Month: June 2014

Older Gods pt 11

IMAG0032

Older Gods 11

The ascent exhausted us. Starved of sunlight, strength sucked out by wakening a God, the spiral miles upwards tortured our aching limbs. There was no compulsion now, no driving force coded into our bones, deep set but alien. Compassion moved us to comply, the sense that there was something there of us, in the story of these lovers, separated for an age and half a world away. We understood the aching of their impossibility, the eviscerating agony of their unmeasurable denial.

And we perceived the fatal flaw in their cosmos spanning passion. Though vast, beyond the counting in the sky’s wealth of constellations, it bore the seed the doubt, desire to prove, scintilla of uncertainty: how does my lover love me? And were it not for our own utter destruction, the ocean pressure rending and our dissemination, then reconstruction to the median of both of our desires, would we too have fallen foul of this encroaching fear? In part we pitied them. Though separate we shared all the components of our being, touching, or even proximal, we thought and felt as one. And if apart the question of what one might do or say was lodged in finite certainties of glazed and fired clay.

Drifting through the air that chilled as we climbed up, we sensed the sad approval of the drowsy mountain God, the transmission of acknowledgement that our analysis was true. But tainted in that inspiration was the stain of bitter truth, our bodies now less differentiated, could not now ever mate. The love that we had left our world to save would die with us, unmarked and unmourned, final and complete.

Was this the necessary trade? If two grow as one, undimmed by doubt, and lack the fall of chance, the randomness, the possibility that rests within uncertainty, do they lose the ability to create. The realisation flushed through our blue green bodies like a blood deep stain of red, our hands always entwined tightened, and new formed hearts thundered as if to burst. But strength flowed pure in that hard bond, the undiminished potency of our perfected love. We had overcome resistance to the peril of our lives, and traded those lives willingly, against one impossible roll of chance. Gods played with our lives directly now and this too we would overcome.

Winter gripped the world outside the mountain. We had not strength enough to fly, but staggered down the slope, through drifts of snow deep enough to quell the vestiges of hope. We forged on undismayed. Unclothed, we did not feel the full force of the cold, but the God touched ichor in our veins ran slow and turgid, thickened in its flow.

The scattered settlements that we had passed before were hidden to us crawling on the ground, we pressed footsore and weary through the sting of biting winds and airborne ice, until a sudden lull in the intensity showed us there was a change.

A city, remnant of a time long gone, fallen to ruin, but its arches, buildings of purpose all unknown, held back the worst ravages of winter. We took shelter there until the thaw and spring, wandering darkened halls and galleries, the weak light of the day filtering through the grey clouds to cast a harsh and heartless light on works of people now long gone.
What could lead to this abandonment? What cataclysm could have killed the teeming hordes that filled the thoroughfares and avenues, where trees left unrestrained had ripped the paving stones apart, as if erupting to retake the earth?

Death and endings haunted that lost place. We scratched at the bases of the statues hoping to decipher some sign or symbol, breathed shelves laden with the carcases of books into long piles of dust. We found only fragments, tantalising moments of a war fought against enormous odds, holy superscripts against the names of those we thought must be the fallen, images of hands that stretched out of the flames beseeching.

We waited only for so long as we were sure the spring had come, and left the ghosts to moan their counterpoint into the ever present wind. There was still half a world to cross, and lovers to be united.

 

Back to contents

End

If you are interested in my storytelling look here

 

The Million Words

The Million Words

A sestina on word use

 

There may be as many as a million words 
In English – lingua franca of the world 
Which sponge like soaks up other tongues 
And claims all new inventions as its own 
Despite this fruitful garden we still choose 
To limit the range of language that we use 
 
Is it abuse to not put into use 
The full breadth of the lexicon of words 
To slam shut the brace of Oxfords and to choose 
To constrain ourselves into a smaller world 
Do we forsake the very thing we own 
By shackling the freedom of our tongues 
 
Or is it that we fear speaking in tongues 
Turning phrases others do no use 
If we claim the rare and complex for our own 
Always ready with les mots justes, perfect words 
Do we depart from the rest of the speaking world 
Is true erudition something we can really choose? 

