Prism

~~When it all begins, you are one man and there are the million stars.  You stand upon the damp, bent, withered, gnarled, mangled, lush, feathered grass, solid packed beneath the soles of your feet and stare up at the wide, intangible, empty space black and singular broken apart by points of firelight like glowing insects pinned to the sky, nearly tactile in their wriggling edges.  Fix your eyes upon them and know you are not alone.  My son, if you cannot believe that everyone is a dream then your eyes are black and empty.~~

"Grandfather, I’m not sure I can anymore.  Like legions of prismatic angels, glass wings made of delineated quadrilateral shards shaped and jagged-edged like a million lives they ascended from the earth through the fog of magic and mysticism, and I saw them this way alone.  My eyes, glowing tourmaline, halted time, reigned it in with ironband fingers then released it, teased it out like fishing line.  I cast time forward in lurched seconds and set my sights upon the brilliant inbetween seconds that no one else could behold but me.  I sunk my hopes into them, I fed them as much astral luminscence as I believed they could radiate back onto me, fed them like sunlight feeds the dyes in bolts of silk.  I felt their warmth, a warmth of stirred embers in maroon brick, spot-sooted fireplaces, the deep orange glow peeling and peeking through the jet black ash cloak blanket hording the fire, releasing it in controlled pulses and jets to fill the night with soothing, twisting waves of comfort.  I could sleep, then."

There is one tree.  A long-faced willow, drooping heavy like each twisted corkscrew leaf, limish green and dull in the moonlight, was rather a weight.  Perhaps.  Perhaps they are.  Perhaps they are the dead’s tears, sucked from the marrow core of cadvaer’s bones buried in the Earth at a supposedly safe number designed by addled, silly, myth-believing minds…the roots of the willow winding, writhing down through the dirt, slithering deeper amongst the debris, past the ringed wet mud-soaked worms, bursting into the deep pocket chasms containing their own fallen brethren, warped into polished and carved husks nailed, varnished, shellac stained, cheap gilt metal trinkets rusting and dilapidated, corrosion, carrion flies and rats, glistening with blood and water and saliva scattering like skeleton dice as the roots drive in like a liberating fist breaking into the mahogany lung and letting it breathe.  Coiling then in the eternally stale, horror black resting place, catching at rotting enamel and mish-mashed rags…into the bone and sucking something powerful, long-lost, untouched by white coats and delicate white hands…drawing it out with an upheaving grunt that shakes the earth deep into its magma core.  This sustenance of sorrow roiling inside the trunk, percolating, festering, transmuting into the soft foliage that becomes pops and chutes that slowly wind down towards the Earth once more…weeping. 

There is one tree and more than a million stones.  Some ornate and carved, made of alabaster, granite, marble, perhaps things more exotic, perhaps just a rock planted, flattened, and etched rudely with a name and a date.  There is a long gate that seems silver in the day time to a casual eye, for it is metal and it is grey and sunlight runs along it.  It is iron and dull and dark now, the moonlight is swallowed by its hungry forbidding.  It devours the rays rapaciously, belching subtle stench…keep out keep out keep out, keep away from the past. 

~~Son, face ever forward.  If it fails, it fails.  Continue on and fix your eyes to the North Star called Future.~~

