Fog-Borne Snapshots

All would be consumed by shadow if not for an unseen, smudged streetlamp blanketing all beneath it in everlasting burgundy mist. In some space-time ripples, it is evergreen. For other eternities, it is cerulean. Despite the variance, universal commonality is found in its blurred glow.

This light delineates all forms, together interlocked in a state of static, monochrome bliss. These relics change, but never while I see them. Those that have graced my apertures in eye and mind include wet playground equipment, monoliths with tops trapped in mist, and abandoned antique cars.

The aura that permeates my body remains the same. It is the tinge of warmth felt within someone’s embrace, somehow gleaned from facing someplace where this had last occurred at least a decade ago. It is a sign of life found in one of countless mounds of dilapidated structures in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It is a spiritual sign of the possibility of solace within the cold, concrete walls of an insane asylum whose inhabitants offer only volatility. It is an infinitesimal, but nonetheless unmoving constant in the midst of chaos, contained and concealed forever from the surrounding universe.

In my disillusion, I believe in the approach of a day when I may graze my fingertips across all of the surfaces. Thought ensnares me while my frozen body maintains a glassy stare as my daydreams and memories, whether fabricated or true, turn to burning rubble where no flame dances. I once again watch the fog-borne snapshots fade to charred blackness behind my eyelids.

Twilight Corona

She sliced through one universal, seemingly everlasting dream with eyes that pierced even the light itself. Her shape was carved into the trees, the grass, and the sky until she appeared in full force. Her hair erupted as would the Sun’s corona, unleashing striking solar flares into the surrounding space beginning at her scalp, which folded, crackled, and collapsed eerily with the tranquility of ripples from singular water droplets joining a waveless sea.

Her aura still undoubtedly shone a passionate scarlet, but this time, no hard, dark lines gripped and chained the borders of her form. The evening light flowed around her, frequenting where harsh edges once delineated her mass’s location.

She had weathered the hardships of many lives on her own, and she had grown. A warm, yellow-orange glow radiated from her mahogany irises, revealing an enveloped darkness. Her eyes were rings of fire, possibly blinding to lend more than a glance. They projected visions of a future where all was eventually reduced to a singularity.

The mystery of where the star that illuminated the land upon which we stood was finally resolved: she embodied it. Where this astral body had been before perhaps neither of us could ever know, but the state of wonder which had produced this question was instantly vaporized upon her arrival, leaving answerless concrete queries attempting to unravel the intricacies of her abstract composition in its stead.

These two gaps in knowledge were similar, however, in prompting me to ask, as a child would, from where the light defining all that our eyes ever knew originated.

She finally spoke with the bite of a flickering flame, spitting embers with her consonants:

“I am Ruby, guardian of dreams.”

Some of the plasma drifted further from its core, causing it to become a thin wisp of smoke, dimming and obscuring the world. The trees seemed to grow all of their branches at once, extending to shroud the forest behind her in somber, nighttime violet-indigo hues.

She seemed to realize that her anomaly was palpable, pushing her to clarify. Her voice created life where her fire had briefly wavered, but this time delivered the brunt of the chill that occupied the interval between flares:

“I am as I was, but now, I have lived.”

Unresolved

Scraping past a tooth, a fingernail grows thin;

The last evidence of a life lost in time

Is this dead keratin.

Swirls from the mind, consuming everything,

Cement uncertainty in the soundest mind,

Loosening grip within.

Each day starts anew, by popular belief;

Yet all is the same except the white numbers,

Not turning a new leaf.

Moving, yet static motions of tumbling grief

Are borne by bodies smoldering to cinders,

Never able to leave.

Dream Resort

Welcome to the dream resort,

Where happy dreams are found;

You’ll never have to worry here;

The fantasy’s year-round.

Anything you’d ever want,

Just think and it appears;

Your focus should not waver or

You’ll lie awake in tears.

When your life weighs hard upon

Your shoulders, come to me;

I’ll show what you had all along,

You just needed to see.

