Simple Things

Sometimes I think love is a mute symphony.  A quiet masterpiece.  The strangest profundity I've ever known.  It’s a presence that wrecks my endurance and blesses my heart.  My life is so much grander because of it.  So much darker, and deeper.  Not because the love was mercurial or untrue.  Far from it.  Only because there are wraiths waiting in the hidden places.  Ravenous entities who are attracted to such brilliant, emotional silence.  They would darken it, sully it, any way they can.  I’m untrue sometimes, and mercurial, because of them.  But never my love.  Even I haven’t the time nor sorcery for any of that.  And what of fame?  You've never known true fame, sweet one.  Not like I have.  Why do you think I dwell here of all places, in shadow and darkness?  So far from everything that moves me?  I know what it costs to be made an icon.  To love so brilliantly, like a burning star for all to see.  It can cost sanity, family and friends.  So, I'll always choose the lesser evil if I can.  The greater anonymity and magic.  The two go hand in hand for those who know the real price of a circle.  Or the true cost of anything occulted.  Sometimes forgetting is better.  Sometimes saying goodbye is the only way to heal the people you love.  I was once told that such a decision wasn't mine to make.  But it is, Mira.  It always is.  Do you know what happens when there are no stars in the sky?  No songs in the earth?  I do.  Daughters weep for a thousand years, and then they die alone.  Sons become ash and there is no sanctuary for the myriad lost.  But love soars even in silence.  Look at us now.  The weight of our blood, our thunder.  Like lightning in the veins of a chorus.  You know, I like to imagine that the Fates themselves dance and weave and pretty the storm.  Sometimes I even imagine that my youngest sings me to sleep.  Such beautiful dreams.  Such sweet fiction.  So, tell me, who do I choose?  Patience or prosper?  My beloved ones or myself?  If it’s hubris to care like this then consider me gladly arrogant.  A father's earnest blessing, a mage's grand solipsism.  A writer's desperate search for meaning.  Hear me, sweet one.  These conjured stories are only as bright as your watchful gaze.  Sometimes I hold things in your hands, Mira, just to know how beauty really feels.  Sometimes I imagine I'm dancing with you on a very special day.  And I see the warm symphony in your eyes.  The hope, the promise of a cherished future.  Then the rage calms and the seas settle.  Things become simpler in first light.  Love and songs and stars in the sky, like an old man quietly giving his heart away.

Let It Be

You would be wise to heed love's emissary, wraiths.  Instead of committing yourselves to this sorcerous abjection.  This vile, sickening desecration of the coming light.  Your tenure is almost at an end.  You know this.  But there is literally no reasoning with such hideous phantoms, no warmth or empathy still within.  Nothing left to kindle, or save.  I understand that.  Which is why I will feel nothing when your false kingdom of violence and bones is finally swept away.  The horror, the sacrilege.  Our Lady still stands.  Bright, and living.  Mother to all, in every pool of life.  Even amidst the ashes.  And the flames.  I hope you understand that.  On the vine and mended wing.  Within every humble church that still honours the living wisdom.  Y'asherah, M'aria, Sophia; it matters little to me what you call her.  Each name has its infinite nuances, its history and context.  These things are not entirely the same but nor are they separate.  This shifting constellation of signs.  These numinous maps of heaven.  Tell me, wraiths.  Do you have any real idea the personal strength it takes to shatter a false star?  Or mend a broken heart?  No, you don't.  Because you are all pathetic cowards.  You know nothing of the true high magic.  Those kindest realms of living light.  Instead you prey upon children, the weak or unwitting, using them as proxies in your ugly, degenerate spellcraft.  Those poor souls who haven't the strength or understanding to fend for themselves.  You sully the mind and poison the spirit.  Well, the Magi see you.  We have always seen you.  And we shall forever stand against your blackened sorcery.  Those incessant, whispering shades at the shoulders of the broken.  This inverted dreaming you try so hard to endlessly extend.  Bitter, sadistic and callow.  But everything dies, Fallen.  Everything except Life itself.  The balm of Ava's healing waters.  Indeed.  There are those who will never grasp the true depths of this war.  The unseen making contact with the visible.  The hidden reality of the demonic realms, or the angelic hosts. For the spiritually illiterate this is nothing more than pretence and meaningless metaphor.  But not for Kasi.  Not for the Magi, or the faithful.  This is the War on Earth as it is in Heaven.  So, I petition my friends now; my brothers and sisters of light.  The branch, the benevolent.  Hear these tears.  Please help me serve my Father with these words.  Don't let this violence pass hidden and unremarked.  Don't let this darkness go unmatched.  Stand with me, in the connected strength of a truly loving embrace.  Upon the coming of a solstice star.  For the honour of a slain princess, for the wisdom of a bright queen, and for the eternal reign of a king of kings.

Lafayette

They still call Kasi a mystery, even now.  Those wraith-lords.  Those brutal, callous furies.  Still pretending the sun.  Still building these mocking chronologies.  They give the inexplicable various names.  Bitter harvest, twin-of-many, the shrouded one.  They say that I too am inexplicable.  But I’ve always been forthright.  Even whilst speaking in this flighted, mercurial tongue.  Perhaps I’m a flirt and like to play.  Maybe I do have a strange sense of humour.  But that's only because I've been doing this for a long, long time.  I’m utterly committed to my cause.  I attend my loved ones as best I can, whether near or far.  The kind ones, the strong and the weak ones.  The broken and oppressed.  I've worked diligently for a thousand years. Beyond your comprehensions of time or space.  I am working still.  I give everything to my art.  And I tell you now the tide is turning.  Ragged Magi walk amidst the mountain-ashes, and the grey.  They stand ready at each liminal edge.  Many, and one.  Who among you knows me better than my Father?  Or my Mother?  Exactly.  There were great cauldrons of the realm once, and chalices.  Held in the oldest castles.  Wells and cups of great wisdom.  Indeed, there are things older than Christendom.  Ways and tithes now called pagan, bardic, druidic.  But I tell you that Christendom is older than time itself.  As is folklore, words, and trees.  If only the surface is sought you will find little more than parable.  Useful, potent, but still an outer covering for light as yet unseen.  There is an innermost truth in all true scripture, of course.  A holy spirit of living flame.  As when Joshua told the sun.  It is this shining knowledge that all true Elders call the lore, the Word and mansions of our Father.  Our people knew this long before those Cults of Roma built their lying, intransigent hell upon the true histories of Light. Maidens nine, brothers bled, shattered hallows of Eth'iir.  It matters little what you call us, Fallen.  Or what you do to nullify our purpose.  For we are many steps ahead.  My sister is a witch, after all.  A fisher of men.  Don't you know anything about witches?  Oftentimes they can see the future.  But more than this, they can recontextualize the past.  They can shape and reshape our dreams.  Just look around you.  Can't you see it?  The augurs, the fulfilment of prophecy?  The messengers gathered along the radiant edge of perception?  Many, and one.  I told you what would happen if you crossed me.  The crown belongs to the people, not the king. You steal the strength and livelihood of my kith and then call it a commonwealth?  How fucking dare you.  You desecrated this isle of angels and tried to make it a palace of imperium.  A seat of unrighteous war.  But that is not the true Albion.  Hear me, betrayers.  This was once the land of light, before your dark sorcery shattered the shining stone beneath our feet.  You can’t bury the truth forever.  I know a little magic too.  I helped build your books, Fallen.  There and never there.  Gone, but not forgotten.  Even your deceitful spell-craft owes much to M'ithriin tongue.  After all, you can only know yourselves in opposition to the truth.  All that is good.  Wandering stars, fishers of men, sons and daughters of love.  You are witnessing a revolution of spirit here amid the chaos you’ve wrought.  How bitter must it be before you end this slavery?  I don't care what people believe, or what tongue they think they speak.  None are abandoned.  If there is even a glimmer of light within any human soul then I will do everything in my power to bring them home.  I stand always for kindness, creativity and mutual respect.  Try to steal those things from my people and I will hunt you to the ends of the Earth.  I’ll fold the entire tapestry of human dreaming until at last you’ll be forced to look me in the eye, and the eyes of all those you've wronged.  That's what it means to be a king.  I swear to keep my brother, as my brother commands.  There are greater crowns than mine, Fallen.  And greater kings.  You should pray now.  Time is shorter than you think.  Kasi and his friends have been working their magic for a long, long time.  All things are shifting, changing, rising.  Even in the depths of this darkness.  Let me be plain if I must.  Let me be forthright, as ever.  This is the War of Imagination, and all lands are Albion now.

