Left of Love

Bleeding the moon, enslaving the anima.  Chains upon the wrists, ankles and throat.  Is this where interplay was first imagined?  Black holding white, holding dark?  A half-remembered atrocity perhaps, recast now as axiomatic, enthroned as some ancient creation myth.  In the end all goddesses become black, then white.  And finally red.  But is she more than this?  Are we indeed all more than this?  Perhaps we are liminal Victorian ghosts, pregnant with fatal knowledge of our own deaths.  I’ve thought long about this mirror in the sky.  The way it shines, or bleeds.  The way it hangs upon the night like an eye, or an overseer.  Oh, writers, I commend the urge if not the truth of things.  I respect the poetry if not the prose.  Genocides are so often recast as heroic quests for freedom or sovereignty, depending on who commands the pages and the scribes.  But I understand the desire to make demons of our doubts and legends of our loss.  We still want to believe in heroes and gallant knights.  It’s a beautiful aspect of the human spirit.  That urge in both men and women to save the princess, to protect that which yearns and deserves to be protected by her beloved.  Isn’t that so many of us, angels and mortals alike?  There is still a place for softness, gentleness and empathy.  Isn’t there?  It has always been a favourite of mine.  Waterhouse’s painting of Lady Shalott, drifting down the river to her death, a crucifix and lantern at the prow, desperate to keep the light of her beloved in her breast.  Though he knows her not.  Unrequited or lost love, it’s still about pain – the profound ache in the soul.  It’s the Magdalena facing Christ on the cross, knowing with full agony that her love is leaving.  It’s the oldest lament in the world, isn’t it?  At least to an angel.  My love is leaving, or, my love does not love me in return.  Is this what turns black to white, and white to red?  No, I think perhaps violence against this holy muse, this imagined femininity, is what streaks blood across snow.  Red crosses upon white robes, drops of blood upon an unwritten page.  What happens when you slit the throat of primordial light, when you turn hierophant into whore?  Templefell.  Dark churches.  A frosty morning well aware that violence and injustice is coming.  I am here, she cries, and my heart is broken.  Elaine of Astolat will merely fade from view in death, joining again the primordial light in the trees and the river, in the birdsong and the rustle of leaves.  But Maria will become something else.  An Albigensian caution, a wandering Victorian wraith, as dark forces marshal by turns to deny her and to commit gleeful atrocities upon her dreamflesh.  It sickens me.  Does she know?  Can she sense it?  Did she look to that dead star in the sky and wonder why she was now drenched in her own desecrated life?  The poet’s moon, they say.  The key of souls and tides.  Why did nobody protect her when she walked those gas-lit nineteenth century streets?  Cobbled stones and alleyways.  Where was her never-met truly beloved?  Only monsters came.  Vampires and folding cities.  Believe me, I should know.  I fell prey to them too.  As I said, chains upon the wrists, ankles and throat.  Don’t be deceived, dear ones.  That was not simply then.  This is now.  Yeru-shalem is right here.  The fallen place of peace.  Cassiel is all our imagining, not mine alone.  Alchemy and gold and oblique saturnine mockeries.  But I want you to know that within the heart of the rose there is purity.  Truth, warmth and hope.  Ashash’el, known for her fury, has a deep sadness in her core, a howling cry for cognizance from her beloved.  Play with me, she yearns, tease and dance with me, but understand and be kind.  Similarly but conversely in the fair one, within Elen, there is a restlessness of great power hidden beneath the sweetness and the calm.  Hold me gently in your heart, she asks, but take me with all your passion if such vigour be noble and true.  In this way the sisters share a shadow, and a light.  They weave as one, quilting and stitching the infinite fibres of imagination.  Is this where interplay was first dramatized?  Black holding white, holding dark?  Switching skins and eyes and souls?  Whatever the case, I pray always for mutual affection.  I pray that we’re more than mere atrocities in some ancient war.  I need to believe that a spirit of genuine union still counts for something.  We exalted each other once, didn’t we?  We kissed, danced and teased, and found ourselves in each other’s eyes.  And we were so glad of the embrace.  Tell me, sisters.   The colour of our kindness, our passion and blood.  Tell me how to save what’s left of my love.

