the maelstrom.6 "following the drones to sleep"

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...

yet

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

refrain

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

the maelstrom.5

The sun is not yet fully manifest...

In the sky...

I align myself with shadow as best I can...

That I might remain...

Unseen.

The bitter winds swirl and tiny flakes of snow and ash from the ruin all about wet my face.

The black bird at my side on the rail regards me with something that may have approached...

Pity.

My thoughts return once more to the woman whom I presume to be slowly waking beyond the war torn walls that divide us.

I remember all too well how she feels...

How she tastes...

I understand better the little bird's pity for me.

It occurs to me that the twenty odd years that I've lived since last I...

Tasted her...

Were like some half-life...

Or if not a half-life, then some crass and sustained experimentation in causality and consequence.

But that cycle, if it could indeed be deemed as such, had been set into its dire motion as a result of a single grace offered...

And spurned.

I closed my eyes and thought of something that Anton...

A mutual friend of Billings and mine whom we had reencountered those weeks prior in Salzburg...

Had said in response to the Day Three Conference Theme: "Globalisation and the European Debt to Morality."

The idea was that as a result of myriad atrocities that had gone before...

As a result of war or merely human sickness...

Displacement...

Trafficking...

Ukraine or Moldova...

In the Balkans...

The two World Wars...

Innumerable conflagrations and tiny cuts at the veils of both humanity and spirituality; whether healing or damning in and of themselves...

The point the organisers of the event were trying to make was that no matter the cost; both economically and societally...

Europe's borders needed to remain open to ensure at least the chance of providing refuge to those from other parts of the world who were in desperate and mortal need.

When the speaker on the stage had said those words aloud, Billings, Anton, and I had all taken a long sip of our drinks and indeed, there was a sense of those in attendance having been rendered collectively agog.

Horrifying scenes of famine and violence occurring in detainment camps hastily erected near port and land border crossing points across Europe appeared randomly and furiously on the massive monitors that had been mounted on walls and arches all over the smokey hall.

After a moment I muttered to my friends,

"I suppose it's like Camus used to say, 'Freedom is nothing more to a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst."

Anton choked on his drink.

"Fuck Camus. Have you seen what's happening to the European demographic? We are witnessing arguably history's most significant 'peaceful' infiltration...

Invasion... 

No, it's more than that...

It's an infestation...

And I emphasise 'witnessing,' because we're sure as hell not doing anything about it."

Billings dragged his cigarette.

"Harsh, but you're not wrong."

And though I said nothing in that moment, I was thinking the same thing then as I am now...

Freezing on this rail...

That it was sadly...

Fatefully...

Pitifully...

A result of all of those tried and true human failures...

War...

Oppression...

Exploitation...

And on and on...

That I had met Nadija in the first place.

It was as a result of all those things...

And the choices that both she and I had made up to that point...

And since...

That I find myself stationed on this iron rail outside her window now...

Obscured within the greater malaise of war and the absurd...

Afflicted by a throbbing erection and thoughts of ideal...

As day begins to coalesce into some semblance of...

Being.