I.  NO I

Some say our perceptions create this teeming reality
That all, whether good or ill, is raised at the mind’s command

Two flowers enter his mind, Cornflower and Forget-me-Not.  He watches their colours flow across the tight drawn sheet of the sky.  The sheet pulses gently, a shifting of tones and shades, and he thinks of lapis lazuli and the sufferings of the saints.  He sees aquamarine streaked with turquoise and knows that within the heart of blue chimes the slow bell of melancholy, of regret for worlds passed and words never spoken.  It is a realization that births SHE in her multitude of shapes and shadows.  SHE, a realm of dust and dreams beyond distance, of secrets and sorrow.  SHE, the unknown.

He stands before a mirror the surface of which trembles, his reflection vanishing, lost to the silent silver waves that birth slow a book from their twilight ultramarine depths.  The title glows with a mercurial luminescence, The Distance of Dreams, and he plunges his right hand through the mirror’s rippled surface to bring the book into the shimmering sub-aqua glow of the room.  His body aches in dreadful anticipation of what the book will reveal and his voice is small against the blue insistence.  It is the whispered loneliness of midnight in a deserted swimming pool.

each sensation becomes another memory…sepia tints of clocks…hands of time grooved into stillness…

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they shall be tender regrets that in the slow hours…when the dawn cracks the sky into the saddest smile…will become the shadows of suffocation…ghost partners in a weary dance…

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where the weave of memory is a sustaining melancholy…

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the drift of grey veils across a late summer sky…

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fading moments of time…

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where imagination cradles a self-created doubt that gnaws into the silence of the dead hours…carving new paths into the wilderness…

Heart deep the melancholy that blooms within his chest.  A bruise blue flowering that cradles his heart in a petal soft despondency.  A rush of memories, indistinct, fragmented.  Soft the smoke from forgotten fires, of summer’s fading into a drift of whispers.  SHE flares into soft focus, in her eyes the moon, its mystery of dreams and desires.  On her lips the promise never spoken.  The sorrow of the taxi’s lights fading into the never known tomorrow.  Such memories are wind driven clouds across the face of a forgotten sun.  They form to collapse to form to collapse, are dark-shrouded pathways to a lifetime ago and he remembers clearly only the silence of a broken phone.

Sleight of hand and the clock unravels.  A photograph rests in the palm of his right hand.  The bells toll of forever ago but the colours of its composition still gleam beneath the developer’s gloss.  As his eyes accustom themselves to this other world other time so the colours fade as if bleached by time’s ghosting hand until only the red of her lipstick remains.  The gash of her smile, the gash of her cunt, the flush of his cheeks for another memory that refuses precision.  The sky is a fire-glow scarlet and the photograph burns in his hand, is reduced in the instant to ashes that pile soft their treason and then vanish at the wind’s nagging insistence.  The sky is now a red canvas that stretches beyond the limits of vision.  It pulses gently, the sway of its rhythm inviting him to step beyond his fear and know the glowing temptation from within.

As he steps into the red absolute so his senses are flooded with a scalding vermillion.  He knows only rage, is the fevered summation of every anger he has ever felt or expressed.  The world is without shape.  The world is without form.  At the furthest edge of vision SHE shimmers into an approximation of being, flickering her sunset eyes and smile of dawn’s slow unravelling.  He remembers and is consumed in the core of the flame.  Nights of bitterest blood collapsing into days of shell-shock ruin when his skull would crack and birth a nation of shape-shifting grotesques.  The Furies would claim him and he would lash blindly at the loveless void, his teeth shaping a snarl set to consume his world.  Within the cornelian realm his senses scream and the faces from memory melt to congeal, become the accusation of eyes that refuse his imprecations for mercy.  He is again the claimant only to her shadow, to her breath on the mirror fading into absence.  He becomes nothing more than a suffering shape in the glowing wilderness.  He closes his eyes to resist the horrors that refuse to yield, a molten tide unrelenting.  He speaks aloud, hurling his words of scorched desolation in an attempt to banish their searing presence.

to know the ideal is to feel our memories in a single weave…a pulse of creation all the more beautiful for its fragility…

