JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& the sun no more than a memory
A glaze behind the eyes
A shimmering afterglow
Of days long since birthed
Of days long since ended
The clouds gathering a smothering darkness
Weaving veils of mourning tight stitched across a sky slung low & mean
Swollen with bad intentions
All the usual signatures that deaden the day
Baffling the mind against external sensation
Demanding of the imagination that it turn with ever greater urgency inwards
To wander the hallucinatory weave of worlds within
Where the rain falls its percussion of cutlery
Detonating on the scrubbed surface of a plain deal table
Where the dying man sits in the slumped light carving keepsakes & sorrows
The window is the sky that is the clouds that are the ships that carry their cargo of distance & dreams
& the rabbit vanishes down the hole to discover the orchestra aflame
Birds nesting within fragile skulls
Panthers a sinuous presence within the sighing shadows
Here to think actively against thought
To commune with the Automatic Ghost & its attendant revelations of self & other
The faceless stranger who walks always beside in a glimmer of whispers
To create a sun & a sky & a love more real for their quality of dreaming
Now is the hour when we must unpack the baggage of ashen shadows weighted beneath sleep-hungry eyes
Now is the hour when we must spill our secrets from the scarlet sack
Now the hour of the whispered dream
Now the hour of the murmur
Its inexhaustible nature
Of mountains & oceans
Of silent phones in abandoned rooms
Of inverted umbrellas gathering scorched feathers
Of the empty page & words unwritten
Paint a crimson wound across the hungering heart & discover again that realm of wilderness & fever
Tender
Aching
The west wind whispering of a sublime desolation
The beautiful ruin of songs yet to be sung
So unstitch the silence & sing…

Simon J. Charlton is an ongoing contributor to Synchronized Chaos Magazine. He may be reached for questions or comments at simonjohncharlton@gmail.com.

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& that song on your bee stung lips was the song of the silent snow
Of an earth frost-hardened
Iron-bound & fading into absence
The sky & earth a blank beyond comprehension
The line of the horizon a line beyond sight
Owls emerge in a hush of feathers by darkest midnight
When the song & the dreaming are one
Their flight is a gathering of fatal intent
A gathering of light into the bleak moons of their eyes
Striking the murdering beak
Its fatal consequence
Blood beaded scarlet across the snow’s fragile crust
The twitching eyes of the stricken subsiding into stillness
That song was all songs of heart & sorrow
Of horror & hunger
A song dreamt within the folds of a memory seeping like snow-melt through a time-scarred roof
A song to stun the birds from the sky & wrench the mountains from the earth’s timeless grasp
That song a poem upon my skin
A chilling dazzle of starlight
A caress of moonshadows across sweat cooled flesh
A fingering of beautiful scars through the slow hours of night
When the clock’s hands appear frozen to the moment
Time rendered timeless
The song is for the moment silenced & the only dream is that of light
Spilling illumination like the relief of rain to a parched tongue
Prayers have risen from suffering tongues
Have climbed their weary & crooked path
Have cracked the forbidden arch
Leaching stars to drift their silver contagion…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& the stars that danced in your eyes were a contagion of silver laughter
Coiling me closer to you than flesh
More intimate than death
Bathing our eyes in the blue lustre of moonshadows
A drifting melancholy across the melting snows
Beads of blood washed away into the warming soil
A sorrow sweetest imagined in the dreaming beds of innocence
Blanket deep winter’s jagged edge is fractured
The barren earth gathering its song to birth a pale green promise
Tenderness striving towards an unknown sky
& we by silent communion banishing reason to that wilderness of sorrows
Corrupted Saints & Tarnished Angels gather at the shadowed edges of faded fires to mourn the passing of such innocence
The attainment of experience
A grim wielding of yet grimmer knowledge
A falling of shades
Erasing the word
Silencing the song
But the moment trembles & by merciless white light a realization is agonizingly hatched
The moment deconstructed with stark brutality
That was
Another time
That was
Another place
That was
Another world
Where each day we laid claim to history
Laid waste the scars of winter
Asserting dominion over all things unwritten
All songs unsung
How could it be known that such dreams as we shaped we did so only in water
The surface broken our indelicate touch
Ripples ever expanding
Eventually to fade
Beyond vision
Beyond time…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& as beyond vision so beyond time
