Opal
We drove through the ancestral skeleton of the world and it’s broken harmony. Driven by the song we were searching for, following the path of the pendulum, divided by time – driven, as souls drive their path through the dark forest of the universe. I closed my fist around a mantra and felt the serpentine blood drip through the fingers of my hand that would bury the day under the night and then resurrect in the emerald eyes of Millenia each morning as if for the first time. I push my body through the dense air of insomnia retrieving the hunt for silence in the hour that knocks incessantly on the door of my heart. The indifferent knock, the indifferent questions put to life that some would weigh and sell or place in jars to be kept for the future to solve. The song is pierced and exposed at it’s core is the rotten carcass of a god. The flesh of it’s being withered, the blood long run dry. This is my city, my voice, this is my frozen will and arsenal against the time it takes me to run away from the voice inside that carries a dead abyss.
In the ruins I have placed here my footsteps to freedom, in the wreckage I have designated my home they follow me blindly, loyal as a shadow and as indifferent. The only habitat I can pull from my genes is the knowledge of death carved from time into the form of life. Where else is there to begin? Though the question may be untrue, I feel like this is the only answer. Still, my eye cannot give to itself and the voice can only point and never touch the image that was given flesh this unfinished, burning hour. So I slip through it and pull the cords tighter, as a knot, as a fist round a mantra, as a mouth round a stone.
In this place, in this instance the nomenclature is diced in no fashion other than symbolically. Where dreams live and die like an empty TV set or abandoned theatre. We sift through machinery, once collectable symptoms of our collective disease and become mere mercenary to trend. Ideas pinned to thin air like radio-waves living in the ultra. Born sightless yet carrying out a vision, paid for in the womb. Embodying the embroidered fate of a dusted loop, still now after the depleted force of turning image to flesh and blindness to vision. The hours are mantra dislocated from the jaw, clocking mileage where mirage fails, falling pivots that redact inaction with seismic leverage and sense of occasion. The sense of ourselves spilling through the dense air I force my way through may be known tomorrow when the child that weeps inside me is given a name. When I release what has long since gone from my possession.
In movement
The burnt shadow of your heart still whispers it’s first word that collided with the image lifting itself over the horizon of the earth. When the sun has drunk it’s painful silence and followed blackly the memory and mirror it is chained to, retrieving the gesture will be simple. The race to outsmart this dark venom began early morning. You weigh, singularly, what cannot be reached inside you. The simple essence of a loud voice being disappeared as an object is moved or replaced is a message that points to fracture in our approach to struggle. Really, the silent essence of spirit having split the eye as an atom and fallen blindly into the crater of imagination is where a story ought to begin.
Longingly, I exhume detail for what might suit me as the whole armour, all the while remaining motionless becoming the engine of the void, afraid to tell the story that tells me so often, the black memory the sun is chained to will engulf my heart too. In paroxysm, the image is lifted over the horizon of the earth into a wider gulf and birth we share with the twin eyes of time. One eye that sees with a dead purpose, singularly, as a clock might be wound and forgotten and one that sees as though resurrected each moment it is seen. The hidden depth of what cannot be reached inside you. When I am given to compassion for the ghost (whose song only some will hear as the sun sets and the shadow of the fire escape drapes over the alley) it is the key beneath the blues keeping me awake.
The migrants who died trying to cross the sea for whom the sea is their cross and the dark, dark painful silence we carry that is ours. There is the gesture and measure taking place here all the while. The terrific irony of a moment that carries and sacrifices the weight and purpose of a single heartbeat, shed like a second symmetrical history, covering distance inside the iceberg of thought. Contained inside space, negatively, the surface is frozen, and living the way we may live is the reflection. A glass like plain where I, the engine of the void, may regain a foothold as the lucid speed of the disappeared voice becomes apparent. To welcome the deceived and deceased alike within the structure of movement becoming clear in the gesture the conversation opens with.
It’s true and the measure is correct. The sun empties it’s thought into the black mirror and memory it is chained to by every imaginary eye, swallowing it’s own impregnable music within the fortress of a violent, reoccurring birth none shall escape. What cannot be reached inside you a hidden irony displaces. The future is lulled closer as a spider plucks the strings of her deadly instrument and web. Blinded by the music, her prey enters the kingdom where she alone is queen and reigns over every chaos.
What else are you keeping secret? The thoughts that woke you at 3am? The symmetry splitting you longitudinally between an East and West – a past forgotten and a life longed for – a line the sun drew with the same invisible hand in the pocket of the killer in the Audubon Ballroom? It ought to be enough that silence can be mapped in your body by touch alone, traced as though the broken mirror of your memory has been cartographically outlined. So that at the border between dream-states, the landscape wakes and spills a lucidity that one might recognise as an aerial photograph of the past. Say something. The secret is a grave in you that you feed the promise of silence. You sit with the knowledge a ghost gave you,
a Pandora.
who’s only possession
like a burning ember
depicted in shadows
is swallowed whole. And the same lurid darkness follows you home. Stalks the voice you have filtered so carefully so as to not let the ghost fly out. So that they don’t build on the grave(s) you protect and feed with the promise there is a place in your memory where the secret sits, fragmented like an island inhabited by the unspoken.
Jaie Miller is an artist from London, England, and has been published by various journals at various times since starting sharing online.