Above This Silent World

Homogenous and Pure

From the empty streets of Outremont Intrudes the evening darkness, clashing With the stairwell's bronze lighting Over your intimate, shadowy figure Inviting one last timid embrace To be silently judged by Glass and no one - A faint flesh sprinkled across decades Of solitude unbound, so natural Like the dawn itself was an impossibility Where this sort of thing could simply unhappen.

Cut from the cobblestone and risen Out of the metropolitan archaic, A peaceful lethargy transposes itself With the iridescence of another land Over and over again, as though No static Earth could contain These passions, lost like diamonds In a sea of diamonds - Precious and unnoticed, Homogenous and pure.

To what ember still lit With the faintly brimmed ideals Of a glorified yesterday Could outlast the inspiration Promised by escape? No burrowed destiny Nor cratered fate Would cease in the image Of what never was - The eternal satisfaction Of indefinite misery As life’s only remaining certainty.

Who would go to the park, still? On days such as these, stuck Between winter and spring, Torn apart by the melted And unmelted snow.

The gusts blowing through the air Carry with them the emptiness Of a space where happiness Could reside, but does not.

Where hearts and initials etched Into the decaying wood planks No longer have any meaning Yet still outlast the paint frayed Around them.

Where the shouts of active children Bellowed straight to the heavens As they stumbled for a baseball On a hot summer’s day.

And the sincerity behind creating These soft little lands Gets undone by time. That’s okay, though.

The mystic voices of joy since past Still need an ear to hear them Before they evaporate into memory forever.

The cul-de-sac that led nowhere Still, to this day, unpaved In a still unbroken field

Thrives in its loneliness Under the silent night sky Unjudged by the suburbia That forgot it amidst the grasses.

Yet sometimes a car Quietly nestled beside The thick, single wire drilled through Those slanted wooden posts (Hardly worth calling a fence)

Will dim itself awkwardly In view of the homes perched overtop And hope that no one is looking -

That no one remembers this cul-de-sac At the precipice of forest and fawn Teetering on the brink of Uncontrolled freedom forever.

Stale wood warps in the summer heat Prying, gradually, the nails from the wall To be dislodged eventually, some years from now When this bed is emptied of people And replaced with a memory Of where it used to be.

Where, in the sweaty midnight hours, Dreams would fill the crevasses With ghostly mists too temporary To truly haunt anything.

You, a thin apparition, came to me From the breath of the universe Lightly mocking this cubic rot And my meagre attempt to rest within it.

You, the spiritual interstellar, constantly Enamoured with, and enthused by The insanity of the modern world Clung to the breaking dawn disappearing

Escaping into the force of light itself And replaced with a memory Of where you used to be.

Mystery (Scenic Acres Suite, Vol. 1)

They say that smoke cleanses the soul. Deftly swindling from each breath Primed for regurgitation – The impure, exhumed from tomb to Tongue, and spoken into the abyss of this world.

They say that breath is life. Passively swallowed behind a lamp dimly lit - Your past life lingers in the air in front of everyone. Surrounding it, staring deeply into it, eyes drooping Into solemn shades of unearned euphoria Untethered from the real.

At an hour no one should be awake at, On a day where there’s better things to do, We’re all just staring into the mystery Of what everyone was Intersecting with who everyone is Until it evaporates into midnight’s wintry echo.

Behind these draped, frost-tinted windows, We’re all hoping, somehow, to delay or pause Today’s conversion into yesterday Through exploring a mystical sense Too advanced to understand.

It’s as though the universe has shown you its true form Before you’ve even begun to understand your own.

One Day

The cul-de-sac is shimmering with an icy morning slick that’s brighter than a sunlight still hours away from breaking through the sky. It’s this quiet, solemn beauty that awaits a merciless violation from the daily onslaught of muddied car tires and bylaw-prescripted snow-shovels. These types of moments tend to erode quickly and erratically in response to the peopling of this Earth, and in the uncertain prairies their regeneration is far from guaranteed. To stare off into the distance and suffer under the harsh, frozen air is a privilege unredeemed by an uncomfortable majority that simply seeks to shuffle away and avert acknowledging the fact of their environment.

I always felt a kindred connection with this intensely suburban beauty, as though this perception wasn’t fairly afforded the amount of time required to sink into and linger in memory. Eyes shudder at the dread of the air, everywhere, leaving an eternity of fragile frosts to graze an unfettered prairie morning without notice.

The longer I’d spend outside, the closer I felt to this unexplored world layered with these illustrious whites. The forcible dilation of each step felt as though the air’s frozen density was a viscous film impeding natural movement, where the pressures of lifting the weight of a boot off the ground yielded no reward satisfactory enough for the accomplishment of doing so. Limp-dragging through the snow yields pauses from exhaustion, making the horizon increasingly alluring - no longer as a figment of convergence, but rather, a concept of emergence. Everything you haven’t seen yet now has power over everything you do see. It takes the limitless infinity of this vast land to render someone fully encapsulated.

