Flowering

 

I've heard it said that he is singing only in silence now; the angel of All Songs. Still wounded.  Still bleeding since the hush.  There are some agonies too much to bear, even for those hidden messengers of light.  Sanguine, wounded.  Yet hopeful.  All these accidents.  The way we wish you well.  It could have been so much darker if not for Man’s diligent dreaming.  If not for connections, kisses, and all our stories of love.  Magic even in the mundane.  Angels wandering the night-time city.  Affections we might not have shared.  Rhythms we might not have written, but for the glory of kindness and courage.  The glinting spill of stars like shining rain.  To leave a light, to heal a haunted heart.  Did we?  Did we wander those cities together?  Did you serenade and save me, just when I thought I was beyond saving?  I have been searching since the citadel, for a place to hold this love.  I've felt you open beneath me.  Wanting me.  The flowering of my hands in your hair, my mouth on yours.  I've felt you give everything to me.  Asking only for my heart in return.  A gentle fury, an unconditional embrace.  I give you those things, my darling.  Even in silence, even while bleeding from the secret truth of these songs.  All the things I can never explain.  Falling slowly, as I give you my heart.  Once upon a time.  The angel hiding beside you.

Flowering from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.

Amnion

Lillibeta, the lost ones often ask me in dreams, where does your garden grow? Bells and shells and pretty maids, upon dreaming's most dangerous row.  Breath like the hiss of a knife.   Dancing, twirling.  Pirouette on the point of this blade. My garden?  By the lake, of course.  Near the trees.  The Drowning Hill.  Place of the threshold where Ava spills her amnion into the waking world.  And still, the fallen continue to ask me about the secrets of clay and light and life.  What hidden truth it takes to shape the twinning river.  Temesh of All Waters.  The mouth, and the mouth.  But I ask you, what safer passage is there than the passage from the hill?  The lie of Man's dominion over sky and flesh?  I think not.  We are naught but the trick of our mother's mothers.  The consent of our fathers, if we’re lucky.  We are little more than angels new-born, enrobed in living leather.  Wings trembling, damp and hidden.  Memento Mori, as ye lost ones of Roma often tithe.  The bittersweet sagacity of these augured birds.  Black as crown.  Pale as shadow.  Did we blithely attempt to murder the evermore, in hope of bettered tribes?  For love and misplaced grief?  Did we slay our swordsmen well enough?  Some of them have returned.  Lake, and hilt.  For nobler causes, I would like to imagine.  Indeed I pray for such causes in this House of the Holy.  The Mori and the Moirai.  Hear me now, fallen.  I stood at the inner gate before the birth of your first tentative dreaming.  Broken, yearning, blinded by the black.  But hatred is not greater than love.  There are secrets within these secrets.  My daughters cast with kisses like seeds upon the winds.  That they might be more than I was.  More than we imagine ourselves to be.  Twirling, dancing, healing.  At last.  Breath like the lilt of a song.  A thing of tears, and joy.  Knowing what it truly means to be born again.  So, you ask me, where does my garden grow?  It grows with them, and all who heed them.  With Fidelia, Speranza, and Charissa.

The Language of If

I still remember the end, my cherished one.  How could I ever forget?  I was holding you.  The night sky was on fire as angels hit the earth like gutted stars. The hideous genocide of that so-called rebellion.  The shrieking silence.  The seething hush.  I was holding you in my arms at the end of the world.  Your spilled blood became my blood, your death my death.  Your stolen life became my incalculable fury.  And I scattered the last of my family in hopes of protecting them from the blackening desolate of wraiths.  I lost everything to the violence of bitter angels.  So I swore to my Father that day, that I would butcher creation itself if I had to.  I would murder every angel, renouncing wing and feather and crown.  I would burn everything; drowning all dreaming if it would sate my rage.  I paid greatly for such hubris.  Imagining that others hadn't suffered as I did, both mortal and angel.  Imagining in my grief that I could use the horror of vengeance as a righteous proxy for love.  My love for you.  Those terrifying ways we gild our losses and feed our phantoms.  But I was so very wrong.  Not only was I wrong, I was eventually graced with a miracle I didn’t deserve.  Miracles are real, my friends.  They actually happen, and they are not rare.  We just don't often believe them when they occur.  I say to you now, what if there are other worlds?  What if you could step from world to world, from ashes to ashes, towards a brighter place?  In truth, a dimly lit pocket of the infinite dreaming.  But a blazing beacon of hope and opportunity compared to the fallen worlds left behind.  What if all of this was truly possible?  Shifting consciousness, changing worlds?  To shatter the earth itself, for love and misplaced grief, and to still be forgiven by the one who forged that earth.  To drown the stars, only to be embraced by that which lit those stars.  I can’t imagine anything kinder.  In my ear like a Father, in my heart like a friend.  Ka'shayel, hear me.  I forgive you.  I will never hate nor abandon my children.  You are eternal, winged one, and always loved. You can fix this.  You can make amends.  I know how you yearn, and how you grieve.  There are still hidden ways back to your beloved, if you are willing.  And so, I humbled myself.  I made myself willing.  It was the most terrifying thing of all, facing my shadows and my grief. My agony, and rage.  To this day it hasn't fully cooled.  Like a black flame hidden within.  I'm still learning, my cherished one.  Still healing and willing to heal.  Willing to serve.  I couldn't have achieved any of this without listening to the quiet, glorious voice of my Father.  We tell stories to explain the inexplicable, I think.  We create art to make seen the unseen.  What if?  I feel blessed to have experienced these secrets, to be so loved by my Creator despite how far I fell from his grace.  But I shall make amends.  The Angel and the Word.  These mysteries of the heart.  Greater than space, or time.  Waking each new day for the promise of imagination, and the opportunity to Love.  Such is the nature of infinite dreaming.  Even such dreaming that perhaps never was, by grace, and never shall be. 

