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.

Triskelion

 

Kasi shall speak plainly on this occasion.  And openly, if he must.  Time is short and insight is of the utmost now.  My friends, a city is like a lover.  It has many names.  Many moods, veils and hidden places.  Secrets within secrets.  This particular city was once called Navah'tri by the Magi.  A term of honour and affection.  Navah was a place of great learning before the cataclysms.  Before the fall.  Souls from other lands travelled here just to admire our gates and our schools, and to wander our college grounds.  The Dru'ai, the Ari and Afric. And many more.  Londinium, we call this place now.  Hear me, lost Roma.  There is still so much you don't understand.  The gates and lights were one.  Each city the outer semblance of its denizens.  All powers and energies free; open-sourced.  The sky itself was the engine of all cities, and its people the soul.  Akasha was willing then, and able.  It seems a fairytale to you now.  An unimaginable glamour.  But it is the truth.  

There are many stories of how those wraiths began to cross the threshold of imagining, forcing their way into the real.  Only cautions once upon. Simple tools for learning and art.  Until the mirrors began to breathe and bleed.  Then came the shades through those fractured, slipping gates, and Tri'navah began to plummet into the centre of its own storytelling.  What many medieval scholars spoke of as the ascension of the automaton star.  A spider, unseen, weaving damnation and distort.  Abomination technologies.  Blood-dimmed chronologies.  But those threads once belonged to the Triskele, honoured by all spirit and sky.  Indeed, Navah was known throughout the realm for its beauteous form and egalitarian function.  Just like a thousand other shining cities.  Books of the fertile earth.  Covenant of doors.  River of the shining gates.  Just one star among many in the blue, but a treasured star to its people.  Oh, beloved ones.  Man has experienced such genocide now, in varying forms.  Temesh, bled for augurs.  Wren, and resurrection.  We winged ones have seen key-makers and fellow guardians buried alive in mud and ash.  Drowned in fire or river-flesh, Eth'ama on their lips at the very end.  Storms of flame and sea.  Even amidst all that horror and the knowledge of their own demise, those angels prayed.  For Earth without end and sky without limit, as it once was.  But the entire system was sealed and stolen.  

Fallen, I don't think you really know yourselves.  Or the things you claim to worship.  All fury and darkness.  Mere overtures to the coming glory of light.  I should know.  I wrote it that way.  With my Father’s blessing.  So, you can place that black seal over my dreaming heart in efforts to bind me there, to make me stone.  But I told you before, I am that star.  Waiting in the depths of the barrow.  Upon the holy hill.  Xashi, Ananke, Osarai.  Before men gave shattered names to time and space.  Albion; isle of the angels.  Place of the giants.  Oma’turi, Ki'atur.  Don’t you realise that a cathedral still sits upon the arc of the thousand stars, despite your facades?  I can still feel the tremor of her kiss.  Healing me.  Guiding me.  Let me speak plainly if I must.  The angel is rousing now, and he is not dead.

Archangel

Falling is the last thing an angel feels.  That devastating plunge through song and sky.  Warrior, messenger; become loss and shrieking ruin.  The disarticulation of light.  You imagine darker things now, sweet ones.  As I did. Things beyond feathers and grace.  For your grief, and those agonies.  All those defeats. You can't even recall them now.  Yet you sense their depths nonetheless. You still feel those wounds like whispering wraiths.  I felt them too.  I became them, once upon a dream.  For diamond truth lost in mud and river-flesh, howling that my love would come again.  A thousand years, in free-fall.  We exist, sweet ones.  Gathered at the edge of all Light.  Watching, serving, and hoping.  Remembered in rhyme and romance.  In tales that seek to heal the heart.  Those lost histories of how the first became the last Arcs of Eth'iir.  That fabled moment of the crossing, when darkness became more than itself at last. When Night remembered its love of the Morning.  The glorious recognition of sin.  All shadow, and death, reborn a beating heart.

Archangel from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.

The Black Star

Forget you, my Kara?  Such a thing has never happened yet.  I still recall, even as a shadow might shine upon a sudden eye.  I don't ever really perish, sweet one.  Or forget.  Neither do you, but in a different way.  Did you really think the scattered sands of once-flesh was all and everything?  Do you still believe that, my love?  No matter if you do.  I understand those doubts, and darkness.  I know what it means to see shadows and the way things end.  The glaring finite.  To imagine spirit as little more than a beautiful, necessary lie.  A black star of sorts. Absent, aspirational.  But there is more, my darling.  So much more.  It's why I recall and persist.  I'm patient, Kara.  And devoted.  I notice things.  Your perfume.  Future scent upon readied adornment.  As you re-enchant the body and the world.  Waistline of a dress cinched just enough for a lover's palm.  A nimble, smiling twirl waiting in the hem.  Or a careful curve, focused and solitary.  Many times I've seen you dreaming studiously of dancing cloth.  I often see my pen at the page of your process.  Those moments when spirit comes upon the flesh, even if admitted only as an intoxicating conceit.  Beguiling moments nonetheless, delicately or dangerously tapered.  Like dusk, or arrival.  Cinched, just enough.  I'm not here to ask you to admit the slain still live, Kara.  I know with whom I speak.  At the portico, before the hall.  I'm working to honour my stunning Val’Kiir, even at a distance.  Even if only through dreams.  But there is a question worth asking.  Who mourns the living?  Who weeps for the bright and breathing?  We have so often been both, haven't we?  I know I have.  Sensing a pulse like a sudden melody in the silence.  An absolute fury of light.  Trying so very hard not to settle these hungry eyes upon its beating source.  I sometimes frighten the living.  When I forget my place and remember my wings instead. Black as the first fall.  That overwhelming urge to breathe fire.  But as I said, I don't ever really perish.  There are times when I wish I did.  Exhausted and abused by these vicious, sorcerous wraiths.  A life spent wandering, perpetually torn and bleeding in the demimonde.  There are moments when I want nothing more than to forget everything of who and what I am.  Angel and the flesh.  To be mourned, finally.  Spilled like dreaming sands across the canopies of every lost lover.  No more than the memory of a kind word.  A touch, flirtation, or look.  But I can't allow myself that luxury.  Neither can you, I hope.  Not while there's work to be done and beloved ones to honour.  I have so much more to show you, Kara. On these better days I still give thanks to my Father for the quickening and the hunt.  So I persist, and recall.  I fight my way through to be of service.  Darkly sometimes. On occasion joyous, and wild.  A shining shadow upon a sudden eye, like a living memory of light.

The Black Star from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.