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this is the enchantment that I embrace…a trembling flame in the cupped sorrow of my hands…

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the wound of inevitable separation…

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this the moment of the weave’s collapse when the illumination fades to a dust drawn smile of terminal regret…it is the moment when the heart folds in upon itself and is lost…the shedding of hopes accompanied by the silent scream…the hour of rocks and ashes…dust and the faded tracings of tears…a terrible rain…

At this enunciation of the terrible rain the links of fire in his mind turn to whispering ashes. Curled now about a fading centre of self he trembles to feel a shadow falling across his abject form.  The shadow’s cooling softness, like the memory of rain across sunburnt flesh, is a promise of relief he does not wish to deny and he opens his eyes to a looming weight of gigantic black thunderheads.  Swollen bellied they claim dominion the ever shrinking sky.  Within his mind their threat is a tangible presence but his body opens to claim the relief proffered by the black rain that is the sweetest of lashes upon his skin.  Raven-winged darkness descends and in midnight blindness the rain becomes a deluge.  He hears its steaming rush and hiss upon the recently burning ground.

A lightning flash returns him momentarily to the blue past; reveals in its crashing shard of light water rising from the drenched earth.  He stands, is naked, and feels the water cold at his exposed ankles.  The rain continues; the sweetest of lashes become a punishing promise, a foaming inferno.  It rises to claim his knees, his groin, his stomach, his chest, his throat.  Panic is the clutching of spectral fingers at the unravelling fibres of his mind, terror a black vice upon his heart.  The rain continues and the water pours into his mouth, whirlpool swirling down into the vacant depths.  With a guillotine’s rush to consequence the temperature plummets, the waters freeze and he is encased within a block of black-veined ice.

It is to this time out of nowhere, to this place out of nothing, that SHE comes, a shadow that dwells as a permanent hunger within his heart.  But though he attempts to name her he cannot. SHE breathes upon the ice that encloses him and slowly it begins to melt.  Each frosting of her breath, each drop of moisture upon the paling surface is a fragment of time that can never be redeemed.  Gasping and helpless he lies at her feet.  Raising his eyes the immensity of her form he would claim oblivion rather than the embrace of her eyes, their ebony impenetrability.

Sleight of hand and the clock unravels.  SHE speaks and her voice is a traveller from a great distance, her words forming darkly on the air, each lending itself to the construction of a perfect and vast obsidian sphere that is then placed upon his body by unseen hands.  Upon its surface in gleaming letters is written The Distance of Dreams.  Beneath the gathering weight he struggles to connect with life that he senses is being revealed in the text.

it is like stumbling half-blind through darkened alleyways slick with rain…

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haunted by the smeared yellow light of the moon…it is like staring with terminal disbelief into the heart of desire and
remembering the days lost to sensation…the giddying need to claim another climax…

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the prickling cold sweat memories of withdrawal…

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moments in time plucked piecemeal from the weave of memory…

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old wounds reopened…

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alleyways vanish and the rain ceases as illusion falls away…the idle mind’s distortion is a bleaching of colours into absence…it is screams transformed into silence…

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final secrets…

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always beyond reach…

At her oration’s close the spheres have assumed the shape and mass of some unfathomable monument to gods long dead.  Moving beyond himself he becomes the helpless witness to the sight of his own suffering.  From the distance of his shadow’s fall, a distance that allows of no rational measurement, he is the appalled spectator to the fracturing of his physical and psychological self.  There is the awful sound of seams being wrenched apart, the pained stripping of flesh from bone, the shattering of petrified timber, the slow grind of glaciers through incredible ages of agonised time.  Voiceless screams across a flyblown wilderness.  Cries and whispers.  He is cast to the wind’s unknown mercies, cast to the crow-shadowed desolation.  It is the moment when all senses fail as black recedes through red and red recedes through blue until all colours fade and the world is reassembled in a glare of white that blinds his eyes against anything other than the vanishing form of SHE.