A mirror’s surface darkening
Your face lost to the gathering gloom in this room of absence
Yellow wallpaper peels through years of desiccated silence
Windows lost beneath time-deep shrouds of dust
The tousled bed that once held treasure beyond kingdoms
& laughter that unveiled the rainbow’s weaves of shimmering wonders
A fool’s promise
Now shadow-shrunk abandoned
I can no longer dream
No longer cup light like water
My hands a shy child’s awkwardness of gesture
No longer to trace the wilderness of your flesh with a feather’s grace
No longer to close your eyes
Their secret depths of sweetest sorrow
These hands are corruption
Knuckle swollen & crooked
A grief of agonies
Their gathering of prayer a broken steeple
Their gathering of sleep a dreamless mercy
Silent of thought
Absent of fury
Void of frenzy
Instead the welcoming of dark tides to drag me from this weary surface of masks & illusion
Of deception & division
Ladders of smoke ascend to nowhere & ropes of wind lead to nothing
Cradling me into the soundless roiling depths
Ghost children mourn the memories of their own deaths
Drifting aimless tides of unknown oceans
Whisper soft & sad of lives never known
Their murmurs the night
Their night’s eternal…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& out of the eternal night a crust of shadow smudges the moon
We gather our reflections from shattered mirrors in the half-light murmur of dawn
We charge headlong and howling into the pit of grinning teeth
That gnash through spittle flecked snarls
Chain checked they bristle & roar against the imposed limits of their ferocity
Until choked they slump whimpering
Only their eyes telling still the truth of their dire intent
On lolling tongues eyes of blue fire illuminate the forgotten & unwritten who splash the darkness with song
Lash starlight to their drink deep dreams & understand the siren’s sigh as the signature of all sorrow
Its aching beauty of betrayal riding the wind across rocks
Formed to a scarring of broken teeth
A wilderness of broken glass & poison rain
Those unmapped regions of the heart where strange birds explode their iridescence
The air tainted with the stench of burnt feathers
The traces of which hang in acrid suspension
Become a sordid rite of passage the dreamer’s demise
As he conjures the thread that will lead him to a grief older than time
Stories rise with the smoke of abandoned fires & the smouldering ashes of song still strive towards expression
Fated always to fail
Mere smears of sound that gain no
Purchase on the dead- weighted silence
Dreams cool in the white light of a pitiless moon…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& by the white light of a pitiless moon we reheat our dreams
At the expense of our heart’s sacred fire
That they may provide a spoonful of comfort against the cold that hammers a desperate frost across the already wounded land
That gathers frigid skirts in the desperate hour before dawn
Darkness is absolute & deaths foretold in midnight mirrors are bleak company
In their lost depths the swan raises its song to the silence that is the end of all things
Terror follows
& then
Out of silence softer than snow on a child’s eyelids
Sweeter than rain across a desert scorched tongue
Your breathe stirs
Dreamlike it raises
& in its ache of ascension is gathered knowledge of mountains turned upon their sides & oceans calling down the sky
Clouds breaking upon the teeth of the rocks
The nightbirds united in grief
Their songs of eternal mourning drawn from the depthless well
The sheen of their feathers a pool of oil in shivering moonlight
The nightbirds’ song is the crackle & static of hearts in sorrowful disconnection
Beating into silence across an ever widening distance
Horses gather in the shallow light of dawn
Their breath feathering the stillness of the air
Disinterested sentinels
Silver ghosts fading in silver fields…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& silver ghosts fade in silver fields
Carrying us into a sleep of restless dreaming
The horses rage mad in their eyes
Wild in their teeth
Rearing hysterically in their straining against the ever unravelling moment that may never be reclaimed
The crumbling sanctuary of whispered prayers
Where she wanders between the winds
Desire blind in her eyes
Her name collapsed across the creases of my lips
The dry of my tongue shaping its wound into the dying light
Within such partial illumination we mutter fearfully of sunsets & sorrow
Waiting upon the blue of the moon to accompany us into the terminal hour
Hearts melt in the dreaming & love is the shadow that falls alone across the rocking of an empty chair in an empty room
The guttering candle clichés witness
Love the spectre at the forgotten feast
Perched at the shoulders of the silent guests
Their dreams dead in their eyes
The tables groan beneath their weight of expectation
Like children we desire only to reclaim the experience of innocence