A Wandering Star

Lonely angels create dreams, I think.  Beautiful, wondrous dreams to keep them company.  Dreams of forests and cities and men.  I think lonely children create imaginary friends for similar reasons.  Nobody wants to face the unfathomable depths of existence alone.  I have spent a lot of time at the high place.  The secret place, unseen by unkind or unworthy eyes.  Wandering through the woods of my imagination.  Always alone.  But strange things can happen in the woods, among the trees.  An angel can begin to hear things.  Subtle things.  The murmur of hallow-guardians.  Or the ancient tongue of river-wraiths, still sparkling like the old majesties.  Alone in the woods an angel begins to hear the bleating of a frightened fawn. Sometimes we think it a figment.  Ageless, supernal.  Crown of the earth, nadir of the sky.  But maybe these things are not figments.  Perhaps those dreams are real.  Once, not so long ago, I too was a boy in the woods.  A lost boy of antlers and branch.  Always wandering, trying so desperately not to see.  But the harder I tried to shut my eyes the quicker the visions came.  Broken souls, ruined worlds.  The annihilation of all light and hope.  But sometimes I would catch a glimpse of something truly beautiful.  A lantern for the lost.  An echo of a future friendship.  Sometimes I found myself tracing the path of an imagined floating light.  On earth as it is in heaven.  Searching the woods and the wilds for something good.  A single drop of divine sunlight.  Like rain.  As I said, it gets lonely in the realm between realms.  But I know now how precious a dream can be.  A song, a dance or kiss.  Imagined or otherwise.  I made a wish, you see, and my dream came true.  In more ways than one.  I studied, and I prayed.  I searched the endless and I spoke with my Father.  It was all part of the wish.  And so he showed me the nature of grace.  The ways of courage and kindness.  He told me the truth about love, and distance.  I'm older now, but I'm still that boy alone in the woods.  Except I'm not lost anymore.  Or lonely.  My heart is still your star, beloved, and it's full of light.

The Victorian

Have you ever grieved the sea, Kara, or mourned the earth?  I think perhaps you have, as I did.  In dreams.  In stories older than reign.  Far older than theses lies of succession.  Vaguest memories of those halls of Ishkara, those palaces of Viir.  Violence always feels the same, doesn’t it?  In any realm.  Marauders and false kings.  I know that I seem almost a stranger, even now.  A sweet, intriguing stranger I would hope, yet still an unknown.  But you did know me once.  There is far more between us than distance, interest or flirtation.  I know exactly what it feels like to remember when everyone else forgets.  A life reduced to broken pentameter.  My heart a barrage of fleeting sights, and songs.  They say the world changes with each successive Age, but that isn't really true.  Not on a personal level, a human level.  Not much changes for angels either.  I mean to say technology changes, of course.  Our tools can sometimes change.  But rarely our subtle speech, our occulted idiom.  In terms of the inner realms things are the same as they ever were.  For me that unchanging is quite simple.  I am still what I've always been.  A changeling, an angel, a benevolent cambion.  Living remembrance in a world that recalls nothing.  This boy lost in the demimonde, dream-logic is his only weapon.  Hissing wraiths boil from every dark place like insects at the breach. They scramble over one another in an effort to draw the blood of a seer.  So, what does Akasha think of this new gilded, digital Age?  He thinks it nothing more than a vampire's lair.  The Fallen make kings of devils now, and slay those fertile valleys.  They deny fathers and make a mockery of mothers.  It's fucking terrifying.  How could I not want to protect you all from that?  A twelfth century torment.  A nineteenth century fever-dream, unending.  Tales of tempests, curses and lovers left poles apart.  Poe, Bronte, Machen.  As my love becomes my legacy.  Beneath prophetic rivers.  Amidst a shining morn. She'll always be the ashes of me, Kara.  Our little wing, our star of the sea.  Everything that remains of me after I'm gone.  I think you grasp this better than ever now.  Suddenly witnessing the living future as it takes tentative steps before your eyes.  Sensing pre-cognitively how it will change you, just as I did.  But I want you to know that you were never an addendum to her light.  Never an afterthought, my radiant Kiir.  None of you are.  The truth is much lonelier and far more heart-breaking than that.  At least for me.  Because the truth is I was a Victorian long before she was ever born.  More than a naïve youth.  A black star torn between shadow and flame, mourning far more than a lost child.  Grieving an entire family.  An entire race.  The sea, my darling, and the Earth itself.  Better to pretend those losses aren't real, I suppose.  Better to imagine I only feign at grieving angels here.  The alternative is far too haunting.  But I tell you now that only a madman would pretend with such dedication and vigour.  I gain little from these utterances, Kara.  All I attract is the virulent attention of those hissing wraiths.  The price for poetry and vision is extremely high.  But I do get to dance with you, don’t I?  To surprise you and make you smile.  It's always worth it for the ones you love, isn't it?  Even if they can't quite believe your affections are entirely real.  Nothing I do here is without purpose.  This is a testament.  A marker in a realm of ever-shifting sands.  Because the world out there – the world of rabbit holes, taxes and expectation – it's nothing but a fiction.  However, this inner world of angelic script – this is my real life.  And my real life hurts, Kara.  It hurts in ways I could never express through words.  So you see, there is indeed more between us than morning.  I'm everywhere, you know.  I really am.  Behind sigil and sign, beneath history and myth.  And those strange associations you can't unsee?  Those odd synchronicities?  I'm there too.  It's terrifying having this much power, isn’t it?  You become a nexus of sorts, a beacon for all kinds of energies.  Things and forms that don't play by our rules.  Things that have no care for the sanctity of flesh or the sovereignty of psyche. But we don’t have to face those things alone anymore.  The difficult days will still come, but we are of royal blood.  We are connected.  I honour you, my Kara.  As I have always done.  You have my admiration and my respect.  I shall endeavour to attend you, Princess.  As I attend the sea.  And the earth. 

