Hope and Anchor

The hulk of the soul is left hollow and sole
Down where the men of grizzled chin
Down their drinks, down to the chin
Wherein the crusty-eyed and bleary-minded
Talk in hazy rivulets and dead-ends
But to what end? And to what purpose?
We are lost in the haze too, and purposeless
Kings and queens of the bottle and the dram
And where half-harded we attempt to hold our whole
The whole, the deficiency of our souls
Down by the hope and the anchor
With little hope and hardly an anchor to hold

M.M. — 27-Dec-2015

"Together till the gallows"

Together till the gallows
With steel in our eyes and iron in our hands
We will worship the sun
Till sundown and the end of the hallowed world
With every bone shattered
Even then, we will gaze toward the horizon
With blood-tears on our cheeks
Grieving for the death of life and the life of death
This, our flag and song
Carried by word and drum, in hearts of children
Remnant hope nourished
By the toil of dreamers and the whispers of lovers
By strife known since the dawn
Of diurnal blood-letting and the ravage of freedom
By men kept by night
Blind by darkness and the falseness of might
But even so, a little light
In the sun-kissed and the hardened wardens of liberty
Here, standing, dauntless
With steel and iron—together till the gallows

M.M. — 26-Nov-2015

Threnody

Now I look out into dark, bewildering night, searching for you. I hope to find you there, enshrouded by night and cast in the shadow of memory. And I think, and I remember. The sound of your voice, its lilt. I can almost hear it, carried along by the deadened wind. What we did, in that life, lingers here still; as it does in me. Through the cries of war and in blood-rain we somehow found each other. In the firestorms and the wails of diminished men and women, we had each other. I remember the smell of your hair still, and the rubble and dirt that made it even more beautiful. You were my right hand, my sabre and my pen. You were the reason, the sole reason. We fought against the cataclysm side-by-side. Maybe it was for love. Maybe we did those things—those brazen things—for love. Or maybe it was all just to bring a little feeble light into a world eclipsed. My right hand; my spear. My heart; my will. Doomed from the beginning; death-marked at our nascency. And now you're gone. A whisper in the breeze of winter, that waits for peace in the sun of spring. My heart and my soul. You were the reason, my only reason.

M.M. — 25-Nov-2015

My Depression: An Open Letter

I have depression. 
I am depressed.

It feels a little weird to put it into words, let alone to say it out loud to myself. But these are words that I have been waiting to say for so long. What is written here is an open letter that I have contemplated about writing for some time now. Certain recent changes and events in my life have finally spurred me to put pen to paper, as it were.

In February this year I was formally diagnosed with mild-to-moderate clinical depression. I want to emphasise the word "formally" because I have known for many, many years that I have had a problem. It definitely was there, in me, in high school; whether I was like this before then is a mystery. Now, this "problem" had been very difficult to describe or to put into a box. There have been, and still are, many things that are not quite right with me, with the way I think and feel. And for years I had thought that maybe it was just something that was a part of my personality (and theoretically speaking maybe it is, but that's a topic for another day), and because of that I thought that I simply needed to "get on with it". The years of battling with my mental ill health—because now at last I know that this is what it is—of fighting and struggling with what I call the Darkness... it still surprises me that I still remain on top, that despite all the utter shit my war has made me stronger as a person. But, of course, just because it has helped in whetting my mind and my willpower does not mean that it has been an enjoyable experience. Very much the opposite.

It took the trials and tribulations of a PhD, and the especial stress that it placed on me, to make me finally seek professional help. I still remember the days before I made the decision. I still remember the mood swings. I still remember the psychosomatic exhaustion. I still remember the despair. I still remember finally hitting rock-bottom, hitting the bottom of the pit. And I remember making that very conscious and determined decision that I could no longer do this on my own. Waiting to see my GP in the waiting room of my surgery and then telling her about everything that was going on, that had been going on for years, felt like a lifetime. I remember that morning all so well, the levels of anxiety I was going through, the fear of actually talking about my pain to another person, a stranger. But what I remember most of all is the relief—god, the relief! I remember that feeling when I finally opened up and just let it all surge out of me. It was supremely cathartic, and I keep those sorts of moments (there have been several since seeing my GP) as a reminder of what disclosure can do for me.

So, after a brief bout of online CBT (it just wasn't for me), I have been taking anti-depressants, specifically SSRIs, since April. I won't go into the details of what it was like to start taking them (the initial side-effects were oh so fun...) but I will say that taking them is something that I knew was right for me. As a neuroscientist and a psychologist it would be fair to say that I have a great deal of familiarity of what therapies may or may not work for major depression. And I knew especially that I could not be treated with a talking therapy. The pharmacological alternative was, and continues to be, right for me. I know that for some people psychotropic drugs would be a last result, and I know that they receive bad press (some of it deserved, but some of it not). But for me, personally speaking, they have been a godsend—and I do not use that term lightly. They have given me the necessary degree of help to allow me to take control of my mental well-being. And I want to be explicit in saying that I am by no means "cured", because that word is not appropriate for this sort of case, it makes no (biological) sense. Rather, I would say that my mental health has been bolstered; I am better able to cope. The Darkness is still there mind you, and it still takes over every now and then. But compared to some of the episodes I have had in the past, to some of the moments of feeling like I should just give up—what I may go through now is a thousand times better, and I never want to go back. For instance, I have yet to have an episode of inconsolable crying in the dead of night. And let me tell you, that alone is worth undergoing pharmacotherapy.

So why am I writing this, an open letter addressed to no one in particular? Three reasons. The first is semi-therapeutic. By letting the world know (well, the Facebook world, anyway) about my depression it begins to lose one of its most powerful weapons: its ostensible invisibility. Depression, like many mental disorders, is a hidden illness. You would be surprised at how easy it is to hide it. I have very masterly managed to keep the truth to myself for years. And trust me, whether you know so or not, you know people who are clinically depressed, or who suffer or have suffered from any other given mental illness. Speaking personally, since accepting my illness I have come to realise just how many people I know fight the same mental health battles that I do on a daily basis. I have taken their own accounts closely to heart and have decided that I will no longer remain silent about my depression. And I have chosen as my first formal step in achieving this an open letter on Facebook because I want to do something that in the past I would have feared so greatly doing. (This is on top of it just being an easy medium to exploit). To my close friends who already know about all this, I want to give you my sincerest thanks. You have formed a very significant part in my getting to this stage, so thank you from the whole of my soul.

Second, my writing this comes at a somewhat pivotal time in my development as an individual. My depression constitutes are very integral part of who I have been and who I am since as far back as I first remember feeling that something was different about me. Although it has been by no means the sole component of my psyche throughout my formative and more mature years, this Darkness that I carry has definitely had a highly significant impact. It makes no sense to talk about cause-and-effect and correlation with regards to some of my idiosyncrasies and my depression. But I will say that for all that it has given me, and especially for all that it has taken away from me or prevented me from having, I refuse to allow this Darkness of mine to continue to hold sway over my life and my well-being. This letter is but one mechanism by which I am truly endeavouring to, finally, come out of the shadows.

