Random… um… Prose?

(nov 2008)

I don’t know what to call this kind of thing. I’m sure there’s a term for it, and if I put a lot of random returns in I could call it poetry, but whatever. It is what it is.

TRUTH

I sit at the edge of consciousness and dreams, and stare past the glass. Cold fire and tight stars littler the streaky sky as the night takes over and passes by the day. And as this dark mistress steals over the world I am trapped in limbo, neither awake nor asleep, but drifting half in and half out of that other place; the place where dreams and inspiration lie. And as I hang, suspended at its edges, I feel that I am close to some revelation. Some truth, about to be revealed, tickles the tips of my fingers, though I cannot grasp it. The exclamation of discovery quivers on the edge of my lips but refuses to be vocalized. Yet I can feel it; destiny is so close that I can almost taste it.

The fire dies and the darkness grows and with it the restlessness of my spirit. I strive too hard to touch this unattainable thing – this knowledge which is waiting for me to find it. I try too hard and it slips from my grasping hand and fades away into the late twilight. Though I try to bring it back, I find that it is utterly gone and that the chance fled when I applied too much force.

Is not that the way of the world, and of humanity? When we see some fluttering beauty weaving just out of our grasp, do we sit and wait in quiet, finger extended and expectant, for the butterfly of reward to light upon it, or do we run and stomp and cry as we try to tackle down the elusive dream and wrangle it into submission? The dream must submit to our hard hands, it must form the way we wish and give us that which we desire, and it must do it now.

And with these threats, the gently fluttering treasure flies away at break neck speed, and we are left stumbling alone through a field of yesterday’s stubble and wondering why nothing good comes our way. We let the stalks crunch beneath our feet, never looking down or thinking what damage we might do to those who we walk over. All the while we moan and cry because we have not been fulfilled, we have not been given what we deserve.

But what do we deserve? A throne to sit upon and dictate edicts to the common man? But who is the common man? The one who has yet to catch his dream, or the one who we deem to be beneath us? Who decides what rank and privilege is handed out? Is it in our hands or the hands of the universe?

But the universe- oh the universe – how fickle does she seem as she dances always out of reach, tantalizing the weary with the golden truth but never handing it out. Still, what would we do with the truth? If she gave of it freely would we even know? Or would we be too busy staring at the sky and moaning our misfortune to see that truth lay all around us, bathed in purple as the sun died for the night?

photo by me

Fav song of the moment – Simple and Clean (long remix) – Utada Hikaru 

Butterfly – Rambling

(originally from May 2008)

 

I call this flash ficiton, but is really more free flow prose. Oh well. I’m not making a banner just for that!

*********

They say that time is precious, that each second melting into one another can never be regained and must be lived to its fullest, and  in the same breath they say to watch where you step for fear of falling from an unseen edge and landing in pieces on the sharp rocks of disillusionment.

I release the breath I’m holding and, like an indigo jewel, the butterfly flutters away. It fades to nothing against the sky, lost in the tides of a cloud swept azure sea. I watch it go and feel a longing in my heart to follow, though I know I can’t. The butterfly disappears, free from the fetters of this life, and I am left standing in a hopeful field of green, surrounded by the ropes of what was once familiar and safe, but is now a mortal coil of binding steel that wraps around me and binds me to the earth. It holds me in this place until its grip becomes a choke hold and I strangle for a breath of fresh air.

The problems and the worries of this life crowd into my head, pushing out the flights of fancy and pressing away the moments of melodramatic melancholy. There is no time for such thoughts because there is too much that must be done. In this systematic ritual of day to day activities all feeling is lost; chilled to a boneless numb that only touches the subconscious when the sun peeks through and melts the protective crust surrounding it.

In such moments it feels as though I may scream or fall to pieces where I stand like fragile glass shattered into useless shards and left shining on the ground for some unlucky person to collect and discard. Because, in those moments, broken and scattered, I am not worth anything else, I will serve no other purpose than to make the ordered structure of the world untidy and to disrupt the symbolic sanity that we all live within.

What is sanity but another illusion cast by the sun’s dying rays as they fall through crystal prisms of despair? We cling to our rainbows and hold to our hallucinations. We pretend that they are something tangible which can hold us back, and all the while we stand upon the brink of a thousand nightmares, shouting and unfulfilled and never knowing what it is we truly want. We watch eternity pass us by and we clutch at petty feelings. We grip them in our hands as if they are the most important possessions while the larger things pass us by. And though we watch them go and long to reach out they are too big for us to grab unless we let go of all those things we already hold, and we cannot do that. Bitterness, while cold, is at least familiar and something tried and unpleasant is better than something untested.

That untested road is where the butterfly goes now, but not I. Afraid to live, afraid to die, I cannot fly away because I have no wings and my feet are stuck in the cement of suffocating sameness, trapped by all the unimportant details that make up a life, choked by regrets and weaknesses.  With eyes shining of unrealized expectations I watch the spot that he was last, waiting for him to reappear but he is gone and I am alone.  A lost soul staring at the sky and waiting for impossibility to become reality and for a hero to come and save me from myself.

But there are no heroes left, there is only me and this green field and the memory of my lost butterfly who even now has forgotten my face.  And yet I stand and wait because what else is there to do? To save myself is too hard, like moving mountains from their eternal home and leaving them on the doorsteps of unsuspecting victims; a cold and lifeless heap of rock for them to find when they open their door in the morning, coffee in their hand and expecting to find their newspapers. And the shock of such a thing would be enough to tear them from their tidy world of measured moments and ticking clocks, and leave them reeling and gasping for something to hold onto.

What I need is not a hero or a butterfly, but a mountain. Something to make my eyes open wide and to throw the preconceived stillness into chaotic disarray filled with noise and thunder.  A magic bolt of illuminating inconvenience to open up the vast chasm of disorder and newness, but such a thing can never happen because they have gone the way of my butterfly, stamped out in favor of a semblance of order and unresolved productivity.  Now nothing but the dust of dreams remains and perhaps if I am fast I can catch it in my hands and hold onto it until something better comes along. That is the way of the world, or so we have been told, and to fight such an established order would be a waste of breath. Better instead to stand still and wish for things we cannot hold, better to dream of far green mountains than to step from the cement of daily order and find that the world outside our rusted bucket didn’t live up to all the expectations; better never to know than to be disappointed.

Or so they say.

***************

I dunno.

Fav song of the moment – “incomplete”- The Last Goodnight