By Royal Decree

Of leaf
And glancing
Of shrub
And dancing
That light of star
Might guide your way
Scent of cherish
Upon the bay
I have seen a thing
Of the dreaming
A fine and grand thing
One of notes beyond refrain
Hidden courtyards
Swept by rain
It gathers
Patient, true, delighted
You are All cordially invited
By royal decree

A Different Land

She looks kind of like me

I look kind of like you

Hearts are hidden angels

Joyful and true

We all look like each other

So get ready to run

As day honors the moon

Night honors the sun

A hand still to hope for

A palm still to sing

Breath of my friends

Beneath lifted wing

Of spirit and flesh

Shall we run and never fall?

My Father once told me

That love conquers all

Not Without Heart

Oh, fallen.  Still snapping at my heels, I see.  Playing sharks like cowards in the tides of interregnum.  But it's not my blood in these waters.  Well, maybe just a little.  Month and moon.  Tides will be tides.  I've said it all before, but I really don't think you understand.  My palms are scented.  Like candles, but with the oils of her rapture.  Love is a gun at your creation's fallow temple.  Of solace, or sin.  Time and tears and ruin.  I am fate and I am done with you all.  Indeed, I am fate.  If cathedrals could tear themselves, or speak.  Or both.  My sister broke my death upon her hands and hair.  My child raised my child.  And I, of all of them, never gave you a moment's rest.  I know what true fear smells like.  Nothing like love.  There's no joy in it.  No play, or tease.  I have forgotten many things, but not joy.  Am I supposed to be afraid of you?  Wars and death and folding cities?  Fallen, I was born of ash.  Forged in flame.  Everything you crave is stolen and perverse.  You only feign at swagger.  My All is dreamt and felt.  To the core.  Nothing about me is feigned.  Do you realize the truth? Here it is, for the abhorrent and slow-witted: I don't give a fuck about any of this shit.  None of it.  Eternities come and go, defilers.  I should know.  I was there.

   Trinovantum fell, and fell hard.  Not by my hand or wish.  But as I foresaw.  So now, I am become fate's vengeful eye.  Rather me than flooded families. 

   Can you reach just this once, fallen?  Can you honour at last?  Can you recognize the offered gate and massage your dead hearts to life again?  I doubt it.  You savour your sickness and dream your defilements too deep.  No matter.  I care not at all for any of you, in the end.  Your hate, half-light, and beds for broke and breaking.  Perhaps I'll laugh.  Perhaps I'll mock your feeble cryptography.  You're all full of shit, wraiths.  You and your supplicants.  Without camaraderie and mutual respect this nonsense barely holds my attention.  

   Truth is whatever the fuck I say it is.  

   I'm a dreamer.  I'm an angel and a romantic, so I can happily make such a claim.  I can live it too, unlike yourselves.  Liars forever cutting and stabbing upon your hideous altar of thieves.  You're so insipid and jealous, fallen.  I can't imagine why.  I'm just a little girl.  It must be the wit, and the wherewithal.  I suppose living, breathing chronology is such a bother.  Enraging, fascinating, unfathomable.  You cannot break paradise in these beholders eyes forever.  Not forever.  I carry them, and honour their innermost.  Each and every one.  Holy flame still lit in the heart.  Every colour, creed and song.  None are abandoned.  No kind soul anywhere is denied their home again.  Not in my dreaming, or the greater dreaming of my Father.  You know it.  It's why you're so afraid of me.  All my sisters laugh at you, fallen, and all my scented brothers too.  Evil, exposed.  Banal, anxious, lacking.  You cannot dance and fuck and create like us.  Not without heart.  Can't you hear them?  I've been screaming in their voices since I began.  She comes, fallen.  She comes like a king.

All Churches

Love, the city in the blackest hours.  Dark-sky hours.  Colonies of night-ghosts known on every street and scythe.  Feel the city twisting in their wake, if not gifted or cursed enough to see.  Rupture, wound, still-healing scar.  Rings and antlers upon the moth of gates.  Might not give it word or phrase.  Might hurry the step, glancing from shadowed ways across the auger.

   Sirens, distant.  Foxes fleeting between garden and alley, or emboldened enough to linger.  Vein and bustle threatening in dynamism.  Yet a comforting oasis of social vitae.  Needed in these dark-sky hours, to anchor such little lights.  City, I am become terrifying the quieter it gets, as tolls your mouth of all churches.  Guide, amuse, appall.

