CALIBVRN

I found a star today, buried in a lake.  Hidden in a hollow tree.  I can part the veils with this star.  I can open worlds with the edge of its dreaming.  This star, this tongue of burnished silver – I share it with a friend of mine.  A girl I've known since I was a boy, and long before.  When we wandered hill and dale and spoke of Vivian's music.  The calling thrill of the twinning river, mid-morning.  The ghostlike mist that kisses those lakes of grey.  A world of myth and making, when the hours themselves were golden and the skies ablaze with tender promise.  I sought that sun today, my love.  That bucolic gold in the meadows and fields.  Nis'atur, the pages once sang.  In the oldest tongues of Albion. Navah'tri, of our thought.  Ann'ethi, of our flesh.  Cam'ri'lach, of our heart.  But is it enough to fill our heads with stories of the old world?  The half-forgotten vistas of a lost and shattered chronology?  They sicken me; these Plantagenet wars of Tudor glance and sinister revelry.  These false flowers reddened in blood-dimmed tides. That they might speak for Ebura, or Lune?  How absurd, when these pretenders knew and know nothing of words, or names.  Calesvol is written upon the brow of the first angel.  Just above her left eye.  Did you know that, Fallen?  It is written there in all the colours of continuum. Sometimes names are passed down like secrets.  Altered just enough for hiding.  K'ashayel is such an old name.  Albion is such an old tale.  See, I won't pretend I'm not a man.  I am.  But neither will I pretend that I wasn't once a prince.  My dear one, I wanted more for you today.  I really did.  I wanted to offer you something other than these stories.  Something tangible.  I can't give you a gift like that, but I can still seek with inner vision.  I can still take you with me in my heart.  And so I did.  A small gift perhaps, but earnest.  I quickly discovered a path on my journey, set with an eight-pointed star.  I wandered this path adorned with bunting, beside the angel and the crown, until I came upon such monument as is fit for a day pledged to you.  These turrets of Magdala.  And so here we are again, little one.  Priests and their hills, daughters and their hallows.  Mothers and their kin.  This work is greater than those hideous lies of succession, those dark attempts at alchemy.  Greater even than those supposed angelic scripts at Mortlake.  Besides, I care little for blackened glass when all is said and done. Ga’hala will tell you, my love.  Lest you forget these tales of truer waters.  Tales of near-drowning and the breath.  A daughter of fortitude?  Oh, for certain.  But such a daughter is of far grander provenance than these wraith-lords understand.  I still recall the sleeping river at Richmond, when we spoke of future dreaming.  Imagined archaeology.  There is thunder in our hearts, my love.  I cannot drown again.  I cannot risk the depths to truly know once more, but I swim towards light in my yearnings.  And so I climbed Richmond Hill to be with you.  There at Turner's View I stood in perfect sunshine and watched the ribbon of Temesh weaving its way through verdant meadows beneath a sky of crystal blue.  I wandered among the deer and the fawn that gathered at a fallen tree in the meadow.  A hollow tree.  Later still I ventured deep into the woods. Until, to my astonishment, I witnessed a caped traveller upon a white horse.  I imagined him a gallant knight upon his steed, in honour of you.  Far too naïve a sight, too innocent for a cynical soul to recognise.  You and I are not children anymore.  We both know the cost and price of war.  But these sweeter visions indeed are kisses from the otherworld.  A gentle smile can sometimes be found among the trees, where branches hold the eternal sea.  I still remember.  The tiny bells upon ankle bracelets, barefoot in the grass.  Like a vision in white and gold.  Half human, half fay.  You were there with him, you know, at the gate of Lud.  In the churchyard on the hill.  In the shadow of Powles Crosse.  The angel and the ghost.  An exchange of experience, you called it.  You had such warmth in your voice as you offered to carry his pain for him.  But that boy in the courtyard knew he could never do that to you.  Not to you.  He couldn’t let you be cursed like that.  Oh, Little Rock.  It’s far grander than you ever imagined.  That shattered blade, those shining eyes.  Made a star once more.  In the hands of a dreaming king.  Upon the brow of a singing angel.  It matters little of those hordes of Vort’eth, those draconian towers.  We tongues of the true fire speak louder in silence than all the lies of those false thrones.  I need you to know, my fair one.  I need you to grasp the depths of who you really are.  This Path of Roses, of Mother and Child.  For Daughters, and Sons.  Albion is not merely these isles.  No, all lands are Albion.  And the true regent of those golden hours shall never abandon their people nor leave them without hope.  We share this silver star, my darling.  For Love, and little else.  We were warriors once.  We are warriors still.

