Another Stream Storm of Consciousness
The Maestro for the Maelstrom
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What spirits stir within me now / To draw from my unworthy pen / Some thought that might disturb the blood / And cast to light the pain I bear
Tuesday.
Night before last I couldn’t sleep. No, I hadn’t had an extra dose of caffeine. Wasn’t trying to self-destruct—not this time. I couldn’t sleep, so I wandered out. The wind brushed her hand across my face, rustled the rose bushes in the garden down the lane. The lights all changed from green to red. I jumped over the train tracks, leaned far back as I could on the spine of a park bench. The clouds sailed in so fast, like thick wooly blankets over the night city’s rust. Drops from the skies, pools in my eyes. Songs swelled when the wind sighed. Without knowing I smiled.
Pressed a towel to my hair, hung up my clothes. Lit bedtable candles for two raging storms. Lightning smiling through the window, thunder mumbling under alt-indie ballads with a blue-heather lull. Woke an hour later, thrashing undressed in the sheets, like an unread message-stoppered bottle on the coils of an angry sea. How did it come to this? Why is it always everything or nothing? Why is it rage and despair and joy and revenge—or only empty stone numbness?
There were discarded rose bushes outside the coffeehouse today. Bizarre and beautiful. People kneeling to pick out their favorites. Through the window I could see ivory petals with a perfect-length stem. It’d fallen along the sidewalk’s edge in a puddle of rosewater draining out to the street. It looked lonely, it looked lovely to me. I had the sudden urge to save it, but I didn’t. It wouldn’t have made a difference, really. Tell me what I would have done with it.
By leaving it there, all forgotten and wet on the concrete, it was a little closer to a piece of art maybe. A little closer to poetry.
Today is different from yesterday in that today I might have gone ahead and pushed the self-destruction-chain-of-events button when I ordered a second coffee at half-past six p.m. The level of caffeine intake, combined with the speed at which it’s consumed directly relates to the speed at which I lose my mental stability or escape the usual flow of my thought process-seas. It’s fine; I haven’t worked an equation correctly since grade nine. Essentially, I lose my head so I can find it again. I relinquish control of my thoughts, let them wander as they will until, as is often the case, they flow into a vision that allows me to grasp their meaning, all circling back to me in a form of general lucidity.
That’s what I’ll attempt for you now. A most unreliable magic trick. Let me cast my thoughts into the void, onto the page, and see what shape or meaning they take, if any. Not that it makes a difference to you. You, who won’t be reading this. But I have to try. For my own sake.
My world is a world of windows. A realm of mirrors, things seen and observed and reflected back at myself. There is little to touch but glass and the water that runs through my fingers; it rolls against my shore. This island life I wander and skirt at times as though in a sailboat. I am the master of my ship… even when it’s moored? Given glimpses of worlds on some other shore, proof by lights that on still nights I catch glinting from the horizon. Their colors stretch across the waves, sometimes so far I can scoop them up and take back to my cave, pouring them in some orb of sea glass where they play out in wondrous, unlived visions. Suppose that was me? Do life’s gentle lived-in moments feel the way they seem?
I listen to the waves dash against the crags in a chorus of time and decay. It’s an unbroken cycle, this place—a fortress of rock in a sharp ring of a shape. A repetition of moments—the waves crash, the world sings, the circle goes around. I press my hand to the glass. Yea art thou there—I toss the stars my prayers; as if their connect-the-dot creatures will manifest some character to fly down and rip me from my world.
And they do, one night; you do.
Rare, I don’t expect it. I don’t anticipate to look up and see some unidentified being whiz across the sky, wrapped in a chrysalis of celestial lights. Your irises like oceans; your pupils like the holes to fit some key. I should guess then what’s to come, but I don’t see it. From ancient volumes to which my head had been turned, there split the night a bolt of incandescent blue. Maybe that’s what draws you down; it’s beyond myself to say. Mist of sea spray—and you dissever the fortress, crumbling rocks in an iridescent light wave, lighting with the softest touch at a ripped open sea cave. I don’t have time to brace; a silent dive, a sudden embrace.