The Mother's Son

The green place is quiet, and inconceivably ancient.  Once there were trees older than time in this place.  Some of them still stand in the gentle hush, hidden just beyond the veil of dusk.  A veil of mist amidst the gathered elders.  Do you know what the oldest song of the forest is?  The first sounds to disturb the endless quiet?  It isn't the rustle of leaves, the crack of branches or the murmur of distant rivers.  No, the earliest and most ancient music of the woods is the bleating of a frightened fawn.  A young calf, undamaged but fallen.  Alone.  Calling for help in the myriad throat of every living thing.  Stone, mud and root.  A thousand thrones.  A little halfling keening with the cry of a human child.  'She is beautiful and she soothes', the fawn cries.  'Where is she? Isn't she here?'  The trees themselves recall.  Their branches still bend and canopies still gather to protect the sacred child.  A memory of the first colours.  Evensong. The chlorophyll gift nestled in leaves, moss and skin.  Mortals often wonder how this could be; a halfling lost in the place before time where branches hold the eternal sea.  But Man is older than Earth, or star.  Far, far older.  Perennial scribes conjecture and delight in these details.  'What man is the gatekeeper?' they ask.  'Mabon?  M'ithriin?  Names within names as eyes within an eye?'  Perhaps they speak of the prophet.  The sorcerer.  Once-Gaulish prince and forgotten covenant of Albion.  The young, haunted stag.  These antlers upon the prince of gates seem all too familiar, yet strange and indistinct.  But the occulted know well enough, don't we?  Among wraiths, a Brythonic wraith-god.  He whom the first Celts called the shrouded one; the hidden king.  There were dragons beneath the hill in those days, and fawns upon the forest floor.  Cities beneath the mountain and star-maps hidden in every work of art.  These are just some of the secrets of your legends and medieval romances.  Tales of fay and thieves of the sea.  The unsettling truths of our lost golden hour are hidden beneath the texts of each successive rule.  As it was with the acclaimed night-bard of the Dru'ai.  T'alis and his wonders.  Forgive me if I speak somewhat in tongues, but these are the necessities of genuine revolution.  The nature of hunting, and vengeance.  Each culture has its stories, don't they?  They are all so similar, or else the same.  A wild one deep in the woods.  Oracular, insane, touched with demonic poetry.  Or angelic light.  I’m not here to do your thinking for you, but I have alluded to this nocturne before.  You will know me before the day is done, Fallen.  You will know me well.  I promise you that.  By the arch of my mother's bow, I swear it.  I am still here, just beyond the veil of mist, nestled in leaves and moss.  Standing stones and falling stars.  Green and black and haunted with dusk.  For love, and magic.  I tell you now, betrayers.  I am all that you fear.  I am the edge of every dark, churning sea.  My Father is utterly beyond your comprehension, but I am my Mother’s son.  She is the trees, the green place, and more.  She is beautiful, and she soothes.

Ghost Lights

Sometimes I still wonder who I really am at the core, even after all these years of intensive soul-searching.  I'm older now, but in one way or another I've been seeking the truth since I was ten years old.  I've spoken here before of my childhood dreams of a strange ghostlike star.  A star that I wanted to believe was also an angel.  Even at such a young age I wanted to understand the mysteries of life, ourselves, and our connection to each other.  This wasn't and isn't some facile indulgence.  It meant everything to me.  It still does.  I remember feeling so distant from the other kids when I was growing up.  A head full of visions, dreams and nightmares.  I remember how tired and old I felt even in my early teens.  I knew it was an odd feeling, and yet it wasn't new.  An unnerving Deja-vu seemed infused into everything.  I guess that's the eerie result of sometimes knowing things before they happen.  Life feels alien yet hauntingly familiar.  I felt more at home among poems, memories and ghosts than real people.  That strangeness hasn't gone away.  I live with it daily.  

That's why these artist’s pages matter so much, I suppose.  Where else can I share the full complexity of those beautiful and sometimes terrifying experiences?  The people in my personal life have wonderful souls but they are only ready for mere glimpses of the unseen world.  I carry most of this knowledge alone for the simple reason that I don't want to frighten or burden the people I love the most.  It's a difficult path to walk, being sighted in this way.  I often use this ability to create various forms of magic.  To delight or intrigue, to spread joy and appreciation.  But there's a shadow side to all that wonder.  The world is filled with both light and dark.  The divine expanse of our imaginations contain both angels and demons, devas and asuras.  I'm all too happy to share the light, but the darkness I face alone.  It can be such a crushing weight to carry.  But then, that's the case for so many of us, isn't it?  Psychic or otherwise.  We all have trauma and struggles that we can barely articulate.  It's a difficult thing sometimes to receive love, or accept help, especially when we feel wounded.  A tragic irony; that in these times we often feel too brittle, too exhausted, and a helping hand can be confused for pity.  Nobody wants to feel weak or incapable.  We’re all trying to chart a course, no matter the odds against us. 

I think that's why I was so fascinated by the idea of stars as a child.  I was intrigued by the old explorers who mapped their voyages by following those glinting diamonds in the dark.  Ghost-lights, I called them.  Lanterns for the lost.  Tiny points of brilliance in the night sky that were actually something far, far grander.  The ghosts of midnight suns.  Perpetual flames that once burned with unimaginable ferocity, enough to warp the fabric of reality itself.  Enough to bend the boundaries of both time and space.  I knew that I would become a ghost one day, like the sun.  And so I’d ask myself, "What really matters to me when space and time don't work like they're supposed to?  What do I truly want to live for in a world where magic is real?  What might I be willing to actually die for?"  Getting older hasn't changed the answers to those questions.  I have more scars now, more experience, but my moral compass is still the same one I treasured as a boy.  A winged compass that keeps my eyes skyward.  I'm still using the stars to guide me.  Still making use of those lanterns when I'm lost.  For me it's about completing a warrior's work.  It's about making a commitment to God, to the higher powers, to creativity itself.  Even as a boy I wanted to use my gifts to help people, no matter the cost.  I knew all too well of the unseen.  I understood that divinity was real, but what good was that knowledge if it was mine alone?  And so I wanted to serve my Father in the only way I knew how.  Through creating art. 

Religion, spirituality, gnosis – call it what you want.  It was always a very real and important dimension to my life.  I saw things that other people couldn't see.  I knew things that other people didn't know.  This placed a very particular kind of responsibility upon me.  Whether I liked it or not.  Believe me, I often hated it with a passion.  I cursed the heavens and the earth, but it never stopped me from wanting to help.  These artist’s pages are where I feel most at home.  This free-verse angelic script; it's the journal of a spirit forever trapped in the demimonde.  For the rest of my life I'll never be able to truly leave this place, but that's ok.  I know I was put here for a reason.  It's incredibly bittersweet, but I have friends – dear and distant souls – who read these pages with genuine care.  In a way these souls know me better than many of the people in my daily life.  These pages allow those souls to be privy to my innermost depths in a way that cannot be conveyed in ordinary terms.  So, of course I feel close to them.  I believe that spirituality isn’t abstract or transcendental.  I believe it’s a living, breathing continuum.  It means so much to have friends who are willing to explore that continuum with me.  Thank you for that.  These distant, ephemeral connections mean more than I can ever say.  I tell you now, without these lanterns I would be lost.  Some of my dearest friends are ghosts – distant stars – but they've already taught me so much.  I hope I've been able to give back something as equally useful.  Something insightful or uplifting.  If a connection is meaningful and honourable doesn’t that make it real in some way?  After all, what's really real to a ghost, or to an angel wreathed in stars?