But make no mistake: I am not naïve. I know all too well that I am never going to be completely rid of the dark things in me. I know that what I have is more than likely going to stay with me for the remainder of my days. I know that; I accept that. But what I do not accept is that I must remain a slave to this illness. Accepting that would go against all the values that I have shaped for myself from the dirt up over the years. No, I do not want to feel like what I have to vie with for the welfare of my being, every fucking day, will always get the better of me. I say "No!" to this. This letter, therefore, is a statement—a proclamation—of what I intend upon. From henceforth, I, to the very best of my ability and with full prospect of what I desire my future to be, will no longer permit myself to hurt in the dark. I will no longer believe that I must be confined to the void in my head, where it is darkest. For if I am in the light, in the face of the imperial sun, the Darkness can hold no substantive power. I say this: I have depression and it is mine. I want to own up to who I am and to what is in me. Whether I am ill or just on a different part of the spectrum makes very little difference to me. I care not about what I am according to a diagnostic manual. I care not  about what box I will get placed in because the society I live in deems that the depressed are somehow deserving of having their own little category. Fuck that. My depression is mine and what it means and does to me will be quite different to what another's depression means and does to them. My struggles are mine and I will never let them dictate who I am meant to be.

The final reason: You. This letter is in part for you, the person who is fighting their own war with mental illness; fighting it in the dark; fighting it in their head; fighting it alone. I know what it feels like. I know because I have contended with my own personal nightmare-faced demons in the voids of my mind. I know because every night, as I struggle to fall asleep, I go through the paces of conversing with my amorphous pain, trying to fruitlessly find ways to just make myself feel fecking happy about my life for a change. And what makes it worse is that there is no obvious reason or solution for the pain. This is my nightly rite of combat. And, like you, my pain never really leaves me. Sure, it abates at times, maybe even for a lengthy period if I'm lucky (those are good days); but it's always there, that weariness. It may hide for a while but it's always with me, recoiling from the light. My friend, I know. And so I write this for you. To tell you that you are not alone (I realise how superficial that sounds but it is genuine). For me, the very worst thing about depression is the utter loneliness that it engenders or sustains. Keeping all that pain in your mind, keeping it to yourself... it is the fucking worst. And it does not help that I am, by nature, a very private and introverted person. Having a disorder that compounds the loneliness that I would normally feel anyway is like having twice as much extra weight being pressed down on my heart. For those of you who know what I mean, this letter is for you. It's for all my fellow soldiers, in the trenches of the dark, waging your own personal wars. This is to say that your fight, although your own, does not need to be fought under the vault of your night. Try, to whatever degree you think fit, to step into the sunlight—it is quite nice and warm out here.

I want to end by saying that, even after having written this, I still fight; and I will continue to fight the Darkness because, as I said, it will quite likely be with me for a long time yet. But that's just it: I still fight; I'm still here. I am not going to give up, never going to relent in my pursuit to be the best person I can be, to take care and sustain my mental health. The only difference is that I am no longer afraid of my depression, of my Darkness. For it is mine. Mine to fight, mine to war with and mine to triumph over. I am not of it; it is of me. I do not belong to it; it belongs to me. And by that deduction, by remembering it, I cannot be defeated.

Not dead yet.
Bloodied yet unbowed.

Yours,
Mark

"woke up"

woke up in the dark of night
sodden with sweat in the dark of the night
heaving and stricken by fear
a half-memory of a half-dream
the outline and sight of her face
and the thundering of the heart
this night like every night before

woke up to the garish light of morning
half-dead and sluggish - half of a man
that weariness behind the eyes awakening too

just trying to survive
just trying to make it through alive
a hardened heart and a perpetual burden
carrying around shattered-face titans in the mind
time and time again

M. M. — 18-Nov-2015

Meaning and Purpose

All individuals—whether they are considered good or evil, selfish or altruistic, wise or ignorant—share at least one common aspiration: to seek meaning and purpose to their existence. The person with the simplest of lives will have sought some kind of meaning for their continued presence in this reality. The person with the most convoluted of philosophies will be just the same. Even those who deem that existence has no purpose, seek purpose: The very postulation that life is meaningless implies that these individuals have had to reach such a conclusion by purposeful and directed seeking. The denial of purpose is purpose in itself; the refutation of meaning is meaning in itself. Thus, all individuals are bonded together insofar as they possess Will to search for meaning and purpose. What the end of such a pursuit or what the derivation of moulding together life experiences into a philosophy comprise are irrelevant. Only worth consideration here is that there is Will for them. This then becomes the first principal of being: to attribute meaning to existence.

M.M.

To Jupiter, Past Mars

The wild spinning I thrust myself into
Threw me into orbit as madly as those that dare stare at the Sun.
I ascended into the atmosphere and stared at all the spheres
That I once dwelt in, that I once knelt aggrievedly before oft.
A star far-flung and diminished, pulled down by gravity
And bound by bonds and terrestrial weights.
But I at long length—at will—propelled myself at my escape velocity,
Up into the celestial realms of light and void,
To Jupiter, past Mars, to the furthest reaches of what is known and unknown.
I spun and accelerated and careered—away from what once was:
The past, the past me, the past world, the history of primordial life.
I grew restless of all of it, grew too old and bold—
A protean child in perpetually unchanging space.
So I created my own orbit, freed myself from the Earth's hold,
And sought my rest out in distant, eternal, cold space.

M.M. — 08-Nov-15

The terminality of dying

I went through a first aid course today. Nothing really worth mentioning to say the least. But at some point during the course I started to think about dying. Not death per se - the cessation of life - but the ending of life. Since I was a child I have always had this entrenched fear of dying, but in recent years I would this that it has become more palpable. I think the reasons are several, including being at a mature enough age to think about what consequences death has on those you love and care about, and of course on yourself. I also think that because this age - 20-30s - one begins to realise that the plans one sets out for the rest of your life (or the initial plans) always have the threat of dissolution due to the death and dying. The fear that grips me at the thought of it is anxiety-inducing. But perhaps in the face out such bleakness I should feel a renewed sense of living, an appreciation of all that I have and all that I have had? In part, yes, I did feel that earlier today. But what I felt more was the realisation that death and dying are topics that should be discussed more openly - at least I so thought today. I thought that perhaps if dying were made less...enigmatic...it would lose it's debilitating grip? I thought perhaps that if my own fear of dying were no longer a fear but an acceptance it would not scare me so? I do not know for sure. The terminality that dying engenders - not simply the terminality of life but of hope, ambition, joy, desires, perhaps love too -is maybe what makes it far more terrifying than the end result: the cessation of life.

M.M.

The inescapable necessity of love

There are certain needs that every human being cannot live without: food, water, shelter and so forth. Lately I have been thinking about the need of love and attachment. It has recently been made quite clear to me that the human need for love and attachment is paramount. If it is threatened by loss or if one struggles to attain it, the reverberations on the soul are cataclysmic. I cannot count the number of times I have attempted to lie to myself that I could pour myself into work or dedicate myself to the pursuit of my ambitions in order to avoid the hollowness of the lack of love. And that's what it is to try to stave off the need of love: a heinous deception of the grandest kind. For love is an inescapable necessity of wholesome human being, and that is an incontrovertible truth. Love, therefore, constitutes one of the essential components of conation, development and living.