The cleansing moment within the core of the flame where her eyes are eternal across the shivers of my skin
Haunting the broken moment as midnight falls
Knowing nothing of mercy
Just the stench of ancient sheets
Chlorine depths beyond darkness
The child clutching in desperation the day to his heaving chest
Waits wide-eyed staring wild for the panthers to pounce
Become instead the progenitor of his own suffering
Detested experience the years that dull his eyes
Sleepless through the straining hours of a blind intensity
Impossible to forget her shadow of song
Impossible to refuse memory’s dark invitation
& so
A ricochet crack of bones forming against thought unwanted prayers
Come to me with a thorn on your tongue
Come to me with your heart of sorrows
Come to me with your eyes of stone
Come to me with your bittersweet longing
Come to me with your words unwritten
Come to me with your songs unsung
Come to me as vast as the sky sunset shrouded scarlet…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& the sky sunset shrouded scarlet casts a hideous glow across the ocean
Driving the ships away to their bottles
The fingers of punishing light reaching beyond the shore to stain the heart of the desert with crimson fear
Driving the dogs in their skins of madness to crash against the fever of their dreams
Their slavering jaws & twitching pelts
Envisioning the famished fallen collapsed along the endless miles of the sun- perished highway
Clouds gather again their darkening weight
Rain falls fat & slow
Vanishing within the sigh and hiss
Ascending invisible to the crisp blue vault
& the rain shall be my witness
& the rain shall transform that image of you I hold closer than skin
Closer than the knowledge of my own death
That tolls its deep bellied charms of persuasion
Reflected in the sloping eyes of the dreamless cat who pisses his intentions to the wind & spies a flower softly erupting from the baked soil
Ants clustering the bell of its mouth windfall drunk
Oblivious to the slow unwinding of sighs through trees that glow with emerald fire
Branches gathered of their own weight
To conclude summer in a shock of impossible iridescence
& then the draining of joy as the Halloween colours surrender to blankness…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& the draining of joy as the Halloween colours surrender to blankness
Trees no more than charcoal sketched outlines of loneliness across barren fields
& such draining of joy leaves only a dusting of words across unwashed floors
The breath of the dying man is the fading of ghosts
The erasing of words from the time-scarred page
The silencing of song from a withered throat
The drifting of lights across a distant harbour
Their guttering neon trails claimed by the extinguishing darkness like the ocean claiming fathoms deep its prize
A slow swoon of moonshadows across a deserted shoreline
A dry whisper of summer grasses through nights of sleeplessness
The scratch of nocturnal creatures hungering through blind tunnels
Seeking port of entry the dying man’s world of fading memories
His interior kingdom of starshine and moonglow cataract scuffed to tarnished sepia
His fingers a scaffold of suffering
Blue veins raised through time-creased flesh
Retreating into his unconscious depths
Where his muscles still glow their sheen of toiled sweat
& sinews straining know nothing of limits
The world a weight carried without concern his ocean-broad shoulders
All now fallen in the torrent of his years
Leaving only unknowable sorrows
Beyond depth
Beyond dreaming
The song of the solitary nightbird his only witness save these words
Cupping the glory of his grief with the tenderness of a hatchling child conjuring a wilderness where the paths of suffering are conquered & erased
& yet such paths are written unconquerable
Beyond erasure
Naming the unfortunate hour
Naming the absent guest who makes of this heart a desolate acreage
Her shadow falling to delight the hunger in a stranger’s eyes
Leaving only the desolation of prayers muttered in stale corners
Decayed reflections cast out of bitter mirrors
Fragments of memories no more than dreams
The depthless groans of an unnoticed passing…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& the depthless groans of an unnoticed passing
Are the songs of winter ghosts
Voices of desolation spiralling out from the depthless well
Desire prowls its animate hunger
A panther looming in the swarming shadows
She the wind that scatters my bones by starlight & sorrow
She each horizon that glows with lost sunsets beyond retrieval
My bones a liquid forming semblance & shape by the grace of her command
Her tongue of fire & roses
Her breathing softer than the touch of feathers upon silence
The slow rise & fall of her chest
The soft down of hair across her arms that gather the moon in bruised yet tender fellowship
Its cast of blue shadows deepening into ocean sorrows where these fingers tap out the ruins of solitude tasted like ash