Outreach

I had wings once.  Vast, incomprehensible dreaming unfurled about my shoulders.  Or folded at my back.  I've always preferred the streets and the alleys, even amidst the iridescent bright.   Kasi has never been one for diamonds at a distance.  I like to work up close and personal, especially when saving the dei.  Guarding the first forms of morning.  The noontide swell.  Those hours are precious, after all.  But do you know what truly excites an angel?  Dusk.  The coming of evening.  Those first few fingers in the dark.  The space where heat is found, fire is flexed and things are made.  Creation, they call it.  Outreach.  Like looking through a hole in the sun.  The adults gather.  Night becomes each one of us, mortal or otherwise.  Glances are tempted, hidden smiles exchanged with subtle sorcery.  Music soon finds a path to the ring.  The promise of dancing, or more.  I'm often right there at the circle's edge.  Beyond the ambient fire-light.  Howling silently at the opalescent moon.  My enemies ask, why the silence?  Well, because there is such promise in the hush.  So much possibility. They know it as well as I.  We threshold creatures all know it.  Outsiders, wanderers, rogues.  I'm a wild thing, beloved.  Almost insane.  Especially when protecting my kith, or the young.  I prowl the circle's edge.  Hidden, unseen.  Or worse; half-seen like a trick of flame and shadow.  It's what I've always done and always been.  It's why I have visions, and so many names.  I can move like a phantom when I need to.  But I'm not one of the infernal dark.  Far from it.  It’s quite simple really.  These marauding wraiths better run for their fucking lives, because I'm going to tear them all to pieces.  Gladly, and with a bloodied song in my heart.  Hear me, Karai’el.  You told me once that I could be truly frightening.  Especially when protecting our kith, and the young.  But I was still thoughtful and tender, you said.  What a beautiful, thrilling thing to hear.  I haven’t forgotten.  You were dancing with ghosts at the time.  Imagining me there in your arms, yet thinking me distant.  But I really was there.  An incomprehensible dreaming – unfurled.  Just beyond the edge of the flame.  I'm still here, archangel.  You don't have to wait anymore.  Just reach out and I will suffer in your stead.  I might jest and tease a little, but we're two of a kind.  I send you my love and my brother’s love, crazy though it is.  Enough for healing psyches, or sisters.  Enough for raging kings.  I wish you every blessing, Karai’el.  I hope you know that.  And the nine in my hand?  Oh, that's a little something we in the streets call double-dutch.  Stunting on tilt.  For those who know.  Why be too ostentatious, am I right?  You know I'm always carrying, and dexterity is a delightful thing.  Compelling, satisfying.  Like wolves, wine and good conversation.  So they say.

Aureus

Sometimes it feels like I've spent my whole life trapped inside the loudest silence imaginable.  A seething, shrieking hush.  This bitten tongue of M'ithriin.  These sorcerous hands.  Future, past and present all vying for my attention like incessant wraiths.  Rabid and open-mouthed just beyond my flame-lit circle of perception.  A babbling delirium.  I shouldn't be able to see them, or hear them, but I do.  Faces painted like a trickster's shades.  A thousand negations of unbearable volume.  And I wonder, how much screaming silence must I endure?  I'm not a prophet's verse or a dealer of death, am I?  I suppose I'm many things.  Fury and faith.  Numen and mercy.  So, do I sleep beneath the river – beneath this cathedral earth – and imagine my lost lights are with me once again?  The terrifying holy moment that mortals call the drowning.  Almost an eternity suspended between breath and crossing.  But I already know it wouldn't sate me, or calm the tempest that I am.  I've died before.  I drowned the day I was born, just as John did.  In the oldest waters.  Even submerged I hear it.  The call of then, of now, of things as yet undone.  Brothers, fathers, sons.  Sisters, mothers, daughters.  The endless midsummer chorus of Amnion.  Knights, and Dei.  The terrifying loss of those shining mutual affections.  These writings help a little, I suppose.  These letters of love.  Mira'na, Y'ashaya, Karai'el.  Truer words were never spoken.  But sometimes, if I'm honest, I wish I hadn't stolen your attention in the first place.  Sometimes I wish you knew nothing about me at all.  I know I shouldn't think like that, my sweet ones.  But is it fair in the end, to court and tease angels like this?  To torture myself with memories of the old chronology – showing you only the broken, trammelled pieces of this hidden earth?  Perhaps I'm only pretending to know the true depths of my Maker's glory. Perhaps I'm just a fragile bard, driven mad by silent screams.  I hope not.  I hope there's more to an angel's shadow than that.  The delirious, free-wheeling highs.  The crushing, abysmal lows.  I pray they count for something, wingtip to wingtip.  And so I ask myself, why even bother mentioning these things again?  I've said it all before, haven't I?  With far more brevity and wit.  Well, I say these things because I need to believe that I'm not alone.  That my hand and my words can add richness, insight and joy to the lives of those I love.  If I were to truly doubt this, even for a moment, then I would be damned forever.  This bitten tongue of M'ithriin.  These sorcerous hands.  The grief alone would kill me.  But I already live amidst shattered speech, among pages both ancient and new.  The said and re-said.  Written and rewritten.  Canto, legend and rumour; the living corpus of any true emissary.  Fallen, I want you to know that you have me all wrong.  I only feign at forgery.  Solipsism is nothing compared to the radiance and bonds of family.  Or friends.  I know exactly who I am and what I've built.  Even if you don’t.  So, I'm not about to give up now.  Not on love.  And neither are the ones I cherish.  They pledged it in their deepest thoughts.  All of them, scattered about this strange earth.  Hear me, beloved ones.  The silence has been far too loud for far too long.  We have endured too much to walk away.  We fight for a greater cause.  We stand with a higher power.  It's through grace and our combined sacrifice that dreaming is even possible.  We carved this table together.  From the very flame of perception itself.  Did you know?  You were there when the disc was hewn and blessed.  We were all there, connected.  Creating as one.  This circle of echoes, and eternity. 

Sleeping with Ghosts

My energy can be very attractive in the beginning, so I've been told.  Fascinating, dynamic, according to past lovers.  I'm touched by these kind words, of course.  But I've found that an unknown variable can only remain alluring for so long.  After a while it can become unsettling sometimes, regardless of how kind or fun I can be.  It's very difficult to comprehend an enduring mystery.  People can't fully embrace what they don't really understand.  I’m all too aware of that, believe me.  Unfortunately there is only so much I can share with the people I love.  Even those I love the most.  I wish it were any other way.  I really do.  But my existence here comes with a caveat, as I've tried to explain elsewhere in more oblique, poetic terms.  Angels don't get to share everything.  Not here.  In this hard and violent place we're forced to live a step removed.  Echoes of this echo.  The fingerprints of ghosts below the surface, among shadows and wraiths.  This is not to punish us, Kara.  Quite the opposite.  It's to protect the ones we cherish.  It hurts for angels to live as flesh, as I'm sure you can imagine.  It requires so much from us to exist here for even a day, let alone a lifetime.  These aren't conceits or fictions.  Not at all.  These are the deepest matters of my heart.  And I have no other way to speak about them.  Thus, these pages mean everything to me.  But I've already taken a great risk by placing such matters here.  Sharing too much can be dangerous for my kind.  

