Una Via

I had a dream that I was waiting for a train. The platform was empty, buzzing lightly with the coo of some neighbourly birds at my feet. A wild wind suddenly rushed up from behind me and, following it, came the desperate roar of tons of metal screetching toward the station with uncontrollable speed. The train derailed and took everything with it. The floorboards exploded violently sending chips of wood and sparks into the air, igniting a carpet of soaring flames that fled in every direction like a plague. Disconnected cars slid across the earth like a web, cascading what was all deliberately positioned out of its place and hurling it into nothingness like a waterfall does to new rain. As is the case in most dreams, I stood in the middle of all the chaos like an omniscient observer. I stood perilously on a cone of platform that had remained intact, protected by my dreamy aura of invincibility. I awoke to a quiet morning and news of the death of an unborn friend. Some things in this world are meaningless, like cold hands against an unsuspecting neck, others, have the power to rattle prison bars, releasing the sinless from their wicked cages. There will never be a world so simple as there is reserved for those who die so young.

Fuck

I like her because when I lose her in a crowd and finally find her, I can point her out as the girl that isn’t smiling. No one would confuse her for an unhappy girl, but that solemn expression, ever pensive, lights me up like a fever. She only smokes cigarettes in the dark. All the darkest hairs from her head stay put, never falling astray. She looks at my eyebrows and not my eyes when I talk to her. It’s as if my lips aren’t important, as if she knows it’s my mind making the sounds. She catches herself breathing and it gives her goosebumps. I asked her once why she lets me in to her weird little world and she told me “time is slower with you, and I’m just trying to buy a little”. She’ll never be anyone’s anything real and i’ll never let anyone know me, so in a suspended way what we have makes perfect sense.

The Lady (Part 1)

I sat gazing into the harbor from my bedroom window. In three days I would finally be boarding a ship for the new world, until then I would have to stay alive. For years I’ve been watched inside my home. It happens at different times of day in every room. I wake up alone and begin my day as I should, and eventually, I feel it. These eyes on me are cold. They watch me intently as I do menial tasks, judging me. This phantom is relentless. She, and I feel that she is a she, has been living here with me. Something has happened here that I can’t expunge. I hear music sometimes, and groaning, as if from a sleepless stir. I can’t get her out, so I must leave this place behind.

The day of the sail I had my belongings ready and met a boy at my door that would help me carry my new life to the dock. As we walked away it felt like a long villainous sequence. The house got smaller and the gaze felt less present on my back with each step. I hadn’t left the house in months and my legs weren’t what they once were so I used my umbrella as a cane to aid me on the cobblestone path.

When the two of us reached the docks I felt an uncontrollable relief washing over me. I inhaled the sea air deeply and my body shook all over, as if to toss away the webs left from the vile demon’s unwelcome spiders. The ship was magnificent, truly sublime to behold. The sails seemed to block out a city’s sun for a day, so thick and purposive. Hundreds of people were saying their goodbyes, coming and going, and, I among them, felt like a young adventurer again. Ready to take in the joy of nature, I tossed a penny for the boy and hoisted myself aboard.

We sailed for weeks and with every day I felt more alive. In the course of the first days on the ship I required help getting from my cabin to the mess hall and even to the head, but lately I had needed no assistance. On some evenings when the wind was strong and the crew moved about in a flutter I wanted to offer to be of use. It was as if the lady had been sitting upon my shoulders, pushing my knees into my ankles with her brutal weight, and now, in her absence, I was rediscovering my own nimble body.

I spent much of my time on the deck enjoying the sea air and doing minor exercises. The first mate approached me when I was doing chin ups on the mast and asked if I would like to join the crew and be compensated for some of the cost of travel. I happily agreed and made plans to meet with the captain to gather his approval. I waited until the following day and met the captain in his chambers at midday. It was a gargantuan room, elegantly decorated with treasures from across the globe. A fine silk cloth hung floor to ceiling behind a desk with wooden feet intricately carved, threatening claws gripping the slats in the floor.