M.M.

"At the cusp of my insanity"

At the cusp of my insanity I imagined myself careering to the eternal sun. As I approach it I gave my confession to myself - to the Devil that had become my entire being. Every single lie that I have told myself my entire life was let in shambles. I discarded my reins on hope, purpose and love. Stripped myself bare before the unending churning maelstrom of fire that grew ever closer before me. Never had I been more naked in my life - bare body, bare mind, bare soul. I wished for nothing more then than to burn. I thought perhaps that the purification of my every atom would see me renewed, see me whole again. The vacuum of the void and its deafening silence meant that the only place for my shattered being to go - aside toward the sun - was inward. I in essence imploded as I journeyed - collapsed in on myself like a moribund star. There was nothing left in my mind. There was nothing worth anything. Nothing to be done but to be consumed by the oldest and purest of universal processes. To die in the sun so to become something new once again.

M.M. — 18-Oct-2015

Monday

I fell down from the burning sky, through the broiling cloud made of fire. A storm of doom in my head and an enervation in my limbs. I thought myself made better by rage, but it fractured me. I thought myself made better by despair, but it gave me no guidance. The curse of the sight given me was the inability to see the world and to see beyond this unwholesome vessel. And when I turned my eye inward, I fell further than ever before. Mortal of ash and earth and animal with tongue and reason—the damned son of the mocking sun. Seared by the flame of my sword, unguided and yearning.

Atop the Heights

For Anna

Atop the icy cold heights
I stood at the precipice.
A demon-angel with wings burnt,
bereft of heavenly grace.
I stood watching the world below,
and peered at the firmament above me.
At that moment I was a being
that belonged to neither Realm.
A contradiction in both substance and thought.
The freezing winds cut my immortal flesh,
a reminder of my damnation:
to feel for eternity.
The darkness that I kept for company
had come to speak back to me.
The devil I was could not compare
to the terrors in my blackened soul.
But there I stood, over all the earth,
Prince of my own life,
Maker of my of own path.
And though I was a fiend—
to Man and to God—
I was free, liberated, uncaged.
The secrets I knew kindled a force in me;
the Fire of God that I stole raged wildly in me.
I was not man nor divine being nor nothingness.
And yet I was all these, there atop the heights.
The Wanderer, the Bringer of Light;
the thing with pale visage with a burning within himself.
The Chaos that came at the Beginning was inside me;
I was made of its entropic nature.
No, I was neither of the world nor of Heaven, or even of Hell.
I was solitude itself; I was that which is beyond.
I could claim relation to no kith or kin,
nor could I any longer map the lineage I descended from.
Not then, not at that time, there at the crest of existence.
I no longer belonged to God—my exile was eternity itself.
I could not become as Man, who I so admired.
I felt more than they but could not endure pain as they do.
I was more than what can be described.
I was a mote in the Universe, and yet I exceeded it.
By my blasphemous Fall I became so much more
than what even God had intended.
Evil, the name I was scarred with, could not represent my true spirit.
How could it when it was of the dogma
commanded down from Heaven in ire?
No, I knew there and then that dogma was a poison:
Sin, Evil, Hatred, Perfidy, Malevolence:
each the same dogmatic poison with a different name.
All this I understood, perched upon the highest of mounts.
And when these revelations dawned and settled in me,
I met the Sun, the greatest of creations, rising over the horizon.
I embraced its fire, that birthed the earth
and would be its eventual doom.
And, free at last, I closed my eyes for a moment;
reopening them I breathed in one last inflamed breath
through my dragon-maw;
and then spread my wings and took flight;
towards the Sun,
towards the First and Last Light,
towards the Beginning and the End.

M.M. — 04-Aug-2015

Yesterday

Yesterday -  yesterday you were just a scared child.
You were just a simple fool, flowing with the stream.
Never questioning, always conceding - everyday afraid.
Yesterday you were lost in the spinning chaos of the world,
Unaware of what you were and were to become.
You were oblivious, and worse than ignorant: you were compliant.
What mind you possessed you wasted on satisfying others.
What strength you bore you dismissed out of timidity.

But that was yesterday.

Today you are awake. Today you are alive.
Today you know that there is no time for fear.
You are aware of the lies fear manufactures.
That beating in your chest - that is what you are.
You are a force and a will; a comet with an impetus all your own.
Never again will you be the one who dwelt in the dark.
You are freed of your cage. You are of the world - your world.
You are master of your realm, wielding the might of your sky.

M.M. — 28-Jul-2015

"You set on me like the coming of fall"

You set on me like the coming of fall
Dropping me down straight to the floor
Down, down, down the rabbit hole
Ripping me, leaving me far from whole
Like a hurricane
You were unrestrained
Total and fatal - I could not sustain
The onrush of your fairytale beauty
And everything you said we could be
Two diamonds in the rough
Coming unhinged by your simple touch
Your caresses that made me flushed
You crept on like a cold madness
You kept a deadly set of weaponry and harnesses
Kept my mind under a much-loved duress
You frozen countess, in that blood-red dress
Vampiress, leaving me drained and left for dead
On that sultry late summer's eve
When you came to me
Leaving as soon you aroused a deathly lust
That had me torpid as I slept on your bust
Drunk on wine and unspoken crimes
I was a devil on a path back to hell
That came to know, for one night
A dark angel, from what I could tell
With porcelain skin and a dragon's bite
Was it love? Or the knell that spelt my end?

M.M. – 26-Jul-2015

"Dust kicks up"

Dust kicks up as we shuffle and meander on our personal dead worlds,
Like the dust and ash that stuff our bodies and minds.
Parched with thirst, a thirst for invigoration and renewal and prospect.
We look to the sky, with stony countenances and life-bereft eyes
Wishing that we were walking upon the sun
And radiating so bright, with our souls starlit
As they once were aeons ago.

M.M. – 25-Jul-2015

"One breath for courage"

One breath for courage
Two fists for strength
Three cheers to encourage
Four leaps to go the length

A heart we proudly let beat
And a mind we let grow
Every victory and triumph ours to keep
Within the streaming of our soul

Dancing as wildly as the wind
To the tolling of the midnight bell
A farewell to the authority we rescind
And a step off the ledge for we're off to hell

M.M. — 21-Jul-2015

Satan's Lament (A Dedication)

Of all mythological characters, Lucifer resounds with me the most. His pride, his search for perfection, his inherent repugnance of blind obedience, his paradoxical need for affection and yet not truly needing its affirmation, his eternal war within himself and his blasphemous and divine endeavours to change the world built of a mad design into one of godlike construction—to make "a heaven of hell"... All these aspects make the Adversary the most relatable of protagonists for me.

