Metanoia With a Dead Star by PunkassDiogenes, literature
Literature
Metanoia With a Dead Star
“You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...” - C.G. Jung The police car is hidden in the juniper, and Caroline does not notice it until she has already gone hurtling past, pedal-to-the-metal down the gritty, pothole-riddled highway toward Bassing. It peels off into the road, sirens blaring after her, and Jonathan smirks in the passenger seat. I told you there was no rush, he says, somewhere behind her ear. You are in the void now, Caro. We have as much time as we will ever need. The first pull-out is around the bend, on the other side of the road, but Caroline crosses into it anyway, the gravel crunching beneath her wheels as she slows and finally stops. The flashing lights of the police car whiz right past her. Stupid pig, Jonathan sniggers behind her other ear this time, and Caroline can’t suppress a little
They wove themselves to sleep and were boiled while they dreamt of mulberry leaves and sunlit dusty wings of flowers and flames and seductive full moons of forests rustling in the summer breeze of bustling streets filled with shrieking horns and the pungent neon hiss of food stalls. Their dreams unfurled and were woven into garments with all the softness of unmetamorphosed ambitions. Come, wear this wondrous tomb of a thousand ghostly wings and feel fluttering against your skin all the colors of the sky and on your tongue the faint flavor of midsummer midnights the laughter of leaves the song of cicadas.
Things The River Told Me by PunkassDiogenes, literature
Literature
Things The River Told Me
The river told me a dry leaf with a pool of water held perfectly still in its crumpled yellow palm. It meant solitude. The river told me a stick of wood, warped and intricate like the crudest of carvings done with the finest of tools. It meant understanding. The river told me the corpse of a fish with a glossy eye toward Heaven, towing its slick red entrails down the current. It meant opportunity. The river told me a white foam cup that left a breadcrumb path of macromolecular snowflakes, feather-light and poisonous. It meant forgiveness.
Cygnus is in the sky tonight, and everything hurts. They called our home Swan House. It is the place through which I entered this world and the place where your spirit released its hold on the flesh. I was born on the coldest day of winter. You departed just as Deneb, tail of the swan, grazed the distant mountains. It was several weeks before the Solstice, when the night air still held a whispered threat of bite. Seventeen years it has been now. I am no longer in that corner of the world. Swan House lies in dust. You were my portal into this reality. Without you, I am abandoned to its labyrinth. You would hardly recognize me if you saw me now. Only the sky still follows the old rituals. Cygnus will rise all summer, trailed by the fox, the arrow, and the vulture’s lyre; flanked by dolphin and dragon. At the swan’s heart, I am told there is a gravitational event—a singularity of endless appetite. Beyond it, perhaps, there is another world. I wonder if you wait there, pining for
it depends on which way you look at her by PunkassDiogenes, literature
Literature
it depends on which way you look at her
You think you can excavate me, pull my bones out of the dirt and scrub them gleaming white to string together into some fancy history? Well. Let me tell you, friend: my geography is a seismic nightmare. Today’s swamp is tomorrow’s mountains, and you will never conquer this land.
My sister was seven days in the cold ground when the piano began playing itself, a lonely ringing voice in the winter night, snow-consumed howl of mourning breaking the silence we clung to like a life raft. My mother grew furious and beat the thing as if it were a disobedient child. When it did not cease, my father took a set of pliers to the keys, pulled them like teeth until there was nothing left but a gaping grin and the tremendous weight of an absence. Later, we awoke in darkness as the wolves screamed hell into the freezing wind just outside our windows.
I want to rip myself open and make you look at all the beauty inside me. Do you see this nebula, this abyss? At the core of my body, there is no such thing as entropy. There we can bathe forever in the light of the beginning.
Forgive me: I was a fool. I thought by running I could keep you here that a boy’s callow touches might stop time that what I could not see would not be so I kept the blinders on. Forgive me: the jacaranda honey on my feet was only the life leaving you all along. I was a fool. Summer’s end took him away again like we knew it would and three long months slammed shut all at once like a heavy book, like an ending. Summer’s end, and there were no more callow touches, crushed petals, stopped clocks. No more of that, just an abyss, closer than ever. It devoured every prayer I had. Forgive me. I stopped running, but there was no time left. I measured the space between your breathing until I was alone. When the silence rose like floodwater, smashed the windows and broke down the doors, I screamed to drain it. The abyss wrapped itself about me like a friend I never wanted.
Carry the trees forth to the hollow,
spoke the spirit, and the fish rose
from the seas. Bestowed upon each
was a seed to carry deep within itself
as they set out upon their pilgrimage
across the untamed primordial world,
the cobalt kingdom of coelacanth.
The first trees grew from deep within
the fish, emerging from their soft flesh:
smooth, leafless, scaled. Delivered
to the original soil, which lay precisely
at the point farthest from all things,
they threw down their roots, burrowing
into the river's muddy floor and pulling
it upward. Before the totality of the earth
was introduced to the air, it had never
known anything but wet, and i
Summer's symphony fills the air.
The crickets leap and warble at the moon.
Sweet August: flowers in my hair.
An owl unfurls his wings with regal flair.
Two more upon the rooftop gutters croon.
Summer's symphony fills the air.
The night awakes; from stream and lair
Emerge the frog and ringed raccoon.
Sweet August: flowers in my hair.
A moth bathes in a street lamp's glare,
Of which she dreamt from her cocoon.
Summer's symphony fills the air,
And I sit humming in my chair,
Adding to the night my human tune.
Sweet August: flowers in my hair.
Such nights do not afford despair,
Although the Fall will chill us soon.
Summer's symphony fills the