Realms

I can't believe I didn't die that evening.  Fallen in the fire.  Broken on the edge of sunlight.  Perhaps I should have died.  Maybe I was supposed to.  But I didn't. Not completely.  Lying there in the grass and the dusk, beside steel and sidelines.  Imagining lampyridae all about me, like the rain was rising and aglow.  Like the stars came down to kiss me.  Perhaps it was just my life flashing, as my eyes deigned to close.  You know, I still believe I didn't die for nothing.  Because I get to hear the sounds of how they find you.  The way you give back, my courageous one.  All beneath a tide that's rising.  I can guide you, if you'll let me.  But I can never speak the future for you.  Not directly.  I can't commemorate what's to come, flute in hand and clinking glass.  I wish I could, my darling, but there are some things an angel just isn't allowed to say.  It's the difference between ghosts and men.  Fantasies and fireflies.  But I hope you sense the breadth of care in all the things I can never tell you.  Like the sweet pride your Mother has in her daughter’s lyricism.  Or the depth of your Father's gratitude.  I'm treading waves in a seashell, princess, to better the bruise.  Maybe I can reach us if nobody moves.  If I just lay here, holding my breath.  Watching echoes of what love might lose to love again.  Maybe I can be clean now, my beautiful lavender star.  I can't believe you didn't leave me, lost in endless shadow.  But you didn’t.  Somehow you found my heart.  In the dark of my most vulnerable moment.  Part of me wishes I could give you spoken words instead of secrets hidden in things unsaid.  But that's not our story.  I still believe you might need me, my dearest river-flower.  The romance of your endless here in my shaking heart.  I might be alone but I'm never without you.  I wear you on my sleeve, wonderful girl.  A testament to all the ways music can heal a broken boy.  You gave me something that I can't really give you in return – except in dreams.  Through you I found more peace than I ever thought possible, and for that you'll always have my heart.  Thank you, kind one, for the depth of your understanding.  These ghosts in the candle are lit by the flame of your love.  This light of my outline, these heavens above.  And so, I fold a kiss in a rosebud.  Like when we were young.  As I pray it crosses realms to reach you.

The Lantern's Brother

We were supposed to be lights, Amas.  Moments of meditation and wonder.  Shining mysteries glinting in a sea of infinite black.  We were never forged for chaos, or horror.  Distortion, inversion, disarticulation.  But the colour of this so-called rebellion – it's the same colour you always speak now.  The colour of nothing.  Dressed up as prowess, and pinnacle. That you would glory absence so, that you would gild the hollow with such relish.  Is that all there is to your poetry now, my brother?  Is that a demon's poetry?  Shall I burn the apocrypha as kindling beneath your wicked wing?  Are you only lifted such upon smoke and lost light?  Well, I made shapes in the ash for you, didn't I?  Special shapes of falling things, of storied hush, of brothers with avian wings.  Hands upon lips and feathers upon throats.  You were prettier than all of them, brother, until you whispered those things in my ear.  Until I finally saw what you were trying so vehemently to become.  Do you really think there is some cachet in all this?  Some dark genius that only the abhorrent can recognise?  Slavery, perversion, the scent of violent sex upon the living waters?  Is that as deep as your petty wicked can venture?  By all that is holy, my brother – what happened to you?  This is rhetoric, of course.  I know exactly what happened.  You dreamt yourself a hideous god and haunted yourself a king.  But there are no other gods.  No other kings.  Amas, my love, you still don't understand the nature of brothers.  Or sisters.  The living flesh of the twinning river.  Oh, I shouldn't mourn you like this.  Not like this.  But I do.  You are not the bitterest of wraiths.  You are the palest of storms.  You have no fucking idea what it means to be a ghost.  Or a fury.  But you will, in time.  I have poison in my veins, Sama'el.  And shadows in my heart.  Because of you.  Love is true.  One day soon you will know the kind of sire you've made of me.  But there will be no relish.  Not for you.  Not in the end.  We were supposed to be lights, my brother.  Electric, like the stars themselves.  But no man is an island, I suppose.  Not even the blackened sun.