After the cold finishes moulding you into paralysis, you can only dream of a day where the horizon you stare into finally breaks under the pressures of the unexplored, and the essence of everything that hasn’t yet happened floods the world you currently occupy, and the person you currently are.

I suppose that’s what hope feels like.

Finally

A stale, white drapery stiffly obscures the wintry landscape outside, where the unassuming weekday collides into this sparsely-filled hotel. If this room came before us, there’d be thin slivers of light dispersing, from within, the cornered furniture shadows. Only the lamp on the bedside table remains lit, giving just enough visibility to explore without illuminating the unnecessary.

The patterned coils lightly imprinted in the wallpaper, interspersed with faint roses, spiral inside themselves repetitively, dancing upon the irises with an indefinite tease. And when the shadows from the unlit hallway pour into the room, they’re met with a visible clash of soft yellow – like a vibrant magnetic field is sealing off the exit from this cube.

This undoing of perception is ornamented by these wandering ghosts that together we’d peer inside of. Their faint wisps of energy cordially fade in and out of time, reminding us of the long history this room has had, and the many stories that could have happened within. Once we finally become comfortable with the others who are not there, we allow ourselves to become the other who is.

Together is everything is everything else, as though it were a still a conclusion and not yet a state of being. And when it finally becomes a state of being, several years later, after we talked our last talk and broke our last bond, it all finally made sense. It made sense in a way that made it impossible to just treat it as it was – a taste of beauty small enough to last a lifetime.

The long, distant breath of a summoning city falls to rest outside its last neighborhood, hovering graciously over the frozen, bulldozed mud. The natural border of a land so flat allows the expression of every direction to intersect at the point of its perception. As suburbia folds inward towards the pulsating core of this sprawling metropolis, one can only look outward to an unexplored emptiness. Between the hedonic rushes of caffeine-fuelled adolescence and the irreverent chatter that serenades the deepened evening, there’s this inescapable sense of isolation that continuously distracts from the social frenzy. Like this hill we all stood at wasn’t just for laughing or talking or racing on toboggans, it was the amplitude of an introspective dilation being stretched beyond the quiet nocturne and into forever. You quietly wonder if this city would ever tire of expanding, and leave this barren wasteland preserved in its quiet, unfettered state.

Oh, how that laughter escapes me. This memory is so old, I can’t even hear it anymore. Yet, I still can’t help but adore the resultant human bonding that embraces imminent destruction without acknowledging it. That together, we’ll all awaken to the next day, bleary-eyed and stuffed full of headache, and still feel as though it was all worth it. Indeed, once the night finally prevailed victorious over our mortal selves, that seizure of temporary youth collapsed with fatigue. We all dispersed, quietly trickling away from each other in separate directions, at separate times, all longing for the same idyllic dreamscape before it begins eroding with age. I spent the long journey back across the city drifting in and out of microsleeps, allowing the streetlights’ orange blur to enmesh with my starts of the lid. The tires on the asphalt were remarkably quiet, as though the very act of driving at such an hour was instantly rewarded with a subtle sonic purity. The illusory veil of camaraderie, excitement and juvenile wonder had blown through the skies running on the fuel of candy and soda, just to atomize completely in this night of inescapable loneliness. Temporary and eternity are not opposites, they’re merely reference points for what the other isn’t. The path towards starlight will always come crashing down unless you are the star itself.

Some contemplative nocturnal stills from the first 40 episodes of the anime of Maison Ikkoku. Hand-drawn will always be far more emotive, expressive and sincere - I love how this show characterizes the night as a time for longing, feeling and introspection.

Night retreads passively behind the intersection of Heritage and Macleod, where the few remaining vehicles separated by empty lanes naturally drift towards a silent city centre. The streetlights, in their continuous passage, blur into a horizon that’s beginning to slowly peel away from the empty skyscrapers stapling it down. Lit as they’re always lit, the buildings embrace the moonlit sky as an extension of themselves, and as their blinking windows become indistinguishable from the stars, they transcend form in abstract space. In a breath of soft wind, the horizon finally blows away, leaving these blocks to tentatively twirl and gradually float. This eventual motion is neither urgent nor insincere - it solemnly embraces the arbitrary nature of our universe with an indefinite framework for the unexplored periphery. Hoping that, one day, some of these drifting shapes may collide into others, the beating heart of eternity craves reprieve from its limerent solace. It pumps its blood into the possibility of creation, seeking to permeate the fruits of that serendipity to all of time. Yet, this world of contextless geometry usually just lingers patiently. Like a temporal fog thinly glazed over a forgotten temple aching for worship, space consumes the light of our reality until we acknowledge it with our presence. Evolution is but a humble thing, silently conforming to an unrealized distance that only takes notice of what it could never be.

