rust

I myself have lots of repressed skies / but I do not kill stars.

I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made any sense, anything.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

…golden October declined into sombre November And the apples were gathered and stored, and the land became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud,

the church’s silver your mother / keeps polished in the cupboard / and how your father always / flinches at thunderstorms. / some things that / are unstrung: shoelaces / violins / suspension bridges / hearts—these remember your name / even when you do not. wet fallen / leaves are deadly as ice / on the highway shoulder / after it rains, all the / dead children of summer / scattered like roadkill, gutted & slick. / the shining earth when the lightning / has passed, pooling with life, / unwinding the bones of trees / across power lines. the metal taste / of silver in your mouth, / copper in your throat, / channeling the electric shock / away from your heart.

there’s something about summer that incites nostalgia. the kind of nostalgia that’s deep and harrowing, thick and heavy like honey but never as sweet. it’s the kind of nostalgia normally felt in the midst of a blue winter but in the heat of the summer, in the bloom of spring, somehow it appears and it's even worse than when its cold and inviting of sadness. its rife of regrets and loneliness, slicked with sweat on necks and lazy twirling of melting milkshakes. maybe it’s because summer is supposed to be bright times, sunshine and ocean smiles. maybe it’s because it’s suppose to be warmth and warmth is never sad. but that’s the thing… that’s what makes it even more sad. to feel the heat but to not feel the warmth. to know the sun is alive, bright and iridescent when you yourself feel bluer than the depths of the sea. it’s the expectation of happiness, and never reaching it. . it could be that. or it could be a bunch of other things. i’m not too sure what it is to be honest, but its the sound of cold showers, shadows in sunflower fields. something sinister. something painful almost. and maybe it’s because nostalgia is a liar, the best liar, the queen of deception and bittersweet pills. it’s a pianist playing a violin, unsure of their own fingers yet knowing the notes.  . i like to think it’s memory. the way your mind tries to protect you, spinning your history into brighter more luminous hues. but your body, holding its scars and your heart, knows the truth. and it's this diaspora of mind and heart, memory and history, that makes this summer nostalgia so prevalent. . and in the end, night will fall and instead of regrets, instead of sleep, insomnia takes over. ghosts visit you, lingering behind closets and lamps. and perhaps the reality is that nostalgia follows you everywhere, not just a seasonal haunt. but a constant reminder that maybe people never really change, but the knowledge that people never change just gets more noticed. and that’s the saddest thing, the worse part of nostalgia. the want to change no matter what, despite knowing the impossible.

Sometimes, in our confusion, we have been known to turn the Other into a monster and a god. Hierophanies – where the unshowable deity shows itself – are often terrifying. Hence the double etymology of monstrare, to show and to warn. Zeus’ mutations into a plundering bull or rapacious swan epitomize this paradox. And Kali certainly knew how to scare mortals. Even the generally ‘good’ biblical God could resort to horror on occasion, as Job realized; or Abraham when commanded to kill Isaac, or Jacob when he found himself maimed at the hip after wrestling with the dark angel of Israel. Or Zechariah struck dumb by the angel Gabriel. Not to mention the tales of floods and plagues and conflagrations sent by a jealous God to fill his people with fear. Divine monstrance was not infrequently an occasion of terror. Fascinans et tremendum, as the mystics said.Poets too have attested to this enigma of the monstrous God. W.B. Yeats captured this disturbing ambiguity of the sacred, for example, in his apocalyptic image of the ‘rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born’. A sentiment echoed by Rilke in his famous opening apostrophe to the Duino Elegies: ‘Every angel is terrible’. And one might also recall here Herman Melville’s chilling evocation of the quasi-divine, quasi-demonic whiteness of the whale, recalling at once the horror of Leviathan and the transcendence of Yahweh.

We pray for revolution so what happens when it doesn’t come? Imagine us, the children of protest signs, stringing ourselves up like the Enjolrases of social media. Every day is just another chance to show rage and ours never ran out of gasoline. Did we not love the fire, did we not write it poems in blood thicker than love, did I not take a gun and say goodbye to my lover, look how much I gave – The revolution never comes but she lights my cigarette. We wash our mouths clean, validated every step of the way. Instead, I say no. I take epiphany into my body and call it anti-darkness, call it revelation. Something better than five dime prophecies, peddled in 140 characters. And some of us cry in grocery stores, some of us believe in no magic anywhere, despite the sirens in the swamps. When you ask the ocean if the oil spills hurt, she looks around, asks “What oil spills?” We all pretend we can’t see her skin changing. Maybe I am tired of talking about us like long lost tragedies that never had a chance at history, so they threw up in the dumpster instead. Maybe we were never the victimization generation, maybe all these disasters took nothing out of us. At the end of the world, the oceans are acid and what is oxygen anyway? We are scavengers of the new kind. I’ll trade you a canister of light for a shot at happiness.