Moment Stretches On Forever

Nothing lasts forever. Everything is transient. So says popular wisdom and some religions. If so, does that mean time is elastic? Heartache drawn out in front of a second hand that never seems to move. Despair squeezed my heart with a cold hand, the shock of which galvanized me into twitchy wakefulness.

Awake to a sky burnished pearly and streaked with dull orange. The cottage cold as the fire burned low. Sitting up on the edge of the bed I felt the dream receding like the waves sliding up and down under the ice along the shoreline. Head heavy and sluggish, the ocean looking the same and eerily gelatinous. The ocean, I thought, is transient in appearance but not in existence. It is there. Always.

Apparently like the pain I felt this morning. Still feel, that is. The notion of transient and "this too shall pass" seeming an insult in the face of the broken heart lodged in my chest. It too shall pass? 

"When?" I muttered to the icy air. "Time is stretching out before me, and the end point of this seems nowhere in sight!"

Oyster colored clouds parted out over the waves. A thin beam of sunlight slowly made its way into the cottage, limning the interior with a glow that had little warmth. Outside the waves continued their slow caress of the beach along the headland. Faint tinkling reached my ears as the ice clotted along the tideline shifted. 

The blood seemed thicker in my veins. I could smell the salt water but it did not stir me in the usual manner. It was cold. I needed heat. I needed light. Time to stoke the fire. I shuffled over to the hearth, picking up the ice cold iron poker to prod the embers. Driftwood was low. I would need to do a beach walk.

I threw a few pieces of salty wood into the fireplace. More would go into the small potbelly stove, for tea and breakfast. The flames winked into existence, slowly growing in intensity. The minerals in the wood flared faint blue and green as they burned off. The heat seeped into my grateful bones. 

I turned to look out the windows facing the sea. The water was jade flecked with orange and gold from the sun. It was beautiful. The horizon stretched from side to side, infinite, relentless. It became my moment, delineator of pain, stretching on for what seemed like forever. To my lips came the prayer that soon the clock would tick, and this moment of pain would pass. The waves break, the ice cracks and groans. I wait.

The Fall of the King

The king awoke to the metallic caw of ravens, and a sharp stabbing pain in his left arm. He struggled to open his eyes through the crust of dried blood caking them shut. A raven sounded loud in his ear, and he started in spite of himself. The heat ebony bird hopped away and took flight. It had been pecking the the king's exposed arm. The vambrace was missing, lost somewhere on the hill above the beach.

The king groaned. A throbbing in his head sent forth waves of nausea, threatening to spill out on a flood of bile. He gritted his teeth. Bloody, groggy, he determined that he would not embarrass himself by spewing the little contents of his stomach in front of his men.

His men. Where were they? he wondered. The only sounds he could hear were wind on the grass and waves on the strand. No human noises met this ears. Only ravens and the earth. The king struggled to sit up. Rolling over, he braced his arms against the turf and pushed. He made it to his knees before a lancet of pain shot through his head. He trembled. He spat blood onto the emerald grass.

Slowly he lifted his head. The helmet he began to lift off. His hands trembled but managed to slide the iron with a bit of tugging. Blurry eyes focused on the inside of the helmet, dark and slick with blackening blood. One side of the piece was deeply dented. It was only by grace that whatever had struck his head had not split the helmet asunder. 

The blow had perhaps knocked him unconscious. Gingerly he felt around the top of his skull. Sure enough, there was a knob about the size of a small goose egg, split slightly across its middle. His fingers came away damp with blood, a few graying hairs sticking to his flesh. The king sent up a prayer of thanks to the war god that the wound was not worse. 

But his men. In his field of vision he could see what seemed a carpet of corpses, strewn about the hillock, entrails and blood bright and obscene against the deep green of the grass. Not a soul stirred while the ravens feasted. He saw them. They hopped and pecked. They ceased to pay the king any deference now that he appeared to be alive. Their feathers shone dully nacreous under the pewter overcast sky.

"I am alive", said the king, "yet the world appears to be dead. By what fortune is this?"

The king struggled to his feet. A cool wind sprang up, bringing with it the smell of blood and ocean, iron and salt. His sword lay in the grass. The tip was broken. The oyster colored steel shone through a film of blood. Notches in the blade gave testimony to a hard fight. On instinct, the king reached for the sword. The dread eased as he wrapped his scarred hand around the grip.

