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