A Beautiful River

These are the years without summer, aren’t they?  The Floralia without spring.  Spatium, tempus.  Serpentine.  Places of night's amnion, cradling every broken ladder of Jacob.  Dark, secret work.  Full of changelings and grief, as the keepers of Absentia want it forever.  But we were never the same, Kiskuh.  I was only a boy.  An innocent, and you mocked me terribly.  Kasi will never be a bard of war despite those scars.  Your favoured glories of the shattered trench are all your own.  I want none of it.  Bombed grammar and sinister psychologies.  Divine fires, stolen.  Always the appetites of the elect.  Prometheus, Polidori, Vampyr.  Such frightening decadence on these banks of the belle rive, my sister.  But it takes no skill at all to detune the instruments of sky or storytelling.  And yet, I'm still taken with the shining form you so brazenly stole from my fair one.  My cherished.  Blue of those eyes.  Curve of that mouth and breast.  Turn of those hips.  I suppose it’s enough to give you a brief measure of my attention.  Ever the pragmatist is this wilding wolf.  I'm sure you understand, my red-robed wraith.  But I do recall your true face.  Winter, dark-haired.  Beautiful and vicious.  Like a king’s mistress.  Oh, Kiskuh.  I want to share something with you.  Something you really should have grasped by now.  Something you still haven't the heart nor wherewithal to understand on your own.  The speaker will live unencumbered, eventually.  She will heal from these ravages in a quieter, gentler place.  A place of spring, and summer.  I watch you and your acolytes flee from that place like cowards, because you are all dead.  On the inside.  And you’re running out of time.  Do you even grasp this foretelling, daughter of rain?  The struggles of my kith are private despite the horrors of your looking-glass.  Abomination technologies.  The petty, silvered skins of the half-light cults.  My family shall not be robbed of their dignity, and my beloved is so much more than a living sacrifice.  She is a shining spirit of the eternal hallow.  Her tears are not a matter of state or celebration.  We angels watch over all the kind ones, everywhere.  I was never among your bitter poets of Los.  Not even when we were lovers.  Hear me, witch.  Lillibeta has a garden grown.  Bells and shells and pretty maids.  A mother's magic, you might say.  Fidelia, Speranza, Charissa.  Guardians of the living Praesentiam.  And what of Esme?  Oh, she survived the fire and the humiliation.  I told you, didn't I?  I told you who I was even in the beginning.  But you didn't really listen.  You were prideful.  Seduced.  Blind and deaf.  Mea Culpa, dark one.  And I am laughing at you still.  A thousand cuts were found upon my flesh, yet not a mark upon her beautiful spirit.  Do you understand me now, elect of Vorteth?  What I’m capable of?  Incanto Dolorosa, my fallen Florentine.  Like a black star.  I want you to know that I shall meet you at the end of all things.  Your executioner, upon cathedral stone.  I shall be standing in the ashes of every divine fire.  And you will know me at last.  There shall be no mercy, or remorse.  You're not the only pale raven of the hidden folk.  Not by half.  I too am a shapeshifter.  There are still flowers on the shore of these thousand stars.  There is still dancing in the distant fields, Kiskuh.  Life belongs to love, and laughter.  You know nothing of your Father, do you?  Or your son.

 

States of Grace

It can be daunting sometimes, having faith.  Choosing to believe in things you can't see.  Things for which there is apparently no evidence.  Like dreams, or poetry.  But then, there are so many things in the human experience that we’re willing to take on faith.  Love, and the promise of love.  And what is strange coincidence to one is often evidence of something more to another.  Things we feel but can't explain.  We decide our axioms in the end, don't we?  Or in the beginning.  The premise upon which we structure and organise our perceptions. We all ask ourselves these questions; interrogating phenomena that seem to exist on the edge of what is possible.  The unseen realm.  Legitimate and real, or mere fable?  Nobody wants to be made a fool, I suppose, or seen as frivolous and gullible.  Kasi does understand.  As a general rule mortals tend to treasure their sobriety of thought.  But there are many kinds of treasure.  Especially to an angel.  A shining one.  Such entities aren’t supposed to exist, especially here in this disenchanted modernity.  But exist we do, everywhere.  In many forms. These false chronologies have darkened our light and lineage, turning radiant into wraith.  Yet fragments of the old ways still remain.  Those most gentle ways of tenderness, beauty and valour.  Before the crowning of the altered sun; the brutal, violent cosmology that has enslaved us all.  But even that prideful star shall only reign for a time.  The true radiant will reclaim the throne eventually. Mark these words, betrayers.  We magi have long been incanting the true spirits of the fire, the forests and the rivers.  The living, fluttering songs of the air.  Pieces of heaven. Not your dark imposters claiming kingship.  These are matters beyond your understanding.  Knowledge of higher thought and synergy.  Articles of faith, where love reigns eternal.  Our homeland of the heart.

