Karl Finch

I’m still alive, or so my heart rate tells me.

I’ll be posting on this new blog for the time being—it’s still me, but it won’t be the usual stuff—which will be either of some or zero interest to you. I’m not abandoning this blog by any means, though, and I’ll be publishing again on leftfield.cc in the nearish future.

Rebirth: a lone cosmonaut crashed on a planet sufficiently familiar yet rightfully alien to leave any mind asunder.

Beauty: revelations triune, wholly bonded, caught in suspended moments, crystallised fireflies among chandeliers: divinity, absurdity.

Madness: is the one aware of their own lunacy the one with wisdom? Across such deserts of insanity, to leave voluntarily—what then?

I’m wandering again but know just where I am with the two-humped hill to the west in last light of a day in January and that lonely mound east already cloaked in twilight.

I walk with my father among the pines where we share words, the only sound in these woods. We talk without speaking. I’m not a good dad, he says. It falls no heavier than our footfall in the muddy ground we trudge. Side by side, we’re miles apart.

Back along the path, like that groundless one we tread and retread, the road takes us west towards the sunset’s inviting glow with the onset of dusk to our backs. Am I to take meaning from this? The brave buds already emerging upon their trees are eager, premature.

I watched the sweeping of the ape / from tree to bush, earth roofed by canopy / and then by sky with its naked stars / who, like their gazers, had stories to tell / and paths to go.

There was the clearing of the land, / forest giving way generously, the laying of stones, / towers and walls rising as one man came / and then another, until the youngest child / lay dead in mud, in malice.

There was the tumbling of stones, / monuments falling into pits of ruin, / a nest for the phoenix of granite and iron, / a bed for impure birth— and again fledging, / soaring, in a moment beautiful, / in the next terrible.

There was the bird of broken nature / humbled only by faltering, losing its skyward hold / and with it the grace found among clouds: / grace and lightning strike to follow each man, / his triumphs remembered, his tragedies repeated, / until none was left to take his place.

I watched the wheel formed / and set turning, broken and remade, / its every part changed, a circle perfected: / but always the same wheel.

Oblivion seems the destination as I strain through hours that in turn strain me with no sun or stars above to tell of passing time.

All that moves are black waves unseen but felt as they roar in the tempest running its course in wait to pull me under a final time for the long and dreamless sleep.

Then comes the other, first in flashes, blades of light tearing down a dead sky as lightning strikes chaotically, but with some purpose like gods on chariots riding across the firmament.

In between treading water thick and salty, all’s afire, now a glow gone supernova. The rushing warmth building, blanketing my skin dry calms the fathoms, replaces them as it wrenches back the tide.

The devourer is devoured.

Behind blind eyes welded shut by white heat now I make outlines of futures and find a new fear: what could not be known instead of where before was only what could not be fought.

Eighteen months ago a simple message shared. Didn’t say a word to you since. Were my reasons good enough? Health complications, a good man dying young, is all I know. Didn’t say a word to me either. I’ll always trust your reasons more.

Damn the calm glow from the bulb under which pen in hand basks, reigning over the night as it does while motivation lies scuppered and inspiration’s nowhere to be found.

Curses on the pool of white-blue ceaseless screens bathing the same hand hanging over keys like the victim of a spiderweb contorting in fear, then limp, lifeless.

There’s an ease in seizing what’s already in place. Others will forge your fortune by sweat or suffering. You could say it’s the way of the world you take every desperate effort to hold in place.

You’re the vulture so upright though lacking a spine. Overhead, all else beneath you, circling now until that time your flighty principles leave you again impatient to create your own carrion: the weakest of your own kind.

In shrill birdsong droning of prosperity and integrity you return to lofty nests built of lie and deceit, the gore of cowardly plunder still painting your face.

What a legacy to have to reduce a rich land to desperation, union to alienation from a House of jesters and crooks in the finest suits.

We can only wish it part of some greater plan and not the wallowing in the pigsty of power play at the expense of progress.

Have your words: the world looks on at this pantomime. Have your way: the only good citizen is a hopeless one.

Through sunless winter days you sleep. On the short nights in summer you look for a place to rest a heavy head. Here and there on the pendulum swing of the passing year you cry without cause as if only to remember the sensation of tears.

The demons of the day— and you can’t count the days— immobilize you (so much force from something without form!) The weight of it— a mass of chaos and contradiction, furious, roiling— breaks you in an ending without closure.

In this featurelessness thoughts wander further only to return with words and the breath for you to carry them. (A long time ago some people believed that speech itself was magic, that words were spells.) You return to what crushed you, encircling it to find a misshapen face, expression fixed in soundless scream. It’s ancient, and you’re still young.

Seems we agree: the best time for anything is a summer night. You’re out with purpose, though, while I walk here with only half a reason. You talk almost without pause, but for my part I’m silent, content to listen— not even that— I’m just content.

It’s a tide, but one that only comes once in a while. For a moment I’m awash in that seafoam peace—the still air warm as kisses, the last of the lights— and your chatter. This is all my senses need.

Some grooves are so natural that they beg the question of whether you made the mould or the mould made you. Something of such smoothness seems only to invite the idea, exciting, foolish.

My envy is for the ones in temples made of certainty by architects of pleasing truths. It’s nothing short of bliss to walk beneath the dome before, in time, the weight of reality comes breaking through the roof, carried without coincidence by the light of day that carves up shadows and demands the petty sanctuary be rebuilt.

Out here I live to the sound of water settling in black earth, near enough to smell it, so close I sense (beyond heaviness or lightness) the weight of potential: the percolation of thought, a splitting seed splaying fragile-fingered roots down into the richness, while above, pushing past the safety of its soil, it finds the world where the great struggle lives as does the truth of being.