avalonmylove

[avalonmylove]

My Dearest Melancholy

I.

How could I chide she Who roves through memories; Whose voice tickles And gaits about The mind of one yet firmly devout?

I admit I felt her for a moment — Domiciled under same roof — As though living beside me was she,  And her love for me resolute.

I held her in her lightness, (This wraith of love’s spirit) As she decried the sight of I, Whose embrace and shared delights Brought back the weight of life. In flashes I recalled our life spent as one Whose choiring voice silenced the sun. With our destinies chosen, And our tatters interwoven, We basked in our noise, though our nadir was sung.   II.

What am I to think Of an organ that spends its days Dandling moments and frames; That fools me into thinking a sequence mine, Though a memory is but an image courting time?

Yet, I remember her dancing about the hearth, Twirling and waltzing to the rhythm of fire; An arch show for a lone admirer. This must be a memory of finer days; I hear the lilt of my heart in its sway.

While remembering the flicker and flare, Of her skipping feet and her manic stare, A photograph among the rubble, I found. And in it: no dancing, no fire Though, on the couch, a lone admirer.

Ah, memory (taut in youth yet weary in age) Recalls my heart for her in childish days. The splendour of remembrance, it’s as bent as a bough, And as her face appears, I shall know: It is not she. III.

Yes, memory, my dearest melancholy, Forever condemned for your trickery. These hours spent between her and I — Illusory, fractured — Are now singularly mine. And as I forget her, Is it an act of castigation? Have I been trying to forget, Or has she left softly, Like sins that depart the body in ablution?

Now what am I to do With these memories of mine? A collection no longer plagued by She, the wraith whose gait has slowed; Forgotten by the very mind she roved.

Well, dear, it seems to me a youthful dream, To revisit these memories Of a love resolute. But now, alone, I say my truth… Steadfast in my movement away from you.

[avalonmylove]

Excerpt from story titled ‘April, All Those Years Ago’

He sits on the remote pasture. It is late and desolate, though the ambience of the night carries with it an aura of sanctity. To the right of our protagonist lies a pond, surrounded by plants that occasionally touch the land, but are bound to the rhythm of the winds. Disturbed by the vexation of memory, he lies down and closes his eyes in the hopes of conjuring halcyon images to counter a resounding unrest. He falls into a profound sleep. [Stephen and Amory walk upon paved path in the midst of an illuminated forest. It is the quintessence of summer walks. They question one another, seeking advice on the vivacious and perplexing life they individually lead. The only conscious thought the sleeper has is that he knows neither. Both are wearing clothes of distant times; the formality of the twenties would be a category under which to identify their outfits. They begin their inquiry] Amory: I find myself unaware of what surrounds me. Do you have that sensation; as though the exterior and interior do not mingle? Stephen: [smoking a cigarette] Sounds like a Cartesian end; the solipsistic conclusion. Amory: No, no. I’m devoid of quarrels with our maker and fend off such desperate ends. Stephen: What is it that heralds such distrust? Amory: Rosalind is the herald of all distrust. Her image instigates distrust in myself, even. Have you ever loved? Stephen: Very little. Amory: I shan’t clamour on about the enigma of love, but the fluctuation of things felt and things lost; squandered emotions forged in the relationship itself, such are things that I cannot describe to a man of little love. Stephen: Relations of all kinds are predisposed to an end. Tis a finite world, dear friend, providing us with momentary bliss and the illusion of transcendence that you title ‘love’. However, I find these cures, too, in poetry, music and sex. Yet in these activities unity remains splintered, for I read the words of dead men, listen to the voices of dead souls, and sleep upon a bed shared by a dying breed. Amory: [chuckles] Planned obsolescence? Stephen: Righty O, Amory! Ay, tis all planned. Amory: [touching the branch of a tree] Would it be beneficial to lack sentience? Stephen: Never. Amory: [ogling the trees] “I love not man the less, but nature more.” Humans are built to revere nature. Stephen: [pausing, looking pensively at his surroundings] No. Byron had a taste for the aesthetic of all things. This taste was not restricted to nature alone. Amory: [turning swiftly to Stephen] He revered the Dionysian ideal, too! Stephen: [laughing] A caricature of Bacchus himself! It is the balance that, if   fulfilled, would function as the solution to your quandaries. It is the need for equilibrium shared among the exterior and interior worlds; these things that you theorize have no connection. In the division of mental hemispheres lies a chasm separating revelry and logic — the Dionysian and the Apollonian imprisoned under same roof, yet wary of introduction. These two mechanisms of thought will remain a supposition in the collective psyche; uncertain, cloudy, the children of some dim fog. To express such unity would be first to lift the murk and to then illumine the path before us. Amory: Would beauty arise out of their unification? Stephen: I am unsure. It is of the few things that have yet come to light. Tis the great lacunae between now and what follows. We may not derive from past civilizations an understanding of that which has never been successfully retrieved. Amory: Well, conspiring theosophists might call upon their Lemurians, perhaps the Hyperboreans. Stephen: [laughing] The Atlantians are still among us! O, ancients of the ancients, how hard you fell!  All is futile but change. Amory: Why are you absent love, Stephen? Stephen: I have loved. I have always loved my family. I live regretting many actions, particularly it is omission that plagues me. [staring at the paved walkway and mumbling] Surrounded by white curtains you were, mother, while I forgot to pray. I did love once when I was younger, but that is all. Amory: You should return to the search. Stephen: I cannot. I must discover myself, manufacture I into perfection as I shield myself from influence, leaving me to forge myself according to inherent principles of art and livelihood. Amory: Beware of lonesome life. You must be emotional, Stephen! Something I fear that is lacking in such endeavours. You must build yourself whilst opening your heart to the possibility of love. Stephen: This is not my calling. My calling is my own and perhaps God will intervene, but until then I shall enter into communion with myself. Amory: Sounds like solipsism. Stephen: [smirking] Touché, you bastard! Amory: Did you ever rekindle fire with the girl you loved? Stephen: Not quite. We once saw each other by a lake; nothing more. Beautiful pigment — pale as a swan and dripping with ripe mortality. Amory: [nearly oblivious to Stephen’s comment] O, Rosalind. Stephen: You were sentimental, weren’t you? Amory: Once, and yes, with her. I had always been a romantic: festive within the temporary confine of another’s arms, but never foolish enough to succumb to sentiment. Stephen: Life strikes with great cunning. I suppose it was your time to face its force. Amory: She remains my glimpse of mortality and change. Stephen: Alas, he speaks truth! The ultimate characteristic, yet the difficulty in demonstration! Amory: Friend, truth drips from your mind. Do not fret over our limitations. Stephen: I think it the only limitation worthy of our fretting. After all, art is a consequent of past sorrows or momentary apotheosis. In experiencing either, we find our ability to express dwindled by incompetence, by our overly abundant inquiries and thus, truth remains unspoken; evaded in exchange for the mere shell of true feeling. I fret over such limitations. ———