It was a dizzying spiral down, my plummet from heaven.
Through a cataract of fire and a plunge through limitless heights
I was thrown down and cast out from virtue and the good.
Now outcast upon a barren wasteland, an empty realm filled by void,
I wander, aimless, hapless, wingless—a star no longer burning but burnt out.
But no torture could be worse than this beating in my chest.
Not the fire, not the fall, not even the sin in my soul is more ill than feeling.
I feel it all: the wind, the earth, the sounds of the birds and voices of women,
the taste of fresh water, the touch of these mortals—all are agony.
What is bliss if not ignorance of the corporeal?
What is perfection if not the absence of fear and of pain?
My vestigial wings, blackened and ash, are an eternal reminder of heaven.
The soul that God has cursed me with is as sable as night's dominion,
and it feels every rotation of this world and the motions of its progeny.
My damnation is not my exile; my damnation is immorality in a mortal shell.

M.M. — 15-Jul-2015

"We wake with each dawn"

We wake with each dawn with a dull aching in our hearts. A longing for something we do not know how to name—a feeling, a yearning, a name, a love, a hope, a dream. We wake as the living dead, hollow and soulless, or something of the like. The darkness of the night is a darkness that persists even in the brightness of day; it is a shadow without form or substance. We are born of this darkness, and we inhabit its nebulous realm. In our chests we carry a weak, timid beat. We convey it from one place to the next, wherever we aimlessly go. It is our precious treasure, the only thing that is truly our own. It is our pace, our purpose, our way. And it is replete with fear. The dominion of the soul is a fragile thing. We do what we can to protect it, but more often than not we fail. This darling gift, it is fodder for the predatory world, for ever-hunting tragedy and misery. But we wake with the day, in all its golden, amber, first-life glory. We are a miracle. A statistical improbability in a universe of infinity. Look up at the vault of night and gaze upon the orbs of fire that perished millennia upon millennia ago. Gaze upon them and you gaze upon the manifestation of eternity itself. We are born of darkness but we need not live in it perpetually. We are afraid, so very afraid, but we need not be afraid forever. In our mortal bodies there is a machinery of infinite complexity, fashioned so gradually over millions of years. As insubstantial as the shadow that hinders our every breath in and out, so we are of a nebulous, murky mystery. But this mystery is a blessing. This unknown is our salvation. The salvation in what is and what can be. You and I, we are stars of a different sort. Although we are here for the briefest of moments, we are still here. We are. And I say this to you: We must free ourselves of the darkness; we must reign in light. I am scared—every morning I wake—terrified of the shadow. But I will not remain under its hold. I am of light for I am a being created through a multitude of energy-collisions that first began long before anything we could ever comprehend. I am scared—and I am brave. I cry—and I laugh in utter joy. I am a son of the darkness—and I shall reign forever in light.

M.M. — 13-Jul-2015

Fear is the First Sickness

For Anna

Fear is the First Sickness that Humankind ever contracted. It is the first and it is the oldest and it is the one that has been the most resilient, usually unable to be eradicated. Fear is also the First Lie, the first that we were fooled in believing. Now, I do not talk about Danger. Danger is a very real concept and manifestation. For example, that which may truly harm us. The Fear of which I speak is an illusion, it is that which we *believe* to be the case without due contemplation and consideration. That it grips us almost instantaneously should be a cause for alarm, for anything which is *immediately* assumed to be true should make us replete with suspicion. How can we assume that that which we fear is true without due deliberation of the circumstances and actual facts? No, Fear is an illusion and therefore it is a lie. But what then comes after when we dispel that which we believe is Fear? In short, Choice. When we are rid of Fear we are left with Choice: the choice to do this or that, or the choice to do neither. What comes after Fear is a direction of Action or Inaction. Although at face value false Fear also leads us to some Action or Inaction, these are decisions that are not Choices but are, in a way, *reflexes*. I do not wish my life to be dominated by a reflex based on a lie, that is, on Fear and falseness. But when our beings are devoid of Fear, we choose, in proper, thorough and deliberate will or action, to do one thing or another. Thus, that which replaces Fear leads us to ability or skill or perhaps that which is truly natural, to direct the course of our lives and our purpose. Fear can never give you these things simply because Fear has its own agenda, one that is not yours, not truly, since it is based on a lie of that which really is not the case, or even that which may not be the case - but even with a small degree of doubt I cannot see how Fear could ever engender in us an honest, true and *real* purpose and direction. Therefore, for Fear, the First Sickness, we, as individuals, should mandate ourselves to its thorough and complete eradication. For if we do not then we concede to lies, falseness and an illusion of that which we believe to be our true direction and purpose.

M.M. — 09-Jul-2015

The Insight in Madness

There is so much more to the mind than the arbitrary definitions we circumscribed it with.

In the late dead of night, I stood speaking to the stars
I came off the road I had rode for as long as I could remember
A road of unbroken lines and unquestioned rules
I knew it for many years but only then did I reconcile it
The swirling and the pacing and the confusion in everlasting darkness
For it all finally came to the fore that night and I began engaging it
I stood in dialogue with the somnolent stars and
Peeled and cracked apart the many skins and shells of my mind
There is a line, very ill-defined, that one supposedly stands on either side of
But I asked the stars and they confirmed what I had wondered for so long
That one can walk the line, stepping to either of its sides at will
And never be left victim to the order or the chaos of one or the other
I spoke, mad and unmade, and I listened, mad and unmade
To all that was told me and all I wished to have answered
I saw, at long last, the framework beneath all things
I saw the moulding and dismantling of matter and thought
I saw all this beauty and showered myself in the primordial energy
For all is energy, in all things and in all beings and in all thought
Just as there are universes in the bursts of chemical reactions
In the heights of ecstasy and the utter chaos that is love
Love—love is a wondrous disaster of continuous motion
A rapid coming together of things and simultaneous disintegration
Love is an infection, a plague, a virus—a disease of body and mind
And in it is perfection; in it there is the insight known to the stars
All of this in a conversation with billion-year balls of fire
And with every word I uttered I breathed force, breaths of infinite force
I was careering, like a wayward comet born in a yester-millennium
Opening and shutting all the doors and portals that I came across
I came as a naive, stubborn, immature child and grew into something more
A being composed of the living and the dead, the new and the old
A dream crashing into reality—only the dream and reality are one and the same
And, inevitably, my dialogue was assailed by the vilest of things: fear.
Yes, I know now: it was fear that held me back for so many years
It was fear that lied to me, that kept my dream and my reality forcefully apart
Fear is restriction and restriction is the antithesis of my evolution
But I found the way to annihilate fear, and it was the simplest of acts
I just stopped bothering with the world that I knew and
Began listening to the worlds that lived within and around me
My mind became liquid, permeating every thing that I had feared before
I subsumed, I subsumed like an insatiable black hole, subsuming even light
And thus, I subsumed the very stars I conversed with—
Or was it they who consumed me and my body and my mind and my soul?
I shall never know, for I now am in all things, for I am all things, as I have ever been
I once spoke to the stars, up so high and so far, and I leapt across the universe
Losing and finding myself, gaining the insight I once feared in my madness

