The Dream

The image is seen from a great height, maybe through the lens of a god and it appears ageless and intractable. The image looks out over an abandoned city centre. The buildings still stand and inside, their offices still housing grand desks that still guard papers, but there is no familiarity here whatsoever.

A road divides our image and leads us towards an orange horizon where at its crest, stands a great shadow. Here we see mankind encircling the dawn of a new era, linked by their passion for love and existence. Under the birth of a son they breathe, they wait; they prepare to move as one. The Collective; gathered, with empty hands, light feet and unstained minds.

Suddenly a unlike image emanates from a decrepit unfriendly tower; cruel, violent, and ghastly. Mankind gasps; the night loses a breath as fear is fought with a heaving resolute groan. The Collector; carrying his penance as fashion, flaunts his imperceptible self. Hearts race and fevers peak as a storm of anxiety lashes upon a sea of sleep. The collector: His tongue, lavish with lies is venom. His face, fraught with malignance is cancer. His voice, an unnerving shrill of vile tempestuousness is pestilence. And he alone, is void. In his hands he carries his reflection and in his eyes, one will find their own. At his feet lays a bulky rucksack; its black fibres splitting at their ends and pulling apart to reveal the corners of strange objects piercing into the light. 

The collector’s lips quiver like a dancer’s feet with unwavering rhythm, poise and passion as his poetry falls silent against the pane. There shall be no song tonight.  As a city sleeps, its fears are confounded. The mass, the collective, as one, lay on their backs, their eyelids flickering, their hearts pacing, their fingers twitching and their sub conscious, learning. 

The storm subsides; the unlike image retards with The Collector retreating once again behind a veil of shadow. A wave of content now laps at the feet of eternity. The Collective; looking forward, nomadic and becoming are in focus and in their sight, once again, the orange hue of the undying horizon. Yesterday has no face, it casts no shadow.  Tomorrow bears no man no child. There never was, there never will be, there only is; present, here, in attendance, now. The Collective: creative, emotional and living. The feelings that paints this image: belonging, hopeful and out of harm’s way; a mother’s breast, a father’s fist. The image is splendorous and surreal and more importantly, shared by all.

As they slept, the people learned. For the most part, their fear girded their direction. They thought only of that orange horizon, never faulting in its purpose. They dared not think of a yesterday or cast a glimpse over their shoulder for fear of making an unfortunate acquaintance in The Collector, the face of all their fears. A metaphor in their lives for all that has been; every fact and every facet of thought that ever was. Their governance was simplified; zero and one. Zero being fear, abandonment and desolation. One being love. Fear in shades of grey, an image that is frozen, that can be touched. Love, an orange hue with reddish purple wings painted on a horizon that can never be reached.

Together they give contrast and definition. Everything can be zero or one. There is no margin for error, no cause for ambiguity. It is with colour or it is without, it is or it is not and it can help maintain love, or it must be punished. Each night as the city slept, the clarity of right and wrong, of love and fear reverberated in their sub conscious,  and when they woke, their hands would be empty and their minds would be light; as they should be; as has been determined, thus spake the Collective.

This city once had a name, but that has since long been forgotten; so too, the manual for its assembly and instructions for its use. Before the blackout, everything was illuminated. The rules were clear, the table was full and the house was very generous. This city was alien. Every inch of this now concrete obstacle pulsated with radiant energy. It was very much alive and its inhabitants kept it so. 

Their collective conscience fed the same understanding of what society meant and their place in it, and every day, they uploaded new definitions, new understandings and greater complexity to this abstract concept. The energy they burned in their thoughts could have fuelled a thousand suns as they painted and sculpted in a fashion that only a god could envisage. They made a world small, attainable and of reason. And they left it all behind.

Einstein

Desculpe por nao sendo com voce. Espero que voce ta comigo em morte. Eu perdi parte do meu coracao quando voce saiu. Obrigado por a vida e felizidades voce deu pra mim e keli. Te amo filho.

Girl

I picture myself standing on some vacant tranquil beach. The sea is calm and what little movement there is, laps at my naked feet. There is not a cloud in sight, and a realisation beckons to me that mine are the only footprints to have ever touched this shore. I am as I have always been; alone, yet for the first time in my existence, I am privy to company.

