His breathing, stopped, he found it. Four dimensionally, he opened it.
Its fragility stunned his eyes with convoluted memory tears, while his new inhalations syphoned the colours from the pages – colours that would help him navigate the convolutions –
that’s when he noticed some words were underlined. She had underlined them! But the ones left untouched – he smiled – they were the portal.
There’s a door down there I keep circling. A closet door in the deepest floor, and these stairs like optical illusions. Or as my mother liked to say, optical collusions.
These stairs of chalk.
(Revisited with audio of my reading)
"Can we just lie here for a moment? She knows what to do and it's so much easier to make out the words if you press your ear against the stone." He hated this place. But she promised it would be the last time. And it had started to snow. It would hopefully slow the others down. They needed to leave. He was too scared to look at his watch and now he was struck by how beautiful she looked in this light. That pink light, reflecting from the tears frozen on her face. He pulled her gently up from her mother's grave.
Lyrics: mother they are coming again they come to shoot what we already lost mother they are coming again our silver covered by their rust father they are coming again they come to jail the things that i have seen father they are coming again burning minds to keep the ruin clean no one is around „little girl there’s safer ground follow the sea and you will find that place little girl there’s safer ground come take your years and put them in their hands“
(Revisited with audio of my reading)
She didn't say anything. Why wasn't she saying anything? But she had. She just couldn't hear her. She had always heard her through her heart, and now it was frozen to her cheeks. He lifted her up as her chest was caving in. He sang instead. The words she had taught him when they met, years before. The ones she had heard from her mother's friend. Before they never saw him again. "Little girl, there's safer ground..." That ground. Rising up out of the sea of him.
Lyrics:
Her breath pliable, she crouched down in that corner, the one that didn’t fit like a glove.
Her movements were whispers, soft and borrowed from someone she couldn’t remember, but they had told her to use them in times such as these. The movements abandoned her though, as she started crying the music her mother used to sing to her.
this rake isn’t as heavy as I thought it would be,
I feel your suggestions as you’re watching me
make these corrugations –
portal permutations,
at least,
they were in my dreams,
the ones
bursting from the seams
of my mind’s eye.
From here below periphery,
silent door’s epiphany,
you hear my eyes as you look at me…
one of my current ear worms. if you need a little energy boost, or a push through a portal or something…(and if this video doesn’t play for you because you don’t live in the best country on earth 😉 there is this acoustic version:)
Lyrics:
balmed in a constant, gentle stream.
Filled with achingly quiet strength, healing purpose. Vibrating with the tenor of a generation.
He carefully strung his violin with them, using the instructions in the back of the book he was holding.
A journal he had found in, of all places, the attic.
His beloved father’s journal.
Sigh. What a beautiful performance.
Featured image: my husband’s
The water stung her eyes.
Darn it, it must be the black and white. Probably too acidic.
This memory did look good on her wall, but she couldn’t remember why it was there.
She had dived in, of course, to find the details, but the pain in her eyes caught her off guard.
Being two dimensional, also caught her off guard. It shouldn’t have. But it did. She was new at this, after all.
New plan –
to back away from this old plan. To get back, at least, to three dimensions.
It would, surely, all come to her then,
when she caught the now…
+++
My chocolate levels have oscillated today, and with them, the way I feel about this piece. I took it down for a while, then rewrote it a little. So sorry to those of you who read it earlier. But this is definitely a work in progress…more like some doodling…and the character found herself laughing in the mirror a little as time went on…
Featured image: my own
Between here and here
you make this grief infinite.
Wormholing your vice.
She drew back the curtains with all the care that wasn’t in the world. It was the only way she knew how. To stop the time. To restart his breathing.
(I could have that wrong – it might be, that she was the only one who knew how to do it. No one remembered. No one cared.)
The air was so thick with the calligraphy they had forced out of him. She uncurled it and admired it in the twilight/non-time. All things considered, it was still exquisite.
She had a new idea. And when he read her thought, he sat bolt up right, smiling.
Now the dune crescendoed right in front of her. Had she climbed it? What side was she on? Did it matter? This weary could not answer.
Sifting it through her fingers, she couldn’t find the piece she was looking for. So she let that gentle wind catch them all instead.
She wrapped herself in the cool of the breeze. And when she woke, she smiled, for there was nothing left. Of this dune of memories.
Nothing, that is, but him.
one foot in Pause's door unravelled, by tones wined into rain's chalice
(featured image credit: Pixabay)
He knew it.
This would be the place. The place at the end of the wrong road. And somehow, it was exactly how he pictured it. It looked just like the other fork where he made the wrong turn.
His favourite music particles flew past in perfect, mesmerising harmony with his non astonished gaze, landing at his feet. Forming those pages. He just wished he could remember which was the wrong page turn.
he was afraid
the tenacious unspoken
in a thousand fragments
would crash down on him.
he was amazed the trees
were not bowed from the weight
of that thing they couldn’t say
and he remembered that song…
he looked up at the changing of the colours to paradox –
now weightless.
it would be the paper cuts
Every way she listened, there were endings.
This weight of pretense had to be shifted.
It was time to chord change them out of the cliché, and even though his music always made her dance, his shadows were not hers.
So she did what he didn’t expect. She brought the pig’s heart.
And they drank the wine…
It was the first time she had come back to his space. They walked into the room where he didn’t do much living and he showed her the place. On the wall. Where he strung up the different shades of pathos.
In the right order, of course.
She was more impressed than she thought she would be.
And now she was scared.
Scared that he knew right where to put her.
(NB. there may be an expletive in here)
he wore his strobe light
to precise his own sight
incising surreal
into a savoury byte
she wore lightning cloud
it fireworked the shroud
the diaphanous shield
of cataract crowd
they met late one noon
not a decade too soon
their time in half life
when lit by half moon
they laughingly shied
and together they cried
out relief of their failing
when hopeless they tried
synchronisation
endless illumination
their timing instead
fuelled love’s fascination-
of dark with the dark
love’s company,
divine spark…
Confused by the vapid voices of renewal that languided out of the new year cake,
they did used to jump, she recalled,
she thought it was time to do something.
Something had to be done with this pile of the unsaid.
She searched for that wisdom file, the one they’d all spilt wine on at the new year’s eve party. How they laughed. Such a good night.
She wondered if she should rake through those coals over there. Some were still smoldering.
Melancholied by the cold she had a better idea.
As she cast the pile onto her knitting needles, she was struck by how colourful it was…
“Please tell me you know that feeling. Everyone else is in on a secret and I must have left the room in the telling. Don’t you feel that way sometimes?”
He gasped suddenly and almost burst her ear drums with the silence he exhaled.
“But you did leave the room…”
It was going to be a normal day. If it was the last thing they ever did. A normal day of picnicking in the sun, like normal families. On a sunny spring day. With a packed basket. And a blanket. And outside games. And other normal things that nobody they knew ever did. Because, well, they did time travel to get there.
And this was where they were going to meet her grandmother. She told them she had the secret to normal and she wanted them to have it. It would be in a little box. And normal people carried such things around. Although, she had never opened it herself. She was just going by what her mother had told her.
And sure enough, it was labelled “normal”.
On one side. The outside.
The other side, the inside, was a lot more than they ever did not expect.