What was I to do? Nothing but what I did. Tracing lips soft as breath and your ribs like the strings of an instrument. Lullabies echo in the thunder to come after, but I don’t hear them. I cannot picture a future; I can feel only this. From others I’ve known the throes of hunger, but nothing given so gently. I accept without looking back—without looking ahead. All the poetry piling up for a time as this is vanished. I can think of nothing to say. Such must be the nature of happiness.
And such is its nature to fade.
When I wake, the red light of dawn. Sun bleeds through the sky; red bleeds in my eyes. I let myself live wholly in the moment for once; it brought me such warmth. And I could have sworn you were made of sunlight. Vibrant, unyielding against my tendency to fade. My literary heart should have remembered sooner that nothing gold can stay. Of course the beauty I would find, would hold for a night, would prove inaccessible by morning’s light. Poetry will be the death of me; mark my grave.
In a shallow haze, I stumble to the lip of the cave. White waves swell at my feet where before there had been shore. My heart feels heavy in my hand, holding it as I am. I don’t understand. I don’t understand. When you lit upon my island, you hadn’t torn into a fortress. You blasted through a dam. Those keyhole ocean eyes of yours unlocked a door, though you didn’t mean to and I didn’t mean to let you. Help me what have I said what have I done. That abyss in the center of the island—that underground tunnel down rabbit hole wishing well. Those things when confronted I desire not to feel get thrown down there. Now they’ve all come geyser-ing up. What sweet release. What a damned torrential mess. The fortress of stone, cracked. That place where locked things go, all but destroyed. I didn’t understand. I do now.
Those waves of dreams, of things locked away now sieged upon this island—and you? Somewhere beyond the stars? Sympathy, tenderness, a night warm as the sun; I admire the simple poetry of it. Or rather, would have, if in the end, I wasn’t stranded watching the tide come in. And each lapping torrent brings to mind the memory—nothing I can hold. I feel the unsteady uproar begin to ripple from my heart.
Shoving it beating, back in my chest, I throw myself up the side of the sea cliffs. Dam thrown open, dammit. Geysers of seawater and castaway feelings erupt from every crag, rain down at every step. I grip more water than rock. Growling against the pressing storm, I drag myself to the jagged peak that still stands and unleash. Darkness covers dawn and lightning splays from my fingers. And I scream into the void. I scream until my throat is sore. Affections so sweet, once lost, turn dark and uncontrolled maelstroms. And all hell breaks empty and the devils are here. Now I rage—heaving up wave after wave. Screams and sighs keep time with thunder and lightning. Cresting in joy and misunderstanding. But I cannot curse your name without cursing my own. Don’t know where to cast the blame, this pain—whose soul? Release my own storm, then have to fight them both. Water roars into a wall. What does it matter now? Let it take me, take me all.
I cast a tempest for you, my dear. Did you feel it? Did you feel it in the murmurings of the earth? Did you even glance back to see it pull me under? The grand finale, the last, glittering magic spell to close out this new month. Can’t wait to add this to my list of top ten ways in which I really felt myself grow this year, you know? Gee, what would all those monetizing self-motivators think? Downward dog right off the brink.
I, the more conflicted, never choose to play the fool. I wave my arms; I cast the storm. A portrait of the artist as a young man, remember? A merciless, relinquished, but by all appearances contained young man. And if waves spill out the portrait frame sides, so be it. The gallery floods. All is destruction for now and then nothing. All is new. Blank page; blank face resumes. Tuck this away, save it for later. How lovely to have lived. How the more beautiful to have died and been brought back to life again.
Ah me, what stirrings are these? What am I to do with them? Toss them to the sea? Treasure them like some vague, untouchable holy relic? Leave their imprint in the sand, which time may eventually cover up, then peel back again?
In an act of desperation I reach into the cavities of my chest, wrench out that thing called a heart. Tendons snap, both hands above my head. I launch it into the sloshing sea, tiny thing consumed at once in the depths. But with its crackling storm and its dancing waves, my world just laughs. I could no more escape my heart than I could escape myself. Some monster of the deep finds my heart, and, wrapping it in a tender tentacle, sees fit to swallow it whole. Wriggling, giggling, it scuttles to the top and splays its great number of arms around the base of the cliff. Shit.