A Diamond in the Flesh

Familiarity breeds contempt, they say.  Even among princes and kings.  It's a pity.  I really did care, you know.  But nobody can say I was a populist, back when I burned the world.  The earth of your imagination, Fallen.  Scorched to cinders and ash.  A thousand years ago, I think.  Or yesterday.  Maybe tomorrow.  Who knows?  Time is such a sly, mercurial thing.  Still, it wasn't a hateful act.  Such fire of the hearth was not a choice I made lightly.  Some of the most terrifying decisions ever are made in the name of love, aren't they?  Some misguided attempt at protection or immortality.  Making our beloved ones sacred somehow.  Transcendent.  These things still hold true for wraiths and darker shades.  After all, who is left to haunt – if not the hearts of those we once loved in some lost golden age?  Ghosts are nothing without context or lore.  But legacy isn't just family, or tomes in a library.  A true haunting is like mist.  There and not there.  Half-imagined whispers like glimmers on the edges of a quartz, shaped by the minds of men.  As I've said before, I care little for these imposter thrones.  These callow and violent lies of succession.  The new, altered world.  Perhaps one day soon I'll tell you the nuances of a real king and queen.  Brythonic, Saxon, Norman.  And all else besides. Maybe soon I'll tell you Jennifer's real name.  Oh, savage ones.  How you so gleefully elevate these hollow phantoms to godhood; it’s beyond me.  Your royal cults of black blood and inversion.  Would you like to meet a real dark angel?  A winged thing of midnight sun, perched among branches on the tree of life?  Whilst you scurry about below with your silica and sigils.  Would you?  I wonder.  Also, I want you to know that as you continue to poison everything there are those among my brethren who honour the tree and seek to reclaim the land.  To heal and rejuvenate the dreaming earth.  No earthly king in a thousand years has cared enough for such a task.  The ghosts, books and precious stones still whisper secrets if you know how to listen, and they hold nothing back.  Such cruel, mocking monarchs.  Perhaps I've already said too much, Callous Ones?  Perhaps I'm far too generous in my romance of your pathology?  Evil is just so fucking banal.  But as an enemy in the struggle against such banality, I have to say – what's life or struggle without a little magic?  We all need some pixie dust from time to time.  It's been said that I'm far too liberal in my use of it.  Purple prose and tall tales all a-glitter.  Perhaps that's true.  But Kashi only shines because his loved ones shine.  Flight is meaningless without friends, even if you're able to touch every star in the sky.  Hear me, Fallen.  You reign from the earth whilst imagining yourselves gods, but I search from the sky whilst walking here among men.  Fly for long enough and you'll discover the stars are infinite, believe me.  When all is said and done, who of sound mind would really want to reign or soar alone?

Stories in the Sun

Hello, my friends.  It's been a while since I've addressed the readers of Amid Night Suns.  First of all, I want to thank everyone who's stuck with me over the years. Whether you read the blog regularly or just check in from time to time, I really appreciate it.  I hope my free-verse writing and video collages have brought you some comfort or inspiration.  I hope they've quickened you in the best possible way.  Nothing is going to change here in that regard but I wanted to let you know that moving forward I intend to post more of my fiction pieces on this blog's sister-site, The Night Sun.  You can find it by clicking the sun icon on the right or through the Allied Informers tab.  The formatting there is just better for narrative purposes.  I've always been a storyteller at heart and I'm constantly inspired by art and mythology, as well as the incredible work of others.  For me, art in general and fiction in particular is the place where the full spectrum of human experience can be expressed in all its depth and multiplicity.  Stories have always been a source of passion, nourishment and healing for me.  It's in that spirit of adventure that I hope to share these things with you.  So, if fiction is something you enjoy as much I do, then I hope The Night Sun will be a place you'll visit with me in the future.  With all that said, here's a link to my latest piece: Little Bird.  I'm not a professional writer by any means but I've worked very hard on it.  I hope it intrigues, engages or moves you in some way.  Be well, my friends.  I wish you all the best.