Gathered now in a clinical dream of perpetual sorrow he knows only the luminescence of neon.  It is a frigid unknown otherwhere absent of colour, absent of comfort.  Sleight of hand and the clock unravels.  The Distance of Dreams now a cold weight in his right hand.  He gathers the memory of his voice and raises its pale whisper against the white silence.  A distortion of echoes chimes within his skull that multiply until his single voice becomes a delirious babble.

it is an ending I suppose…or at the very least a sigh…a shrug of disconsolate shoulders…a dispassionate surrender…

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a signing off into silence and other worlds…but there is something that remains…something  unutterable…something unnameable…something finally unknown…I may catch a scurrying glimpse in the corner of a sleep-smeared eye…a blue shifting murmur like smoke from forgotten fires…

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and here I know again the hour of our tragic unbecoming…the terrible sadness clouding the ecstatic yet fearful depths of your eyes…the desperate hunger of your lips that in seeking purchase upon the shape of my name found only silence…

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like the drifting of the moon across a cloudless sky…

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but these are mere tricks of the light…

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distant stars fading…the vanishing moment of sea-washed footprints on strange shores…

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it is now the exhaustion and surrender…when awareness fades into absence…

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ghost fragments drifting…the crumbling of shadows when the merciless dawn creeps through unprotected glass…the echoing of dead voices on broken phones…

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the frayed edges of vision…the stranger still scurrying in the corner of a sleep-smeared eye…the blue murmur and refracted light…

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but this is not enough…no matter the depths we plunge in attempting to recover the hollow heart of lost time…no matter the stars we cradle obsessively in the fragile sanctuary of our hands…no matter the names we scratch into tainted flesh or the dreams we breathe from corrupted lungs…for no memory can ever become sensation…

Echoes recede into silence and a memory aches.  SHE, lost within the weave of a perverted rainbow’s detested benediction.  The abandoned hour of her perpetual rain.  He hears vague noises from the unknown beyond.  Ghost fragments of sound that speak of pistons and steam, of gears slow grinding as some great engine contorts through mechanized agonies.  Within the dislocated realm of his senses he seeks the identity of SHE.  Faces gather in a plenitude of confusions, of planes distorted, of angles and perspectives ever shifting.  Mouths open to create silence; eyes closing are reclaimed by the void.  A host of names kaleidoscope forth but will not settle.  A glaze of tears across his cheeks and he seeks to escape from this glimmer of memories that refuse to coalesce into a significant whole.  He seeks escape through The Distance of Dreams but discovers that the pages are now blank and his senses are assaulted with absolute terror, with the realization of despair’s absolute finality.

Within this swarming of horrors a secondary realization is tenderly, tentatively hatched.  A shadow trembling.  A shredded weave reforming.  He fears for its newborn fragility.  Dreads its obliteration at his clumsy touch.  It is a pulsing awareness that he cradles with softest hands and it births within him, with a drowning man’s clarity of vision, the realization that release will only come when he is able to think actively against thought.  When he is able to reach into the unnameable beyond that he cannot yet imagine and so attain the condition of NO THOUGHT.

As these two words are forged in his mind so the manacles are sundered, time is rendered obsolete as space becomes the totality of his conscious experience, emptiness the beginning and end of all realization.  It is the instant unending of seamless union when the divisions between internal and external are erased in the bliss of utter annihilation.  Thought consumes thought to birth incandescent unthought.  He raises a cracked voice, a parched whisper, that through increments of awareness rises to fill the room.

“Obliteration is Purification!  There is Nothing.  I am Nothing.  You are Nothing.  No I.  No you.  No memories.  No past.  No future.  No present.  And as I am Nothing so I transcend the idea of Nothing.  I am transcendent!  Shunyata.  Akasha.  Shunyata.  Akasha.  I.  No.  I.  No I.  NO I!”

As the final ‘I’ reaches beyond its ecstatic climax and surrenders into the silence so the sound of shuffling feet can be heard beyond the room.  A key can be heard turning in a rust-choked lock.  But it is not something that he registers for the room is now empty, a white space that contains only absence.  A door swings soundlessly open and unknown eyes discover the book upon the bed.  As if written on water words tremble to form and a sentence slowly becomes legible.

only the distance remains…the distance of dreams.