#cyrillium

destiny so confounded sloth in astounding glory garbed in garbled stories                               tales woven by others                               tangled as cloth about                               limbs cloven or misshapen stumbling about groves beholden by antiquity or bewildered astonishment                               heart belies admonishment                               truth burnishes bright                               smoldering bitter sacrament offers to goddesses of silvery ambrosia in trade for grandeur                               and dreamy ataraxia © C.J. Lightbourn 2017

My descent is perilous. Pained effervescence reigning in lingering omens under skies– So umber. Offering little incentive. Riddled electric plumes; Subsumed eccentric in patterns rarely striking. Raging lanterns less than woolpack wisps whispering whys into the widening gyre. Whisked by currents in directions sired by polarities inconsistent. System incoherent and drinking from brimming glasses of Malbec & chaos. Higher proof than– Some measly iota of reality nagging for force. It’s a puzzle. A nefarious one, of course. Its source? Nascent and tipsy. Brewed in minds fingering at the fringe. Fumbling at sighs on the wind. Stout and lumbering in sin. Lips so crooked as brooks; Babbling about virtues of straight lines unseen between– Now and the Ever Could. Anything and All That Should. The drop and the Storm. A tapestry glorious formed from naught and nether. Warp and weft; Betwixt soul and desire; A tenuous tether. © C.J. Lightbourn 2016

Your influence is a confluence of corruption and charm. The touch of your words and cobalt pen; Unavoidably amending the harm of my negligence. You are magic, murmurs, and mania. So by consequence, I am liable in your presence, to be irresponsible and irreverent of the dawn. Rambling without regard or phobia. Every other sentence smoldering and spawning asides irrelevant but heartfelt. Every other gaze awe inspired and struck between strings of stars and random tracks. A skipped beat only a finger stroke away. A way to allay the pain, in a heart which lacks, with just one more refrain. Just one more replay of gyroscopic hails from the chorus. Shush now. Let us forget what they told us, as hands and hips embrace abandon, in hours bewitched and emboldened; By the next sip.      the next song.      the next secret spoken in silence: Of cardiac violence. Of caresses somewhat missed. Of a weight on a precipice. Threatening all avalanche. To be buried beneath memories, manuscripts, and sin? A demise, half-welcomed. Yet still unsure of how to begin. © C.J. Lightbourn 2015

The world is cliché; Overdone and full of foreshadows long forgotten. Rife with plots plodding and conclusions unfinished. Populated by characters barely developed and speaking in dialogue with any clarity diminished. Mankind races along a scripted history; Unevenly paced. Laced with scant traces of inspiration. But mostly? Faced with morbid repetition. Death and Love our ever recurring themes. Romanticized in every single scene. (Embedded even in the italicized asides and stage directions.) For immortality and self-content are unattainable afflictions. Utterly unrelatable to the audience. The future is of no consequence when the curtain call is so far off. Indeed the front row critics scoff and claim that this is the penultimate chapter with only doom to follow after. But in fact we have yet to reach intermission. Players and prophets locked in a war of attrition, Causing such confusion between setting the stage and striking the set. Every soul met: A protagonist with no motivation. An antagonist seeking salvation. An anti-hero born of a divine crucible. Lifelines blocked out and intertwined in such laughably tragic complexity, leaving even the luminous gods scratching their heads in the balcony. Eventually Dionysus will turn to Loki whispering, “Hey, wasn’t this supposed to be musical comedy?” © C.J. Lightbourn 2015

My time is an echo. The nascent emptiness of life reverberates (berates) as I evade and contemplate the letting go. Vortices with gelid notes blow against vinyl and pane: "Oooh Oooh, is it not all the same?" The answer seems plain as starlight in a sunrise                    barely civil. A silence be-riddled with ageless breaths and blinks [X]XXXXXXXXXXX so long it becomes coma and blight. A flickering blindness that sinks beyond remembrance. All that remains?                           ...a sky incomplete. Ymir's skull                    replete with snow, anxiety,              and absence. © C.J. Lightbourn 2015

Tears spent from a soul rent. Head hung in lament over years lent; Purchasing naught but despair. Wails in the face of Luna’s uncaring gaze. Wishes— For freedom from feeling. For a mind stronger; No longer reeling. For fortitude by failure unfazed. Concealing cries in shadows. Fearing my torment will spread; Along lines of caring to those closest. A disease in quarantine. I rot— Ravaged and damaged; From outside in. My stance caving. My words raving. My logic leaving echoes; Screams and pleads— Cascading across the last vestiges of a heart hollowed out. To abandon: This self-imposed affliction. This cynical condition. This clinical perdition. Craving just the slightest; Course correction. © C.J. Lightbourn 2014

A brutal practice; Decoding one’s depth. Strange and complex. Absent any codex or cipher. Scratched out plans evaded, Oft by your very own nature. It’s a puzzle. It’s war waged; Against our will. Against our world. Against our waiting fate. Struggled attempts— To carve tomorrow from the tenuous dust of today. Shifting before our eyes. Always somehow surprised. Heaving with hope for answers: Will my path prove vain or victorious? Are my plots too grandiose? Too foolish? We wander in the night. With queries unquashed. And yet, with hope unabashed. Fear surrounds only blindfolded souls. The dawn—Your goal; Far closer than you supposed. Rising over the shores of Infinity. As you construct castles in the sand. Standing on the brink of oblivion, Before a gateway most halcyon. A threshold on which lurks a secret: Lingering within your very bones. An unrevealed companion, Ensuring you’re not alone. © C.J. Lightbourn 2014

It was a question rhetorical. It was spite surgical. Slicing and extracting; A heart supplanted. Transplanted with cardiac cynical. A trade made to fade the sores. Sacrificing and exacting. Correcting the flaws in a chest still raw and raging. Shown naught but your sympathy; Naive and disengaging. My empathy emptied away; Swapped with bile riling up from an abysmal within. Surviving your sin left me: In stances unsteady. No longer soft and easy. Snarling rough; Ready for waging war to avenge the tears. to assassinate the fears. to erect a new veneer… However sheer it may be. I am left after years with broken oaths once made in seclusion. Bitter refusals now lost; Backdrop for tender confusion. My spirit sizzled with wishes— For karma to offer you lessons in misery. For dharma to extract your apology. For mantras repeated to taint your story. How is it now that my curses have caved? Fallen to ash from sweet warmth on shoulders saved from glacial apathy? It’s a puzzle. Pieces still burning in amity; Coals huddled beneath the frail timbers of time. © C.J. Lightbourn 2014