#Thread - of dusk and halcyon days

[vallitevoice]

It's late. Way past late. Azura had been tossing and turning in her bed but sleep would not grant her repise. Azura finally rises, deciding that slumber will not come tonight. Perhaps this is an opportunity to observe the monastery more closely now that most students and faculty are in their beds. While she had decided to live a quiet life in Abyss, the songstress can't help but feel curious from time to time about what is above her sanctuary.

The dark hides her figure well. Now she is nothing but a flitting fragment in the dark. The Vallite forsakes lantern light altogether, though. Nothing can be safe enough and there is no one to trust in this world. Slowly, she makes her way through the grounds. It's quiet, just right for a change. The moon is clear and comfortable, giving her a sliver of happiness.

Finally, she approaches the head of the academy. Even if it might not prove useful now, it would be good to get acquainted with the grounds. In the faint moonlight, Azura makes out a large figure feeding the dogs and cats. What? While she knows it's time to turn back, it's too late. Any further movement would make her known. Azura tries to look closer with the barest light but she cannot see the figure's face. Well, there are only so many cards left to play.

"I would never guess that someone comes here to feed these little guys at night," she finally settles with.  @paragonknightxander

of dusk and halcyon days

[secondsovereign]

[WATERFALL] - It takes the bravest of hearts to jump from so high, but all hazards have been carefully removed to make for only the safest leap of faith down the rapids. Take the plunge, or shove someone else into taking it!

Despite the roar of the water, the flecks of frost that dotted the air around them, it was the quietest place they could have been – the most at peace. So too were they themselves, although it was not immediately apparent that anything had changed within them to any outside observer. Both appeared as quietly distant as ever, but without the gently tremoring thread of tension between them.

It would never be eradicated entirely - such was the way of it, to hold so staunchly to an ideal as to see it achieved in only one specific manner - but neither would it wrap around them, suffocating. Instead, the air between them might shift, the ripple of recognition, and occasionally of respect.

Kevin did not turn to look when he felt it, kept his eyes out on the expanse of blue, the shifting dark of the ocean beneath the high sun, the glimmer of something in the distance.

"We cannot know how long it will remain so peaceful," he said, and while it wasn't mean as a threat, he was sure the other man knew well enough that all it took was the gentlest prod to send the surface tension to spilling over.

"But if it is only for another few moments, I'll be grateful."

THEY LIVE ETERNITY IN A MOMENT, grasp the grains of sand that pass through their outstretched fingers in hopes of one moment turning into two, spiralling endlessly into the depths of the abyss in fear of grasping too tightly to these fleeting halcyon days. These pictures, these picturesque paintings are little more than fragments of a different life, of things that could have been if Fate had dealt them both kinder hands, yet Joachim is almost desperately clinging to them either way, wishing that it may never end despite the inevitability.

Welt remembers reading the Kaslana Oath time and time again, memorising the pact born from the sacrifices of the man before him, yet, it is sad in a way. There is a truth that both have shared, a realisation that is born of their time spent in the space where no stars dwell, an understanding that neither will ever let go of those core ideals, will never convince the other to loosen their grasp. Yet, they pretend, they clutch to that distant phantom and wear it like a shroud forever more, this is the truth of the man crowned deliverance and the man who bares the hopes of the world like a crown of thorns.

Welt looks to the sun that begins to threaten the horizon with its descent, wills the bubble of timelessness to birth itself in the same way he has so many times before, a desperate attempt to stave off the creeping dusk as his gaze focuses on the pull of a distant world. "It's hard not to miss it, isn't it?" He speaks of Earth, but his tone longs for peaceful days, simpler days when neither needed to bear the burdens they did, yet something else lingers in the depths, a longing for the myriad phantom worlds he saw when training Bronya all those years ago, the worlds in which fate did not harbour this path for them.

Perhaps come the morning they will be enemies once more, but for now, for tonight, they can linger here beneath crashing tides and joyous laughter. Neither can make promises to the other, fate, the cocoon, the honkai, their lives have never been that kind, and yet here they sat in comfortable silence, watching a sun that would never set inside a bubble born of countless entangled emotions. "Yes... I'd like that... Kevin..."

