Living Life

There is nothing worse than watching the suffering of those you love.  So many of us have known those kinds of torments.  Too many of us.  Agonies at a distance.  Helplessness by proxy.  The worst part is that most of us would bend Creation itself if we were able, just to spare our loved ones.  Or we would break those laws and rules completely.  Linearity and causation be damned, if we could somehow go back and stop their pain.  A wounded child, an ailing parent, a terrified lover.  Family means everything in the end, by blood or by heart. 

   Live long enough and you realize that love is the only real thing worth a damn.  That truly human, empathic desperation to seek out a miracle.  Not for ourselves, but to spare the ones we love the most.  It's one of the most beautiful things about us, that warrior-spirit.  When we fight so honourably to protect something we deem more precious than ourselves.  Our families, our friends.  But it's usually only demigods, angels and storytellers who are granted that kind of world-changing power; to single-handedly alter the very course of things.  Fictions are often the only solace in a world that seems ever darker.  Chaotic beyond all reason.  I know it hurts, my sweet ones.  I know how scary it can be; those thoughts and visions at the edge.  I've felt that kind of worry too.

   You're not alone.

   I know what it's like, watching helplessly as a spirit or a soul appears to fracture.  Or even an entire world.  Those once shining glories of the mind and heart, now threatened by greed and sinister inhumanities.  Wraith-ravage upon the eye of dark colonies.

   I dull the pain by deeming it fiction, but I once saw my homelands reduced to ashes and sand.  Everything and everyone I ever loved.  A shining realm of prosperity and peace, all lost and burnt away.  A ghost of all light.  But life always finds a way of returning, in the end.  Against all odds.  I know it can be difficult to believe in the throes of suffering, but nothing is ever as it seems.  Things do get better.  Sometimes before death, sometimes after.  Fear is powerful, but it's nothing against the immeasurable glories of hope, knowledge and wisdom.  Such glories transcend the physical, whether you believe it or not.

   The words of a lost, flesh angel might seem little comfort when people are anxious and afraid.  I do understand that, beloved ones.  Just remember, if you can, that life itself is on your side.  It is the very spring and essence of you, your literal source of strength.  Grander and brighter than suffering or fear.  Eternal.  As are you and everyone you love.

The Blue Blazes

I often think perception is the strangest of all pastimes.  You have to be a little crazy to endure it, and death is no respite.  It dwells beyond translation. Transcendental and frighteningly pure.  There is nothing in all Creation that demands more of sentient beings.  Endless, and without end.  Sometimes it's like looking into a perfect mirror, or a glass darkly.  Like cracks in a mask of porcelain.  The veins of an insect's wing.  All those untempered schisms.  Delicate and furious.  Rhythm and races.  Face after face, from star to habitable star.  Perception is a little like walking across the surface of the sun.  Dreams of shining, incalculable mass.

    The gravity of angels.

   Mapmakers and seraphs and the skins of a billion worlds.  Knowing this, experiencing this, I can only laugh when the Fallen offer their books of lies and false howlings.  Pages of shit, bound in ugly leathers.  Dead, defiled and defiling.  Listen to me, wraith-makers.  If you dare.  Inversion is no great sorcery.  Cruelty never is.  You are not wolves, of any description.  None of you.  You have scant knowledge of true wilderness or true civilisation.  All you know are the lies of your dead, fetid pages.  Hear me now, if you can.  You are slow-witted and dull.  Just as I explained.  What do you grasp, really, of truth or story?  You grasp nothing.  You understand only these basest chronologies, these hideous tempests passing now for history.  Where you bind and sell the innocent, and crown the most violent wraiths.  You desire flesh and the blood of that flesh.  Star and song of that blood, for you generate so little of your own.  You have built false thrones upon such sickening augment.  You disgust me.  Truly, you make my skin crawl.  But you bore me in equal measure.  