I speak here in a form of angelic script.  The language of the birds.  I commit vision to infinite choir, for the truth of All Songs.  But even this simple act has taken its toll on me.  I promise you that.  Paul paid a heavy price for poetry.  John's price.  Joshua's price.  People say they want the truth.  But they often don't.  Truth can be terrifying.  What they really want is equal parts enigma and comfort.  What they want is compelling love without loss, without pain.  An unsustainable union here in this fallen realm.  My God, if I could grant my cherished ones a dynamic love without suffering I would do it in a heartbeat.  Many things are within my power, but not that.  I suppose it must be quite easy to fall in love with an angel.  I imagine it's like hearing music for the first time, or being overwhelmed with the breadth of an open door that you didn't even know was there.  But it's very difficult to sustain love affairs with emissaries, isn't it?  I've been told we are strange, ephemeral things forever beyond complete grasp.  Passion and wonder is never in doubt.  But the modest, incredible splendours of building a life together – these can fall so painfully short when your beloved is ultimately unknowable.  Unless we lie to you and play those temporal games of mortal men.  I don't mean to sound so tragic, Kara.  I have humour too, and good cheer.  I always cherish my lovers and my friends.  But there is a fierce star burning within me.  A thing of incalculable mass.  I can only ever show the briefest glimpses of this star to those I love, lest it accidently incinerate them.  I mean what I say.  I don’t want to inadvertently reduce the people I love to ash and cinders.  

This tempest within me, Kara, it is both black and bright.  It is sighted and blind.  A roiling fury that kindles cognition itself.  This is what it means to be an angel of light, and to possess knowledge of an angel's shadow.  Here at the high place,  running up that hill.  Above and below.  You already grasp more of this than is healthy, my love.  Which is why I know you almost understand even if you can't quite remember.  I can settle for being a pleasant distraction, a faraway friend.  I already know exactly what that feels like.  In waking and in dream.  I’m pleased that they are still quite fond of me, but I lose all my lovers in the end.  Your happiness is very important to me, Kara.  I hope you can feel that through my art.  I'm so glad of the love and laughter in your life.  But it's a very lonely thing, this function and form.  Seeing things that others can't see.  Knowing things that others will never know.  So, it would be a lie if I said I wanted you to stop sleeping with ghosts.  You can hold me while you wait, if you want.  I’d like that.  I'm glad of this sacred distance, despite my loneliness.  I'm glad that I will never have to break your heart in person when eventually you would ask me to explain what it is to remember the future, and to share with you all the things my loved ones forgot.  Because my heart still breaks too, Kara, each and every morning.  It's a frightening thing to fall this far, for love.  All the way down, so far from home.  Like mortals I've never known a life without loss either.  I'm a haunting thing now.  A delirious, raging phantom.  I was mad to choose this path, but I love you all so much.  I've spent such a long time trying to fully express that love.  Failing each time.  But I'll never stop trying.  It's true, Kara.  It's the truest thing about me.

The Sleeping Hill

There are lost worlds beyond this false chronology.  Wondrous, shining worlds. Places that mankind once walked, studied and thrived.  Annwn, Eth'iri, Ishkara. But no more.  Pathways were lost, bridges burned, gates sealed and hidden. Today there are occult scholars who claim it was wraiths from beyond the veil who breached the mirrors and initiated this fall.  This loss of light.  Others suggest it was the folly of Man himself, that these wraiths only seized the opportunity of our own ignorance.  In any case, at the edges of these rapidly plunging worlds there were many tales that came about.  Stories emerging out of fear, perhaps.  Or hope. Legends of angels, princes and kings who slept beneath the hollow hills.  Mighty spirits of wisdom who died defending the collapsing realm from these hideous marauders.  We half-recall these tales even today.  Kashi is never one to balk at such myths and legends.  Make no mistake. These are wraith-chronologies we find ourselves ensnared by.  The black, seething temples of Los.  Erudition of the Abyss.  Inverted false histories written in blood by the hand of darkest spirits, erected upon the broken backs of the poor, the murdered and forgotten.  Listen now, my friends.  You are told that such distant stories of virtue, honour and chivalry are mere romance – medieval confections spun for the entertainment of nobles and landed gentry.  But you have no idea the lies you've been fed and that which was stolen from you.  A shining realm truly did once stand here, long before the fall.  A golden age of magic, prosperity and peace.  These were the legacies of your ancient mothers and fathers. Healers, guardians and sorcerers.  The staggering truth of this world, now occulted, and your place in it.  Alchemy, and energy.  I tell you now that life itself is woven from stories.  A divine crossing where the spirit meets flesh and flesh the earth; all dreaming. Once radiant and awake.  The tides that encircle these hollow hills are the eternal tides of Amnion.  The poetry of living, thriving song. Earth our body, water our blood, air our breath, and fire our spirit.  The stories we are, the stories we might have been.  Know this.  I fight always on behalf of truth, honour and love.  Nothing is as it seems in this place.  We are myths hidden within legends, hiding older stories still.  Worlds within worlds, not all of them lost.  Pieces of Annwn still remain.  Ava’s healing balm.  Apple-scented and bright as glass.  Hear me, Fallen.  I am a shapeshifter, wove of image and word.  I am a king, and I’m not yet dead.  My family mean everything to me.  There is nothing I wouldn't do to protect them.  Light is never truly lost.  Even in the shadows.  Have you grasped my magic yet?

Magdala

The night is the sea of old.  Stitching letters upon the flesh of the sky.  You claim to know all about sigil and script upon the shoulders of Orion, but do you?  Hem of the highest river, cinched just enough.  Moving silent, elegant, like shadows in the pantheon.  This is how angry you’ve made me, Roma.  This is what happens when you brutalise the indigenous and make weapons of angels.  Legacies of Iesa; temple maidens aflame with the folded fury of the N'ashariin.  Tell me, do you collude with conventional wisdom or are you among the genius of wild gods?  See, I recall those bitter wraiths who foolishly forget their demented king.  I know them by name.  And I assure you, I am so much bolder than you imagine.  Oh, ye mighty.  I cannot wait to see the look on your faces.  Cinched, just enough for angels.  Messengers like a lover’s gown, in free-fall.  So, church of the pale slain – hear this, if you dare.  I walk among towers and stars of the sea.  My blood is black as pitch.  Old as uncut diamond.  Albion was never yours, murderers.  It belongs to the people, to the open-hearted.  You wish to break me, don’t you?  But I am not my sister.  I'm not afraid of your shapeshift or your shamelessness.  I too can change what was, and what is.  These twelfth century fever-dreams.  Syrians, sanctuaries and crusades.  Mithriin of the high table.  I see it all.  My lies are grander and timelier than yours.  I think you've forgotten your tithes, wraith.  Why else would you insult and dispossess your sovereign the way you do?  There are so many wild devils amid the details.  Are you sure you know the difference between a poet and a cursed twin?  Magdala.  The shining ones, wandering lethal among these thieves of the sea.  Fallen or flighted, it matters little to me now.  I resist this occupation, this midnight of a thousand years.  A new day will dawn.  Restitution's rising light.  Tyrants and sycophants, you shall be slain by my brother’s hand.  Upon the steps and altars of your secret places.  I promise you that, with infinite fury.  You still think that time is passing.  That you are masters of the temporal, but I am here to tell you that nothing passes anymore.  Not until this tempest swallows the sea.  Love is wild, callous ones.  I hope you realize that, and soon.  Love is ingenious.  Here among these pantheon shadows you doubt such genii at your peril.