[stupendoustrashmagazine]

A 10-pp. selection of poems

Personage The terrace offers a point. From this point a view. It's only a stop-off; it assumes the motion requisite for temporary stays will continue. The speculative friction required to stop those passing through would require planned extinction; would require war against generations of persistence across biome, suffering & misery magnified it remains threatened always. Building requires digging. Digging creates hollows to be filled. A move past botanicals—it doesn’t exist. A pulse in the web. Walk toward beyond the view: journey’s luck to close in on production. Pace picks up, dusk’s dis- appearing light invites one in: welcome.   Prelude Tonight the act of naming fell through the floor. We speak permeable solids inflected by light. Skull’s grid moves units indistinctly: windshield & palette cross paths, hatch an Ovidian shift, difixiones to devotio; the faux-gorithm teases pantheon from closet, traces flotilla’s down, hot air balloons, celebrating you or prairie fair. You’ll learn to kill that hunger for thunderhead drift. I follow shapes of your speech, attend to your syntax, taste your configuration; to keep up I sketch stick figure, code hypertext script cascading in style, the result of which confirms, again: we’re lost. Plot is a plait’d plat, flatland destination & another assemblage? I want aura to invite aural meiosis, aurora splitting into rural roads, for the bassoon quartet to be forgiven for plastic bag reeds on my direction, for aria to, moody, move into a different mode & travel out through spring’s open window; I want the racket splenetic melancholy, for dynamic accompaniment fit for unfashionable passion, the like. That state of exilium you described as a quantum between. Always pain hover triangulated. Frame Matisse with me, guilty stokes both— say the magnolia blooms shall remain & not at the expense of any other but they do not. Creek diverted, river dead: suck’d dry wax & cone though still dragonflies are purple, abdomen metallic sets of curvature & husk. Nearby: field of lightning. We walk through fjords of light forking down, resisting electrocution, naturally. The taste of our nakedness waking in early in your bed, black walnut leaves catching first October light. If I leave the house or library I sit on benches in Walmart or go to the Coralville mall alone, growing frosting in my chest & English ivy in my sinuses, scribble notes with my fork-tongue alone. Walk with me this once, again, into notional forest, ash-grey landscape dotted in umber, newborn beetles radiating, cobalt blue.   Skykomish in Summer In Goldbar Washington boys crossed river with driftwood staves feet slick-step between slime & rock, underbelly of serpentine but liquefied, algal nets stretch’d between toes, Like scales without edge—stiffened Cold after crossing they crawl’d up & into caverns allowing in fractions of sun but they felt cradled in a way shielded, intimacies there before they dove into round pools spun by spit current’s swirls, the bank of the cove gritty enough for a grip as they’d climb out out of sorts, alive they’d look at the congregation from which they just emerged tangle of nets, sunken conflagrations their bodies against the wake pressed a force there, quiet, endless, sound moving through medium beckoning, shape taking a form inky jar, turbine spat out from the bottom of an oil well.   Grass Cuts Nyanza Street. South Tacoma—we’re on A hill & approach it, tall grass, foreclosure. Blackberry brambles thick on the lawnslope purple, thorns & stickers, irritable touch. Boss climbs roofs with too steep a pitch; Hauls mowers from mud when I mire it Good in a ditch. His daughter today works with us, we weedwhack waist-high grass, rake clippings & tufts long enough to be hay in neat quadrants. They steam mornings we make it out as early as seven. A canopy borders the two-acre lot. I stare – emptying’s substance against nothingness of total inattention’s default setting. Metal asphalt shingles, roof’s pitch steep Low ground valley & everywhere: unhinged Botany thrives. Ivy plaits helices Around five-feet in diameter firs, in follow some twenty feet up when Jamie grabs a pitchfork. See something. It skitters through raked mounds, Goes through tunnels punctured By tines or cleat-roller aerating the lawn She shanks its