Star Child

Ashes to ashes...
           Dust to dust...

We are the children of the stars.
A blink in the eternality of time.
Our states and empires built upon the blood and sweat of millions,
Built to take it's place underneath the never setting sun
Crumbles to soft sand in the flood of passing summers.

Standing against the crashing of the waves you pledged an eternity.
But your eternity is hardly enough, merely a lifetime, a short wink
Or that moment between wakefulness and sleep
While I wander amongst my brothers and sisters in the stars, never tiring, never sleeping, never aging, never feeling.
Dear dear child, of what use can your eternity be to me?

You stare out at the stars to search for me
You wait and you wonder, you cry and you bleed.
You canter across these boundless plains, yearning to feel, again, the rush of stardust in your hair.
Your travel endlessly, on boats and cars, by foot and air
Yet what you search for will never be there, on this little circular planet
Where to go forward is to draw tighter the strings of your net.

Out goes the brief candle then, I watch your flame
Flickering against the dark, then begin to wane
For it burnt at both ends, for me,
Then, the last struggling ember glow and fades
As you grow still and cold.

Only then do I hold you again in my arms
When your warmth no longer bleeds into my skin
I will take you into the stars again, dear child,
To that place where the deepest cold seeps through skin, and flesh and bone and blood
And ice locks you away from the ravishes of time
So that I may gaze upon you forever.

Confessions II (T.A.T.U.)

These are serious times and I feel totally lost, if I'm asking too much it's only because being with you has opened my eyes. Who would've believed, such a perfect surprise? I keep asking myself, and wondering how, I've tried to close my eyes and block it all out. Want to fly to a place where it's just you and me, no doubt no shame and we can be totally free...

All the things you said, running through my head...

and I'm all mixed up, feeling uncommonly rushed. They say it's my fault, but I want it so much. Silence the screams, in the summer rain, running down my face and wash away all the stains. You stop and stare and worry about me, but I'm feeling for you what you're feeling for me. I can't try to pretend and I cannot forget and it's driving me mad, killing me instead...

All the things you said...

They've shackled me tight, I've rattled the rails. They've bound me tighter and pinned me with nails. I've screamed and cried in the dead of the night, I've wanted so much, just give me the signs. Nobody else and you still can't read minds.

Faster, looking at me, tell me what do you see? 

Have I crossed a line?

Farther, nothing can be, something you clearly told me

Have I lost my mind?

Confession

We sat, and from across both sides of the table, our overflowing words dammed behind closed lips. Our eyes, pleading for the other to end the silence. Suddenly, the wood that separated us could've, instead, been a writhing, blackened sea, a burning savanna, or cold and jagged peaks. Then that moment passes, and though we have not moved, I wake and I know. You are untouchable, unreachable to me. The bridge between us was washed away in the flood, and I had lost you in the plethora of words unspoken.

Epilogue

I'd always thought that the world would end dramatically. I'd pictured it a thousand times over, the darkness, the rain, the blinding flashes of lightning in the sky and the rivers of fire would score the earth, the screams of panic and pain and suffering and despair and terror, and death, sweeping its smothering robe over the orange horizon. Or perhaps it would be a watery grave for us; the low rumble that crescendos to a ripping roar, the sea risen, tearing rabidly against the shore, and then plunging towards civilization, engulfing us in its suffocating jaws.

But never like this.

Looking back now, perhaps I would've characterized it an unnervingly serene. The calm before the storm, as far as cliches go. Though there is a flaw with that convention; nearly any ordinary day would seem eerily calm in comparison to the events that followed. Perhaps, then, it is purely a matter of contrast rather than a foreshadowing.

Either way, it matters not. The wheels of destruction had already been set in motion against our existence long before we were aware, the earth churning beneath us, the laws of physics and fate aligning each minute hapchance, accumulating steadily towards our demise. And by we, I bear no self-indulgent notions to infer the destruction of humanity is comparable to the destruction of the world (that would merely be another extinction, an event with which we are all too familiar, and contribute regularly to) and extend this to mean the entirety of the planet on which we reside.

With the dampening effects of hindsight, the destruction of one planet in on solar system among the billions of solar systems and millions of galaxies in the world and the trillion stars and supernovas, it hardly seems a very significant event at all. What is the destruction of one little lump of rock in comparison to the disintegration of entire galaxies as they are devoured by black holes?

