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.