The sky was swirling with ravens. A cloud of jet broken only by patches of gray sky a few brave seagulls flitting in and out of the crowd. Death saturated the air, barely kept at bay by the ocean breeze. It was clear to the king now that he was apparently the only survivor. The captain of his guard lay a few feet away, his skull split by the axe still lodged in the bone. The sword of the captain jutted from the ribcage of his killer, both unseeing and stiff beneath the sky. The rest of his guard and the cohorts of the barbarians were splayed about the hill. Not one appeared to breathe, or make a sound.

Wind picked up, gusting, bringing with it the scent of rain. The king turned to face the sea and found himself wishing the drops would fall, if only to wash the blood and failure off his broken armor and battered body. He felt the specter of sadness nosing about his mind. So many lives lost of those who had believed in him, had made him king. But now he felt there was no kingdom, unless the territory was defined by the shell of his body alone. The king wept.

Hours may have passed. Maybe days. The king grew insensate to time, or so he thought. It was the creeping chill of sundown that finally roused him from his despair. Behind him the birds had settled down, some in a nearby copse of trees, others walking stilt-legged through the grass pecking at insects and the bodies. 

The king stood. The sun, peeking fitfully through the clouds, neared the horizon. Waves beckoned to him, and he resolved to wash himself clean in the saltwater. A staggering walk downhill along a rutted path, he divested himself of his armor and padding, piece by filthy, bloody piece. He clutched the sword by habit, but when he reached the tide line he thrust the pitted blade downward into the sand. As he did so, he pierced the body of a crab that had washed up in the wrack.

Fitting, he though darkly, that no respect is accorded to the living or the dead. He stood naked before the sea. Cold wavelets lapped his feet and ankles. A few sluggish strides forward found him knee-deep in the surf. The waves were gathering height and force, now, and he wondered of the sea god knew he was here. He wondered if the sea would reject him, now that his kingdom seemed lost, his body wracked and bruised.

The king raised his arms and leaned forward to plunge into a tall wave that rushed up the strand. The shock of the green water evoked a roar from the king's ragged throat. Seawater ran over his body. The salt stung the myriad cuts and scrapes that webbed his flesh. Pain and cold galvanized the king. He struggled further out into the surf, scraping blood and the flesh of others off his aching frame. He roared again, anguish and shame pouring from his soul. Out in the water came an answering voice, which to the king sounded like a command.

The king swam deeper into the sea. Up on the hill, in the company of birds and the night, the remnants of the kingdom  slowly faded from sight. He swam on, not knowing if it could be saved or if it would rebirth itself, and he would once again know the feel of a crown bestowed by the heart of another.

Sandcastle

Joyful spires built on foundations
laid in bright white gold sunlight
Under a sky of ecstatic blue
growing as fast as hands
could pour the shells and quartz
Into the molds formed patiently
by eager heads and hearts
Gadding about in a newborn day
Made just for them, by them,
glistening eyes so blinded by glow
the proximity to the waves
was overlooked and unheeded
Until the sea swirled in, uninvited,
swiftly swallowing the hope
that grew along the tideline
Swept out into the breakers
leaving only marks below
a surface bearing bruised
memories that once knew
the secret at the heart of the world

Et Tu, Amor? (Sensory Deprivation)

Long ago I read somewhere something like to be writer one has to deal in hard truths, discomfort, and things that make one cringe and squirm. Honesty of feeling is paramount in what goes on the page. Credibility is at stake. I know this. I have written about some things that made me squirm and cringe. I understand this need for honesty. Honesty has been on my mind overly much these days, a byproduct of emotional turmoil and loss. Here is a little hard truth I need to purge. I want love to bleed.

My cup may brim full of cynicism and bile, but love is an asshole. An asshole with inexhaustible resources to keep reminding my heart of that fact. Omnia vincit amor (“Love conquers all,”) wrote Virgil in his Eclogue X. I believed him, once upon a time, but in a very different fashion. That has changed. Love may conquer all as a creator, but this time it conquered me as a destroyer.

In my time of writing I have spilled much ink, digital and physical, in defense of love. How it can sustain you. How it ties one to others and allows growth, security, desire. Now I am seeing I have no faith anymore in my own hype. There is a limit to the numbers of heartbreaks I can take. It is most maddening that we have no way to hold love accountable for its transgressions.

Love lied to me. Not once, not twice, but three goddamn times in my adult life it flattered to deceive, pulled me down a path I believed led to a cure for loneliness and pain, a fountain of belonging. Love betrayed me. It smiled the entire time, every time, with every twist of the knife. So begins the stripping away of the senses that give juice to life.