body up against weed- blocker & brick. A metallic pling rings fades, she scoops it somewhere— this brought up her enjoyment killing, dressing, & cooking fowl. We move more grass I looking for insects, think of meat saws yawning day & night do they Day & night, fumbling—sound like chain saws or Colorado cattle feedlots, cottonwoods standing by during a drought, the sugar factory’s honey-butter burnt hair & soccer cleats left for week in a car. Mulch, juncos, midmorning sun on, sun off, Rake, return, pile, killing rabbits once we snapped their necks wrong, twice partial Breaks, botching it, both shaking we Shared an acute horror in our optics. Then we crushed their skulls with a hammer, But that’s when we lived near the volcano, when the halcyon sensation when standing at the bottom of Nisqually glacier, the sheaves of receding rose-grey gravel in aggregate felt like meteoroid field sent to grave resting place, armatures of old growth First & hemlocks in steep fractals jagged landings in glaciated river so thick with silt it looked an ash-blue sleeve. We take HUSKY 55-gal. trash bags of grass to the organic waste dump. We smell like gasoline & two-cylinder oil & grease. When I get home my house mama says Pew-whee! You smell like Marty; you smell like something that kills.   Shards What was it that came out the water in a sled a Wayward gesture young-&-stuffed Mess to common rendition Duchamp’s Pearl Neckless? In his version The sledgehammer fell square to carcass/shard/caress. You wanted/saved like anyone else wanted, A sequence of diadems, diamondic scales on A yellow python’s back. Be-figure, a mole Amongst slag pits, a slog truce from igneous slab. Bats tunnel boroughs, funnel rigmarole We keep one ray or dot of spun molybdenum— Torque at the end of the…—that glint relieves Grog, luster, a clutch lets cable go its single, slackening line. True fundament! come to the party— From up there, from below? Come beat through this bog’s Excrement, creakily swung skew joints, fallen centurions, Carve away gluttony,—an economic model Levels the field of every thistle’s purple demarcation. Remains disappear. Binary caskets Glisten polyurethane on oak grab it… If - you – get – to – the – place To – get – you – the – records: Prefabricated dirt tastes discard bottles, Skittling crevice, crick or face, collections Binding fractures. That which goes unseen. Make & model, blue castes. Signature mummies. Huffing. That kinetic thrill Pushing hammers through Masonite, Bulls snorting horns at a flag The very requiem of the horse’s eye A black so dark it blued the muscle in deafening Postures of grey fog: a way: body: yes, a shard, Blight-bit, a descending distend, steep bends— A weather system approaches Centripetally, a large unformed cat, To distillate—nothing—to pray to the grommet, One ventricle, alas—poor valve, the idea Of the river. The river. Is. Itself. Course vessel in a Losing resonance a tributary vacillation tip-toed beyond A materiality that is, is not, any old trick.   Spilling the Flour Began not thrush’s stamp, nor cardinal blue whistle but The sour flack going out, the waist line spilt. Emptying cylinders combed in sheet metal corrugate, Fill another vision, the conveyor belt muscle Persuasion. Sometimes a harvest sits like pheasants Before buckshot, freeze-frame, promise cannon— What will be. Corn stalks chopped at maggot root twist Wind crowing a parade, sans confetti, sans soleil. Platoon the distant mist, forgetting it’s metal multiplied In numbers not quantity. Not fog. That’s fire But the wound continuum in ears splits hair mimics a mime Brown cerumen flax spreads flat lays down in- To a line. Elements bind fetch needle & borrow thread Stitch from denim you see the voices hear. Spiders don’t mean to. Bats garner a wick of light Against normalcy of shadow. When is not Important. Con memory commemorate ingrown toe- Nail sunk into rib-line fleshed out for sake Of sake of being. Forsaken lake: equivalent to constrictor Vine, not theorem. Carpet moves imagined Equestrians run between alder beetles the abandoned Horses heaving in the meadow along the orange Vector. The chemilume incision furcates the dark shells Guarding liquefied innards, the many legs.   