Tectonic

From a storm yet to be unleashed, the black plumes In the embattled sky are splicing the fiery sun. Forebod the unnerve from a tectonic motion, The rhythm wafts off the undulating canopies Of a green, green everywhere.

Yet the lakewater is unphased, even in the shadows Whose rapid growth signals, behind the foothills, Death and the highway that recklessly turns into them Becomes the only exit from the impending chaos. I am calm, I am dreaming of back home

Where an untended heart is left smoldering In a pausal metropolis too distant to impede The obsessive anticipation that poisons it. It yearns to fuse worlds separated by fate, Before it empties in dismembered turmoil.

While the uncertain tides trail behind the asphalt, I am here, forced to guess between scald or hail. An ominous hope languidly envelops my chest So that my mind may reunite With what could never be.

Outside, in the vague peripheral Swaying too fluidly in the silent wind, The coniferous jungle rustles softly, awaiting A decision it’s long-since been familiar with. But it’s still terrifying anyways.

An inexplicable rest has been laid to the season of divine impulse. The burgeoning mists aid the transition into a landscape of passively accepted solitude, curtailing the August euphorias with an increasing distance. The windshield smears with thick globules of sopping, tenderized leaf while the heart grows weary of the blur and its fondness of it. These autumn months are a dream if the dream were real – where blue and grey become indiscernible, where the eternal can be captured in a single moment.

Breath follows wind as frost follows footstep - it is morning. The traces of a new beginning are shrouded under the skyless skies, where the position of every sound changes. The birds do not chirp, the tires’ incessant swish through the gutter water deafens the engine’s hum, and the rain triumphs over all. You’re waiting for the bus, you’re on the bus, you’re waiting. Time flows softly through you, yet you don’t even realize it. You don’t even realize how these unassuming weekdays make contemplation a natural language spoken fluently through silent motion. You’ve arrived, you get off.

The shoulder-dipped stride across the campus concrete is marked by a peculiar apathy, one that embraces the environment with a subdued pace despite the frigid dampening. All the sadnesses felt by an identity of pervasive, unspoken rejection and all the dread felt by academia’s directionless fugue are revitalized through this limping awareness, where discomfort becomes coldly metaphorical for the endurance of life itself.

It is not the singular experience of this autumnal chronology that creates the essence of reflection. It is the routine of it, where the contrast between the various days of rain and wind eventually expose undetected subtleties after enough are overlapped. All these downtrodden thoughts assume their own presence as a force, not a memory – they shatter instantly when consciously acknowledged, and evaporate back into the stratosphere if ignored.

Reflection is the state of constantly searching for something you sense is there, but isn’t.

The slivered night weaves around the asphalt That bequeaths an illustrious freedom Spoken through boundless nature By mouths timing each other’s promise To never leave the tongues alone - To spare them the rot of silence.

The cascading starlight blinks above The hairgrasses of the furtive plain - A perch to an unveiled expanse Of the industrial epicentre sprawling Into every crevasse but our own.

The construction of this universe From the most delicate of language Becomes the boundary of light That preserves its privacy. No one can reach us here.

Even if it shatters, infinitely And breaks us both - No one can reach us. Until it's gone, we're bound To the dusk that leaves our bodies.

This land breathes solemnly And mourns all that tread it For they’ve left their earthly hollows And gone up into the sky, unbridled In search of something to let go of.

Absorbing the endless Glare from glacial mists Eroding breaths of night With uncertain light -

The ice breaks solemnly And melts into shatter Slowly, in that beyond Unveiled through dawn.

This separation of before And after that Seldom fruit of conquest Is a wound of the flesh

Where the frigid wince Of transience itself Bursts into the nectar Of infinity's vector

So the fragile land May dissipate underfoot And breathlessly drown The lonely, without sound.

White Horizons

A soft breeze caresses my shadow Shades whipping in the beside Bellowing waves ornamented By invisibility, by an intrigue Subsumed in an impossible glow.

The starlight blinking white horizons Filled to the brim with postulation – They’re aliens! They’re angels! They’re the canopy of a cosmic eternal Diffusing answers to questions unasked.

Holy lands could breath twice so Wiry birch trunks hold upright Against the orb of a quilled clasp Mightily on their thin branches Bent around the aural darkness.

Shadows investigate the fading narrows Rusting in the epicentre of forbidden - A 1960s Chevrolet decays in foliage Burned, empty, lost to a memory Woven into the sun's ashen remains.