"You’re so cliche.  It all seems so cliche.  Here admist the mist of night, droplets collecting and shedding off my skin as they coil slowly around me in long tendrils become descending rivulets running to the dirt of the Earth I feel cheated by my optimism.  What comes now to my vision are ghosts, phantasms made of settled sky, broken debris from the stars, cast off as unfit, flotsam and jetsam from the phoenix fires of eternity, hurled across space like comets with destination, caught up in our gravity and sped to Earth catching at the ground and finding resistance yielding to spin and twist in the air along the inches above, gathering with its fellow castaways, forlorn and morbid and intangible but seen.  No moral anchor, no mind, no soul, no spirit…the flickerings along the lines of their mouths unknown to their own nerves, no nerves to know it truly, eyes seeing, mouth speaking, voice heard, voice unknown, no ears of their own to hear it, no mirror to see their movements, no eyes to see their limbs willed out winding, moving, hitting, impacting…all this impacting and unknown by the very being that impacts.  Some knowing enough, osmosis of omnscience gained from their term as star matter, cursing their former souls for castigation, cursing that they may not see themselves and what they do.  But it is not their curse!  It is mine!  It is ours!  Grandfather, don’t you see?  I may face forward and march and be good and kind and charitable, hold my heartgates open with steadfast hands, but their bodies beat against the wood, battering it to splinters, bending the metal, breaking the rivets, cracking the boards, shattering the nails, they march backwards.  They march backwards towards the stars once more….they are on fire inside.  They try to ignite me.  I hurl pitchers and buckets of water, turning the raging inferno to spite-pitch, envious tar, and faithless ash….all left cinders and smoke rejoining the nebulous mass sparking it like quasars and quarks…unknown to themselves.  Still unknown!  Their heat burns at my skin and peels it into little white paper that scatters and shreds in the wind, mixes with them and leaves me cold."

I am but twenty-three and solitary.  I wear blue jeans woven and patched by hands in far off lands, a t-shirt tag telling tales of sweatshops and tiny profits and starvation and deprivation — it is bright yellow.  It has a pithy statement stitched across the front.  It assures the world I’m as funny as any.  My shoes are leather and better than my outfit warrants, but they are gifts from someone belonging to a different, far more metaphorical sepulchre.  My hair is messy, shag-short, it ruffles slightly in the wind.  My face is hang-dog and my skin is sallow and trench-worn from tears eroding its surface.

He is a billion years, part of the Earth and History.  Books weathered, yellow-stained across their entirety, broken spines and dog-eared pages, licked, spit upon, food-stained, dirt mangled, anger gnarled, pen scrawled tell of years when he had a face recognizable to me only now with the wear of the book itself…the photo and the book linked in age and in the aeons of experience, exposure, and wear.  There were real wars in his time.  Casualties were considered just and proud, the reasons were all the same…self-preservation and betterment….but then all was Catholic faith, even the non-Catholics — even the Christians, even the Lutherans, even the Muslims

: all was Catholic faith.  You could hold your hand out if you had the knowledge and touch the power of the time flowing, rushing across your epidermis, biting at the very spirit inside you and sinking grapplings into you, pulling you along and dragging itself inside you, sheltering itself from the sky and the world and the eventuality of everything.  Inside it nested, but there are no eggs left…no more embryos burgeoning with that promise.  He is part of that billion that possessed humanity…gave birth to a desperate confusion in which the crib cries were strangled and wild and spoiled with indulgences over-compensating for the eternal Hells of character, of tribulation, of trial.  He is ancient.  He is The Ancient.  He is the Past. 

~~And remember that at every man’s end, he will be alone, the one man and the million stars once more.  They will have moved and changed and dyed and burst forth, they will have shifted but they will seem fixed evermore.  I know this for I am now that, and when I go you will be then, the one man.  And I will be the million stars.~~

"So you are not the stone and you are not the willow tears, mourning our decline, mourning my misery at the expense of others lack of mysticism…you do not rue the tangible skin of the women I’ve laid with, the men who’ve set their knuckles against my cheeks with ferocity unthinking and unbridled.  You do not taste the blood I’ve seeped into the dirt to feed the worms and the corpse vessels.  You are out there.  Living in the future.  Ever-moving through the present and marking the Past.  We are too look to the Past.  This halloed haunted ground is not the first testament, it is the last in a long slew, a single statue in the pantheon, a mausoleum the ember of a star finally fallen to Earth and crashing with such force it forms something hard and eternal crying out to the sky and the wind that it cannot be worn away, that there will be hands to build it up again and these hands will possess the magic…and that what we curse and what we bless is not what matters as much as that we possess the magic, which you ensure.  You place it within us, wrapped in velvet and nestle it safely beneath our ribs and let it breed flesh and blood and grow and become something else entirely with a new name and shape, altered so that we forget what it is so we can discover the meaning like a treasure….like a faith….like an angel with prismatic wings.  It is but one dream that we find…and if one, then a million."

There is one man and a million stars.