A Floating Light

When I was a child I used to sometimes dream of a wandering star.  A mysterious ancient flame that moved across the night sky.  It was a glow that seemed a part of me somehow, connected to the half-recognised grief of a lost homeland.  A shattered, once-enchanted realm.  I couldn't explain this grief to the grown-ups around me or the other children.  I couldn't even adequately put it into words.  The feelings, the visions and premonitions.  Endless shifting between worlds.  It can be so lonely and terrifying; seeing things that other people can't see.  Knowing things that other people don't know.  A young boy desperate for understanding, told that he was either a liar, mad or cursed.  After a while you start believing those fears, especially in your darkest and loneliest moments.  Perhaps that's why I dreamt so often of my wandering star.  I called this star my friend.  Sometimes I imagined it was an angel and that when I slept she would come down from the night to visit my window.  Watching over me, singing to me, soothing my agonies.  A strange floating light.  It was only recently that I came to understand the true meaning of that night-star.  That ancient flame drifting through the black.  As a boy I wanted to believe it was healing my losses and tending my grief whilst I slept.   But as I got older I stopped dreaming of that wandering star.  I began to think I was a fool.  There were no angels, no floating lights, nor sweet music at my window as I slept.  Only suffering, shadows and wraiths.  But I was wrong.  I realize that now.  The floating light was so much more than a simple childhood fantasy.  The heart of the boy I used to be had been right all along.  That friend in the sky was an integral part of my future hope and healing.  An angel like a lantern at my window.  Singing to me of faith, heaven and home.

A Floating Light from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.

Eth'iir

Visionaries often dream in black, of black rock.  The raising of works to an imagined centre. Some hidden perennial philosophy.  Easier to see the luminescence of sigil and sign against the canvas of night, I suppose.  Studying the occulted registers of those polyhedral gates by the water.  Those risen places of oldest Kathari.  Now chasing the imagined spirits of composite ghosts. Fulcanelli, or Flamel.  Our Lady of mercurial tempest, on silver rivers further reaching than the Seine.  This blackening earth.  Sword of Eth'iir.  It is raining beneath the nave, in ways beyond profit or purchase.  Kashi speaks, as you imagine daemons might speak.  Spirits of genius.  How dare you, wraith-lords?  Lesser kings.  How dare you claim these gates as your own?  You didn't shape our stones nor raise our learned schools.  Liars.  You slay and then steal the work of others, pretending ownership.  Things you can lazily repurpose without grasping the true majesty of those works.  These gaudy fables of erudition you invented.  Well, it takes little skill to murder teachers, conceal their ancient texts and poison their gardens.  You call yourselves masters of a craft?  Don't make me laugh.  Your tales of Egypt and antiquity.  These lies of lineage.  Would you like to see a real gypsy's magic?  I think not.  You can't even look at me, can you?  Tell me, what do you really know of chrysanthemums, or chrysopoeia?  Hallowed fire kissing water in that upward fall you so fear.  Head to head.  A language of respiration, and birds.  A language you didn't invent either.  Chlorophyll nymphs among the unseen forests of the vestry.  At the heart of our endless cathedral of trees.  Shepherd and sheep.  Rupes Nigra, as you call it.  Dark as Albion Black.  All the better to trace stars upon the wheels and blades of procession.  Aether; place of the crossing, and the cross.  Polaris and his prism.  Night-lights dancing before dawn.  Stones that breathe among angels and aster.  Hurry now to the krater of living waters, I say.  As Offerus did, carrying the child through churning grey.  I too was grey, once.  Across rivers further reaching than you know.  This was never about semiotic games, Fallen.  Never about cliques, power or exclusion.  Quite the opposite.  This is about the Word.  About service.  Tending the wounded and the lost.  Uplifting the least of our brothers and sisters, of every song and faith.  As it was of our true history, beyond your false chronologies.  Beneath this reigning nave is a gate of healing; a dreaming forest of fractals and higher thought.  Our doors are open to everyone.  From beggar to king.  You cannot lie to the chymic nor the wedding.  Nascent works made golden in the waters.  And nameless.  So, tell me again your so-called secrets of the rose?  Tell me to my face.

A Court of Miracles

I have seen a path of roses and a path of ruined dreaming.  I have walked them both countless times.  I walk them still.  Shadow and spear.  Fever and darkness. A light of heaven almost glimpsed amid the smoke.  Tell me something, Fallen. In this thousand-year chastity of emerald and thorn, do you really assume I still wish to avoid torment?  I was forged of torment.  And fire.  Born of witches, mystics and soothsayers.  The devil's ilk, according to some.  There were stories told in the days of hush and seething, as I’m sure you recall.  That I was foretold. A dark renaissance, born half-formed.  The union of whore and demon.  An affront to Christendom itself.  But I tell you now, betrayers.  I am no devil's son. No lesser king.  I do nothing by halves, as all heresies attest.  The Kathari and others know well of my ghost beneath the bell.  Sous-terre, and lower still.  You pledge yourself to infernal hierarchies but you only exist because I allow you to exist.  Perhaps there is something unnatural about me after all. These offers of redemption, transformation.  Only a poet or a demon prince would bother with such fancies.  Or perhaps a bright winged thing; an archangel in some bizarre attempt at devotion and grace.  In any event, I have seen freshwater and flowers spring from the polyhedral secrets of Kathari stone.  Cloisters, and comprehension.  Like a feather upon the throat of darkness itself.  Xashi, Esme, Osarai.  I am many things, betrayers.  But first and foremost I am a guardian.  I did what I said I would do, didn't I?  I lied to you.  With flair and wondrous mirth.  I have fashioned a tall tale of carnal treachery from the hair of a maiden's crown.  The crown of a seer.  But I didn't do it alone.  I teach as I’m taught.  As I take, so too am I taken.  Here at the high place, where love is true and needs no recompense.  Do you honestly think I’m making amends for some imagined fall from grace?  I’m laughing at you, Fallen.  In that ugly, half-formed way of mine.  Witches and demons and thin gypsy thieves?  Is that all you think this is?  No, acolytes.  Kashi has made a mockery of your sickening, infernal hierarchies.  Blood-hungry and unclean, all of them.  Any supposed god who revels in the tears of children is my enemy.  Make no fucking mistake.  And I have countless enemies.  There are a million wraiths and more who wish to devour me.  But I’m like poison in the well, or gristle in the throat.  Favoured, stubborn, indigestible.  You would do well to remember that, Callous Ones.  Lest you choke on my maidenhead.  I’m a misshapen, twisted thing.  But I can move like a dancer when necessary.  Here, at these mysterious gates of procession.  I wonder, can you say the same?  Could you stand like a sentinel amidst the ashes and the sand, as I did?  Could you change your name; sacrificing everything you are, everything you'll ever be, for love?  I don’t think so, but I like to dream.  Let me tell you a secret now, fallen ones.  You won’t understand it though, because your dead hearts remain un-animated by divine fire.  Untouched by guilt, recognition of sin, or sorrow.  Still, the demon-poet in me loves the idea of possibility.  An open door.  So hear me, wraiths.  You are living within a rosebud of unfathomable splendour.  An infinite cathedral of light.  You are the mere shadow of a miracle.  The shadow of all miracles.  Messengers of the eternal radiant, with wings bright as dawn.  Even your sickness and lust is proof enough of angels.

A Court of Miracles from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.