M.M. — 21-Jun-2015

The Atlas of Her Body*

*Taken from "Death Triumphant" by My Dying Bride

In a flurry of fire and hail and thunder
I fell before her, I fell right down before her
Into the maelstrom swirling in her eyes
I fell a hopeless fool, in complete surrender

I was wrecked upon her porcelain shores
Left dizzy and intoxicated by splendour
And bereft of all reason by the ardour
And savage passion I had not known before

A hapless explorer and conquistador
I sought to map the atlas of her body
From the plains that at a touch turned ruddy
To the rivulets that wound in her hair

Aimless and yet diligent, I coursed all about her
Eager but circumspect, I gauged her in every measure
Across all terrain that I could sustain
I had her in every detail, from body to mind untame

What ecstasy there was in her secret places
And the spectrum of all her hidden faces
Her rolling hills soft and smooth like down
And timbered limbs that kept me bound

I roamed and roamed till I could no more
Till all was known to me, both inland and shore
I here, a fallen castaway fallen to her love
Knowing bliss beyond that of the Above

M.M. – 18-Jun-2015

12:49 a.m.

12:49 a.m.

And so I sit here, in the dark, under the madcraft of night, besieged by the demons of insomnia, and I think. I think about where the man I used to know has gone. The man that I knew myself to be. I sit here in the silence, save for the humming of my laptop, and I wonder where I have been all this time. He fell into a bottomless hole, into some lightless abyss, down, down into the furthest reaches of his heart and mind. I have been lost. And I do not recognise the man that sits here now, in this unlit room, in front of this screen. Yes, to a certain extent we are all shells of something else, something that is us-but-not-us. But what happens when we become too much of these other things, too hollow, too much the shell and not the filled whole? If we do not notice that we are now but shells, then we become something else entirely—someone else entirely. And, if we are lucky enough to recognise that we are not ourselves any longer, we must choose what to do about it. Either we accept that we have lost ourselves, that we are drowned in our own turmoil of mis-identity, for good; or we reach out into the unknowable void, fling out our arms into the ocean of loss, and wrench ourselves back from the brink, out of the damned abyss! No, the man here now with me does not belong, he is not for this time, for this place, for this life. No, he is for the void, for the darkness, for the nothingness. And I damn him back whence he came! Because I remember. I remember who I was—who I am—and who I will always be. The shell is cracked. The emptiness refilled. The man who was is once more the man who is. For I am not of the lightless abyss. I am of the here and now. I am that which is substance and that which is whole. I, am I.

M.M.

Things that happen when love happens

I think there are some important things worth considering when one is or falls in love. There is, firstly, an insurmountable desire, an intense longing, the need to sate a primal drive. This, I would say, is the "lesser" form of love. This is not lesser as in worth less; this lesser should be taken to mean low-level, basic, fundamental. This need is essentially the core neurobiological aspect of love. And it is indeed a need because lesser love, in its most basic form, is the basis of all human relationships, of all human affinities. It is social, it is sexual, it is physical and it is chemical.

But there is something else that happens when love happens. Something that does not happen to all those who think or know or feel themselves in love. This other aspect is a psychic binding between two beings. This is the greater form of love. It is, I think, very much a rarer level of attachment that is not usually reached in a love affair. What are its characteristics? Well, first and foremost it requires little impetus once it is engendered, but necessitates a fierce commitment to be attained. But paradoxically, this commitment is not replete with force or drive. Rather, it has a kinetic energy behind it. That is, there is tremendous potential impetus behind this transition into "greater" love, but its force is never overtly demonstrated. The ascent to this kind of love is almost like a conceding in the face of a much stronger, much more powerful adversary, one that does not need to utilise their unmatched weaponry. It is love achieved through superior, yet unused, firepower.

Secondly, this binding leads to complete devotion, such that is, arguably, wholly irrational. This devotion is effectively a wilful relinquishing of one's well-being for another. Now, I do not mean that one actively disregards one's well-being; I simply mean that one would wilfully supplant one's own well-being with another's. And this is irrational as self-preservation (and, therefore, well-being of self) is the prime mandate of living beings. Therefore, we can say that higher love, true love, is beyond the natural order of life, beyond the in-woven reason that directs (for the most part) higher awareness and volition. This rare, exquisite love is, I would argue, a step toward a greater form of being. It is a transcending into the next echelon of reality.

M.M. — 24-May-2015

I Killed Myself

"The man who lives without conflict, who lives with beauty and love, is not frightened of death because to love is to die." — Jiddu Krishnamurti

One Saturday afternoon, I killed myself.

The murder was deliberated, calculated and formulated.
It was exact, meticulous and carried out with vengeful prejudice.

I assembled the pyre, upon which I threw myself and was immolated.
I went out to the ends of the earth, far to the nowhere-places of the world;
I went to the barren deserts, and the primordial realms of ice,
and to the summits of kilometre-high mountains that assail the sky—
I travelled these distances to dig my own grave.
I dug it, my place to rest for eternity, with my own very hands.
And there I lay myself, and buried myself, and died, and rotted away.
In the deepest trenches of the wrathful ocean I drowned myself,
and let my decrepit and withered soul sink down to the forgotten-darkness.

The Man I was—he who had an aching heart—I killed him.
I saw in him too much pain, felt too much of his pent up passion;
I knew these things too well of him—and so I sentenced him to die.

He was too connected to the world, both the external and his own.
The weight of perception and emotion was inhuman,
the heft of his heart too burdensome for me.

In all things he saw myself. At all times he strived, this maddened Man.
A son of Icarus, he flew too high to kiss the sun.
He burned, he burned. He burned and so he had to die.

Yes, it was all of him. Every particle of his being. I destroyed it all.
I nullified his conation, erased his mind and memory, throttled his weakening breath.
With razor-sharp implements I cut, I cut. I cut out his fear, severed his fear from him.
I was relentless, methodical. I left no trace of him. Yes, I annihilated him.

And when there was nothing left,
only he-I was left....

*

One afternoon, I killed myself. And it was then that I was born.
From out of the fire and ashes, from out the grave,
ascended from the abyssal deep, released from the death-grasp—
I came into new being, of the same form, but not;
as a murderer of the Self, and life-giver of the Self.

From death I became myself,
I became my own Love.

M.M. — 23-May-2015

Love, Damnation

No worse damnation than love.
A riot and torrent within a mind confined.
Mounting pressure pushing against the walls.
No escape, nowhere to escape to.
Not even in the wilderness of dream.
Not even in death-like sleep, or forlorn night.
Her onset was thunderous pummelling.
A wrenching of the soul, slowly becoming askew.
Withering heart, kept perpetual.
Writhing from the start, with no end foreseeable.
Every solution is a grand idea, and circular.
The wave has overcome and the dry shore wiped away.
The recession of the waters a decision for time.