The Rounding Sleep

Sometimes a storm will come, without warning.  A roiling tempest upon the seas of our minds and our hearts.  Sometimes the only thing we can do to weather such fury is wait and be willing to adapt to each moment.  To find nuance and balance even in the terrifying ebb and flow.  Sometimes the skies open and the heavens speak.  For both mortals and angels.  And we are roused from sleep by the distant call of gathering chaos.  We must always remember the lost.  Those who fought so that our lives might be a little brighter.  Our brave ones.  Our glorious dead.  There are so many slain in these wars of imagination.  These wars for the stars themselves.  We shall honour their memory. And sometimes, if we can, we will steal their place among those halls of the fallen and the dead.  We will send them away to escape the horrors, in hope that they will live better lives.  Free from madness and suffering; a third eye sealed with a kiss.  Hear me, dark ones.  Callous Ones.  Your time is short.  Believe me, I should know.  You don't get to harm the people I cherish.  Not without a fight.  If you want to get to them you’ll have to come through me, and I still don't think you realise what that means.  Who I am, and what I stand for.  This so much bigger than sorcery.  This is destiny.  Love is true, and against this stuff as dreams are made on no wraith shall prosper.

The Rounding Sleep from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.

The Refracting Rose

Sometimes I savour the sadness of broken things.  The unameable, irreplaceable loss that comes with time.  With vantage, or vision.  It's tempting to enjoy such melancholy when all one has is time.  Especially through the eyes of a poet.  Or an angel.  The fields of my mind and my heart still bear the seed of my creativity as I attempt to bring such visions to term.  But this birthing process is almost never easy.  And what exactly is this nostalgia I’m craving?  Is it the longing for a genuine return – Ennoia; the secret flame, here again – or am I just savouring the loss once more?   Have I made a fetish and fetch of her absence?  Perhaps I’m simply spinning these wheels like the ever-circling hands of the clock.  Perhaps, in my baffled kingship, I've told one too many stories.  Maybe not truly, but in those ways of the spirit and the heart.  It really hurts to love someone, my friends.  I don’t think you need Kasi to tell you that.  But it hurts almost as much to tell a good story.  Angelic light, demon poetry – and everything in between.  Throughout the ages many have made monsters from the tellers of tales.  I can understand why.  It's a frightening thing to come face to face with meaning.  With context, knowledge and growth.  It's unearthly, isn’t it?  Intoxicating.  Sublime.  Truly, it’s a strange place that storytellers occupy.  Halfway between healer and sorcerer, cartographer and mythographer. Because those broken things are more comely in the astral light of a well-told tale.  Justice is a mercurial thing.  A certain restitution can be found in the human tongue, with or without its poetry.  But a storied annunciation can rent the veils like nothing else.  It can level cities and raise the dead.  But more than this, storytelling is the only prism in which mankind can truly see itself.  The better angel of its nature.  In the end stories are the only place where Man can believe, even if only for a moment, that he is not a monster.  Not a vampire.  Self-reflection is an incredibly powerful thing, believe me.  Through it the heart is strengthened, softened, and remade in gold.  This place of hope and knowledge beyond even melancholy – it is the shapeliest, most comely of dreams.  But more than this, within such divine fire lies the animating principle.  The fulcrum of all existence and perception.  This is the ingenuity of God laid bare.  To love, and be loved.  Cherish it well because life itself is the sacred bloom of such genius; a radiant multidimensional flower of innermost light.

