display, chaos unfurling tattered here, you are as reason unto days, raised high above my earthen form, a tune that drifts but never errs, are we the handlers or the storm, that determines when and where?

to ground

gathered in some absent

scene

still no idea what this all

means

an inadvertent nod to

thickness

a lustrous ode politicised 

sickness

hear or read the clear 

decay

whence dream began it's gone

away

songbirds sing where e'er they

will

the heart of freedom's beating

still

in all of us if e'er we'd 

dare

to be again as something

rare

held my lover in my

arms

to rise above these static

charms

as fading values do more

harm

and torrent times just raise

alarm

we found the structure in the 

head

first rendered voice then heart is

bled

calamitous this shift of

ways

what seems germane but as e'er

betrays

stay in here the chorus 

calls

or is it me just as i

fall

to ground?

far

come unto the flower

as rain

amid the tired and pale

refrain

two steps there and

on toward

love resplendent

move forward

for not in hindsight

are we fed

in weary worry are we endless

bled

free at last to be with you

if you but come with me

it only works when come of two

lest mired in dark soliloquy

fear is just another one

the variables scrape against the glass

for these hearts are e'er undone

for these ideals beyond our grasp

please stay true to the sun in us

transcend such vast pervasive dross

in turns we wail then deign to trust

placing one o'er the other at any cost

for without this we are a field

where nothing fair can bloom

our lives the sum of what love yields

or fade away too soon

as you wish, my heart, my all

i will not speak the words for you

just grasping after all you are

if nothing else you know it's true

as one we'll journey far...

remediation stoicism (book excerpt.3)

I awake almost as an afterthought as the train ripples along the expressionless seeming track.

I absently wipe drool from my cheek.

I look out beyond the window to my left to see that the landscape is fading...

Not resolving.

It fades into some half-state of manifestation...

Someplace between my thoughts and...

Where we are.

All of us...

On this train...

Speeding past everything...

Everyone...

And nothing...

At all.

One wonders at that which one truly has or has not...

Overcome.

My friend's woman used to say to us both that we had "seen and experienced too much to ever be healed again...

The only thing left for one's such as you is to apply the simple truth of what you have witnessed...

And live a better life...

Treat people better...

Because you can...

And you know...

Better."

I am on my way to see my friend...

Anton.

His beloved Anja is now passed...

Away.

And we are left to try to apply some modicum of the goodness and perspective that she brought to him, and by extension...

To me.

But one also wonders...

In those all too pervasive moments when the light of those we love is not felt...

To what extent we are capable of harnessing, channeling, and applying any of that ineffable grace that they wear so effortlessly...

As a second skin...

When such grace...

For all those things that we have witnessed...

And experienced...

Seems...

Alien....

Unattainable...

And if attained...

Certainly...

Unsustainable.

The conversation had actually begun between me and Anton years earlier at the side of a mass gravesite near the border of Serbia and Bosnia.

He had been lecturing me yet again about the importance of objectivity...

Of detachment...

In journalism, and indeed in life.

Of course, this was long before he had met and fallen in love with Anja.

Back then, I had simply nodded in acknowledgment of his words without any real attachment to their meaning...

Ironically...

I had turned to regard a woman who had shaken off two security officers to descend into the pit.

She struggled desperately, sifting through the remains of those that were...

Lives that were...

Here...

In hopes of finding something...

Anything that remained...

Of her love.

I turned away.

"I understand what you're saying but how does one remain objective to that?"

Anton shrugged.

"One simply does."

"No," I said.

And that's when my most fundamental, existential problem truly manifested in my life.

I realised that I simply care...

Too much...

And despite my fervent wish that it could be otherwise...

Despite my endless attempts at looking at life through a Stoic lens that protects me from too much pain, I simply could...

Not.

swirling

And so it was that I lost some hours on a train.

But in the losing I came unto myself again.

I was on my way to Stuttgart to spend some time with a dear friend...

Because he had lost the love of his life...

And he had come unto nothingness.

Anton.

My friend.

My brother.

My mentor in some respects.

But this is a solitary business...

This living.

Except for those indescribably happy moments in which we are permitted the company of people we love...

Moments in which we texture the panes of our perspective with such wondrous colours and tones...

Moments in which we don't actually feel...

Alone.

I'd found it ironic for many years that he should have come to know a love so deep and real with his beloved...

Anja...

Anooshka.

After all, he had once been the prince of objectivity and as he liked to put it... 

"Respectful but necessary distance" that one must maintain between one's self and the subjects of one's observation for the purpose of chronicling and recounting this glorious yet insipid reality that we call...

Life.

The train steward came to check my ticket.

I patted my coat to feel for it.

Finally, I found it and presented it to him.

"Sir, you have a first class ticket here."

"And?"

"Excuse me, Sir, but why are you sitting on the floor beside the sleeping drunks and the bicycles? Why are you not in the carriage for which you have paid?"

I knew what my heart would say, but I would not waste the words then.

My heart would say that I am with my dear friend Anton, and we are come unto nothingness, but to the steward I simply smiled and asked, "Does it really matter?

He smiled too.

"I suppose not."

He shuffled on to the next carriage, pausing only at the glass door to look back and regard me with some modicum of consideration before he continued on with the execution of his duties.

The drunk nearest me on the floor twitched and spasmed against or in unison with whichever dream sequence it was into which he had fled...

The day.

But the irony in his way of looking at the world... 

Or in the way that he had for many years professed to look at the world...

Was exactly the point.

It was ironical because it was not who I knew him to be in his heart.

Even at his worst...

Or in our darkest hours...

In Bosnia.

In his heart he was needing a partner and a companion...

A soulmate...

And I celebrated his relationship with Anja every single day...

From the first day...

Unto the last.

But now, he is come unto nothingness and I must reach down into that absent state to deliver him once more unto the sun...

As he has so often done...

For me.

Despite his...

Objectivity.

I think of the way he had been so upset with me for having earlier in my life reached down into some other scene or reality in which to try to lend a hand to those in need, despite the requisite objectivity about which he incessantly lectured me.

He used to pump his misshapen fist in my face as he repeated the mantra again and again...

"We are not these bodies... we are not these stories..."

But the only thing I could think of in those moments was how both his hands had come to be misshapen in the first place.

In a Gulag...

Beside his father...

Stretched flat on parallel boards...

Being beaten...

And maimed.

The train rattles on the tracks.

The further drunk on the floor beside me flails his arm and wallops the nearer drunk across the head.

I think of the relativity of distance and time.

How is it that I am so in love with the greatest woman I have ever known, and my friend is now undone for such a love for her having passed...

Away?

I think of Eckhart imagining a relationship with God in which one is almost painting on a canvass together with the Father...

Interchangeably swirling colours to render more than what we feel...

In life...

Beyond those indescribably happy moments we get to feel...

When we...

Love.

Soon we will need to turn our attention once more unto the East.

Soon we will need to say something about the abhorrent war in Ukraine.

Soon we will need to reach our hands and our hearts deep into the centre of the most Hobbesian conflict the world has yet beheld.

But first we must emerge together...

As brothers and sisters...

From nothingness.