The captain was an uninteresting man by impression. His desk was cluttered with charts and dirty quills, and he stood shorter than my shoulders, even with his messy hair standing straight up in some places. He asked me why I would like to join the crew and I said that the ocean had brought on boredom and a desire to exert myself. As he scratched up a short contract I noticed a very poorly painted portrait on the starboard wall. I had never seen anything like it. The colors were scraped on as if with a sharp knife, the darkest grays and blacks. Then, as if the painter was in a feverish daze, splashes of pastels poured thickly in the middle making a barely distinguishable face. The eyes were the only skillful brushing measurable. They peered longingly out of the canvas into distant space, a place far beyond anything tangible. The eyes unnerved me. The hazy yellow green irises attached to such a monstrous figure highlighted the emptiness of the darkened background in such a way that I began to feel lost for a moment. I signed the parchment and excused myself with all the civility that I could muster before returning to my quarters for the rest of the day.

Man Overboard

He spoke with dignity in his voice as he answered every question. The stories of hellish things on distant lands ne’er before seen fell out of him like breath against a cooling window pane, lingering on his mind but for a moment before fading back away into deepest memory. The reporters were as silent as any one had ever seen. The man sitting clear as the morning sun brought a foggy air into the room with him while he shuffled in his seat. Marred with indeterminable age, even the eldest around him looked upon him with disdain. Having been swallowed in the recesses of time, the decaying seafarer fell into our day from an outwardly preternatural ship found ceaselessly wandering the Arctic Ocean. His knowledge of current events was decidedly limited; however, his claims could not be ignored.

“Have you ever yelled ‘man overboard!’?”, a reporter asked, to which the others responded with uncomfortably muffled snickering.

“I have, many times” spoke the seafarer. “There are simple sails when the crew has had much to drink and a shipmate noticeably stumbles into the sea. An embarrassing moment for all, but only fatal when the crew has lost interest in the fallen members particular use on the ship.

“There are moments less recurrent when the hour is late and the moonlight pierces through the dense winter clouds enough only to see the steely tips of the water’s chilly depths. One who sails ungrudgingly and habitually can indeed recount a night such as this. I was but a quarter year before the mast when the wind came. It took the entire crew by surprise and roused the captain from his medicated slumber.

“I knew only a petty few of the many commands barked my way and hurried to make myself of use at the bow on the upper deck. Two others hauled at the line, fighting a screaming winter wind’s grip on the sail. I joined them at the back of the line and planted my feet into the deck slats while I pulled. All around were sailors falling left and right into the nets as the ship rocked port and starboard in patternless sequence. The seaman in front of me on the line was sick on himself but stayed his grip until we made fast.

“The captain stood upon the highest flat, his voice booming below. Freezing water splashed over the deck soaking every man and chilling him to the bone. The wailing wind struck the ship from behind and the bow dipped into the water. I gripped the slats and held myself as the two men who had shared my task plummeted screaming into the angry sea. ‘Man Overboard!’ I called out into the storm. All that could be heard around me was the raging beast and nothing more. I held on to save my life as the ship tilted deeper into the ocean. I knew that the last thing I would feel was the ship’s hull breaking and the merciless cold of the water as it swallowed the rest of the crew. I was losing my hopeless hands to the bitter cold.”

The reporters gazed at the seafarer’s aged head, which was dipped low to the ground in his chair as he spoke. For a moment there was no doubt among them, only a painful well of built up emotion threatening to overflow at the brim. He paused for a long while in silence before speaking again.