Betrayal by love disturbs touch. Heat, cold, rough, smooth: all that is tactile carries with it at least a little irritation. Even the absence of sensation creates its own peculiar pain. The hands mourn the loss of a lover's hip, the mouth the lover's lips. There is perhaps nothing so generative of heartache than the void within one's grasp. To reach out in the night and feel nothing but space and sheets is agony realized to a degree bordering on obscenity.

Love as a pillager can ruin a good music library. All those great songs, and so many become unlistenable now. Listening is either a reminder of how good love was or how searing its absence. It is a small percentage of songs left that I can or want to hear without hitting skip. Raw emotion, anger, frustration working itself out in the screaming of lyrics that speak to all of those things festering in a heart exploding along the scars and fault lines. Most importantly, a verbal catharsis to help numb the lonely helplessness if only the sound did not hurt so much.

Do not think the palate escapes the collateral damage of losing love. Oh, no, taste suffers its own degradations. Brightness and sweet fade from the tongue. Savory turns to sour, ashes in the back of the throat. If taste remains it is bitter metallic. To sometimes eat alone by benign circumstance is a fact of existence, easily endured. To eat alone because of banishment from the table of the heart is an exercise in catered despair. Forget about cooking for joy. Stirring the pot with a broken heart is mere pragmatic numbness. The soul may be in limbo, but the belly has its own agenda. When they quarrel, hunger often wins at the cost of inner peace.

With love's loss, the eyes offend us but common sense lobbies hard to not pluck them out. Much business of life still depends on seeing in spite of the searing reminders of what we once had. Who knew that a photograph could pass as a branding iron? What terrible hooks in the heart are pulled at passing glances of social media feeds and photographs! They lie in ambush, these frozen memories of a life once well lived. Turn the page, scroll down left or right, none of it matters. Our eyes collide with the now fractured landmarks of a shared history that was more good than bad.

The heart swears that it recalls the scent of love yet it is the nose that does the work. The gentle aromas of existence, sunlight on a lover's skin combined with rumpled cotton and sweat. Pheromones aloft in the kitchen sensed over the aroma of dinner, teased out with a nuzzle to the neck. Exhalations and inhalations of a nightcap's departure in that time-stopping moment before the consummation of a goodnight kiss. Even the humble nose deals with loss when hearts disassociate.

Someone once told me that love is never the wrong answer. For years, I subscribed to that theology. I was a True Believer. It felt good, it felt right. But I woke up one morning after a few weeks alone again and decided my name was Thomas. The stigmata haven't changed my mind. Maybe because the stigmata are in my palms and I know the source of the pain.

You may think I wish to banish love from my life. No, I want to interrogate it. I want to cuff it to the table in the Box, break it down masterfully like Detective Frank Pembleton did to those perps on Homicide: Life on the Street. I want love to sob into its fist and tell me what horrid excuse it has for killing my heart. Of course, love is not guilty of murder, because I'm still alive. Fraud is another matter, and love is guilty as fuck.

The Fire Behind

Seeker knelt at the edge of the prairie, retching his guts out with volcanic intensity. Slow poison and spiritual exhaustion had taken their toll. His arms trembling with the violence of the possessed, sheer force of will kept his head from dipping forward into the foulness polluting the ground. Behind him, roiling smoke besmirched the horizon of the sea of grass that once held his heart. Seeker could feel the heat even at the miles he had put between he and it. He spat. Pain radiated from the stone behind his breastbone.

The heaves subsided. Seeker rocked back on his haunches with hands on his hips. Hot, it was under that furnace sun. He sucked in grateful lungfuls as a cooling breeze sprang up. He thought maybe the wind spirits still held affection for him if they deigned to grant such a mercy. There had been precious little of that in the many moons of running from a hole that had opened in the sea.

Ticking in the grass. Cricket choruses bidding him farewell, or perhaps composing a dirge. Seeker did not know. The high keening of a red-tailed hawk broke the symphony of crickets. Crusty eyes opened and he could see the hawk circling a short distance away. Towards the east a sprinkling of trees congealed into a dusty forest crowding the terrain that stretched out before him. Green. The color made his heart twitch, memories of who he once was crowding to the fore of a kaleidoscopic hallucination that tumbled like the ocean he remembered lay far beyond those trees.

Seeker made to go, gathering up a sweat-stained hat, a battered backpack, and a heavy walking stick burnished by months of use, sweat, and tears. The backpack bowed his back under its weight. The hat he settled down over his filthy brow. His trembling hands gripped the stick tightly as he willed motion into legs that ached like the throb of an earthquake.

