Stone

I sit at the edge of the night
Watching the frayed bottoms of the curtain rise
Searching for all the missing pieces
That I seem to have left scattered in the wake
Of my tumultuous flight
To reach this precipice

Curled in upon myself I seek warmth
Protection from the cruel winds
That taunt back and forth across my flesh
Screaming in agony for release
Into this, the twilight of my former existence.
I shiver, and I wait, and I watch.

I was beckoned here by the taunts of a childhood best forgotten, these seeds of dismay took hold early and the thorny brambles they grew are too thick for the fragile to pass. I hold them deep inside, protect the hearts of those I love from the true depths of my own depravity, and lie fetal in wonderment as my own imagination threatens to tear my very essence to shreds. But these times I need as well, for the tears I cry are the tears of the Gray of Matha, born of portent and tragedy, and they doom the messenger, my own unrealistic despair. They are the tears of Frigga, and as they pass the portents change, and resurrection can begin. They cleanse my soul of its own poison, and cure my blindness, that I might resume my stolid vigil.

What I watch for has never been clear
A glimpse might peek from the sheltered sky
But lost in the fog of my own solitary confinement
I wait, but not in silence,
Questions echo across the empty span of darkness
Fall back down to shift and swirl about my huddled frame
The scratching of talons on the earths own crust
It calls, and I scream defiance

I lived in this place of denial for many years. Even after I discovered this world I drifted in the unrealistic expectation that I had to be a certain type of person to qualify. I strove for years to mold my personality, convinced early on that my fantasies where just extreme versions of what I really wanted. I have vacant memories that float around my brain, snippets of conversations that once danced circles around my understanding of who I was. Voices that spoke calmly, in deepened tones, as they told me what and who I was. What I needed, what I wanted. They bore a hint of truth and conscious reality, so they never sounded hollow on deafened ears to my own screaming desires. Submit they whispered softly into the cracks of my foundation, and I felt I had no choice but to listen, my own regard so eroded in the swollen waters of their power.

Creeping up from behind they sat
Sharing my space for but the passing of a moment
Eternity in my tiny world, where dark dreams held sway.
The stony façade, the marble iciness of my gaze
Though tempted never strayed
Oaken wisdom, thorny roses, petulant weeds
All tossed and broken in the storm

So I sat alone. Still lost in wonderment at my inability to find my own definition. Each eternity that passed just waking further the demons that danced along the edges of the curtain on the horizon. The one that hinted of wonders, and horrors, and screamed truth loud enough to ring bells in my ears. Their talons crept forward, to rent deep into my flesh, valleys for tears to find passage to the parched and dusty earth that settled where I sat. Alone was far better than the flaccid reminders of what I should be, I should be waiting, and watching, and searching for answers.

When the curtain starts to rise
The edges start to crumble,
Open eyes clenching shut as the light of what has been hidden sears forth
It flashes and falters, for the truth cannot be so clear
Gone again, tears form at the corners of steel blue eyes
Melting stone in their path, fragile flesh exposed
To the twining thorns that twist and flourish around me.

There is no path through me, that was the mistake of lost souls that tried to chip at my base and alter my perceptions. But these thorns did not seek to alter, they twisted and twined and snared me in their embrace, taking nourishment from exposed flesh as it was offered in turn. Each sapping strike bleeds my soul of the doubts and worries that plagued my ideals, and in these thorny brambles I find comfort and solace. Given life in that brief flash of understanding and truth, he continues to grow around me, entwining my soul and making my cry out to feed him the blood of my own pain to sustain the growth of his power.

Stone cannot be bent; it must be chipped away, shed in the light of destiny and the scope of self knowledge that the mind can grasp. The demons still dance at the edge of my awareness, but the raging inferno that tips every thrusting thorn that drives through parchment flesh, tender and weak as it flares and burns in its wake, lends translation to the voices they cast across the opaque distance between fantasy and reality. With the solid wall of his own beasts, reverberating whispers that speak of depth of character and are mortared by protective nature, to bounce from they take on tones of meaning and understanding.

With prodding claws he drags forth my tears
Each searing drop of agony a question lost to wings
They form wider with each strike leading further into the recesses
Twisted realities that lead to a path labeled destruction
By those who care not to heed the warnings
These thoughts are not placid
These raging waters of destruction that persuade me to drown
In seductive images, and terrifying nightmares
Knowing that those thorns that drain me, leaving me helpless in his embrace
Bear also the fundamental ambrosia that grants me life
The vigil continues, but I sit not alone.

Altered Reality

I sit and wonder impossible things. Impossible questions with impossible answers that are impossible to find. It’s no wonder I feel like I’m running in circles, panting and heaving with each labored step to get where? Nowhere except right back here where I started, staring at my own bitter reflection, that warped perception with no face that I embrace and hold dear. It shatters under the pressure of so many hands tugging it this way and that towards their own definitions. No care for the not so fragile doll, suddenly porcelain under their scrutiny, searching for flaws in the already crackled veneer of what they taught her to be. I don’t understand how it can be easier to live on their side of the mirror.

Clarity they say, and common sense, naught but hurled remnants of ages long past that drift to the bottom of the muddy waters that surround them, social conditioning that has no basis in reality. Not clear, clarifying, but crimson with the tears of bleeding hearts and opaque to muddle and blind, if only they could see. I can’t save them from passionate denial, when all I have to offer is words, and to open my mouth I risk the flood pouring forth, to sear them where they stand for their damning accusations of reality and misguided fantasy. Even now I fail to understand the world beyond the glass, its perceptions seems so warped it overwhelms me. I’m a catalyst with no voice beyond a whisper trapped between here and there. Nothing but these groups of letters that fall from my fingertips.

I seem to exist in a world they can’t even imagine, at the edges of their reality, their existence, where they glide endlessly through life on magic carpets fueled by the dishonest truth, kept company by a golem in my likeness, though I long ago fled the safe womb of that chrysalis. I fight my way through rabid jungle that seems so calm and serene from their lofty perch, where the wind barely graces the tops of the trees with its gentle kiss. The reality of who I am exists only in their dreams, where they can cast hideous denials back in the face of my defiant screams, and find succor in their heated delusions that I am like them at all.

I am not who they expect, not who they see when they deign to cast enlightened eyes my way. The reality flows just beneath that brittle veneer, one that could not hold under the gaze of a closer look, a blessing then that they choose not to, their cool apathy the glue that holds its cracked and worn fragments as my disguise. Deaf eyes and blinded ears. Where, I wonder, did they learn not to trust their senses. Common sense in the face of the truth that it is neither common nor sensible at all. The intensity of their lives makes my head swim and no matter how strong you are, treading water is always a losing battle. Any wonder that I choose to exist in my world rather than theirs; they make the same choice every day.