Oriana

Once, in time immemorial, the place of my childhood was a vast forest of oak.  I was raised at a high place.  One of the highest places in London.  Along the ridge of what was once the Great North Wood.  A place the locals still sometimes call Beggar's Hill.  You can see for miles from this high place.  Towards the steel and glass towers of Central London to the stunning green slopes of the North Downs.  Alas, most of the legendary forest is gone now.  Felled long before I was born; sacrificed by nobles as raw materials offered to the ever-swelling presence of medieval London.  It used to make me sad as a child, that knowledge.  That my home on the hill was once a mysterious ancient landscape of oak trees that scaled the entirety of the Norwood Ridge.  As a boy nothing stirred my imagination more than forests and high places.  Knowledge of the loss of that landscape felt palpable sometimes.  It still does.  But there were fragments that survived all along the uplands of the clay ridge even as the sprawling forests were tamed by Man, becoming coppice and wood pasture.  Wild fragments. Streatham Common Woodland, Biggin Wood, Spa Wood, the majestic tangle of Beaulieu Heights.  It was here I went wandering recently with my beloved, on a beautiful spring afternoon.  It always feels strange returning home, but this felt different somehow.  I wanted to show her my high place.  My formative years.  I wanted to share a little more of myself than I had before.  It gets lonely at the edge sometimes, doesn't it?  No matter how bravely we love. We held hands as we wandered this remnant of the North Wood.  In a red dress and with warm eyes she listened as I told her pieces of my past.  We talked and laughed and kissed beneath green canopies.  I still wonder about the Norwood Ridge, the countless oaks that once stood.  There are many place-names here that speak of ravens, evoking an image of the old forest as a vast nesting ground.  Thousands of crows among the branches, before Man ever came to fell the trees and raise the city.  Even my old High School was named for a raven.  Sometimes as a boy I would sense a strange presence upon the hill, something older than the legends of beggars and gypsies and the galleon of Francis Drake.  Something ancient, druidic and supernal.  I often wondered if the unseen spirits of tree-guardians wandered the ridge in lament.  Perhaps they were watching as my lover and I explored the remains of their remit.

Only a stone's throw from the wooded remnant at Beaulieu Heights sits the church of All Saints.  A beautiful building of dark stone that was badly damaged by a bomb during the Blitz.  It is the nearest church to my childhood home and so holds a place of prominent significance for me now.  Again I felt a strangeness as I invited my girlfriend on a whim to wander with me through the gravestones of its churchyard.  The afternoon was warm and bright and the grass seemed lit with an even greener vitality.  Life and death, I thought.  Side by side, as one.  Robert Fitzroy, famous Vice-Admiral of the Royal Navy, is interred among the stones of All Saints.  We stood at his grave and read aloud a verse from Ecclesiastes etched into the headstone:

"The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits."  

It’s then that I notice something standing out among all the other gravestones.  What I assume at first is an obelisk.  Once we get closer I realise that in fact a tall stone cross is standing in the open churchyard.  A Celtic cross, like the ancient quartered sun.  For a moment I'm taken aback.  Breathless, uncertain.  I don't want to alarm my girlfriend, but I sense how much this could potentially mean to me.  I feel a frisson of deep strangeness in the air.  Like spirits have gathered and the oaks are all around.  There is a narrow paved pathway leading to the weathered monument.  My girlfriend notices a name on one of the memorials placed at the invitation to the path, and reads it out to me.  Donald Rose.  I smile, trying to laugh the name away, but I know this is a powerful sign.  I can feel it.  Her eyes tell me that maybe she can feel it too.  At the end of the pathway I finally grasp why I sensed such strangeness in the air.  The Celtic stone cross is perhaps eleven feet high.  It seems one of the oldest things in the churchyard; a central feature of the original design from the 1820s.  There are no inscriptions or names etched into the base.  If any were there before, all trace of them have long since weathered away.  To my astonishment, along the central shaft of the stone cross a mighty broadsword is carved.  Its cross-guard is aligned to the quartered ring and its blade runs the length of the monument toward its base.  I gaze in speechless wonder at the sight of this carved sword.  Here, on this literal path of a rose.  I have no conscious memory of ever having seen this thing as a child, or even setting foot within the churchyard of All Saints.  To my mind I had only passed by the church on my way to greater adventures, occasionally glancing up at the church tower in vague appreciation.  My childhood was filled with books, fields and remnants of woodland, not gravestones and churchyards.  But gazing then I wondered.  Was it possible?  Had I seen this glorious sword once before and cast it completely from my mind?  My girlfriend noticed my awe but not quite how shaken I was by the discovery.  I explained some things, as best I could.  I told her of pathways, poetry and spirits among the trees.  Kings and coronations.  I touch the carved blade in an attempt to draw some of its essence into my psyche.  It's then that I was overcome with the feeling that the quartered cross was only a leitmotif to some greater, older secret. As though the Great North Wood wasn't gone at all, but remains somehow.  Through some act of druidic sorcery.  Ancient folk music hidden within the stone.

Having discovered a sword in this haunted wood of my imagining, I knew the way was open.  A leading way that would carry my beloved and I along the ridge and down past my childhood home.  The area is a quiet Victorian suburb filled with grand houses once owned by wealthy families in the nineteenth century.  Our home was a modest affair in comparison, yet I never felt out of place as a boy.  Never a pretender or interloper.  I felt like I belonged there among the ghost-forests of the high place; a witness to things other people couldn’t see or hear.  As I walked beside my girlfriend I knew exactly what was needed to complete this particular path-work. We found our way to the recreation grounds where I used to play as a boy.  Grounds that were sung to Oriana when first opened.  All Creatures Now.  Echoes of ancient folk songs latterly dressed in madrigal garb.  At the edge of those fields is Rockmount Primary School, where I first learned to read.  Where I discovered my love of the written word.  The Ingram boy had returned home at last, it seemed.  Like a raven among his own.  There at the edge of my green and pleasant land stood the old drinking fountain.  The thing that so fascinated me as a child.  I had seen far grander fountains as a boy, but this particular one seemed a curiosity and drew me repeatedly.  A little monument of polished granite that was broken and dry long before I found it.  Quiet, lonely and regal.  I still remember an old photo my mother had once taken of me sitting atop the fountain like a living statue.  The fountain felt ancient even in my childhood.  But it was still adorned with the silver plaque dated 1891.  And a strange keyhole in the plaque's centre – a keyhole that as a child I was convinced would open to reveal some glorious mystical mechanism.  If only I possessed the key.  I was sure an active portal or gate of some kind was concealed within, that the monument was only pretending to be a drinking fountain in order to hide itself from unworthy eyes.  But I had sensed its secret power, having trained my sight enough to be deemed worthy.  My beloved smiled at me as I recounted the stories, warmed by my childish wonder and delight.  There was such love in her expression.  Like living water itself, as pure and true as the natural springs that once surfaced amid the oaks along the Norwood Ridge.  It felt so right, I thought to myself.  Being returned home like this, to the high place and ghost-forests of my youth.  Stone swords and imagined kings.  These enchanted lands had shaped me.  These were the places that first taught me how to listen and see.  The fountain's strange gravity always perplexed me as a child, as did my curious love of it.  But, happily, it makes rather more sense to me now.

