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