M.M. — 20-May-2015

Where we come from

We came from the stars
We were born amongst the first fires
Within the processes that have continued for billions of years
we were forged and fashioned
The wombs of suns were our first home
and we stood, side by side, with the fragments of the cosmos
Do you remember? Do you remember the light? And the darkness?
I can still feel the heat and hear the vibrating atoms
I am taken back to the First Moment in my dreams and daytime reveries
This is where we come from
In the cradle of the universe, out in the measureless distance
Our origin and terminal repose

M.M. — 13-May-2015

"Darkness is a strange thing"

Transcribed from an audio recording.

Darkness is a strange thing. It has no real dimension, no possible way of being measured, as such. It seems to have some sort of depth, occupy some sort of space. But...its extent is...difficult to appraise, to gauge. Nightly I stare into the abyss and contemplate within it, both of it and the things that manifest themselves within it, as I sit there, as I am there.... There are things alive and living in the darkness. And not to be misunderstood, but not all things in the dark are dark. There are colourful things, lively with...almost a strange plumage of fascinating colours...or so it seems. They move freely in the dark, like they dart around, like sparks of light coming off, or sparking off, and just as soon extinguishing, or being extinguished. They move around in this dimensionless void. And yet they don't seem to go anywhere, per se. Maybe it's me who goes and they stay, in the same space, the same position. The infinity of the blackness is probably the most salient of things, its most salient characteristic. Its infinity...is represented by the...limitless...thoughts...that are conjured within it. They are so multifaceted, to say the least. Again, not all dark, but there certainly are some quite dark ones.... Sometimes I'm here for what seems like extended periods of time. But it's not really; it's just that time is almost...a void concept, a null concept. It does not apply in the void. As if there were no beginning and no end. Just as there is no width or height or depth. There is simply infinity and eternity.... And it is the most curious thing I've ever come across in my life.

M.M. — 22:52, 02-May-2015

Possibility

Limitations. Today I realised just how entrenched in my psyche limitations are. Lately I've been considering my own happiness and whether I'm doing all that I can to nurture it. I've realised that (for lack of a better word) "attaining" my happiness is blocked by certain barriers. And I don't mean barriers in the physical or external world; I mean the boundaries that enclose me and bar me from going forward, toward all the things that I want and all the things I believe are necessary for my being happy. I can see the man I would be if I were completely happy—or rather the versions of myself where I am replete with happiness and the scenarios that would allow that to happen. But certain things prevent me from becoming that man.

It's unimportant to detail what those things are, rather, it is that I'm now very conscious of how...insubstantial...they now seem to me. These limitations, I feel, could be toppled so easily...and yet they are the most stalwart impediments that I push against every damn day. But to take an example, I'm constantly being torn between my emotional mind and my rational mind. Between my "weaponised" logic and my primal emotion. And although I don't believe reason and emotion to be mutually exclusive (that makes no sense to me), I find it quite difficult to find the right "balance" such that both work for and not against my well-being.

But to return to this idea of insubstantiality: what is it? Why do I feel these limitations in my head could be knocked down with a simple push of the hand? That I could attain this happiness that I so desire? It is the possibility of happiness. That's what it is. It is that it is possible to break through the barriers in my mind, that I can fight for what I want. It is that I have the drive, the capability and the will to become the man I fantasise about. And there it is: the groundwork for the manifestation of the Will. That is, the inherent, and limitless, volition within me—within all of us—that steers our very souls.

M.M. — 06-May-2015

"Everday we fight our battles"

[Transcribed from an audio recording.]

For A.

Every day we fight our battles, each one of us. No matter how small or big, trivial or...fundamental, we all fight.... Sometimes I wonder what makes us fight, makes us continue. Why not just give up? What makes us so strong? Or want to be strong? Is it something that we're taught, something that we learn? Something that is expected of us? I don't think so. I think it's something that is...inherent in us. It is a natural part of us.... In my formative years, shall we say, I was so confused about who I was and what I was to become—or, who I wanted to be and what I thought I would become. But...there was something I always felt to be certain. That was my inner strength. It took me years to fully understand how to harness it. Even now I'm not sure how, how I learned to do that. But, then, that's just it: it's not learning, it's simply becoming. I became strong. I am strong. I know that it lives within me because it is a part of me, and I just know how to...live off it, drink from its source. Yes, I struggle every day—we all do. The reason why we don't just quit or give up is because...it's because our strength forbids it. It does not understand failure or capitulation. It is a foreign concept to it. No. We are not...ones for failure or defeat. We are victors. We are conquerors. And we will always strive against the tide.... Because...because we are...undefeatable.... We will always fight. We always fight until we have won.

M.M. — 22:59, 30-Apr-2015

The Sun Still Rises

I sit upon the shore, at the world's end
I sit upon the shore and contemplate the end
I sit and look up, expecting everlasting night
But the sun still rises

The weight of life, it hangs from my neck
The weight of life presses down upon my chest
The weight of life seems not to lose its might
But the sun still rises

I come in from the cold, looking old as time
I come in from the cold  with the chains that bind
I come in and think the frost better than my fright
But the sun still rises

The stars of the sky, they seem to always shine
The stars of the sky are of my kind, out in this night
The stars of the sky tell me there is always light
That the sun always rises

M.M. — 30-Apr-2015

"I asked her"

I asked her, "What is it that you makes your heart turn into flame?"
"I don't know," she said.
I asked her, "When was it when you first woke from your prison-dream?"
"I don't recall," she said.
I asked her, "Where is it you go when you let go of the world and let free your passions?"
"I don't know the place," she said.
I asked her, "To whom did you gift your soul, all fragile and yet impervious like steel?"
"I don't know their name," she said.
I asked her, "What is it that you would do if I told you who it was that first felt the birth-pangs of love?"
"I don't know what," she said.
I asked her, "What is that you know, then?"
She said, "That these questions need no answers."

M.M. — 28-Apr-2015

Love yourself

For a long time now I have believed that love must begin with yourself: you must first love yourself before you can truly love another. For loving yourself means that you know, and more importantly accept, everything about yourself. And when you know and accept yourself then you can give yourself to another, truly and wholly. Because loving another demands that you submit yourself to the care and keeping of another. True love then requires that your submission be genuine, and this genuineness can only come from submission to, and therefore love of, yourself. Come to love yourself first and love for others will naturally follow.