Sunlight like molten copper beat down on Seeker's neck. He resigned himself to the burn, it was nothing new when he compared it to the tannings of his youth. A few hundred steps onward a raspy mewling caught his ear. "The cat!" he muttered to himself. He stopped to unload the pack. Sitting on top of some rags and an iron pot was a small bobcat. Seeker had found him in the grass by a stream crossed miles ago. The mother was nowhere in sight. Little ribs poking through a matted robe of fur had given him pause. Even through the despair and fatigue, Seeker felt the gravity of the feline.

Small paws grasped at his finger. A raspy little tongue licked at the tips. Seeker scratched the animal behind its ears, then rested it on his left forearm as he stood to go. He spat again to rid his mouth of the bile and spite. He looked back one last time. The horizon writhed and curled, the smoke a giant serpent in his garden of Eden. It was closer than he realized. He turned away from the setting sun and the heat. The sea of grass would hold him no longer. There was walking, nothing more under a gargantuan sky to keep him moving towards the unseen ocean he hoped would buoy his sinking heart.

Water-silver, Flow For Me

Blood and muscle seem aggressively prosaic in consideration of matters of the heart. It seems impossible such a lump of flesh could carry, could withstand the currents that flow between one heart to another. Protein seems an inadequate medium for the task of withstanding binding and intertwining the precious elements of souls in concert. Certainly it gives no impression of suitability when those souls get sucked in to the dark that is distance, drift, and dissolution.

Metal, now there is a different story. Ah, what would one gain with a heart of metal? Endurance at the cost of romance? Resilience in the face of soul pain, a refined ability to withstand hammer blows to the psyche? Metal becomes attractive when the grasping at straws in vain hope of keeping the thing together. Even as one watches the rust creep over the surface. Seeing the stress cracks form as the "hellishness of life" grips a flimsy heart in its merciless hands and bends it back and forth. Inevitable, the breaks that form with their sawtooth edges and searing heat.

Metal versus flesh. Perhaps the best course is a combination of the two. The only element that come to mind is mercury. Heavy, liquid, toxic under the wrong conditions even as its fluidity allows it to adapt and flow over the rocks in a river of life. Do you not see the miracle of love as a pool of shimmering silver collected under the sun and moon, flowing from the invisible truth and into the invisible truth? We all have dipped our hands in that pool, once or twice or many times while ignoring the impossibility of controlling what we gather. Our hands our poorly suited to the task.

What of magnetic fields, or cosmic forces of strange action at a distance? This emotion we call love is one way, if somewhat incomplete, of exerting control. Our mercury hearts can only be shaped by its funneling through the channels of love. Plasma fields, magnets, gravity, our hearts subjected to them all. Hope provides fuel, elation the energy, and belief that the forge of love will achieve the successful enjoining of another mercury with ours.

It happens, sometimes. The universe may be insensate to the messiness of the heart's business, but its laws do not forbid the possibility. That crystal clear day where the mind and the body and the soul wake up with that second sine wave pulsing through them. The light from within shows the form of the heart. Picture this form of water-silver in resplendent argentine glory against the absence of light, the fuliginous wilderness of life without shared love. Shimmering beauty held in place by forces we sense but do not truly understand. For what would true understanding bring us in that case?

The universe is full of forces inimical to the propagation of love, this we know. The gravity of emotions, the drifts, the rifts that develops over time as our attention gets diverted by the mundanities and tragedies of existence. Sometimes these forces bend the heart or even torment it to the point where the mind's eye watches it flow into every nook and cranny where pain and loneliness have not taken up residence. For the fortunate the heart of water-silver gradually reorganizes itself. The shape is reattained, equilibrium reached. A benefit of like finding like and remaining close enough that integration is always possible.

Emotional physics often works to the negative, often to our sorrow. Pain, loss, even simple carelessness can in concert create forces too great for anything to withstand.  A heart orbiting the sun of love, a planet of rock and dirt, neither is better able to resist a supernova even if they see it coming from a long way off in space and time.

It happens. The explosion, slow or fast. The superheated plasma of emotion, the gravity of pain and disintegration reach out across the vacuum of non-love to explode the heart. And we watch it happen as the force pushes us out of ourselves. We float and spin helplessly into a black speckled with millions of pieces of what used to give us life. In those moments we no longer trust gravity, or love, to bring them all back together. In the interstellar black of loss we lunge and grasp, frantic to cup our hands around the water-silver talisman of belonging we once knew. We gather it, one small drop at a time.