[The two men continue down a narrow road while the sky glistens in hues of yellow and red. They remain surrounded by nature. As they make a sharp right turn they open their eyes to find themselves seated upon a beach; the lack of narrative linearity within dreams takes hold of the subject’s inner world. It produces magisterial transportations, one place to another at a blinding speed, yet, the sense of wonder is never abandoned. They resume their unbearably pretentious conversation] Stephen: Are you currently in love, Amory? Amory: I’m not sure. I’m with another, yet there is something lacking. Do you know what it is I miss, Stephen? It is the boiling of one’s heart (and hopefully one’s loins if they play the game well) following the moment of initial contact. My wandering gaze matched with another’s wandering soul, the interlocking of sights prior to the gripping of skin. It is these games we play with the one’s we admire, these infantile tests we’ve performed for eternity. It came to me in a dream: I was in the house of a girl and I had a friend there. I carry with me in this putrid waking life images of that lovely unconsciousness. I would not claim them to be representative of a story, nor is that what I seek. It is the feeling of following this woman up the stairs as she held my hand within a light pink room, the feeling of exuberance at the anticipation of love, at the possibility of caressing a new body and sharing with her what I have hoped to share with myself. Stephen: It is the imbalance of romance— this is what you miss? The suspense? These are things that are more transient than ourselves. Love comes in radiant pulses, waves spewed from heaven and infecting the species with absolute shite. Few are those who remain eternally pleased by the withering hand they first adored. For most, they encounter a thing similar to that which you have expressed, bringing them closer to God’s beguiling communion. The rings are cast onto the fingers of sycophants, each trying to prove that they are a truer and better lover than the other. They become quiet, tentative creatures that dare not oppose their counterpart for fear of giving rise to dead quandaries that were thought to have been solved. They never come to terms with love as an insoluble equation, derived from the same group of questions: where is God? why us? what is purpose? It is only natural that you suffer the separation of this initial love, this frenzy of feeling. The mind responds to ‘love’ the same way it does when drugs are introduced into the blood stream. It is euphoric, it is ecstasy; it is the Olympian’s plateaux, a divine playground. But these things have an end. The drugs wear off, new gods are worshipped. The experience and the myth will forever resonate, but the sensation of serotonin will die out with the rising of the sun, and the sound of thunder will no longer carry with it the fear of divine rage. So too, will love evaporate into a dismal recollection, only to be reborn at the sight of a pale face.