But I digress.

It was a rather dull morning. Steel grey clouds smothered the sky and everything had faded into a blander shade. It did not pour, but neither was it dry; a dampening misty drizzle rendered visibility to about the distance between the tip of your nose to your outstretched fingertips. It was not bone cracking cold, nor was it pleasantly warm, but a musty chill that nipped gently at un-gloved finger tips and slipped its way under woolen coats.

At precisely 9:14 in the morning, there was a shudder. Nothing big, just a small jolt, the same feeling you get when a car shifts gears. Life in the metropolis didn't even halt long enough to acknowledge it, the tell tale signs of imminent doom. Lying in bed a the time, I'd associated it to those falling sensations you get half between sleep and awakening.

About half an hour later, for no one really bothered to look down at their wrist watches when the world was ending to record the exact time at which it ended, everything suddenly went dark.

To My Grandmother

I was born in the dusk of your years
When the winter's winds, and wearied roads
Had etched upon your withered skin
The thousand lines of waste's weary pace.

I never knew your springs or summers
Never saw the girl that perhaps still lingers
Untouched and sleeping in your mortal shell
Locked behind the reflection in the well,

Only the old woman bent and stooped
A glowering ember in a darkened grate
You gaze through dimmed brown eyes
Worn and tired as of late.

Your tongue was foreign to me
I spoke of a different world to you
In slurs and meaningless beats
Came the same tired gesture of reply,

I wish I had known you then,
The springs and summers,
The butterflies, that danced and
The songs that you sung,
Now forever hidden within your mind
Calls out to me a tuneless melody

I have watched you seep away
These eighteen long years
Watched the strength wane from your limbs
Watched the colour bleed from your hair
Watched the blood drain from your face
And watched your soul dim in your eyes.
Yet it startles me, that from your body
Two robust generations had sprung.

I wish I could find the words
To say what I wish to say.

Now that you tether upon the banks of Lethe
Would you look back upon us
With gratitude or with shame?

When nights cloak should fall
As is common to us all
Would then, you rejoice
In the release of your pain.

Would your spirit then be freed
To soar high above mortal pains
To leave your decaying shell
To see the heart behind my silent pleas?

What do you dream of now as you lie
White and pale as your sheets
To walk the forward path
Or back to your shackles and chains
Back to our weeping hearts?

And should upon the morrow,
That last tear, forbid, would fall
Would it be a trickle of joy
Or sadness for the sadness we'd recall?

Perhaps, Goodbye

With love, your grand-daughter,
Who speaks a foreign tongue,
Sheds foreign tears,
And grieves with a foreign heart.

Hide and seek

We're washed up amongst these constellations

Floating in this frozen sea

Pushed by the waves of tension

That builds up in between

The lies that you tell me

Carry me out in the tide

Till I'm lost and alone

Yet you still have things to hide 

Knowing us we shouldn't have to play these games

And now it is time to decide

Rewind the clock and return the day

The sun rewinds from the west

Tell me all the secrets you keep

Maybe then you'll find your sleep

Don't keep up this game of hide and seek

A million miles in the wrong direction

I had all those dreams of eating those miles up with you, with the wind in our hair and the sun on our faces, we flew. Meanwhile the musics pumps out and in the deep of our hearts we knew, somehow, that this could not last, we were going too fast...

Tell me why, why is it that one is too far to reach, and the other just walked away?
Tell me how, how have I ended up here on my own, all alone and with nothing to say?
And while the sun stills shine outside the window, I'm sitting here watching snow fall through the panes.

Sometimes I wonder if anything really ever lasts, or my fantasies will come true or its just that, nothing every really goes the way we plan, and nothing just comes with the drop of a hat. I guess, I knew, and it's better than just coming out of the blue, the times I hear your voice are too few now...

Tell me why, why is it that I can't stop the tears from my eyes, or the thoughts of you tearing through my head?
Tell me how, how this would happen every time I'm curled up, sobbing in my bed?
And while the birds still sing outside the window, I'm sitting here picking up the pieces that are left.

It's too dark outside now to see out
Your heart is a million miles out
In both directions...