 

So, fearful of ridicule, we choose
To lay conforming yokes upon our tongues
Denominate ourselves low in the world
Demote to the demotic what we use
To the commonest and easiest of words
We bind the cadences of what we own

 

But what if there was more that we could own
What if we were truly free to choose
From that list of nigh a million words
Free to twist and stretch our willing tongues
Bring the forgotten and obscure back into use
To enlighten and enrapture the whole world

 

Will we deal a recumbenitiban blow to the world
As we autohagiography the expressions that we own
And manifest what could be put to use
Or,  revealed as philosophunculists by what we choose
Will we trip upon our hamartithic tongues
As we dentiloquently squeeze out words

 

The world I fear will judge by what we choose
Nor are we free to unfetter our own tongues
We will never use that million list of words

Me

Today.

 

Older Gods pt10

v2-1326

Older Gods 10

Our minds were not made for this intense attention. Exhausted we fell senseless to the floor and the fluid form flowed back into the pool. As in the dark reaches of the ocean where the God we thought both lone and mad had been sequestered, there was no means to measure time beneath the vast weight of the mountain.

Our minds, conjoined, slowly shrugged off the blankets of somnolence, awoke with drowsy kisses of our shared reflecting thoughts, accreting over ages sense enough to instruct our bodies to arise. The mountain God lay quiet, unaccustomed to the presence of believers and the drained of strength from the fraught tale of ancient sorrow.

We explored the temple, marvelling at the carved shapes shown up in sharp relief, as the blue green glow of our bodies, twice reborn, brought forgotten history back to life. We traced the tale of two Gods, potent and passionate, sustained by worship of every living thing. The early record crudely drawn and barely visible, scratched into the basalt, grew bolder, more elaborate and intricate, until the power of prayer and the marks of gratitude were lost in grandiose confections, art for the sake of art alone, the artist announcing their own skill without a greater purpose or direction.

It ended abruptly. Beyond the swirling self-absorption of the carving were a few scratched messages. The last adherents who had borne the remnants of their faith to this lost temple, long after it had been abandoned, to save one part of the dual deities against the hope someday they may return.

Above us the mountain trembled, as the enormous presence of the God’s awareness shifted in the pool. The pillars shook, dust drifted down in choking clouds, the burden of attention settled on us once again.

“I have imbued you with a fraction of my essence, blended with my lover’s shaping of your form. Go forth, retrace your weary pilgrim’s path, and quickly. Winter will weaken you, fed as you are by sun and starlight, the clouds and stretching nights will sap you in this northern hemisphere.

“Go. Let my blessing speed you, and the last of my strength save you. We have been waiting centuries; at long last you have come.”

Back to contents

End

If you are interested in my storytelling look here

Monsoon IV

Monsoon IV

by Ruswa Fatehpuri

 

It does not rain in Singapore

The heavens weap single tears

Four miles wide, six miles deep

The pavements that we thought so even

Hide inch deep pools to soak your feet

As I once washed your mother’s

Before the thought of you

 

Small hand in my hand, ice cream sticky

Humid, wet as we splash puddles

Bath water warm, spring water clear

You learn what it is to love the rain

And I learn again

It does not rain in Singapore

And this small hand in my hand is not love

But something deeper, wider, something more

 

You can find more of Ruswa Fatehpuri here

Older Gods pt9

 v2-1685

Older Gods 9

The apparition spoke: “I can taste where your scent skims the meniscus, grass after a storm in brilliant sunshine. I remember. I see a shadow beneath the veil of your constructed bodies. I remember. My voice echoes alone around this chamber. Where is the voice that I remember that would never leave me unanswered? Who are you to bear the traces of my lover? Who wakes me from my paradise, eternal slumber, with a taunt, the merest taint of something greater?”

Our bodies chimed like bells, as form emerged from the bright cascade of water. A resonance, reunion with a long lost mother, and the overwhelming rush of knowing something forgotten we once knew. It washed over us in waves as the form collapsed back in the pool, then spiralled up again, spraying a mist that scattered torchlight across the chamber in dizzy arabesques.