The Fracture

Chasm, by Kevin Shea, May 2017

No one tells you that little drama would have a huge part in the fracture of life, in the foot bones of the soul while it slams the brake pedal to the floor in a bid for control. That cliff edge is close and getting closer.

No one tells you that of course this is not your beautiful house, this is not your beautiful wife, because they never belonged to you in the first place. Of course, this is what the imps in your head whisper to you as you try to fall asleep.  No point in asking through sobs "How did I get here?" because you truly don't grasp it all. And sometimes the shittiness of life means you will not be told by those who swing the hammer.

No one tells you that the cleavage plane of mid-life won't be rewarded with that supermodel armcandy in the leather bucket seat. No, you won't get that as comfort, cold or otherwise. What you get is waking up in what feels like a down-at-the-heels luxury hotel, unsure of where you are, and cursing at the asshole cat who can't leave the mini-blinds alone.

You ask yourself, if this is a hotel, why is there a cat here?

Because right now, it isn't a hotel, it is a hiding place. The cat is along for the ride, and you can't help but be thankful for a companion with whom to gaze into the chasm you have to cross.

Magpie Tales 303: Our Ink Began to Dry

Image via Magpie Tales

Ghost in the corner of the eye as

Counselor's door smacked my ass

hollow boom of sanctioned freedom

imploded in a fevered skull

She followed me to the car

worn leather soles scratching a dance

on oily pavement, halogen mirror balls 

glaring up the garage park club

Keys of the beater I got to keep

papers on its roof, a sheaf

of lead ending our mutual bondage

heavier wings we have never flapped

At stall 19 we stopped, me to weep

she to spin, or was it my head?

in the light of release she blurred

into the hard grey of my new prison

That Awkward Moment of Collapse

….when you realize that you are not living up to your promise and potential. Those terrible moments waking from a dream at godawful o'clock in the morning. A dream of collapse and loss, panting in panic muddled with fear. The seizure when you feel in your heart that you are so far from what you said you wanted to be that you will never catch up.

Pardon me. A moment, please. (Sighing)

I keep writing "you" as if I am describing the arc of your lives, you the reader. I should stop that now. What I should have written was "I". That awkward moment when I realized those awful things about my life. Not you. I cannot speak of these things in your life because I do not know the arcs of your lives in such particulars.

Waking up from such unsettling dreams as often as I have in recent weeks, it is my hope that no one of whom I know is experiencing the same. It makes for poor sleep, which in turn makes for sluggish days on which it takes far too much effort and time to get back to being in the moment.

These dreams have a recurring theme, that of losing all of my means of support. Cold sweat awakens me, wondering where my jobs went, how could I possibly lose them and the money that goes with them. I twitch awake, breathing hard. It is unpleasant, to say the least. I know these dreams have their roots in the unfortunate round of layoffs I endured starting in 2008, and the subsequent scrambling to find gainful employment. The question I cannot answer is, Why now?

What add a particular new shade of funk is that this unleashing of the succubi in my subconscious has manifested in the form of shame. Shamed by a sense of personal failure as a writer. In the cold grey sump of sunless mornings, imps have been whispering in my ears: "You will never be a professional. You squander any gift you might have possessed, you have not achieved meaningfulness as a way of life."

This is so disturbing that words are not sufficient to illuminate the heaviness in my heart. It is damning to hear those awful voices, to look back on what I have done, and think that perhaps the imps are right. Catchy titles, very short stories that exist in a near vacuum, the occasional flash of brilliance: these are things in which I perhaps have some facility.

Perhaps. Yet a solid body of work they are not. I have had a million ideas go nowhere. I have failed to produce anything I would be happy to call a book. A collection of short stories, maybe, if one cares to be generous of spirit. Yet disjointed fever dreams and notes scrawled on virtual Post-its do not an oeuvre make. Because of this, the small hours of the morning become tainted with anxiety swirled with disappointment bordering on self-loathing.

My mind overflows. My hand is stilled by a lack of ambition or surfeit of sloth, I am not sure which. The disappointment I feel fuels the crematorium of my dreams. I do not write this to depress or disturb any who may read it, forgive me if this has happened. This scrawling of mine is not a plea for pity, I wouldn't be so pathetic.

I write because of the dreams. I recently read truth from a favorite author of mine, who said "...honesty means nothing if there's no real risk to it, no self-examination". The dreams are forcing me to self-examine. I write this out of honesty, and I am enervated by what I have not done.