“Eyes closed, I waited to be taken to the depths, but it never came. The storm began to subside and I kept my grip tight. I don’t know how I didn’t lose these hands to the winter that day, but when I found the courage to steady myself and greet the day, I looked upon unearthly sights. Ne’er before had I seen such barren decay. Signs of life lived were splashed across the deck, but not a soul to see. I myself was lying flat in a warming pool of the clearest red. All around were signs of painful demise that one cannot describe. For the life of me I wished I had joined them that day. When little nerve regained, I searched the ship for any man to aid in the loneliness already growing in my still beating heart. The day had come and the sea was calm as had ever been. The cold had not yet gone and the sun was ever distant, and all around was a dense fog that crept into my very bones. I waited there forever, unable to sail the ship me ‘self. At night the crew would return to me from the depths, half alive with promises of taking the ship back to warmer land, and each night they would die again in the storm. Over and over it happened the same, with my eyes closed and the muffled screams, but soon I had to watch it. Eventually it became too much to bear on a man, to see such a sight again and again, so one night I released my grasp during the storm as a desperate escape. I woke again the same way, bitter and alone, only to anticipate the night’s terrors.”

The seafarer finished his story with a sigh befitting the last breath of a man’s life, but remained to breathe again in his chair. No pens or pencils scrawled details of the tale, and none have been spoken since, until now.

Currently working on a book of nautical themed ghost stories with my artist roommate. Expect to read something a little different in the coming weeks.

Why I Love the Water

People always take it the wrong way when I tell them I swim everyday. They imagine I push the limits of my body, powering through the water, forth, and forth, and forth. It’s quite a different experience really. I sink into the water slowly and submerge myself. I close my eyes and begin to see everything through the hazy movement of the liquid all around me. There is a quiet soundtrack that always plays. The bubbles leaving me, the sound of swimmers brushing by, and each day, when I’ve been under just a little too long, someone disturbs my silence to ask if I’m alright, if I can swim. That’s when I take my leave. That little piece of clarity gets me through each day.

Our Reticence

She wrote to me for the first time in months and told me about a dream she had. She saw me sitting on a street in Mongolia, softly begging for nourishment. Exultant, she reached out her calloused palm and pulled me by the arm. Upon my feet, I looked at her with discomfort, and in another tongue, I spoke but could not discern her. Her voice fell on me and I tilted my head with haunted recognition. She then saw my eyes were blind. I stared not at her face, but at the air in front of her. I reached for her hand but she reflexively pulled away. I stood listening for a while and she stared back. Eventually I closed my eyes and sat down again, but she said she could tell that I was watching her as she walked away. She awoke and I guess she noticed that I hadn’t been on her mind in some time. I got her letter on a sunny afternoon as I stumbled home drunk to grab my ID for a few more beers with some friends in the park. In the envelope she included a few closing suggestions about how she thinks I can fix myself. After reading it, I held the letter in my teeth as I biked back through the city and let the letter fall into the street. I had been thinking in french for such a long time that I had to translate her words into my head. It’s only now, months later, that they cause me any discomfort. It feels so heavy now, to know that she eventually had cause to miss me. I know it’s simple, but the only thing I ever wanted for either of us was to live to be old. 

Atlantic

I met her in an invulnerable state. She came and went like the day and I spent the sunny hours in elated denial. Her parting was all but awaited, and I of course found no rapture in it. The ocean filled up and immersed her. She sank to the far side and all that was between us became everything that never was. Some day she will swim elegantly back with all her feminal grandeur and I’ll spend only seconds pretending that it matters not. It’s incidental to disregard perspicacity when distance pulls the reins from a struggling grasp. To her I am the boy and his horse, and she will always love the man in the sea.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”. 

Cut Clean

I don’t know what I’m looking for in anyone. Well, I guess I do. Everyone’s a lonely chord strumming on and on, we’re looking for the melody. Sometimes I find solace in the lovely two chord ballads that project the fondness of a perfect pair. There are complicated patterns, busy with antiquated rubbish about a one who met a one who met a one. I thought I had days when that appealed to me, but lately I want something without the chords at all. I want the pages, where the music is but doesn’t play. The thoughtful silence where beauty is kept, and imagination is set free.