Though I cannot see her, I know she stretches far from my reach and I can feel her every tear in each consecutive drop of water that cleanses my skin. She comes to me first as a child, laying discreetly in the shadowy confines of a dank midnight cellar. Her breath is light and her eyes are transfixed on an infinitesimal fracture in the darkness, where the cellar door meets the neighbouring stairs. The unbroken light is a temporary figure of surety meaning there is no-one above the stairs. There shall be no visitors in the coming seconds. Her eyes dare not flinch should she miss what could be a warning dressed in the shadow of her father’s footprints.

A fresh wave rolls in over my feet and a shallow breath takes the young girl. The transient light is eclipsed by the epitome of unforgivable love. She whimpers lightly, fearful to make any sound which would celebrate the inevitable. So accustomed is she to these nightly visits from her father that she knows any unworldly gesture will only see this misplaced affection prolonged. She remains completely still and unemotional.

The darkness that once attained her bedside has now given way to the light she wishes she were blind to. The cellar door opens, peeling back the darkness above the stairs. An imperious figure appears, completely blackened in the wake of the daylight pursuing. It is a man, her father. His scent is unmistakable. It would be impossible to wash his smell from her skin if even she had rights to bathe herself.

It is her father, appearing anything but vestal, making his way down the stair case on another of his nightly conquests to relinquish her innocence and trust. Love is what he calls it. It is a duty he commands of her that he says is her obligation to the only man who loves her in the way that god intends.

“Nothing is as sacred” he would say, “than that of the love between a father and his daughter. You remind me so much of your mother. You have her eyes, her gentle touch and her forgiving heart. She would be so proud of you.”

He would say these things as if they should offer some reassurance for what would become another torturous memory, another emotional scar; another black spot on her subconscious; as if she should somehow be comforted into accepting that this sacred violation is o.k. “I love you” he whispers as he removes his belt and lays a cruel hand on the girl’s trembling thigh. She sheds a tear and her soul escapes once again, retreating into the open sea.

I cast an itinerant sigh that seems to travel neither here nor there. Instead it lingers before me, echoing my discontent to none but myself. The tide recedes briefly, as if it were building some mass swell to press on the shore. I am still tuned to the horizon, twitching my toes in clumps of wet sand, apprehensive about what memories are to come. It is as if the girl were receding the waters to give me a moment to contain myself and measure my thoughts. When that moment adjourned, the memories return.

She appears to me now in adolescence, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old. She is in a room that can only be described as squalid, with men twice her age, six men to be exact, all with emaciated appearance. Her half naked body is slumped on a sofa, seated between three men, leering over her exposed breasts. Her right arm is bound in a tourniquet and in front of her, one of the men, being approximately five feet ten in height, grossly underweight, and having an uncanny resemblance to her father, is hunched over a blacked spoon with a dirty syringe, preparing a cocktail of drugs.

In the grimy spoon lies a concoction of heroin, crystal meth and cocaine. Into this the man squirts eighty units of water, lifting the spoon and holding a flame to it, dissolving the powder into a milky white fluid. He drops a filthy cigarette butt into the solution to act as a filter even though the carcinogens present would do more harm than good.

The man resembling her father then takes the worn syringe and draws back the fluid until there are forty units in the syringe. He lifts the ‘pick’ to the horizon and gradually pulls back on the plunger, flicking the syringe with his index finger as he gradually moves the plunger towards the heavens, removing any residue of air from the liquid. The man gives the syringe one last invigorative flick and turns to the girl whose body has become a mantel piece of sweaty cumbersome hands.

There is not a sign of emotion on her face at all. Her eyes are uncaring and stare absently into the adjacent room where a running tap drips water homogeneously into the underlying sink. One of the three men fondling her positions himself to her right, steadying her bruised arm as the other two men elatedly remove her panties and continue the only display of affection she has ever known.

She whispers silently a rhyme that, time and time again remains caught in the chambers of her mind. The words seem to trip over one another as they fall from her tongue. “There goes that girl over there, whose not really here as she is over there. Unbound and unknowing, unwilling to care, mute to your calling and blind to your stare. See her you will and by that you will swear, that the girl over here is the girl over there.”

Her father figure leans over her body, pushing his whole weight on her right leg and aligns the syringe with her exposed sinking vein. He pushes the needle vigorously through her flesh and the sting provides her with a familiar sensation of being alive; pain being the only feeling kinder than love. The man draws back on the syringe, filling the milky solution with blood and upon seeing the mix of colour, immediately forces the solution into the girl’s vein.