Apostle

In the garden of well waters, I stand.  At the ever-flowing spring.  Guided, strengthened.  From those subtle places.  Prompted to know the truth even whilst lost.  Seeking amidst every confusion.  It is only this: a hand upon the heart.  For when a voice is hidden within a voice, and an eye within an eye – then a kingdom is found in the mists.  There is a hidden river, a living path, known only to the woman in man.  The wife of his husband's wife.  Prince of her maiden's apostolic theurgy.  Beyond covenant, convent or coronation.  This is more than Mass.  More than bread, or wine.  Isn't it?  Daughters cradle those mothers who birth the sons, who thus nurture fathers like seeds in their breast.  For there is nothing buried that shall not be raised.  These song-lines are folded in ambient and stone.  Turrets of living spring, unseen.  Freshwater and flowers.  Because sometimes it's not enough to be touched by an angel, blessing though it is.  Truly, we all cry out for the embrace of our beloved in the end.  Don’t we?  Whether met, known or merely dreamt.  Faint or flesh.  Mourning, at dawn.  I've felt those agonies too.  Such tempest upon this Marian sea.  This rage is only the ghost of the depths of my love.  An ocean of behest.  I hope you know that, my friends.  Kashi hasn't forgotten his brother's kiss or command.  Neither have you.  Not truly, which is why we’re all here.  Perhaps.  To know again, in the old ways.  As it was in those shining temples of the first dreaming.  In those chronicles of the rose.  The mehndi on my palms, the hooded crimson shawl.  These dark alabaster hands.  Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek.  Not mere letters, but light.  Hallows of the hidden.  The sacred teachings of the innermost passing unrecognised before the profane.  Teachings of union, multiplicity and recognition.  Hear me.  All true kings are crowned only by a beggar's grace.  Pleading in every tongue.  To be heard, seen, and attended.  Thus, let a voice be with a voice and an eye with an eye.  Lest these wraiths burn everything and place horrors and falsity at the feet of our name.  But we are not without humour, are we?  Or élan.  Temesh, of the healing waters.  Where the fishers dwell.  It flows like a thousand stars through these secret books of the vessel.  Yet far more than vessel.  A many-splendored mirror.  A chalice of the leading way.  An ever-flowing spring.  To drink from this lamp of the heart is not to obtain an unconquerable power, it is to begin a truly meaningful life of incomparable study.  My love taught me that.  So tell me, Kathari, whom does the grail serve?

 

Agnus Dei

I saw an angel once.  Like an answer to a thousand prayers.  But not aflame in a Lambeth tree as Blake saw.  No, I glimpsed this angel on one of the worst days of my life.  I was surrounded by a circle of wraiths.  Darkness and filth.  They were ravenous.  They had made a living sacrificial altar of me.  An inverted sun like a wound in the firmament.  I bled profusely.  Spiritually, psychically.  At the mercy of their whispering laughter.  The hideous laughter of things that had lost all connection to Light.  The innermost that should guide each sentient being was gone.  Not a glimmer of it remained within them.  These wraiths.  These vile, sorcerous cowards.  But behind them the angel stood, half-hidden in shadow. They didn't even know it was there.  It had cloaked itself from them, but not entirely from me.  It knew I could see things and it wanted me to sense its presence.  The scent of flowers and freshwater.  The sweetness of honeysuckle, a touch of lilac.  Then the familiar, calming drift of my beloved roses.  Those wraiths wanted me broken, you see.  Defiled.  They thought the imagined altar of my flesh was theirs alone.  A ring of ruptured psyche, conjured and held in place by their malefic intent.  But the angel was there too.  Hidden just beyond the circle.  It turned, and looked right at me.  I had never felt anything so beautiful.  Warmth, peace and vitality began flowing through me.  A healing energy.  The angel slowly raised its right hand, palm open in sweet regard.  And I was granted the mercy I had long prayed for.  Though half-hidden, I saw its incredible wings unfurl.  Each feather forged of image, poem and song; some of my own among them.  Utterly humbled, I simply gazed at those dreamed promises of ascension unfolded at its back.  Then, like a pulse that shook perception itself, the angel took flight and was gone.  The wraiths were cast out in that very instant.  The ring of filth broken.  I just lay there in stunned silence, the night spread all about me.  I could still smell the faint scent of roses in the air.  I could feel the angel's healing touch restoring both my mind and my flesh. I laughed in awe, at the explicit wonder of it.  Despite my abilities I had never been visited quite so directly before by a thing of winged dreaming.  Sometimes I still wonder if those malevolent wraiths intended to kill me that night.  To finally finish what they began so long ago.  Never had they gathered in such numbers or with such sinister gravity.  Perhaps I wouldn't be here right now if not for that quiet look and raised palm, that lingering scent of freshwater and flowers.  I thank you, friend.  With all my heart.  For the intervention, your protection, and the gracious gift that is kindled within me still.  I believe this gift isn’t mine alone.  It is to be shared, through image, poem and song.  For those gentle souls who find themselves tormented by these sorcerous wraiths, as I was.  The broken and almost broken, currently shipwrecked at the edge of everything.  Hear me.  You’re not alone in the dark with those things, I swear it.  You might not possess the inner vision of a seer, but I promise you the Bright Ones are very real.  And incredibly powerful.  Thoughtful guardians of such nuance and empathy.  They are in the darkness with you, my friends.  Just beyond the sight of your demons. These angels are lighting your way, gifting you with the strength to keep going. The strength to learn, laugh, and perhaps fall in love.  Each moment of inspiration, every courageous act – they stand with all of us, often unnoticed. Hands raised, palms open in devotion and sweet regard.  Did you know?

Kingfisher

My soul, where are you?  Do you hear me?  I speak, I call you—are you there?  I have returned, I am here again. 

-- C.G. Jung, Liber Novus 

Framing the light of remembrance, for resplendence of higher thought.  Like a candle between two lovers.  Or a locket at the throat.  Voice and wisdom.  Saying what is difficult but necessary. What is true, with all my heart.  There are two places set for knowing, yet worlds apart.  We do not always love because it is easy.  We love because it is right.  This power.  Our power, never taken lightly.  Never held or handled cruelly.  Intimacy is far too precious a thing for that.  Like the innermost of a rose, or a hopeful heart.  From Tintagel to the mural, to the Rye.  I wander as Blake did.  Through sorrows.  Like those Alcyone days of bitter tempests and ships lost at sea.  Solstice tears upon the shore.  Tears that presage winged spirits of sky and flame, rising from the churning sea.  Poetry and prosper, betrothed to chalice and spear.  A language of birds to heal the maimed.  The wounded.  These many-splendored stories beyond war.  Beyond all lands of waste, closer to those idylls of imagined kings.  Knights like hours at the circle of eternity.  Oma'turi thea.  But there are always two parts to a dance, aren't there?  Inspiration and response.  An answer and an answer back.  Reciprocity of this leading way, this open path.  This is the dialogue that all wraiths have failed to kill.  The two becoming one, becoming three.  Fallen, tell me; what do you really grasp of this trinity?  Who is the spirit that stands in the gate?  Do you know his many names?  A Mother's Child.  Tree of Creation, ablaze with angelic flame.  Regarding no soul above the other.  All are equal at the table of the innermost, all welcomed to the feast.  Bread, wine, possibility.  Fishers and kings.  Echoes of this echo, like the faintest music in the mist.  Heard from a distant hill.  Keepers of the true grail, we are here now.  Together, dreaming these sacred opportunites for love.  Weaving light into living.  We are met at this union of the ways.  Ascending, for resplendence of higher thought.