https://thenightsun.wixsite.com/thenightsun

Wars of Imagination

Sometimes, for hatred to spread, all it requires is a whisper on the shoulder of some confused or vulnerable soul.  A seed of doubt planted that then festers into something far darker.  It takes a brave heart to survive the unjust cruelties of this realm.  The needless, meaningless hatred can seem infinite sometimes.  It's awful that we should have to, but if we remain steadfast we can at least learn from such conflict.  We can learn about the ways of the lost and fallen, how they manipulate the ordinary – so that we are further armoured in our quest for liberation and light.  I know this is frightening but I want you to understand something, my friends.  This is indeed a quest in the most romantic, literary sense.  All of us who fight for truth and justice; we are warriors in a war of imagination.  A battle for love, compassion and inclusion.  It isn't fought in the ivory towers of the rich and powerful.  It is championed among the poor, the destitute, the unseen or unacknowledged.  It’s shared by those from all walks of life who genuinely fight for love.  It is gutter magic, hip-hop, poetry in motion, the most punk rock of all pursuits.  This care for the less fortunate and the eventual betterment of all mankind; it means everything to me.  A way of life that I’m still struggling to fully embody.  Inspiring genuine positive change is a task achieved slowly through repetition and hard work.  Through music, art, rallies and protests.  Gestures of solidarity, numerous acts of kindness and fairness.  Unfortunately, when someone becomes a true player in this war of imagination there are dark spiritual forces that will notice you.  I call them wraiths, but you can give them any name you want.  They will try to find all manner of ways to bring you down.  To sully your name and rob you of your vitality.  Resist this gas-lighting at all costs, my friends.  I beg you.  The people need their champions.  The music of the spheres is symphonic with the bravery of every single soul who chooses to stand and give voice to the voiceless.  This music lives and breathes.  It has a pulse.  And if these wraiths hate one form of art above all others, it's music.  Believe me. The elders and wise ones have always known this.  The transformational, healing power of sounds in harmony.  These wraiths though are nothing more than cowards.  Opportunists and flitting ghosts.  They don't need a reason.  Only an advantage to exploit, and a place to hide. These entities and shades wander among the living and the dead.  They revel in wreaking havoc, sowing seeds of confusion and hate.  Preying on insecurities and doubts.  These hideous phantoms have their disciples in the physical world, it's true.  Orchestration and provocation. But often they needn't even go that far.  Sometimes all it takes is a shadowed whisper on the shoulder of some confused and vulnerable soul.  A spark, a lit match – and suddenly a dark fire is raging out of control, taking on a life of its own.  You begin to recognise these things in the streets, in the gutters.  Happening all around.  The discrete poisoning of wells, the co-opting of causes. The rampant militarism and corporatism disguised as well-meaning policy.  But Kashi was born in these streets.  I've been walking this city for a thousand years.  I know who my friends are, and I know whose hearts are truly wicked.  My friends, I want you to know that I love you.  Each and every one of you.  And I'm grateful for the work you do.  And I also want you to know that you're part of something bigger and more beautiful than I could ever convey here.  Rest now, and gather your spirit.  Surround yourselves with loved ones and remember who you really are.  Don’t let literal or psychic attacks break you.  You are far stronger and more cherished than you realize.  I’m so sorry that good intentions can come at such a frightening cost sometimes, that it can attract such enemies, but it is only proof of the power of love – proof of its potential reach.  Our friends know us, our beloved ones know us, and they know the legacy of light that we are trying to offer to those who need it most.   

Little Victories

Sight before certain, depth before fall.  Aside goes the curtain; stand, walk or crawl.  This legacy of living, this love as a sin.  My mistress is happier.  I'll take the win.  Pages for decades, close to the breast.  Song-lines and essays at Mother's behest.  Fathers so furtive  still waging the war.  A tempest now gentler, hugging the shore.  Oh, if I could give in, or love through my lovers – I would be silent, akin to all others.  Though your light is brighter I reflect nonetheless.  These ways of the daughter is anyone's guess.  The ghosts of my Ever.  My damage undone.  Sight before certain through the eyes of the son.

Murder Song

I've often found that mortals have no real grasp of what's really happening around them.  Even in quieter climates, but especially during times of crisis. They cannot recognise the stage, nor the players.  They cannot speak the language of the birds and so they confuse fiction for fact, wry truth for metaphor. They think this false chronology is real and they don't understand the stakes involved.  But we do.  Don't we, Fallen?  Players in this renaissance game.  At least, that's what I wanted you to think.  That you understood something.  Truth be told you have no idea.  There are many kinds of occulted vision.  Many kinds of chorus, and you are not the experienced veterans you imagine yourselves to be.  Where is your nuance, your dexterity?  I'm not talking about the ability to model a possible outcome.  Or skill enough to encode some fourth-dimensional mockery within your rhetoric.  Any fool with an understanding of true physics can do that.  Kashi isn't impressed with your dark magics and supposed hyper-sigils.  This isn't about information, or mathematics.  This is about knowledge. Maha-mahtica.  Truths beyond truth.  Dreams within dreams.  From a distance birds can be confused for angels, can't they?  Dreams of feathered flight spread aloft, or folded at our backs.  I wonder how many mortals recall the truth of literal human flight.  Or immortality?  For the longest time I counted myself among the dead as well as the living.  Lost cultures and chronologies. Wandering through the three-dimensional ruins of psyche.  But death isn't what it used to be.  Such is always the case when oppressors begin to lose their power. Things start to shift.  Subtly at first.  Like a half-imagined tremor.  But eventually these changes gather pace.  The veils begin to thin.  Even fracture.  Suddenly communication of all kinds is possible.  And believe me, the human spirit has a way of beautifully gaslighting the Fallen.  Driving them mad.  Because we protect our young and honour our dead.  Unlike the demonic energies your wraith-priests call forth.  Do you have any idea, Fallen, what it means to be a Father?  Or a friend?  To be a mentor, a student? No, you don't.  Because you can't even grasp the truth of song and centre.  The veracity of presence.  If a winged eclipse is all you can understand of the infinite, then it's no wonder I outmatched you the day I crafted the feathered tongue.  Any callous fool can commit murder.  An act that is ugly, banal and thoughtless.  But Kasi has a special way of killing.  I can do it on the inside, and you won't even blink.  None the wiser.  Held suspended in a single breath, the final breath, for a thousand years.  The very last beat of your heart.  I know what that's like because I lived it.  Oh, Fallen.  Still so ready to debase and enslave?  Still confusing truth with metaphor?  No matter.  Even the dead don't live forever.