   I am a promise, not a name.  I'm a servant, not a master.  True kingship is not as you envision it.  I go with grace, and kindness, and courage.  I'm both work and play, and need no landed gentry.  To hell with your titles and exclusivity.  I need only two things to live as protector and storm.  The first is imagination.  The second is the love of my friends.  I took it as my name, the open blue.  Can you even grasp what that means?  It’s a secret you only think you know.  Between angels and insects, you suppose?  Oh, Fallen.  The Earth is grander than that.  And the verse too.  Far grander than affect or effect.  But Mammon is so impudent, so eager for an unearned stylisation.  Evil is such a banal, petty, colourless thing.  Those atonal discords that you tout as anima of the abyss.  All your lies of antiquity and depth.  What fucking nonsense.  I've stood in the abyss.  Then and now.  Lightless, pitiable, far younger than it thinks.  Here is a secret, my friends.  Something these callous ones never want you to grasp.

   The abyss has no depth.  None at all.

   No range, or deepening.  Only cowards call it home.  My home is with eternal light, for I am its keeper and its dreaming.  A radiant perception, here among the stars.  Friends, they still don’t understand.  Kasi might be a wolf, a truly dangerous thing, but he speaks for the voiceless and works towards a healer's hands.  I am not a conceit, Fallen.  I’m something so much older than that.  You shall not pretend the sun.  Not to me, and not to my Father.  I'll extinguish your hatred in the end.  It might take some time.  Aeons, in fact.  But time isn't what it used to be.  Abusers, mark my word.  I won’t let you make perpetual slaves of Man.  I’ll die first.  A thousand times over.  I will break your hideous altars and tear your false thrones from the sky.  Every single one.  I'm not alone in this task either.  The legacies and spirits of all kind ones travel with me.  Love is greater than millennia, or centuries, or the span of a single human life.  There is no greater vortex than the heart.  Ishkara's physic still shines, blazing brighter than perception itself.

Bad Wolf

My pretty baby

Is a red hot sun

Oh, pretty baby

Look what Daddy's done

Burnin' creation

Just to steal that wheel

Eyes of a killer

But these hands will heal

Archin' & claspin'

Between these sheets

Stars for my baby

They're just birthday treats

'Cause little Lucy Ulven

Has some big bad teeth

On top, between

And underneath

I'm a full-moon switchblade

You're a howlin' star

Promise & pinnacle

Safe inside this jar

You're inside me now

And I'm inside you

Upside, downtown

Across and right through

My pretty baby

Is the first real church

See, pretty baby?

We're still branch and birch

Dance, pretty baby

At resurrection's edge

Hand on my heart

Still livin' the pledge

Angel for the lovin'

You got hate in a sling

I'm blessed with little deaths

When you're killin' the king

I'll put this barrel to my head

Before I ever let them touch you

Daddy's never done, Fallen

Fuck you

I'll set these blazin' eyes

On the rising sun

Night is just the dawn

Still gettin' some

If light is like the languid

Then let it come

I'll blow it down

And right through

Pulse

Brightest sun

And softest star

The first last angel

Must go too far

Across

Every ruined station

Rooftops and revelation

Where life is like a line

In the sky

I jump, swim, and drown

In feathers of this regent

Where crow becomes crown

But I knew a raven

In the nave of oldest known

Softest star

Last first throne

Of love

Come rain, or winds

Earth and flame

Chapters in the book

Of no name
To leave a light

After, Life

I've seen beyond this dance that immortals call the dreaming.  I've seen beyond logic, and linearity.  I've seen the birth of things I never imagined possible.  But seeing isn't enough.  Not for me.  Inner sight is a lot like raw power. Burdensome, paradoxical, often frightening.  Especially for those of us who haven't slain our empathy.  Those who still wish to walk with our brethren instead of subjugating them.  That's why I do this, I suppose.  That's why I show you these things, sweet ones.  Because I'm incredibly lonely, and because I know something of what it means to suffer.  I wouldn't wish that kind of loneliness or pain on anyone.  But we all suffer in varying ways, don't we?  This fallen fractal is built upon it.  Anxiety, insecurity, exploitation.  Perhaps these visions I offer mean nothing in the end.  Digital ghosts, here and then gone.  Like flesh.  Like ash in the breeze of a new day.  But the romantic in me would have it that such workings are kept somewhere in the unseen.  A place in eternity, where all kindness is kindled and held in the promise of our Father.  