Her mouth palpitates for a brief moment as the liquid soars through her veins, accelerated by her failing heart. The taste of the shot coats the back of her dry aching throat. She swallows several times, savouring the evidence and escapes once more, with her eyes never straying from the tiny droplets of water escaping from the clutches of man to join its brethren in the search for the open sea. She casts out her soul in a single tear and she escapes once again to her saviour’s arms, the ocean.


My limbs now shake feverishly. Anger has enshrouded my whole consciousness and I wish only that a day may come where I can take her into the safety of my arms and if need be, spend an eternity redefining trust to this poor broken girl for whom every man had betrayed when they ushered the words ‘I love you’.

The tide recedes once more and then swiftly returns to steal my sight.

Her last memory washes over me. She is standing on the shore of a beach identical to mine self but on the other side of the universe. She is staring into the horizon where the ocean blue meets the cerulean sky and tasting every breath that she welcomes into her lifeless body. She sighs uncontrollably as she runs through a catalogue of indisposed memories. How she failed is how she thought, blaming at first herself for how life did unfold, then with every new breath, gaining clarity and accepting the inevitability of circumstance.

Her idea of love was different to you or I. To her, affection meant intolerable cruelty. A vacation was not merely an exercise in family togetherness; it was escaping to her subconscious where her soul and last drop of sanity were spared from her incestuous father, and all the men in her life that fate would have her drawn to. Succumbing to this revelation will not prevent it from happening again; it will just add unconscionable irony to an already predestined path of surrendered faith and molested love.

She opens her eyes to remove the images from her mind. With every transitory breath, she is alive. She stands as I do, toes twitching and moving in the wet sticky sand beneath her feet. I can sense in her that for the first time, she is akin to innocence. The gentle wind lifting her long blonde locks of hair fills and expands her lungs.

She exhales her final breath and dives into the ocean. With no desire to take another breath, she sinks lifelessly into the water and gives herself to the currents which take her invitingly out to sea.

I inhale profoundly and exhale a sigh of relief. She was now free, moving in spirit with her brethren as the essence of life. Soon clouds would form above her and her spirit would evaporate momentarily, parting from the sea and moving through the sky to rain down on the world below.

Her soul would scatter into millions of droplets that would descend upon the earth, filling the cup of every man and cleansing the soul of the earth. She would nourish the thirsty planet that would in turn feed its starving guests.

Her soul would exist in every flower, in every grain of sand and in the heart of every man. And it is the heart of man that she would judge astutely. Those she deemed worthy would be wrapped in her delicate arms. She would sing to their spirit and lesson its state of alarm. Those undeserving would taste her in every breath. She would poison their souls and send every man to his death.

When I open my eyes again, I am on the train. I’m not quite sure how much time has passed but I notice the blur of buildings and signage passing the window in front of me and realise that I have passed Perth station. There is little I can do now except wait for the next station, whatever that may be, and alight there to board another train back to the city.

A Moment of Clarity

Behold, the defining moment that instills fear into the supercilious mind-frame of the emotionless deadman. He who directed his actions to best suit the desired image that he was led to believe would define his character. Everything he was, and the life he called his own was fathomed by an overbearing self-gratifying consumer industry that’s currency traded on a malnourished sense of self-belonging and perpetual worth.
In a market driven civilization where nothing ever has value until it is sold or stolen, our anti-hero was the epitome of self-proclaimed definition.

He knew his place in society and anchored himself onto identities whose profiles were of more value than his own. His complacency came from the marketed masses that would anchor themselves to his own fatuous image. As long as he was emulated, he was adulated. This value of self-importance is the fading memory that keeps the cold truth at bay. Because of this day, and for every new day to come, there is no sense of value or importance, only a decrepit shell of Metropolis to remind him why. The city streets that were once the epicenter of life are now the decaying tombs of the deadmen. Happiness is no longer a commodity bought through single subscriptions and ready to wear tailored power suits. It is forgotten, buried long ago with the conceited advertising giants and the insipid visions they set about in place.

The deadman is entombed within the memory of an existence that gave him purpose and laboured by an expanse montage of decay (his ‘paradise lost’), to which he chooses only to see whatever best suits the life he now holds. It is when he is alone with his prolonged sense of doubt that he endures a sad and pathetic moment of clarity. It is not until everything has been taken away that he realizes there was never anything in the first place. The magazines told him what to wear, what to eat, who to talk to and what to say.
He had studied their demoralized ideals and often sought to become the seasonal whored identity.