"When it first began"

When it first began, I do not quite remember
It may have been late one night last September
When first I saw her there in a lucent dress
With eyes bright like the moon and lustrous tress

It was slow at first, I think, like a calm forest stream
But when I finally noticed, I was too far within the dream
My mind, once so structured, ruptured in the rapture
I fell into her, fell into fathomless feelings and her capture

And when came night, each midnight, the dream took hold
As if my body fell into ice and was shackled by the cold
But a cold that was met with an equally fierce flame
Rippling through all my senses, a passion so untamed

Where this would take me I could hardly have known
Unknown like the secrets in her dusky eyes in which I was drowned
What she taught me, of myself and of love for another
Were something I had never felt before, and never by another

She was enervating and invigorating, this conqueress
And if I could have stopped it I would not have, I must confess
The constant disassembly and reconstruction in me was a thrill
A passion-fever, a near-addiction that I could just not kill

She, this beautiful thing, stepped out bare from some fantasy
A fantasy that I indulged in and voyaged blindly on its sea
With but a toss of her hair or an utterance of her voice
I was run through and torn apart, all allowed and by my choice

The bloodless savagery, the calming force—this was her way
A weighty, crushing silken caress, I remember it still, to this day
The dream left me changed, left me a little less whole as a man
But how I wish I was there again, there, when it first began

M.M. — 26-Apr-2015

Joseph Alexander

Joseph Alexander sat in his favourite coffee shop drinking his favourite tea counting the last days of his life. The coffee shop, despite being his favourite, was a place with very little character with very uninteresting people, or so Joseph Alexander would say to himself time and again. But there he sat, in his favourite seat—it was by the window, so that he wouldn't have to look at the décor—counting—day 1, day 2, day 3—all the very last days that he had left. "There will be a day when I will go to the library and read every book," he would say to himself. "And another when I shall go to that beach for first and last time." On he went, counting and listing everything that he planned to do, all methodical and quite neat. "I think one day I will save for a special occasion, to do something just absolutely wild. Perhaps I will go to the zoo!" Joseph Alexander continued like this for a good hour or so, and stared out the window, which had not been cleaned this morning, such that everything outside looked hazy and off. He did not quite know why he liked this coffee shop so much, but then, he did not like questioning these sort of things. He was much better as listing all of his "Last Days", he called them. He was very good at this; he did it every morning for as long as he could remember. When exactly any of these days would happen he would not dare, of course. That was not the point. It had nothing to do with when anything was going to happen, just simply that it was listed in proper order, so that when they did come he would know exactly what to do and how. And so Joseph Alexander kept on with his enumeration. Until Death walked in through the door.

M.M. — 21-Apr-2015

"Love"

Love. Love is what will save us from the darkness.
In the face of invisible onslaught of such ponderous weight,
The relieving light of love shall be the armour we so require.
It shall slash open the veil of night with its gleaming tempered sword;
With its heart of unbreakable metal it shall steady us and strengthen us.
What force within it! what hope!
This seemingly intangible thing we name "love".
But this nothing-thing shall be our salvation,
Our flame, fiercely burning bright—
Deep—deep in the dark of the night.

M.M. — 14-Apr-2015

Invictus

It was like I was shot through the heart. Pierced through my ribcage and flesh by a thunderbolt come from some unknowable provenance. I was down; I was low. My spirit's wholesomeness in a feeble state. I found myself winding the villainous back roads of self-doubt. And how fast I careered. But while under the shadowy vault of self-pity something of an immense force struck every particle of my very soul. The adrenaline was oh so noticeable as it coursed throughout my body, carried along by the vehicles inside me wrought by aeons of time and nature's patience. And my mind. It was if a fog or haze was swiftly cleared from my thoughts. I could soon feel a primordial strength take hold of me. Strangely, it was at once a physical vitality and a mental one. I used it; I fell into it; I armed myself with its weapons. And thus reinvigorated I clawed and climbed myself out of the pitiful abyss.

And here I stand—still here and always so. A man with but his heart, his head, his body and his will. With purpose and direction. A murderer of fear and a liberator of my own design. Freed from my self-convicted imprisonment. With his eyes and volition directed forward unto every new sun. Soul invictus.

M.M. — 28-Mar-2015

"Fallen son, fallen sun"

Inspired by the music of Enslaved

Fallen son, fallen sun
Shouted at the gods in vain
Beseeched the vaulted sky
Silent like the dense night

Rode on like the wind
Through the forests filled with death
And the fires of my birth
Hell and earth, one and the same

Moulded from the soil
And fused with the lights above
Caverns in my mind
And the timber of age in my limbs

Fallen from the dreams of the thunder
Onto the hard, living earth
Blood burning, breathing hurting
Child forgotten by the elder ones

M.M. — 09-Mar-2015

Of a Song

I heard a song come in from across the seas.
It came down, like a falling petal, from the starry nightsky.
The melodies were of a lightness of the soul
and the harmonies sourced up from deep down in the heart.
I heard this song, fallen down from the clouds up high,
and it expanded in me. It grew as a child grows,
with turbulence and joy and pain and wonder.
It lingered, it lingered for what I thought was so long,
stayed with me like a lover during the warmth of summer.
I indulged in its lilts and romance, I freely admit.
It led me through meadows and in and out of dreams,
with nothing but a fine note or two, or a whole theme.
I think it felt to me like love, or perhaps spoke of my own,
one lost long ago or unrequited. Yes, it was touched
by the softest tinge of inconsolable, bittersweet sorrow.
And in that sorrow came a flood of nostalgia,
and a smile brought on by memories of happiness,
and sadness too—for what is love if not a most welcome pain?
This song, it left me too soon, abandoned me
to the ordinariness and blankness of the world.
This dream in sound, I fell into it like one would fall
into the eyes of the loveliest of women.
But the dream, the song, ended, like the closing of her eyes:
a moment of bliss cut short and stolen away.

M.M. — 08-Mar-2015

The First Beat of the Heart

The first beat of the heart came from across the sea
It travelled the leagues across the ocean of love
From the kingdoms of ice and evening-time dreams
It came waywardly, fallen or stolen from some star above

Drumming and deepening, its young resonance grew
Consonant and in concordance with an elder song
Soft or rough, and mighty as the seawinds that blew
Coming as a comet from far away, whence it was flung

The first beat came and jolted to life the fledgling soul
Brought with it a light like starlit gold, straight from the sun
There risen across the sea, every one of its parts one and whole
Beginning the beating first begun, deep in the depths of some dying sun

M.M. — 02-Mar-2015

"A little darkness before the dawn"

A little darkness before the dawn
A little desolation before the sun
To Hell and its Gates before we break
A breath so deep before the plunge we take

Heaven's eternal fires are ours to have
Just our hollow hearts we need to halve
If we could see the silver stairs to the stars
And journey towards them no matter how far

Minutes are lost with every passing hour
A droplet drained from the well of power
Or health to our heathen hearts still beating
In this decrepit life ever so fleeting

The heavy toll of midnight's coming
Like the storm from our summoning
Dancing like the dead under the moon
Seeking and searching till eventual doom

But the imperial sun rising once again
Laid us bare under the Light's reign
And we dancing dead stood there instead
Opened our eyes and felt its godhead

Such that we too rose
To join the stars now decomposed
And compose ourselves once more
To reignite our dimming cores

A little darkness before the dawn
A little fear before end of song
To reach the fires of the illustrious sun
To return from where we once had come

M.M. — 01-Mar-2015

Lines of Her Frame

It was like having the weight of oceans slam down upon me
every time she entered and brought her golden presence into a room.

She was written like a well-versed tragedy,
poignant to a tautened effect.
A single line that lingered, like the intoxicating wafting of a fine perfume.
And a paradox:
a blade slipped in ever so gently between the folds of heart-flesh,
terminated with a kiss of fire and pulsing desire.