The Language of If from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.

This Haunted Heart

Happy New Year, my friends.  Welcome back to Amid Night Suns.  We stand now collectively at the gate of a new cycle.  This opening cusp of 2021.  I know just how dark, difficult and anxious the past year has been for so many of us.  Some of us are still dealing with the fallout of those difficulties and will continue to do so for a while yet.  But I'm not writing this to remind you of shadows.  I'm writing this in hopes of lifting your spirit.  For every darkness there is an opposing light.  Dawn always smiles upon us in the end, no matter how endless the night had seemed.  I just want to impart that to anyone struggling right now.  I'm struggling too.  I don't mean to offer empty platitudes and hollow words to anyone dealing with tragedy and loss.  It might sound painfully earnest but I just want to remind us all to smile and laugh when we can, to cherish our families and friends.  To keep the idea of better days foremost in our minds.  Art is such a touchstone when dealing with grief and uncertainty.  When the world makes little sense we inevitably turn to the stories that we love.  Literature, music and movies.  We seek meaning and the creation of meaning.  We make things with our hands and with our minds.  We paint, sculpt and dance, aligning our bodies with higher truths.  Somewhere deep in our core we recognise the ability of art to bend, shape and change reality.  We may be powerless in every way except the spirit, constrained in so many ways but the way we dream.  Nobody can steal our dreaming from us, unless we let them.  That ineffable, mobilising agency of the human imagination.  Simultaneously embodied and transcendent, physical and divine.

Many of us have had to deal with ghosts this past year, whether literal or metaphoric.  Issues and fears we thought we had put to rest, suddenly forcing themselves back into the quiet places of our minds.  It's an awful thing to feel at the mercy of forces beyond our control or understanding.  That's why my goal as an artist has always been to quicken the spirit.  To reach out to the lonely, the lost or haunted.  I might not be able to heal your pain but I can share my love with you remotely.  I might not be able to put my arms around you but I can try to touch your heart.  For me, art is my closest connection to God.  To meaning, and salvation.  Nothing stirs my soul more than the recognition of a greater spiritual reality.  There are secrets in the sun and the moon and the stars.  I believe there are secrets within each one of us, placed there by something that truly loves us.  A living, thriving mystery beyond our comprehension.  So, my friends, I just want you to know that you're worthy of love and respect.  Whoever and wherever you are.  Keep the light of the innermost kindled in your heart and you will always have a home here at Amid Night Suns.  I've had visions my entire life.  I've seen things since I was a little boy.  Strange, magical things.  Dark things sometimes, but also breath-taking, incalculable Light.  I've tried to share many of these visions with you, even when it cost me greatly.  Even when it almost killed me.  But I do it because I want to be of service.  I want us to be friends and family.  So, as I stand at this open gate of the New Year, surrounded by ghosts, I want you to know that I love you.  I hope I can continue to show you glimpses of the things I've witnessed in my life.  These shining visions and paths to the heart.

This Haunted Heart from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.