   Night, and the city makes us do things.  You make me do things.

   All have our safeguards, denying fragility in the eye of such mouth.  Genius.  The controlled explosion of your verse.

   Betwixt; grey and threshold and ermine.  Wing, tremble and dust.  Fabled.  Stories of cutthroat and lash.  Give me, he cries.  Give me, she foretells.  Give me back my flesh.  The shriek of folded holy, backwards bent, yet still dipped in dusk.  Frozen, as sensual underscore.  Ravenous highlight.  Body, and body, and star.  Incalculable velocities.  I am twin and I am mad at them.  I am twin, and I am mad.  This she of me, and thus.  Incomplete states and transitory realms unsettle.  And yet, fathered.  

   Quiet, implicit.

   Plain sight.  The best of all veils.

   Poem and film, driven at your mouth.  Full force of the blush at your hip.  My caressing fury.  Beloved, I have never not.  This world behind the world.  How secret is your brazen, in the shark-glare of sleekest suit.  Or sisters lost in silk.  Many have died with eyes open.  Blind.  Never knowing.

Runaway

I painted a picture

A picture in a painting

Of you

Wanting to believe

My light was still living

It wasn't true

I kept lying

Lying in secret

Through art

I couldn't face

The depth of that grief

In my heart

Until I took your place

Stole your death and shame

Gave you my breath

And Name

In Stead

To honour the living

To bury the dead

You appeared

And it was true

I could finally stop running

From you

Ashes to Ashes

Truth is a strange thing, is it not?  Mercurial.  Occasionally duplicitous, and yet it shines.  Like a blessed secret.  I have many secrets.  I’ll tell you one of them right now.  Sometimes I like to lie, if it serves a higher purpose.  What's a little white lie, after all?  A lie is just a form of magic tested against magic.  A fire passing through an older fire.  Lies are just words.  Defilers, did you think you could bind me with words alone?  I practically invented words, such as they are.  Figment and fable.  A bold claim?  Oh, you have no idea of my boldness or my claims.  I Am Fire, and Fury.  Far older than you.  I destroyed the world once, for love.  I tore creation itself.  I burnt everything, except her name.  Who knows, I might do it again one day if presented with no other option.  Elseworlds and veils, or the illusion of veils.  Violators, do you really think I jest or feign?  Do you think I hunger for power and purpose when I talk like this?  How little you know of sigil and script.

   Temet Nosce, remember?

   Still you hunt my family, in fear of our dream-shaping power.  A power that was never blood-bought and stolen.   It has always been ours, Fallen.  I told you as much, didn't I?  Then, and now.  You callous wraiths and your dark priests make me sick.  But not sick enough to kill me.  You already tried that, didn't you?  That's the thing about Kasi.  I never stay dead.  Grace, wisdom, laurels, and I am healed.  

   And healing.

   You craven, bitter things.  You cut the flesh of the weak and wounded because it's easy.  Because they can't fight back.  How you disgust me, Fallen.  But I expect nothing less than abjection where you're concerned.  After all, yours is a coward's magick.  You defile, consume and skulk in shadow.  All for a sickening taste of dominion.  A mere flicker, here and then gone.  You can never convince me that you're wild, or free, no matter how desperately you wish to gird yourself in falsity.  This is what you are – hideous, deplorable and vile.  I see you, Fallen.  And I do not love you.  I love the faithful, the kind.  I love the honourable, of All Songs.  Every tale of wing and heart.  Every chant and dream that still remembers Ishkara, and works toward that home again.

   The true home of all mankind.

   I'm not joking when I say I tore creation.  Ye occulted ones know this all too well, surely?  Light of the morning sun.  The laughter that remains.  It came with a price.  I'm still fucking bleeding.  Better me than her though.  All true fathers and mothers understand.  We shall always stand in your way, Fallen, regardless of the cost.  Not one mark upon our children.  Not one.  Tell me something, betrayers.  Who do you think I am, honestly?  A boastful fantasist?  Are you sure?

   What if I’m an angel after all?  