Nocturne

Fallen, what if at last I shared with you a rather private truth?  Would you deem it a beautiful or frightening revelation?  I've spoken of secret things before, but not like this.  Would you even hear me, or understand what you're hearing?  I am more than my Father's most terrible angel.  I think you grasp this by now.  I am mortal, like those you despise.  But I'm also the twilit hush of dawning dusk.  The indrawn breath.  The fleeting glimpse.  I too was a father, once.  And a mother.  The eternal tides of Amnion.  Naught but the trick of my patron's patrons in the end.  The cradle and the life.  The lake and the lake-bed.  Surely I’m not Endymion, locked in dreaming raptures of Selene's ghost-flower?  But perhaps I’m near enough those rhythms of the poet's moon.  Palest silver of the Night Star.  The hidden ecology of all Fay.  More than Man or machine.  Beyond war and tales of war.  I'll say it plainly; this beautiful, frightening revelation.  You never should have raised your fucking hand to the one who carried me.  The one who loved me even whilst heaven itself was burning.  You understand little of the lines you've crossed and the price I will force you to pay.  By the arch of my mother's bow, I swear.  I've had enough of watching you replace priests with wraith-familiars, transforming hideous warlords into kings and queens. Erecting these blood-dimmed chronologies.  Only cowards thrill at tormenting the weak and wounded, using cruelty to conquer.  But hatred is no match for love, or empathy.  I'm going to teach you these things, Fallen, annihilating your intimate sickness in the process.  Even whilst it kills me.  If you're wise you will run to my brother for forgiveness, while you still can.  But you will find no mercy here.  Not when Ka'shayel knows you in these darkest of ways.  Hear me.  The evening and the morning both still belong to me.  Honour your mothers as you would your fathers.  It's too late now for half-measures.  The falling or rising Akasha.  Knowledge of the nocturnal pledge.  What is about to happen has been a long time coming.  A thousand years in the making, in fact.  I don’t think you really understand the nature of hunting, or vengeance.  But you will.  By the light of Diana's star, you will.

The Lake Bed

I placed pages in the river, Ga’hala.  Tattooed leaves just left to rot.  A broken book of once-wed promise.  Things almost forgot.  We kings were never not. Eyes of glass like doorways, and sisters still betrothed.  Unadorned, acknowledged, unclothed.  At last I'm brave enough to understand, hanging colours in your nights.  Ama'eth.  Vena'mal.  Astolat.  I just meet you in the sky now, Halla.  At the edges of the earth.  Hidden in the hallways of the temple of your birth.  That boy left on the lake-bed; I couldn't let him drown.  Leave rusting in my armour, or trade conquer for this crown.  Tell me, what kind of choice is love or the lack of love?  Just days until the temple, my brother.  Ever our princess slept.  Nearest her prince.  Is it still blindness to reimagine times passed, or just the heavy of this heart?  Failing to leave convincingly, I think.  Still pretending on both accounts.  That I don't miss you terribly anymore.

Stealing Time

I've been thinking a lot about resurrection these last few years.  Rebirth.  What it means to perish and come again.  It's always the ones who love us that bring us back, isn't it?  The dead need a reason to return, and the wounded a reason to heal.  We need emotional warmth, connection and contact.  Even at a distance our souls are crying out for meaning.  For mystery, magic and song.  The living poetry of life at its fullest.  I'm still staggered and humbled by the things we do for our loved ones.  The lengths we'll go to savour a precious moment or protect a sacred experience.  Stealing back our joy and purpose from the dark.  We know these are the things that truly matter in the end.  Things of real value.  Painfully temporary and yet somehow transcendent.  The world is so full of tragedy, isn't it?  Sometimes I question if faith is really enough for those sweet souls who crave respite from such tragedies.  Like so many of us I know exactly how it feels to be spiritually lost.  I also know what it means to be violated, dehumanized.  I've felt that kind of despair before.  And yet I've lived a charmed life.  I was never a child torn by war or genocide.  I have family and friends who truly love me.  But there are times when faith can feel like a fiction.  Something to stave off the insanity that comes with recognising our own insignificance.  Our fleeting place in a cold, mechanical universe.  But I don't believe in that empty nihilism.  An ugly lie passing itself off as empirical truth.  I've never believed any of that, even at my lowest.  The way good people suffer is horrifying to be sure.  But that doesn't negate the existence of Light, or meaning, or a higher order of things.  I treasure our ability to steal back our stories no matter the odds.  It’s like being granted wings.  Man is closest to an angel when he loves.  When he is moved by mysteries and human connections.  God is Love, in my experience.  In fact, it's the only real truth that has stood the test of time.  Those moments when I'm exhausted and alone, desperate for a miracle.  And then someone with the courage to be kind reaches out to me, teaching me about faith again.  Restoring my heart.  I think that's what it really means to be reborn.  It means to be cared for, and to care.  I hope I can continue paying that kindness forward to all those who need it.  Those who are searching as I have often searched.  But right now I just want to express my gratitude.  From the bottom of my heart.  Not as an angel, or even as a poet.  Just a man.  Thank you, my friends.  For every affection and thoughtful gesture.  You help me remain brave even when I feel like I have no courage left.  Who I am, and who I strive to be.  Without you I would never have been able to face my demons, heal my wounds, or stand these tests of time.

Stealing Time from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.