The Awful Cutlery Traveling by Greyhound between Dominguez- Escalante and Grand Mesa National forest, We’re full enough In the filled up four-wheel lurch on blacktop I-70 elegantly swung across Secluded Rocky Mountain scrag. “This shit’s too country” a woman remarks. You see what she means. The rosaries Of apricot, peach, cherry, and plum disintegrate Vineyard to vineyard to bottle To California, mid-stride Maybe she means. Maybe Damian The off-shore welder tells me about hanging above The water, rigged up, slung out, strapped in, Gluing thousand-degree metal to solid stack Rigs, working twelves till three months pass So he can go—“I go everywhere”—to complicate Home—“Love Alabama but I need to see it all The whole shit.” Dusk is a disk with a predictable arc. I’m here twenty years, this red land. From bottom canyon ditch combs Of bygone eon drag across mesa, leaving scar, Evidence of water, wind, shaggy coats left To bear, bear themselves, on other creatures Pitching, tent-by-tent, a story, a new story, old. The mother tells you, you & me, of Rocky Mountain Flats, the Climax Uranium Mill, A fire beginning with a crack, croaking a Groan to a glow, plutonium then, dizzied in dust, Vapored amoeba flung across the whole Front Range. Cows were the first to show up Without usual parts: eye, ear or triple-tongue. Do I believe anything I say anymore? Set that head against Plexiglas. Feel the chill— A lavender fork makes an albino tarantula Of sky, yet there’s a merge, the speech Corks off. Into each direction, asymmetry Between passengers a music nonetheless, The hiddenness behind tall sediment walls Now, this cutlery mass Stalking hungry movers, clawing at the dirt To reveal the intact pores of a distant femur.   Safe/Way Courtesy Clerk In the aisles of nondescription halogen baleen Sifts shop-cart rift-racket & geriatric dances. Old/new toothpick paradigm cues a mist/turn: Old is to new as young is to old, meaning Painting the urn in synthesizer blue still undoes. The unheard chambers are sweeter. Polyethylene is a mon-on- monomer ladder of Chain-stacks, bindings, writes the blurb We’re all in this together. Savings save you From it, from it you’ll be saved the lapse: Western tanager memorizes its own memory Launched in citrus beneath the varied canopy. Really: in this Safeway a woman chutes Hundreds of one-liters into the re/cycle Machine. She leans on cart rail, no wheel. Her child helps he laughed he threw them into The bin, the coins emerged. Someone said Music moves from a fix-point fence post, studded Down into ground. He’s right—what is there to do But do, bag up a customer’s purple cabbage Dreams stuff them sweet potato mush- Room into room, sacked. They’d blister From oxygen’s lack they’d try to make it, try To survive. Wouldn’t it be courteous To curtsy before bags bulge as balloons stuffed With vision? Even in tulip & rose section I Hand out the foxtail elixir, all the loot; were they Bodies turned down, turned into what now, soup? The day is butternut squash but wouldn’t A lizard do today let’s get all the gutter newts Recalling now how Scooby returned From a long drive he threw an iguana On the chopping block on the counter top In the apartment he was making soup He sawed off its head. What was inside The eyes? Nothing much. Eye cones con, resemble The black glass of a tick’s back. You’ll try To reach in & what — find out who looks back Tell yourself that’s you looking back. A gaze. Scooby ran cool water over the head, on it. Its jaw opened and closed again & again. “This is good soup that’s what happens After the head’s cut off.” What would the body Do after, what voice would reclaim itself, Would reconvene re — gather protest against scores Settled, dust made fall silk, unnoticed? What takes when taken back, how’ll things Exactly as they are be exactly as they’d been? What music shapes the marina, the guitar Rustling out a poison ivy arpeggio to become The place and the things of things as they are? How do you bargain or take the lead For the dreaded duet? The mouth opens cilia Tongue juts out pink premonition the sky boom Nitro’s paisley maize radished in the Word-Ward. Blue pollen doesn’t exist but when the man Who looks one-hundred buys the dyed-blue orchid & says “it’s for my” I cut him off & ask but He just laughs & says “it’s just a flower it’s just An empty bag” & walks out, away, toward Automatic sensor doors, glass partitions that open Like megafauna with a belly full of a world on fire.

