This Imaginary Earth

Pull up a guiding star, she says.  This imaginary earth is always where we are. There are secrets buried in such earth.  Hope hidden in the ground, like red thread that can lead us back to the source of things.  But so often I've found only strange eclipses.  Things without ontology.  No beginning or end.  And then I remember how it hurts.  It's a difficult thing to watch, isn't it?  A difficult thing to endure.  The loss of direction and meaning.  The sense that there's nothing left to do except wait for a slow decay.  When the blackbird doesn't fly.  When everything natural is lacquered, darkly curated, drowned in the shrieking silence of morbid technologies.  I remember what it feels like to have no star.  Trapped, unannounced.  Just an absence in your hands, at the heart of you.  Like you were simply forgotten by your Father amidst the relentless ebb and flow.  Forever falling through the darkness of an indescribable eye.  Through the infinite pupil of God.  I know exactly what it feels like.  A plunging sacrifice that bleeds the very soul of you but is only metaphoric in the end.  Food for stories, as men make ritual and weapons from the half-eaten memory of your shattered wings.  It's not enough to continue, my friends.  Even the dead continue.  It's not enough to soldier on.  One has to see events and horizons beyond the warring abyss.  Beyond strictures and the brutal binds of coin.  It's not enough to simply live, die and repeat.  In either this or some brighter temporary.  Not for me, or anyone.  And I am indeed anyone.  Everyone.  With that knowledge comes the burden of light, for shadows are no longer the lures or excuses they might have been.  Pull up a guiding star, the angel says as she smiles beneath my sleep.  A star like a lantern for the lost.  To perceive is to connect.  The ancient elders knew this.  The wisest among us still know.  Across phantasms of supposed distance.  Beyond the entropic dreaming of time.  And if, like a thing of fire from imagined ashes, I were to rise into revelation...to the mountain at the centre of the world, the pillar beneath the fountainhead, the tree whose branches hold the eternal sea – if I were to rise like that, would I be alone on the hill?  Or would my brothers and sisters be with me?  Because I tell you now, Kasi hates being alone.  I'd rather you were with me, my friends. In these phantasms.  I've endured loneliness for such a long time that I've almost convinced myself I'm everywhere but here.  This imaginary earth.  This gate of higher thought and deeper understanding.  Now I console myself with the myth of movement.  The bizarre legend of death.  Because this is the story of life and her brother the shadow.  The story of dreaming and my sister the ghost.  Pull up a guiding star, she says.  This imaginary earth is always where we are.  Finally I listen to her.  To my angel and my love.  It’s only then that my mind calms enough to truly recall the gift of giving.  The hallows of service.  The freedom of rediscovery.  Tending family and friends.  Alone if necessary, yet accompanied all the way.  Then at last I find an earnest smile upon these lips.  An urge to speak again, and create.  Black-as-crown comes the mercurial flight, knocking at all doors.  And so I find my hands in the earth once more, digging for solace and song.  Red thread, penumbra, and the source of things.