Everyday Words

It might seem cliché; a meaningless and easy observation in our jaded world. But it's true nonetheless.  Life exists in the now.  Nowhere else.  The past is a dangerous ghost and the future a staggering possibility of what might be.  Now is the only moment of true power.  Our lives are best enjoyed by doing all we can to savour this moment.  Of course, nobody can live their lives in absence of strategy.  Or hope.  That's not what I'm saying.  I'm talking about the sacred, hidden dimension to everyday life.  We've all heard these things before and perhaps we agree somewhat blithely.  We understand these things intellectually at least.  Taking a moment to breathe, stopping to smell the roses.  But really feeling the truth of this sacral quality is something else entirely.  I think we underestimate the sheer psychological violence that can be inflicted upon us by modern living.  We human beings are so incredibly strong.  We're masters and mistresses of adaptation.  The world demands this shapeshifting from all of us, and sometimes we forget just how much we're grappling with.  Modern culture and politics can seem alienating and terrifying after all.  Many of us exist in a state of near-perpetual dissociation because of that terror.  We might not always recognise it because we're so skilled at adapting to circumstance.  We're subjected to so many pressures and are forced to adopt a variety of masks on any given day.  But finding the hidden power of the now is a skill like any other.  It grows with repetition and discipline.  These are the true wonders; a poet's muse.  Moments not ordinarily seen.  

Why even write these words?  Because I want to inspire people.  I want to take care of the ones I love.  But more than this, I'm always interested in sharing the truth.  Truth isn't always easily discernible.  Especially in a realm of such chaos and volume.  We all have gifts, don't we?   For myself, I've become attuned to subtle energies over the years.  Moonlight hidden by the glare of the sun, or a night-time stillness buried in the depths of the day.  The space between spaces.  Sometimes I can even sense things long before they happen.  Moments and events, personal or otherwise.  It used to be that I'd often wish I savoured the approach a little more.  The quiet time, the build-up, the foreplay.  I don’t make those mistakes anymore.  I give beauty all the time it needs to linger.  Such gifts teach you something.  An unwavering respect for the mysteries of human consciousness and our connection to the spiritual realm.  You might be forgiven for thinking that knowing the future would make you feel incredibly powerful.  But the opposite is so often the case.  You can feel small, lost and abstracted.  Driven mad by the quicksilver thresholds between fate and free will.  But it matters, this hidden dimension of the everyday.  A way to better taste the richness and depth of our own lives.  There are many ways towards God, many paths into this sacral perspective.  Meditation, journaling.  Physical exercise and focused attention.  And, of course, the creation and enjoyment of art.  Painting, poetry, music.  There are signs everywhere, indeed.  Every story you have ever loved is a part of you and is blessing you daily.  We might be unable to grasp this from our limited mortal perspective, but it's true nonetheless.  Art is the oldest magic.  The true high magic.  Lingua Franca of the immortal soul.  