Like burnt feathers across the inarticulate tongue
Dreaming the child blanket deep secure against the underbed swarming of crocodiles snapping quicksilver in the fog of his nights
Safe from the ghost ships that drift spectral through the clutter of his dreams
Their rigging mere tatters of sea fog
The seabirds broken of heart within their terrible songs of abandonment
He drifts to those depths of blind sorrow
His father’s ashes slip eternally through his fingers
Voices join in silent song
Faces loom waxen & gigantic
Their eyes condemning
On a loop of time
Unending
He could bow their heads to a bloody breaking as the storm rises at the turning of her face into the shadows…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& at the turning of her face into the shadows he hears again the weary sound of a train fading into the unknown west along rails of silver desolation
Frontier barbers convulsed within obsession shave the moon & quarter the light
Smiles like bitter sickles
Cold memories massaged into weary bones
Cupping the flesh against the sirens’ song
A bleeding of desire across infinite skies
The horses are insane in the fields
The oceans tabletop flat
& the mountains turn their backs
This road leads nowhere
Its litter of glass & ashes like a shroud fallen across her dreaming self
I shed my many skins & shape my smiles to gather the silken hush of her breathing into my sheltering hands
Reflected in the silver vacancy of a mirror
Candles burn backwards & and the face of the clock is a congealed leer
Hands locked to the moment of discordant spasm
But time cannot be denied
& the clocks hands ride through their agonies
Time reborn as midnight
Falls…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& as midnight falls the windows shudder
The wind telling of the unseen clouds flight
Trees bending against their nature
Blue shadow deep the fields are an unkempt oceans
Sailors reeling drunken and gigantic
The tide running in their rum heavy veins
Souls condemned adrift and outcast
No lights to call them home to shattered wives & broken teeth
No lights to sing of life
Only the crushing depths in darkness eternal
Soft bodied fish feast rise to the call of sodium flares spilling their light across the greasy surface
Skeletal leaves drift in the attitude of broken fists
The surface trembles & the oil trapped light is a rainbow collapsed
Its weave so delicate
Now a fading trace of nearly forgotten wonders
A ripple ever diminishing as dreams groan against their cleaving through the terminal hour
Cats prowling grey suburbs of sleeping beds
The breath of complacency fogging curtained windows
The grass hissing in the backyard and fog rolling across the waxed perfection of Sunday satisfaction bonnets
On the air a taint of roasted meat
Children’s laughter spills like light
Glistening the air
The cats are retreated to their twitching dreams
The dogs nosing the shadows where the song of the eternal drunk shelters…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& the song of the eternal drunk shelters within the hour that grows ever colder
Each star stencilled into place on a depthless darkening canvas
The realm of shifting shadows
The ether electric
Unwrap the egg for Ophelia is crying
Filter dreams through the grey undone
This cradle of stars
Pallid refuge
Her eyes in the crying light of dawn
Her pale flesh its watercolour tenderness
& yet her absence is huge in the night
So strike these words from the ledger
Unplug the phone & wait on the terminal weight of closedown
Beneath which remains the scurrying interior where the Automatic Ghosts dwells heart-deep & unwritten
The shoreline of faded lights where lost souls wander nightmares of ill-directed mania
Scrubbing their hands against their obsessions & compulsions
Incessant tides of filth that deny the scouring fury
It is a peeled rawness of suffering
Flesh reduced to scarlet tatters until the shock of moonwhite bone beneath mind- forged manacles that refuse release
The clock tumbles through its cogs and springs
Isolates the hour to tumble its charms
The moon surfaced along the length of the horizon
Ghost light across the green ocean where we sway into the drowning cup that will carry us down to where the language of rooks is the language of dreams
To where the weasels burrow the soft firmament
Where fragile lace is laid across our dreams…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& fragile lace is laid across our dreams
Its patterns revealing of upside down mountains & inverted crosses
Paint the slippage of my smile huge across your canvas tattered against the frigid blue of a midwinter sky
Your brushes frame me in an existence never known
That other world where my fingers never bled in the summer sharp grass & the birds were silent within the nest of my skull
The panthers sleeping within dreams of sublime repletion
My eyes never dulled bottle deep
& the nights held only dreams of dreams