At least I tried, I think, taking a running start and a dive. The waves are only too glad to fold me under and send me spinning back to shore. Nothing and everything is the same as before. Rocks jutting, just in a different pattern. Thrown up, thrown out onto the sand, hacking, cursing, spewing out some song. Who am I that I should live such a night as dreams are made on?
You, of a world which I am not a part—of Earth treading stars that make dark heaven light—saw fit to swoop down and hold me in your arms for a night. Am I the more blessed to have been given such a thing as this? Or the more cursed still to know now that which I have missed?
What say you, my rage, my bliss? Shall we cry and cast a tempest?
I pull my knees up to my chest, drawing a pair of shallow trenches in the sand. Lightning forks splat from the distance; now violet, now amber. What makes storms so beautiful? This fury tastes almost as delicious as your touch—if only because it means I felt something—can still feel something even now. If only because it’s real.
Night seeps in colors of pale lead. I lean back my head, can already feel the book of sentiments forming there. I Defy You, Stars … and Other Passionate Curses. I asked them not to tempt a desperate man—but they did. In truth I bear little justification. The stars did give me warning. Some nights before these storms, I asked of the Fates a riddle, and they responded in riddling kind. Their symbols spoke of tender hearts followed by dark thoughts, the anguish of sleepless nights. It connected little with anything I knew at the time. I see it for the prophecy it was only now when all is done. Isn’t that how it always goes? —Useless magic serves only for the musings of poets and their sweetly cherished ghosts.
So I cannot curse the stars, nor you among their number. Who then—life? Life is not kind, but life is rich. Experience is a cruel mistress. I seek her out all the same, in the hopes that whatever I have to lose will be worth the cost of whatever I might gain. Is that too dangerous a game to play?
If not the stars, nor you, nor life—does that leave the blame to my fatal flaw? That turning of everything into anything it’s not. Case in point, immortalizing you in the form of some ephemeral though tangible angel. Characterizing the stars. Drawing a sea monster out of my pain. If I could accept life and its beautiful, broken moments as is, perhaps there would be no need for a tempest. I could simply walk on into the next day, as it was, rather than console myself with the murmurings of airy spirits and wandering beasts. This thing of darkness I do acknowledge mine. But if I don’t cast a tempest—what have I to hold? Or does the power that is the storm help me learn to let it go?
I draw back from the sky.
Night before last I couldn’t sleep. I’d had a dream. I was screaming out into some expanse—the sky or some other void. I screamed until my throat was sore. Someone came running. Someone asked me what was wrong. I couldn’t say. I couldn’t answer them.
I think I’ll rest here. Rage. Reflect. Rock. When I wake, maybe I’ll rebuild the fortress. Maybe I’ll board a ship and push off. Maybe I’ll battle the sea beast for my heart.
I blow out the candle. More thunder rumbles at the edge. Consoles my nocturnal self. You fell from some separate world. You hit my universe. The circle is broken. Strange. Do I feel anything still? Is the circle reforming itself?
… and it was all a dream. Was it?
Dear God. Why defy you, stars?
But if not a dream—to have lived a little starlight as reality, if only for a night? What more should I want? Why this misshapen chaos?
Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate, O anything of nothing first create…
…and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind? We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded but with a sleep…
Ay, there’s the rub. For in that sleep…what dreams may come.
I listen to the waves in their unbroken cycle. I feel the wreckage of this storm drawn about. The ancient books deformed by mist. The sparkling glass in broken bits. The tossed-off feeling skeletons half buried in the sand. Such chaos calls for departure or recrafting or… what? Ought such an island to make a throne? Unnerving how these fallen rocks already look like home. Maybe I’ll just sit here on the shore. Maybe I’ll look out another window. The waves drag my dream back to me in their voices on the sand.
I cast a tempest for— Cast a tempest for you, my love— I cast a tempest for you—
I cast a tempest for you, my love.
But I don’t think you felt it.
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// Featured Photo Courtesy of Norrel Blair //
a literary labyrinth 
Brilliant.
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