We saw within the swirling shapes, projected symbols from an ancient time, the writing from foundation stones of ruined temples and crude marks on cavern walls. Your years of study in the tortured time before we fled; the time of jibes and the cruel connivances of our abandoned tribe, the taunts as you turned yellowed pages, ancient tomes, while outside I railed, fought and defended; had shown something of this.

Another older God, the twin, the lover and the partner. A God beneath the ocean, and a God beneath the mountain. One we sought from signs that you deciphered from crawling scripts, one sought out from a new compulsion woven deep within our bones.

There were no words with which we could convey time’s brutal passage, the birth and death of nations, and the lost millennia. Nor was there any future that we feared but separation. Hand locked in hand we stepped into the mountain God’s black pool and finding no floor allowed ourselves to sink. Dissolution. We dissolved.

All that we knew exploded: the distant prison in the ocean, the rise of newer Gods and the world’s collapse towards corruption. The lingering sense of everything that once we had been, and all that we became, sluiced through our disintegrating bodies, a  stain within the darkness, spreading, glowing brightly blue.

In return we learned the ocean God’s old shame. This Earth, this creation both Gods had spawned to share their love had turned from a floating bauble hung within the starry sky to an obsession for perfection. The ocean God had drawn out of himself the spread of lands, the fields and trees, and with the potency of Theic love had made mankind to glorify his lover.

The water holding us suspended trembled, sending shockwaves back and forth across the pool. “Fool, fool, was I” the mountain God cried out. Tears falling from the liquid frame collided underneath the waves with our dispersing forms and made them once again. On a surge we were cast out of the water, choking, whole and living. The vibrance of two Gods now beat within our breasts, we could feel the weighty restlessness of the rocks above our heads, the earth below us floating on a lake of liquid fire, uneasy as the God so long asleep cried out again, “Fool, fool, was I.”

“We poured our love into this thing that we had made, not content to spin within each other. What he gave life I gifted sentience, what he planted I made grow, until that same creation grew to know its grand progenitors. And still this cheap thing spun from ether absorbed all of our energy, to make it better, brighter, more capable of adulation, able to choose and pray unfettered.

“What he planted I made grow. The search for betterment and for improvement, spilled from him unseen upon the fecund earth, and spread with the winds to sprout as sustenance. We seeded the poison of desire into our own creation.

“Yet so absorbed was he in his grand work, so desirous to demonstrate the great expanses of his love, he could not see the taint that followed him, and I devoted to his cause, adoring every bead of sweat and tired breath made myself the seive to stop the stain from spreading.

“It rooted, deep within the living heart of this bright planet, sucked its own sustenance from the sun and distant stars, while I weakened and in growing desperation he ploughed all of his energy into the very thing that was killing me.

“So much of ourselves was spent on this obsession we became dependent on the power of worship and belief. What blessed relief when arms were raised in sacrifice, and heads bowed in fervent prayer. But it faded in the relentless press of sprouting weeds and dandelion Gods grew up out of men’s greed.

“Broken, I became the ghost of this lost sepulchre, until drained of belief I fell asleep, hearing the distant yapping as my love was hounded to the sea.”

Our bodies began to change, the glow bled from blue to green, the limbs stronger and thicker though still recognisably the median of the shapes we once had been.

“You, denizens and avatars, will bear my message to my love, and the sign of my forgiveness.

“I have been waiting centuries, at long last you have come.”

 

Back to contents

End

If you are interested in my storytelling look here

Older Gods pt8

v2-5687

Older Gods 8

Our thoughts were bound more closely at the times our bodies wound around. The idea that started in your mind traversed through our skin ending and reflecting in mine. We saw shared memories from the perspective of each other’s eyes.

Feet buried in the foreshore, head to head and hand in hand, we saw each other as seen in the lens of our own eyes. My reckless exuberance, your cautious contemplation. My doubt once off the precipice, your soaring certainty. How I urged in stolen moments our only course was that we flee, how long you pondered, read and planned, and then when I thought that we would die apart upon the sands that spawned us, you said “the time has come, we shall be wed under the aegis of our lost deity.”

But now, joined, so much more than married, it is my headstrong rush that pushes your foot into the yawning void, your need for evidence and analysis that holds me at the door. The sudden flush of joy in remembering what we have overcome brightened our glowing skin, parted the darkness, we stepped within, as one.