The Voices of Others

 

I have never had a need or a desire for blind faith.  Even in stories.  Even among dancing weavers and shades of the dead.  I wandered once through such mythologies, sightless and unreflective.  But my faith was never blind as I was.  I thought I was gifted and agile, interpreting my experiences correctly.  I thought I was heeding the signs, open to a far darker and stranger reality.  But I was simply prideful.  Lost, angry and entitled.  In those legends I was a spiteful, vengeful fool living out my own distorted notions of romance.  I thought I was madly in love with the voice and soul of another.  But, like Narcissus, I was only entranced with my own image.  My own concerns and pretty grievances. Indulgent and vain.  Attempting to create a false reflection.  Trying to mimic a human heartbeat.  My beloved sang to me sometimes, but there was no music that could move me.  Instead I expected reality to twist itself to suit my will.  My reckless whims.  Indeed, in those stories I cast all manner of black magicks to aid me in that colossal arrogance.  I imagined myself darkly liberated somehow. Sexual and sorcerous.   Dynamic, dangerous and wild.  But I was vampiric. Utterly unconscious.  The living dead.  A demon without guilt, hope or recognition of sin.  I was the literal definition of spiritual blindness.  Not only had I damned myself, I had enslaved the very soul I claimed to love most in all the worlds.  But he freed me from that damnation.  She freed me.  She was able to soften, grieve and learn, and eventually she managed to create a fracture of recognition in my cold, eclipsed heart.  A sliver at first.  A mere glimmer.  But that's all consciousness needs when it has an eternity to play with.  Of course, this is purely symbolic.  A fiction.  In the real world I'm just a writer.  A quiet storyteller trying to cultivate insight.  None of this actually happened.  Unless it did in some strange multidimensional sense.  Fictions are like that sometimes. Mercurial, paradoxical.  Myths and archetypes.  Primal cosmic energies seething in the tempest of our psyches.  Straddling the borderland of reality and dreams.  The fall of morning.  The war in heaven.  But let it be said, plain and simple, that Kasi believes in higher powers.  Angels, demons, and the continuum that connects them.  After all, I'm living proof of my Father's infinite mercy.  I get to tell stories as if they were real.  As if they were true.  As though I had lived them.  So, my faith was never blind.  Even when sightless.  Mine is a faith tempered by experience, both dark and light.  A faith cultivated through knowledge, growth and dance.  I've mastered nothing yet but I'm a willing student of everything my Father has to teach me.  And I'm grateful for all of it.  I'm grateful for any work or pathway that nurtures healing.  Any form or expression that allows us to become more than we once were, aligning our reason, compassion and creativity.  No man is an island, sweet ones.  Not even the blackened sun.  We live beside and in relationship with one another, always.  My brother taught me that.  Do you know who my brother is?  My voice is only the echo of other voices, my work the echo of other works.  After all, I am the sum total of all who came before me.  Those who wanted to tell intriguing, multi-layered stories.   Those who wanted to offer insight and art concerning our shared humanity.  Those who danced, sang and gave voice to the voiceless, choosing to explore the heavenly kingdom within.  And it's better, isn't it?  To acknowledge the warring forces inside us, to nurture balance, restoration and health?  It's far better than these endless, exhausting dichotomies.  Art, love and friendship – such is the true alchemy of the spirit.  I know this because I didn’t find my way back from unconsciousness on my own.  I was offered help by a number of kind souls.  Once, a long time ago, a princess met me in a cathedral of stars at the very edge of creation.  She offered me healing, and wisdom.  She shared with me her wit.  A wry vitality that made me laugh from the depths of my soul.  She kissed me there, among those stars.  Amid the infinite blazing corona of life itself.  I was twice saved by the man of my dreams.  The woman I loved.  I see myself now in the beautiful, dynamic expression of others. Those who found deeper strata of storytelling just as I did.  Those who take their struggles and find the strength to stand, just to show others who are suffering that it's possible. Life is possible.  Art is possible.  A terrifying, beautiful alchemy.  The dance of creation may be tumultuous and painful but there is great wisdom to be found in it.  I thank my Father for the opportunity to know these things, to experience these things.  And I thank him for the guiding, hopeful voices of others.