Spiralling notes of blue guitars
The birthing of drums across the silence
The song unsung a trembling anticipation
& breath echoing pulse echoing breath
Pluming upon the frigid air
Footprints crackle the surface of fresh frozen snow
Beads of blood hold the memory of the owl’s strike
The wind a feathered hush
We are ghosts of the eternal misapprehension of mirrors
Gathering fractured hands to cup forgotten prayers
Bending light beyond the day at hand
Unfolding the hours
Laying mercury & imagination at the feet of our dawn solemn mistress
She feeds the swoop of starlings
Sews shut the beaded eyes of crows
Calms the horses & commands the winds
Traces an unknown name into water & shivers into the shadows of sleep where we gather midst the shifting realms of delirious awareness
Penitents of the starving heart and severed conscience
Imploring the rider of the pale horse
The jester of crooked smile & dancing eyes
The songmaker & storyteller conjuring fire & blue mist
Consecrating the hour in pills & ethanol until the song is sung & the story told
Challenging the tides
Following the moon’s swaybacked passage across the night that is held in the skinny fist of the faceless stranger
Who whispers of serpents & sorrow
His eyes sordid pearls that shine out of the dark’s ravenous maw
He casts stones across the surface of the dreaming ocean
Shattering the moon
The stars trembling into absence
He curls his spine into a question mark and vanishes into a storm of feathers…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& a storm of feathers tumbles from an umbrella sky
Hands carved in wax are totemic
Their melting ritual
Within the hungry shadows beads of blood form on a silken purse where money glows
Mothers stitch smiles into memories where bones like milk leach into the barren ground
Soft sculptures eventually to burst forth & follow the sun
Watchmakers collude in darkened rooms
Eyes shaded visor green
Hiding the moon in a scarlet sack
Picking their teeth with springs & coils
Communing with ethanol to the point of a divine fury
A knuckle of fists seeking collision
Bones cracking & blood flowing ankle deep
The smoke of failed dreams dragged deep across suffering lungs
By midnight neon glare gutters gaping like drained wounds welcome The Fallen & The Abandoned
The Ditch Angels have eyes like magnolia brushstrokes
They are frenzied within their personal darkness…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& frenzied within their personal darkness
Words splinter across parched lips
Muttering a failed dominion where thorns burst through fading flesh
Opening wounds to be stitched by the failing light of a season-weary moon that sits low in a sky pulsing feebly with the memories of storms & fever
Of vision & passion
The stars have fled into darkness absolute & unyielding
My hands groping to shape a dream beyond naming
My tongue crippled across cracked & broken teeth
I stare the clock to no purpose
Pull a dose of poison across my lips & know again in a whirlwind’s reaping the bottle as cross
The moonbeams spilling their liquid flow
The gutter piled stinking a rancid corruption
For it all comes back to the shifting threads of memory
To the song unsung
The words unwritten
The moments conjured
The moments collapsed
Faithless flames guttering
The melody extinguished…

JANUARY WAS THE WOUND

& the melody extinguished is the song never sung
So we are written
Unsung
Puffs of smoke banished to the strengthening breeze
Dreams pale exhausted into absence
Old bones creaking in the weary darkness
The sickness gathers detested skirts
Harridan howls & music hall laughter
A piano plays in an empty room
The hours are lipstick smeared & stinking
The patrons spill into the ocean-deep night
Cup-deep drunken they sway in weary repletion
Behind the footlights the jaded comedian unbuttons his jocularity reveals a cold smile
A razor slit beneath eyes like exhausted coals
Welcoming me home to the rancid hearth
Where stagger the grey stinking remnants
Where eternal fall the unfortunates who could never find favour with themselves
The isolated & obscure who slide between the raindrops & know the relief of shadows
Birds claiming sanctuary the nests of their skulls
To whom the mirror’s reflection is ever the shattering snarl of wilderness dogs consumed by a ragged hunger
Lay cards across greasy flesh & know that all hearts are black
Communing with the ether
Divining secrets by ethanol
Scribbling unspoken names in the dust of the years
Raising bleary sleep-starved eyes to the unforgiving dawn
The wreck of the sun
Its detested passage
So we curl in upon ourselves
Broken flowers long forgotten
& so we are written
Of sorrows & panthers
Of mountains & oceans
Of stars & moonshadows
Of blood & feathers
Of innocence & experience
Of dreams & mirrors
Of ghosts & the faceless stranger
& so we are written
Unsung
Stale words no more than a memory
Drifting eternal across a silent screen…