Stairs wound into the mountain, a throat which swallowed light and us, spiralling down through air unmoved for eons, smooth walled and dry, without a trace of dust. There was no fear, not trepidation in our long traverse, but sorrow sweet and bitter hanging heavy, absorbing sound.

We grew dizzy through the long descent, surely far beneath the surface of the earth, and though ice locked the world above a dense and humid warmth enveloped us. Darkness sapped our strength, we could not fly, and in case of falling stepped resisting the steady pull of the unknown lying in wait.

And then it ended, a sudden flatness over which we stumbled, muscles still accustomed to the twisting of the stairs. A tomb, chapel, sacristy, broad pillared hall, a central pool and as if responding to our presence torches flared and filled the scene with dancing shadows imitating life.

The surface of the pool throbbed and rippled with our hearts. Here was at last our destination, the place our God had re-formed us both to find. From one corner of the world and to the other we had come, a journey long, marked with a moment of the deepest sorrow and mile upon smiling mile of happiness.

We gave no thought to what might lie ahead, what our God had brought together, nothing could tear asunder. We lit the chamber with our own unearthly light. Our hearts which had so long beat to the time set by this hidden sacred pool now set the pace of hammering until the waters rose to our accord. Our celebration of a life now lived within two lives awoke the spirit slumbering beneath the mountain’s weight. We heard the voice, bone deep and echoing as our own God’s voice had done.

I have been waiting centuries; at long last you have come.

 

Back to contents

End

If you are interested in my storytelling look here

Older Gods pt7

v2-6953

Older Gods 7

Flight. Wearied and worn by the rejection, the fresh evidence that our union was forbidden, we fled, borne on the wings of our compulsion.

Flight. The precious freedom of the air, the cooling dew of heavy clouds, the enlivening chill of the rampant winds, the succour of sunshine. We watched the stars wheel across the sky, the joyous dance of constellations.

Exhausted we alighted in a forest, curled in the moonwashed branches of a tree, entwined, within, without, blue bleeding into blue until we were a single mass of angel flesh, a glowing visitation for the night hawks and the owls.

We sought our own healing in the blissful arms of sleep. Absorbed and accepted in our lone place against the world, representatives of our forgotten God, who gave us the gift of unity, for the price of our lost lives. And yet the yearning pull remained, despite our blood now blue, our hearts enlarged, our bodies merged, amended; the whisper of the waves on clear sky evenings, and the terror of the sudden summer storms were written deep within the locked vaults of our souls.

We looked back frequently in those early days of travel, passing canyons deeply shadowed, lush woodland, plains groaning beneath the weight of endless herds of cattle. We stopped at first at settlements, to bring the old God’s word, but the world was unprepared, unwilling, dismissive and afraid. Few, too few, followed our direction to look within themselves, nor had we the freedom to teach them our new old lore. For the imperative grew stronger as the land around grew colder, and we closed upon the unknown, our far destination.

We flew lower, the colder air could not support our phantom weight, ice formed against our eyes, and our joints would freeze in place. We tired as the sun grew weaker, although our blue blood was immune from cold, we rested longer in the boles of massive pines and dark beneath overhanging rocks. Nomads, seeing us fly, skimming the earth, and soaring up the sides of mountains, fell down on their faces thinking that we might be their Gods, but the compulsion beat too strongly now for waking moments to be spent seeking the company of men.

A single mountain rose, a spire of ice, a monument that we approached for days, unable to comprehend its size, and when we landed in the foothills we knew we had arrived. The compulsion beat against the pounding of our hearts, the mountain throbbed as if it lived perfectly synchronised.

We sought out a sign between the rocks, and then beneath the snow, until above the veil of clouds, we saw a mark against the wall of white, a line of blue that echoed in the blood that coursed our bodies. And there, outlined beneath a sheath of ice, a door, portal to the unknown. Our hearts hammered hard enough to shake the mountain to its bones. Ice melted and flowed away upon our touch. Hand in hand we stood upon the brink of our long quest.

 

Back to contents

END

If you are interested in my storytelling look here