   I hope I'm able to bring comfort to you in some way, wherever you may be.  If you are unable to see, let me see for you.  If you're unable to fight, let me fight for you.  With vision, and song.  There’s a part of me that wishes none of this was true.  A part that wishes I wasn’t an angel.  A thing of ragged wing, bleeding images torn from dream.  

   But I am, unfortunately.
  Even now, in this mortal flesh.  I suppose I don't really know how to be anything else.  Emissary, writer, wanderer.  My waking life is full of masks and charms and lies that protect.  Sometimes it feels like Kasi is the only real thing about me.  Like the depth of me is measured only in how far I fell.  Song to star to bitter soil.  But those thoughts are just tired indulgences in the end.  None of this is about me.  These visions and hidden choirs.  These worlds behind the world.  They're about service, empathy and honour.  Strength and solace, humbly offered to those who might find some use or quickening in this work.  I still have things to show you all.  There are still interesting things to see, I think.  Beyond logic or linearity.  Beyond this fallen dreaming that mortals call the real.  I've seen such vibrant life, my friends, even in those places after life.  The impossible suddenly possible, in an instant.  I've seen it awaken the sleeping and resurrect the dead.  Love, as living promise, even in total darkness.  Infinite brilliance shining in a sea of black. 

Heavenly Creatures

I'm the wolf in Kara's closet

The doctor of the sun

A theorem all to posit

The heart beyond a gun

I'm sacred and the sixpence

Where cloisters bleed the well

New cathedral software

For whom we toll the bell?

I'm delicately violent

Like her and all her friends

Finnish this beginning

To the bitterest of ends

I'm anti, theis, and synth-play

Like sky and blind and grey

An open absolutist

With a little more to say

I'm sisters on the threadwork

A brotherhood of ghosts

Wetware for the mainframe

Flame of brightest hosts

I'm the drums of all my father

My mother's blessed womb

I'm seven billion lonely

Inside an empty room

And I won't let you hurt them

The Well

The dream comes and the dream goes.  Grey skies, ethereal.  A shadowed morning, of day as almost night.  The scent of spray.  The knowledge of crashing wave, yet all is silent.  Or almost silent.  I can hear or imagine a faint, distant melody.  A young woman comforting someone with song.  Perhaps herself.  A dancer at eternity's edge.  I stand and listen, a fist pressed against my chest.  Waiting for something.  I'm speaking softly, under my breath.  I'm calling out names, I think.  Ancient names.  Into the grey, into the winds of the north.  Summoning the sea.  The vaulted beams of a church are hidden in the sky.  Like the upturned prow of a ship.  Above, or beneath.  In this dream I imagine angels listening to the wells of the deep.

   The solace of bluest eye or buried dress.  A life lived beyond torment.  What might we endure, I ask myself, if we could spare our beloved ones?  A wife?  A daughter?  All manner of wraith and broken dreaming might we endure.  I once thought the grandest thing imaginable was to save another.  To carry their burdens, to shield and protect them – even secretly, and at such agonising distance.  But perhaps I was wrong.  Or almost wrong.  You see, love is so fearless.  And wild.  It seeks, ventures, connects.

   It humbles.

   And conquers.

   Fire on the water.  Eternity upon the ice.  Dreams of raven pale, or alabaster black.  Wells of the deep, where even angels are taught of what it means to be saved.  The dream goes, and the dream comes again.  As one.  Above and beneath.  Together and alone.  I know this now, beloved.  I am unafraid, here at eternity's edge.  I saw the truth at last.  I saw you on the cliffs one shadowed, ethereal morning.  A midnight of the eternal day.  A locket in your fist, held tight against your chest.  Like a perfect darkened mirror, wearing my poems and my sorrow.  Strange words upon determined lips, almost silent.  Over and over again.  You were softly singing my names, I think.  Into the dreaming grey, into the winds of the north.  Summoning the sea.