"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  

Tempest

The storm brewed within him for years
Gradually building in strength and ferocity
Deep in the jails of his mind, the confined parts
A rage, an inevitable liberation? Yes - a maturation
One wrought of elements and moulded by time
The vortex swirled and swirled, aflame
All that was false and pretence compacted into a singularity
Cast off into nothingness, the oblivion of the past
And in its place came trumpeting a primordial light
From the upheaving tempest came forth his soul
Prised from the veiled abyss of a dead self
And with it, a new kingdom, a reign of light
Such that he, at last, was now truly sovereign of himself

M.M. — 30-Dec-2014

Lady of the Veil

Shining like a sun-kissed jewel
But light hidden from view
The Lady of the Veil spoke of such designs
Freedom in a world of confines

Held up in such high regard
But one not of her own desire
How could she be kept under guard
When in her chest raged a secret fire?

To say no when yes was the expected word
To liberate a mind caged in boredom
Unsheathe with all her natural passion her sword
And cut down the lies of a decrepit kingdom

The Lady: to be a warrior or a maiden?
But in truth she was both, and never compromising
Just as feminine as she was brazen heroine
Exuding a woman's grace and at once disruption rising

So she armed herself with great weapons
Steeling her mind with knowledge's might
Courage for her heart to continue her war on
All so that she may one day let shine that hidden light

M.M. — 30-Dec-2014

A Half-Dream

Partly written on the edge of oncoming sleep

Found myself again in a crop of stars
Reaped by own impossible hands
Light turned dense and thick
Perception gradually lost with the
Amounting ponderousness
A plunging into the deep dark within
A dark coloured of yester-memories and
Unbridled lustful fantasy
Sequences infinite in scope and breadth
And myself lost in the night-forest
A forest of speaking stars

M.M. — 28-Dec-2014

Notes on Time

The greatest curse of being human
is not so much that we feel or are aware that we exist,
but rather, that we feel or are aware that we exist through time.

The humdrum repetitions inside my head
only worsen the realisation that we are able to remember
the past, to think upon our future in light of our past,
making it all so much more poignantly exacting.

Yes, cursed be time.
Our bones rattle like the rattle of dice,
like the rattling of the universe.
I can see it in my hands;
I look at it in the creases of my face.
The maddening of it all.
As we stretch ourselves,
and are stretched by time—
how we struggle to even perceive it.

But blessed be time,
for in it is our salvation.
Just as in it are the hopes of unwritten futures.

Though it is with the weight of time
that we suffer in anguish;
it is time, and through time,
that we seek our own salvation.
We feverously desire to leap
through the continual affliction, to the point
of catharsis, of release;
wishing things would be so much easier—but they are not.

Time is slaver.
And yet time is salvation.

M.M. — 27-Dec-2014