Once you’re here, you can’t escape;

You’ll wither on the ground,

For while your mind wanders, I’ll keep

Your body still and bound.

The Black Box

Beneath the blankets of flesh, war is waged between that which furthers the impulse and that which smothers every one it encounters. Elaborate devices asphyxiate, separate, and churn forbidden natural energies that compel rebellion against perceived boundaries. The rickety human machine tumbles on, scrubbing its own inner surfaces with high pressure and intense friction that erodes them and produces foul-smelling, burnt dust. Its purpose is to cleanse what appears belligerent and damaged and to leave radio silence in its trail — to kill the raw, the visceral, and the carnal, and to populate the resulting void with programmed standard operating procedures, masked by a disingenuous visage.

Forced to withdraw one more time, chaotic spontaneity is forced into a digestible shape for all who might catch a whiff or a glimpse, but no one dares attempt to swallow what might be unpleasant. Invisible, systemic oppression plagues the rejected individual in superficially individualistic outward society, and without the ability to instigate a deliberate breach of his shell, he languishes within.

He harbors a vendetta, longing to manifest in a world that appears to be full of living movement and yearning to dance to the rhythm this fantastical reality provides. Underneath his skin and within the bounds of his skeleton lie his many souls, at times oscillating in tandem and at other times buzzing in dissent; in either case, a poltergeist is born from their efforts. The tumultuous spirit escapes through the mouth after weaving a tortuous path and speaks its truth in tongues. Then, it retreats to its home, a box of pitch-black.

Spoken words, consequences of actions, emotions felt within, and other products of the hollow ghost and the collective of lives whence it began are collected in this box of timeless treasures, never to be discovered by a modern-day Pandora. The harvest of its dark library of records is impossible when the living borders fall, and with time and repeated turning, the cheaply mass-printed pages become worn beyond recognition, unable to be read even while the natural walls still stand.

The black box stores all of life’s ghastly pleasures, thrilling hardships, and mundane happenings in between only to weather and fade, noticed by the trapped souls upon each eve of self-aware reminiscence. It is a grisly reminder of death stalking all that attempts to adapt to change of its own volition. When an inevitable demise arrives, the box disappears and leaves no trace of the consciousness it once recorded and roughly recalled. It is borne of flesh to be forever lost in its deep catacombs, never to surpass its beginning.

Fire

Fire past my tongue,

Past my throat, past my lungs,

Climbing all the ladder rungs,

Roasting feelings I had hung

Out to dry in the air —

Guilt, anxiety, despair —

From when I thought nobody’d care

For what was tangled in my hair;

Fire in my brain;

Liquid choler, liquid pain,

Liquid sadness, breathe again;

I was numb and now know shame;

‘Cause there’s fire past my tongue,

Past my throat, past my lungs;

Inhale the smoke and I am done,

And though I fought, the fire won.

…do people who say your “self” is only composed of others’ judgments of you truly believe that, or do they say that to deflect judgment and to protect their internal feelings and thoughts?

…it is scary that there is always a chance that you could have blacked out and done something criminal without knowing any better. It is extremely unlikely, but still possible.

…in worlds of simulated intimacy, both mentally and societally now, I want to achieve real ecstasy with intensity equal to or greater than what rests in my memories. I hope to make new memories, though, not to return to old ones.

Corrupted

Unstable fluids, chem fire spectra,

Glowing all colors and bursting through veins

And arteries — flowing, my aqua electra,

Burn lonely silence to grisly remains;

You look upon my thick insulation,

In closed, layered flesh, seeking more in vain;

You don’t want my energy’s toxic corrosion,

And I’ll never unleash it ever again —

Not in the presence of your virgin senses,

And not to any human who can perceive

Can I open my mouth and release a torrent

Of noxious emotions that one might believe;

Despite this, desire dissolving my conscience

Bleeds through in black droplets that some still receive;

The remnants of which stain my innards in blotches;

From whose effects I’ll never get a reprieve.