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.