Personally I have little choice but to treasure these sojourns of the sacred.  You see, I mostly live my life alone.  That's what happens when a human mind somehow recalls life before the Fall.  Before the cataclysmic War in Heaven.  I have family and friends scattered about this ruined realm.  I still cherish and remember them, but they don't remember me.  Or if they do it's only dimly, as if in a half-forgotten dream.  But I can live with that because the battles I face are all too real.  I don't want my beloved ones held hostage, used as collateral, or else swept up in the wake of this nightmarish war.  It's the price I pay, and I pay it gladly.  However, this hidden dimension of daily life keeps me connected to my loved ones.  It allows me to reach out and fulfil my role as silent guardian.  Even at such distance.  I love you, my friends.  I really do.  I'll keep fighting for a kinder and more courageous consciousness, on behalf of all the bright ones.  I'll use these strange skills to the best of my abilities.  We are all so much less alone when we feel connected, creative, or in love.  God is Love, and that’s the ultimate truth.  Our communion with that truth is our release from the burdens of sorrow.  My friends, there is so much humanity still doesn’t understand.  So much left to discover.  Whenever I feel lost or lonely I try to practice gratitude for the good things in my life.  Imagine how strange and mysterious the world might actually be if spirit were a genuine reality.  Because it is.  Even if you imagine only for a moment, there is great power in that moment.  Eternity is contained within each elevated observation, like the many secrets of a holy prism.  These are your pathways into presence, and wonder.  A little flare of rainbow colours on a hardwood floor.  The shining curiosity of a child.  An overheard conversation or melody that mends the soul.  The breathless afterglow between lovers.  Or the quiet joy of a peaceful bedroom filled with morning light.

All My Demons

Sometimes we're pulled downward by an absence.  By the gravity of our own shadows.  Those parts of us we hide or barely even realise exist.  But the lightless realms do indeed exist, within and without.  Dark angels, demonic kings, cultures of war and oppression.  As people we fight these absences on all fronts.  A spiritual battle.  An inner reckoning.  Often we fall short, made savage and bleak, remorseful and ashamed.  It hurts when we fail those better aspects of our nature.  But we're all grappling with the breadth of shadow and light within us.  Messengers, chimeras and gods.  These individuated strata of consciousness.  Nobody is perfect, and we're all fighting the same war.  Freedom versus control.  Love or the absence of love.  It's a war that always costs dearly, even on the inside.  Broken promises, depression and mental illness.  These internal scars are nothing to be ashamed of, my friends.  We struggle for sanity in an insane world.  We fight simply to breathe in a realm of poison and smoke.  I want you to know that every attempt at growth and self-knowledge counts for something, even if it feels like you're trapped.  Like there's no way out.  Like all you do is fail, over and over.  Because insight is the liberator of consciousness.  Try again, and try something different.  Pay close attention and celebrate the little wins.  You're not alone, even in the savage darkness.  Bright ones walk with you, unseen.  Your Father is with you too.  Kasi promises you that.  Our Creator is infinitely loving, and insightful.  He is seeking always to restore our hearts and knows all that is hidden.  Everything we show one another is highly curated. Our best faces, our wisest words, our deepest allure.  But even the most seemingly untroubled souls are fighting battles of which we know little.  To greater or lesser degrees we are all children of the Fall.  Dwellers in the ruins of cataclysm.  Prisoners, refugees and walking wounded.  Of the world and the mind.  And yet we are all unimaginably powerful.  We are mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters.  We are daughters and sons.  We are the eternal presence, not the absence.  Living proof of the loving ingenuity of God.  And we are not meant to wander in darkness forever.  My friends, you are not defined by the most broken aspects of yourselves.  Not unless you choose to be.  And consciousness is nothing if not the ability to perceive and to choose.  Sometimes those choices are extremely limited, or agonising, and often made in the face of overwhelming odds.  I’ve been broken too, and lost.  I know from painful experience that there are moments when turning your face to some idea of spiritual light is simply an act of faith.  But I tell you now, that light is not a lie.  It is the everlasting truth.  We're all made accountable in the end.  Taught by our noble failure and beloved for our honourable success.  The things we do for ourselves and each other.  Everything is seen, and understood.  Those days when we got back up even though we were barely able to stand.  Those times when a kiss, a kind word or the eyes of our children were the only things that got us through the day.  I love you, my friends.  I hope these words lift your spirits in some way.  I want the best for us.  We're all guided by unseen hands towards our highest selves, whether we recognise it or not.  Synchronicity.  Hidden signs. The world behind the world.  We all have demons, but there are bright ones forever fighting on our behalf.