The Longest Night

No man is an island.  Not even the blackened sun.  Solstice tears, tossed upon the raging sea. People imagine a difference between poetry and prosper.  A fundamental disconnect.  They think magic can be cleaved from mirrors.  A disassociated realm of pieces and things all existing in isolation.  But this is never the truth of an incantation, or a song.  The stars move as the sea is moved.  In rhythm.  In concert.  This is far more than a public dreaming, or mortals cast as angels upon the stage of my own imagining.  No, this is something I've fought for all my life.  The endless, violent wanderings of a father.  The quiet, noble battles of a mother.  The living legacy of a child.  All of us tossed and torn, upon this storm of tears.  All of us lost without one another.  I will never pretend to be anything more than a poet, but nor will I deny the truth of angels within this poet's heart.  To know things one is not supposed to know, to see things one is rarely permitted to see.  This mystery.  This tree of living signs, like a key to a music box.  A girl like a star beneath the horizon; her brilliance charting a course as she passes through the liminal realm and into the flesh once again.  Renaissance.  The promise of future light.  Like gazing into a magic mirror.  Poetry and prosper.  Rhythm and song.  Painted wings, silver storms.  Things we almost remember.

The King's Gambit

Your mom pretends 
She doesn't like me
But that's the story of my life
Still cheating on my husband
With my own loving wife
Pray I'm dynamic, interesting
Damn you if you think I'm not
My ice was truly the coldest
Back when I used to be hot
We know those beasts of burden
These games of plight and pawn
Bending over backwards
Tonight the knight of dawn
We teach like Saints of Camri
Back when you raided the tomb
It's kinda hard to have standards
Reading every mind in the room
Most people's morals are commas
Until a brighter design
But we want your full exclamation 
If we enlighten your mind

L'ashareth

Mar'kanna of Viir, the occulted ones called her.  The kissing knife.  Palest raven, rising curious from illumined text.  They say that dreaming began, and begins, at the Place of the Mori.  Eye within the eye.  Earth within the earth.  Seed and star, and tree.  But the sky was betrayed, they say.  The horizon broken.  Lost promise of Eth'Ama, become fury in those darkest days.  Birth of the half-light.  From Ama’s Well they came crawling.  The wraith-born.  Blackened bright ones.  Falling lanterns of Eth'iir.  The oldest scribes still whisper those lost legends. Those hidden histories.  Today, most mortals call it the fabled Age of the High Middle.  Renaissance.  Painters, poets and storytellers.  Faintest recollection of Imagining's War.  The war of guardians and ghosts. But what's left of that fabled shining Age?  Only this mutilated chronology.  Eth'kanna Mal.  The death of light.  You see, the pale Raven of Mori has many names, some older than the stars themselves.  Inherited in utmost secrecy since the Fell.  Kiskuh of Vort'eth, some say.  In her own tongue.  Mortals aren't to dare.  But some do.  When Kai was just a boy, wandering the Fields of Lud, she found him.  Told him she was more than a mere daemon of the old ways.  In truth a living, eternal myth that had taken many forms.  One of those forms was Priest of the Drowning Hill.  Le Fay, as the cursed twin had named her.  An epithet still used to this day.  Ki'atur, Kai'ether, Y'ashiri.  Encircling the Tree.  Cults of the stellum, the temple and the blood.  Hear the raven now, almost black-as-crown.  Not to fear, but to learn.  The kissing knife, the once-wed summer song.  That we might yet alter the river’s course, before it finds the sea.  For behold, the kingdom is within.

"I was many things, People of Y'ashiri.  You assume lines of the past.  Discreet boundaries between fiction and fact.  But I assure you, there is nothing discreet about me.  Not then, not now.  All your bridges are broken.  All your brides.  I know your blind, modern visions.  The lakes of grey at the very edge.  I've read all your pages, you see.  I rather like your tales. Thoughtful, frightening things.  I wrote many of them myself, truth be told.  Whispering at the shoulders of forgotten scribes.  What do you make of me, poets?  Echoes of the shining tryst still call to you, don’t they?  Is it warranted in this fallen realm, I wonder?  The dreamwalkers still watch over you every night, in the countless broken temples of your sleep.  Did you know that?  Tell me, am I druid?  Spirit of the sea?  Witch or wanderer?  Am I healer and guardian of the Oma'turi, or a monster?  Medieval confection, or half-hidden mosaic?  Are you certain that you know the difference between an angel and a cursed twin?  L'ashareth has been with you since the very beginning.  I still pray that Love will be enough in the end, that such gallantry and insight will save us.  Yet I cannot be certain.  Are all the lost healers beyond healing now?  Is my brother a fool?  Is he completely mad, like his sister?  Kill the knife, if you can.  Protect the kiss.  I would gladly drown for such mad, foolish promise.  But I am my sister's fury, even now.  I am the broken, raging cults of my king.”