He sits alone in a cold and lifeless room and opens his eyes to the pitiful mess he helped create. It is now that he succumbs to the reality that things may never go back to the way they were. Control has been sold. The memories fade gently into his mind as yet another missing person on a wall full of broken dreams. Amidst all the ruins of history, hope has taken many forms. All that is left now is to prey to the grey lifeless image of that perfect moment when everything they said would happen; didn’t.

With a tunnel view of what he has become, he looks for strength within himself and a defining character that exists without the marketing dream. He still chooses to relate himself to his surroundings for some sense of worth. He feels he is nothing without his accessories and begs a question that he dare not answer himself. He realizes he must almost start from scratch and put aside his memories of who he was and find significance in just being alive. He has invested too much in his memories and more often the not, closes his eyes again and again to chance an impossible dream.

He has always been truly amazing at everything he has ever done. This day though, it seems would evolve into a moment of pure terror that does little to quell the decisiveness of disappointment, the self-preserving educator dictating the motive for change.

This man, enduring this moment of clarity, stands with the poise and stature of accomplishment, bearing the physical scars of his limitless potential. His clothes sit lifeless, tattered and torn on his broken body, yet to look indirectly, one would suspect that this man wears this blood and urine soaked suit like a scar and it is tailored to fit like chain reaction. To the well-trained eye, this unrehearsed moment appears to almost paint a still life portrait that warms to the marriage of suffering and adversity.

This apocalypse is the genesis that only mankind could conceive.

This man truly is a broken vehicle, siphoned clean of all identity, and serving absolutely no purpose whatsoever. His open arms float like weather beaten doors, flailing helplessly on its rigid joints and only serve to highlight this immediate sense of incident (that feeling deep inside when you just know that something bad happened here). His arms serve to shake the fevered chill of abandonment that courses through his veins feeding the insecurities of innocence. To be born again into a new foreign sense of independence is ever so frightening the second time round with a full catalogue of what now appear to be irrelevant memories. The people, the cities, the countless human tragedies, the history of a the society that recognized identity, those that were loved and those who dine alone, and the cultural significance that lost all meaning; if at all there is any relevance at all in meaning.

This moment feels like an emotional collage of all those heart-breaking and terrible things that can happen to children when they are left alone. Oh what it must feel like to be aware of all that has happened, what is to become and even amidst all the prowess of human understanding, bearing the overwhelming emotional weight of a single isolated child, alone and vulnerable, with no reason whatsoever to believe that hope should exist at all. The physical suffering takes little course in relation to the infant puppet master pulling the casualty strings of the meta-physical being.

This will be a moment indeed.

Choice

What sacrifice, to conceive a dream? When all you leave behind, is all you'll ever be.

A Filter for a Frail Horizon

I lose a breath while I'm thinking
Misplace a second as it passes out of time
A splice of memories now missing
I think a moment passed where I forgot to die

And so this day is becoming

High in tide that will take me home
Conceals a current running straight through hell
It caught me drifting from the world I know
A broken crest on a rising swell

And surely hope is resigning

I think I'm waking from another dream
I won't remember how I made it out alive
The focus centres on uncertainty
The null and voids have become a way of life

And so my self is descending

Z = z2 + C

I am two minds both resvolving

Both fearful of presence evolving

One part equating to trouble the sleuth

Consumed by division the other half knew

This universe

This starry lie

What path shall affect us?

What fate begets I?

Depression

Above the blue oceans
And beyond desolate dawns
Through mists of life enchanting
The sadness I adorn

Solemn days approaching
As laughter takes its guise
My beautiful earth holds me here
And waits for my demise

LEAVE

Take me from where I am
and guide me closer to you
Give me the scars that tear out your heart
so I can be closer to you
Kiss me again and feed me your pain
Then haunt me when I am alone
Nestled in mind I hold you inside
And make your sorrow my own
As death closes in I burn deep within
To taste your breath and caress your face
Before I should die please take me aside
For one last eternal embrace

Silent Existence

Wherin I find the truth so stale 

A stark remembrance of innocence failed

A sheltered dream

An empty wound

A decipherless vision

My impetuous doom

An unspoken word to fall on deaf ears

Speaking in silence to console my fears

I revel in loss and the comfort of pain
To scar my realities again and again

What will you remember when nothing is left?