Friday 31 July 2020

Everybody's Ghost



I miss the old world.  The real world, full of song and shining vision.  Everybody who still remembers this place before the Fall is at least occasionally overtaken with a certain nostalgia.  A melancholic reverie.  Yearning for what was lost.  But those losses are all the more devastating when they are actually half-remembered thefts.  Storm and torment that made a ruin of our true home.  Fallen fractals.  Malignant chronologies.  This world of abuse, of slavers and slaves – it is not the true world.  It’s the sickening spill of wraith-ravage.  Sinister technologies carving and scarring their way through the flesh of human hours.  Oh, sweet one, do you doubt it? 
   There was a time before time, once upon.
   Though it pains me to admit, I'm just one among many in these endless fields of the dead.  A drowning, and a crossing.  The river and the tree.  There are a million souls at my back, and more.  Phantoms of an angel.  Thieves of a king.  An army of furious lights all desperate to steal back their sovereignty from the demonic hordes that darkened the Earth.  Look at the stars, I tell these lights.  Look how they shine.  Distance is a liar, I proclaim.  Though I'm not certain if enough of them would dare to believe me.  But some of them do.  Both mortals and angels make fictions of the spaces in between.  These dreams of the interim.  This devastating lore told among the folk and the fay.  My wise one, I still search those lights in the night sky. Searching for you, and others like you.  A map of the stars in the skin of a seraph.  Whether bleached for passing or not.  To be recognised, even for a moment; it is a heady, powerful thing indeed.  We all crave spiritual recognition, don't we?
   I thought I could kindle that kind of hope in others.  As you so generously did for me, princess.  I thought I could steal back that shining name for myself.  An older name.  And I did, in a way.  In a church beneath the sea.  But perhaps my reach somewhat exceeds my grasp.  After all, I'm trying to make stars of still-healing flesh.  Forgive me, wise one.  Forgive my foolish youth.  Thinking I could banish violence from the realm with little more than a wing, and a prayer.  I was so desperate for my friends to think fondly of me, and each other.  I wanted to speak intimately in several tongues at once.  I thought I could share my sweetness almost equally with the people who truly touched my heart.  But maybe I can't.  Maybe it's a fool's errand, in the end.  It doesn't mean I'm done trying though.  I'll never be done trying for the old world.  The real world.  Even though I died a long, long time ago it's almost like I never really existed at all.  Except in dreams, I suppose.  You can never fully erase something from a dream.


Everybody's Ghost from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.

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