The nebular machinery within her—the aeons-old enigma—
was a rapture, biblical like the parting of the Red Sea.
And yet it was from aimless wandering to glad enslavement that I went.

Falling deep into the encasing moments with her—:
it took me far away from the world and the inessential.

The contours and shapes that made her up,
the lines of her frame, they anchored me to her;
they embedded her in my soul and my form.

Such that the flight of my unsettled mind had finally come to an end.

M.M. — 23-Feb-2015

On tragedy

Tragedy is an inevitability. There is no escaping it. We in our lives will at some point face it, and it will be terrible; this is simply a fact. Tragedy is just another song that we all must listen to in the grand parade of life. And whilst it would be easy to say, with all the hollowness of a cliché, that "everything will be okay"—I reject that. There will be pain and there will be grief. These are stark realities that must be accepted and endured. No, everything will not be "okay". The sooner we accept that suffering is part and parcel of our existence, the sooner we can learn—not that things will pass with time on their own—but that we are presented with a choice: The choice is quite plainly "what are you going to do about it?" Yes, the inevitability of tragedy is all but certain; however, what you choose to do about facing it is squarely up to you. Now, I do not wish to be mistaken to mean that everything a consequence of pain and hurt is within our power to manipulate and steer, but I do firmly believe that (extenuating circumstances aside) we always have some form of executive control over how we respond to the onslaught. A hallmark of what it means to be human is to be in anguish—but just as human is it to struggle against the tribulations, and therefrom to act with volition counter to them. Tragedy, pain, misery: I accept these and that they will fall upon me. And just the same I acknowledge the role I play—the duty I have—in deciding what I am to do about it.

M.M. — 13-Feb-2015

"We were amidst a swirling mass"

We were amidst a swirling mass of infinite blackness.
Nearly nothing in the zero-temperature
of the ever-expanding void.
I do not know when it was: after the death of the first stars
or before the incomprehensible end of the universe, perhaps.
I cannot say, nor do I need to, for it was you and me,
had always been you and me, out there in the dark.
I think once—to simply see if we could—we travelled on light-beams.
There were supernovae—the first and the last ones;
there were quasars and colliding galaxies and events we had no name for.
You joked about adopting every infant star we came upon,
and I in turn amassed for you a stellar nursery.
Our freedom was eternal and infinite.
We gazed upon the supergiants, naming each one,
and skirted across the time-edges of the universe.
We may or may not have danced into a black hole at one point;
but I do not remember that very well, only the stretching of our minds.
And through it all we went the distance,
careering through space and time,
as our blaze streaked across the cosmos.
And somehow we found our centre,
the heart of ourselves,
the beginning of creation
and of our love.

M.M. — 12-Feb-2015

Ballet on the Sun

I saw them once, maybe ten thousand years ago,
dancing on the sun. Balletic beings of gas and dust,
feet aflame as they pirouetted across an ocean-planet of fire.
How they pranced and flowed amidst coronal mass
ejections. The solar flares were as great bursts of applause
from the audience corona and the billion-year fusion
down below the surface. I watched as they skirted,
touching the chromosphere ever so lightly, and then
bounding ten thousand kilometres at a time. Nymphs
of indeterminable age, I saw them once, by the rarest
of chances, in a dance as perplexing as the origin of time.

M.M. — 08-Feb-2015

Experimental V

Written at 4 a.m. whilst intoxicated.

And so we are encased in steel and ice
And priced no more than what we deem ourselves worth
But conceding to all that which we whisper in silent moments
And in the comforting horror of the drop before sleep

Well worth all or worth nothing
We struggle, and battle, with our damned selves
For we cannot outrun or outpace or out-sing or out-lie
The self we are left with when the sun falls and the light becomes shade

O damned be the lights of the nights of our lives
For so falsely we fall to our fallacies of failure
I urge thee to examine the intricacies of all the knots in your mind that you dismiss
From the bedlam of all your denial of who you are

To those fucking goblins, little and small and paramount
That are sickly and are sticklers, and you call "companions"
Hidden in the night of your realm of dreams and solitary thoughts
Or not even, but rather etchings by master artisans with a cruel mastery of memory

M.M.

He proceeded to unmask his first face. A decrepit thing, with a long, hoary beard. He previously had been speaking of the crawling pace of time and its dominion. It was a cumbersome spectacle to watch, he said, even for one as patient as he. But to continue on his point, he removed his elderly face. The second was pitch black, dark as night. And glassy—much like obsidian. It was not much like a face, though; more like a streaming deep into the back-corners of empty spaces. There was a multitude of scintillating points all about this second face. They moved every so slowly—barely at all—but they were for sure shifting. He then started to muse on the impossibility of understanding matter. He was mighty smug when talking about this particular topic, like an older sibling showing off some paltry achievement to a younger sibling. The topic of matter being the extent of existence elicited a quite annoying chuckle from the deep nether of blackness. Making his point—whatever it may have been—he discarded his second face and allowed me to gaze upon his third and final face. This one was not a face per se, but more of a feeling, a sense—but still a "face". In lieu of eyes there were blinding sub- and super-thoughts. Existents and ideas that were a bit too overwhelming to perceive. Where would be a mouth, there were instead sounds of a million-million voices, or something akin to voices. Each emitting lifetimes of knowledge and memories. Perhaps it was the entirety of life (vastly compacted) attempting to make itself significant by signifying and recognising its own being. He attempted to explain that the beginning was in fact not a beginning at all, but one layer in the midst of an infinity of other layers. The best representation he could think of was an onion. But at this he just burst into raucous laughter and could not be made to continue his lecture. Not able to suffer him any more, I awoke.

Their Eyes Became the Stars

In the soil is where their bodies once slept
Children of bitter winters and more golden summers
What journeys were theirs are as ours
What fears and nightly visions haunted then do so now
But night fell forever over their lands of green
And their eyes became the stars
Studding the vault of the heavens for as long as the fires remain lit
Looking up at them, the stories come back to me
The songs of long-dead ghosts with forgotten names
And sometimes in the hills, in the mist, their shades move
Children of the harvest, in tombs of the earth

M.M. — 18-Jan-2014  

Revelation of the Star

All the world is a hard-worn dream
And dreams umbrae of the veil
Like light damned into fog
Like existence wholly devoid of Will

I am a stumbling mass, of biochemical magic
A pounding upon the block of conation
Sound rippling through space
And movement in the swells of time

When we breathe it is a quiver of the universe
We come tearing like comets of unwavering force
An impetus of aeonic being, origin and impact
Stars settled on existing and yet disintegrating

Within the confines of body and finite organism
Thought perforates now and again; infinity seeps in
So that our voices become ululations of starbursts
Our language a muttering of numbers and vibrations

We are all-force, all-time, all-will
A time and universe in our own right
Risen with the First Dawn and destined for entropic end
But always moving! always in action!

The dream is a dirge and testament
One lifeless and deathless in the void
Such that endless strife is our eternal brand
Striving to awaken, to end our beguiling Sleep

M.M. — 04-Jan-2014