[avalonmylove]

And Gather

I saw in the avenues of your brown eyes Gardens beginning to arise, Where I will soon be planting my scarlet heart. Where Candide and Cunegonde cultivate a dying wish; My writhing veins coil around new skin. And gather the teachings learned from other beings; And gather the memories underneath other sheets; And gather the remains of vanquished hearts; And gather the remains of our history. Let the gatherings commemorate vagrant love, A nomadic heart dancing to a drooping song. The sin found in touching more than one, Let it be cleaved and forgotten at the taste of your tongue. Apropos this scarlet heart of mine, Dismiss it with laughter while I toil the pastures Inside the avenues of your now green eyes.

[avalonmylove]

Stalker

I watch you in moonlit dreams Born of a love esteemed In prose and poetry alike; That rue its demise but more its height. Has my time come To taste the crimson delight? Its fragrance in the bosom of the night.

For centuries I have abstained From the taunt of flesh; I have fought the alluring image Of my teeth, aroused by the pillage, Showing themselves in a marauding visage And In the darkness of a home, Leaving a body quiet, forlorn. But what good may come From a life of seclusion? This world, its counterpart in the sky, Belongs not to man, but more so I. For in the end, there is no pearly palace, Tis reserved for those of a mortal palette! Thus, should I not consume the world? Yet, your closeness compels me To release eternity — no longer call it mine. I shall affirm my place among the living, A squalor thwarted by a single anodyne: You, dearest…for you are not them. You are man’s zenith — Life’s radiant mien.

Now upon the sill, You pass as I sit still, Concerned with the thought of love And how, one like I, expresses a feeling Not meant to reside in my heart’s beating. What am I to do as you pass by, Peopling the lifeless world in my eyes?

[avalonmylove]

In Your Absence

The rustling of blankets is no longer heard.

The trussed lace of our pillow case

Left to dangle.

And in a heap, there gathered, are

Memories of before;

In your absence, yet, I hear footsteps

At the door.

[avalonmylove]

Hand in Hand

On summer fields we have trod. The cerulean mystique of the water ahead, It is this land to which we have fled, In the hours of morning dreams spent abroad; Hand in hand.

And to touch the faery world in ecstasy — Our minds consumed by our doting — Will not allow for us to wake in the morning. Why should we as we lay in our felicity; Hand in hand. Pleasure’s nook once moulded into sheets, Now allayed by the rays of day; Though I am awake I pray you stay Relishing in the cloistered world where we meet… Hand in hand. There are no dreams so sweet, As the ones in which all else is winnowed; Where only you are beyond the window, Waiting to guide me in the adventure of sleep, Hand in hand.

[avalonmylove]

Eternity at the Linden House

I can feel passion arising. I had thought the feeling lost, and I wish it had been. The past projects itself unto me; How can a thing deceased pester the psyche? And it all comes back to her! Emma in her red room; Emma in the light, Emma in the shudders of youth; our love now blight. If my feeling is an extension of the past, then why not my life? O, if I could simply bring upon me the swift scythe — with its unwavering accuracy —I would. I would deny myself the pain of dreams; Memories more stimulating than the faces before me. If I had courage enough to utter my Rosebud; To face my life’s longing, I would bequeath unto the world no search for meaning. I would exist in the heightened pitch of my whining! I would stay by her until it was over; repeat it forever, For there is no monotony in love.

If it is true that hell is the recurrence of life and creed; If my suffering is to be a shadowy vista of autumn leaves and her tranquil stare; Of the consequences of my returning glares, Nineteen years is enough. But I suppose the divine decree our final day; Might a lover bring the sovereign to sway?

Let me claim forgiveness on this chair, let me descend to dust, For I await her at the end of it all; Eternity in only us.

[avalonmylove]

Loveless Lips

Adelaide; ephemeral reach of my layman’s hand, Forever at your command, O, how I would shield you from the loveless past. Mask of mystique — the currency of fame, The waning light reborn at sight of the palest face. The foreign shape of full-blossomed lips, The languid speech — an unspoken kiss — Shimmering in my mind as stimuli, Yes, the tremulous response of your loveless lips. And the glances — our eyes merging for a moment, The smile that formed could not be made by those same lips! The lips that spoke of a loveless kiss; The lips that take men to lands of forbidden bliss. Where Jesus of Nazareth bluffs death, Where Utnapishtim awaits Gilgamesh. Yes, the tremulous response of your loveless lips, Like a hex on mankind, they prepare the abyss. And your veins, They course with false speech; Those fawning words spoken to men in love. And yet, as a rose sways in the crevasse of my hand, I beg you to once more take me to these lands. Yes, the tremulous response of your loveless lips, Like a hex on mankind, they prepare the abyss; The lips that spoke of a loveless kiss.