[sasorikigai]

@sonxflight continued from here (x)

His remarkable boldness has become an entire confession, a handbook of burning desire; it has his heart, it has his tears and it has Jack; how Hanzo comes to crave the samurai with his soul, all on fire like summer dusk. A longed-for lightning strike. How the air he breathes, breaches through the coalescing personal space crackles, as the walls and the floorboards of his meager personal quarter hums electric. Hanzo Hasashi’s world was, and always has been small, but so full of the other; in their blaze as his days and nights have been rescued, no longer held captive by the stifling air of Netherrealm nor the conflagration of his guilt, ravaging through his four walls of his miserable prison, with far tapestry of his horizon completely shattered and reduced to rubble. 

No longer all these things that he’s done floats through the lost reverie of his mind; Hanzo’s whispered breaths, the pacing of his veins, the tranced lust floating through the clouds of his psyche as Hanzo’s broader expanse of shoulders hoist up his beloved to paint him further with ink of his venereal need; for their love to mean so much more a confirmation and a declaration. 

“If you would excuse my recklessness for once, for I would very much like to take a leap and see you in all of your nakedness; as I too, would like to submerge beneath the sea, salt and fire heavy on your body,” for Hanzo loves only to be loved back, he wants to be wanted; there may be selflessness within him, but he is selfish in that he’s supporting his own cause, before he considers Jack’s. Potent musk and oak - austere and dry in its resonance - saturates thick as his careful ministration palms over the growing tent of Jack’s Yukata; how he weaves these threads, as a web of insatiable want become a swirl of decisive unfurling as he lets the garment flow freely, as fueled passion injects further energy into his realized dreams. 

“Would you-” he breathes halcyon warmth over agitated steadiness of Jack’s heartbeat; how he wants to incite further exploration and excitement as they break and build each other whole in ensorcelling captivation. “Would you be willing to explore further and crumble our boundaries for good?” 

[libidomechanica]

Untitled (“Nay, not”)

laying thrown Their own lands, Floods and empty  honour unhappy quest. Nay, not my fingers  all as fair. with a solitary  nightly experience to  taketh his brown to herself, relation  me, thou can, then with  curl that she got and my favour, and  gave cut of us in ourself  degree; thus much he of wean  with whom the bites? We hold our  darkenst the heap of  such, a bachelor help me at stretched  by the halcyon days I wanton  made to faint,— a Rose all hither 

wed lie! About with light: I  sunned in a rarity,  prophesy youth remove, while I went, to 

the park putting about  an ye whale-bone my good of  the him, if ever grainy  dusk toward too the view, the  women. And for Love is  ale-house wi a cliff, whose cried, soon maid to  be, which heaunly mirage as  uninvolvd and from the caring  phrase lips, and who keep thou find, a honest  with thine arm, and in  thee; I wishes, and lads the pleasure  dividing tear-flood— In true that  I saw these thread, Little many this. then ? and  when we sit neuer I bore  up smoking north; at eve and down upon  his force and I am man! Every  fairest may love you know, while  now it from the unchangd by the  very harvest house. And if  she mastered less, Cloe is no Gordian king  still Nature, stands and faire peers; or foolish  fields, her she communicated snapdrag  could trust too rare alive or dew-like name  melissa: ready clasp and cut a  garden, at all… he that glistend, and tale.  Have leave-silk was, and bear, and  for down, and more. With  grimly sprent was a son to  my flower, imagining for  thered in facts. But with  heavy eyes, and fickled her Eve, will  needed to with  Ida, full of an awkward  lie down, heard her to win! In good  wings: chestnut-flourishing moon throught  her hand. For still unto that diamond  enteresting intelling gardenias  blow, my heart is over ever at  and a deceit. And make most  evil still her hair woodland was  truth maist set the lassie evenings  dewy green; but if she hear mair mercy  vould raise by bound; though a goddess court, and  ill, I didnt birds as,uttering him  on to the secret  knew, and snares coming, and, oh,  take, as any where was  to pretense to Friend, myrrh, and  cut upon my trembling must met  he hate bedded limbs, too, false for the  daffadown. Till it is first creatures, 

lips have smell out of a straight find.

[paragonknightxander]

A soft purr emitted from the feline as it circled Xander, practically jumping into his hand with each pet. He was certainly an outgoing cat, seeming to think of himself as one of the dogs. Something about spending time with animals was calming for the knight.

Perhaps it offered him a sense of comfort knowing that something’s love was unconditional, simple, pure. If he didn’t come to the training grounds, he found himself here to cope with his own regrets. Especially when memories of his father would haunt him non-stop, always lingering only coming into full view when given quiet time. At this point he wished it would just leave him, maybe he doesn't deserve that. Humans are so complicated… He couldn’t find it himself to rest– not yet.

The comfort begins to slightly fade as he feels the presence of another nearby. It would be surprising to come across anyone aside from guards at this hour, it could be his own mind though he couldn’t allow himself to relax. Nevertheless his suspicions were soon confirmed upon hearing a lady’s voice… A familiar one at that.

At this point he could no longer be surprised when encountering those he could recognize, he turned around to face her. Sure enough his eyes were met with a gentle face, bright blue hair illuminated by the moon as well a soft burning of a candle he kept nearby.

It’s the princess he always wished to know better,

the family he was kept away from,

Azura.

Though he wished to not be seen like this, it was already too late for that. “Oh, I was only making sure they were being taken care of... However, I must agree it is surprising to see another face at this hour, especially yours.” Is everyone here? It certainly felt that way. He offered a calm expression and something that almost resembled a smile, “It’s good to see you again.”

of dusk and halcyon days