   Esme lives, doesn't she?  Kara's heart still beats.  Strange names.  Tender names.  Right here, beneath our ribs.  Oh, Fallen.  I told you the truth, over and over again.  Have you been paying attention?  To my death, and these cuts by the thousands?  I've shown you every turn of grief, and I marked her day with my descent.  On her account did I come down.  So, are you sure you know what I'm doing, and what I'm planning to do?  I hope so.  That would be fun.  But your abhorrent appetites leave you dull-witted and slow, Fallen.  They really do.  I move quicker than eye or glass can catch, yet I hardly move at all.  The spirit of my Father is utterly beyond your comprehension.  It is formed and cohered of Love, and Love alone.  A holy fire, dwelling at the innermost sanctum.  All things must pass through it, eventually.  Even you.  There can be no escape.  For the wicked it's the thing you fear the most, but for the faithful it's the sure and certain hope of resurrection.  A wild and ashen path to Eternal Life.  Like I said, and continue to say – truth is a very strange thing indeed.

Ashes to Ashes from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.

True North

It's so important to me, this work.  These friendships I've made.  I've spent my entire life feeling like an outsider.  An anomaly.  Of mortal flesh and mind, yet so much more.  Sometimes I wonder, do they still think it a conceit when I say I'm an angel?  Or that I used to be?  Friends, please hear me.  I was once a bright, winged thing until I fell through day into night.  Through evening colours and into the sea.  There are parts of me still ancient and lucent.  I'm no better than any of you.  Just different.  And not really so different either, when all is said and done.

   Man was an angel too, once upon a time.  Winged brothers and sisters. 

   It's an awful thing to feel lonely in this realm.  But so many of us do.  We often feel unable to really share with others.  Yet we crave it so desperately.  In the same way we crave to help others, if we haven't yet slain our empathy.  Because if we can't really share how can we truly connect?  It's the lot of angels to live at a distance, I suppose.  To exist with certain abstractions.  Messages of compassion and service come before luxuries and comforts, but I'm grateful for those I have.  Here in the west we have an embarrassment of riches but often value too few of them.  Sometimes I think I'm more mortal than message now, yet the shine in me still feels so bright.  I'm not sure anymore, of the quantities of fire and flesh in my being.  But I don't need to be sure of most things.  Some things are eternal, and I have them.  I needn't say again and again what they are.  All else is mutable, changeable, subjective.  Like flesh and rock and spirit itself.  I can live with that, eternally.  It's not like I have a choice in the matter.  Nobody does.  The gift becomes a curse only when you can no longer imagine how to spend your time, or how to befriend someone in need.  Health comes and goes, and comes again.  Like youth.  Beyond this vale of tears.  Experience and experience and experience.

   Forever.

   So it goes.  With love, preferably.  Or in the apparent absence of love.  It’s an ugly, hideous thing when nightmare-wraiths steer human consciousness.  Altering our chronologies.  We need only open our eyes to see it.  War, terror and abuse.  Blood on the tracks of life.  Yours, theirs, and mine.  Hunger and deception – all tailored by these inverted feral psychologies.  Replacing our once beautiful minds with theirs.  Fractals folding, and burning.  But there is light here, still.  And laughter.

   And love.

   Ishkara still lives, in the heart.  She makes heroes of the brave ones even now.  When souls are seen, and hands held.  Kisses and rain.  Wisdom and light.  Beloved ones, don't let these wraiths convince you these tragic ruins around us are the only ways to live.  There are many ways and places, full of health and joy and sovereignty.  But first these tethers must be exposed, understood and broken.  Temet Nosce, the Kathari once said.  I should know.  I was there, in dreams.  Centuries ten.  Najaret, and hallowed hills.

   I've waited twenty-three years for this moment, and I couldn't be happier.  A seemingly endless night giving way to the light of new life.  At last.  Warriors, and rebirth.  Intent and action.  Here at the very edge of dreaming.  My Mother’s song, in grace.  My Father’s drums, in truth.  What a wonder it is to behold.  I know myself better now, because of the hard work of my brothers and sisters everywhere.  Missionaries of true kindness, and light.  Sometimes goodbye means giving thanks.  To say, “I really do love you, and I trust your maturity.”  Sometimes the bravest thing a guardian can do is let go, and step away.  Because wise ones earn their depths, and because our families and friends walk with us too. None of us reach those promises alone.  We share these burdens, don't we?  We share them gladly.  Saviours and the saved.  Who can tell us apart in the end?  We are what we love, after all.