UNREAL SYMPHONY


I start with prose.

The fire is out and the sky is clear. What now? The smoke is dying and the trees are clearing, breathing life into the waste land that only a few hours back remained dead and teeming with the dead. The shades of green are back to haunt, for he who they haunt cannot perceive it. The house is blackened, and soon it will vanish into the apocrypha of time and memory. What then? The grass is reborn, and the fresh birds are hatching on the branches of the trees. The stream is alive. Yet the sparks of fire still thrive, and serve to linger on where he who is haunted by the shades of green seeks a remedy, and where they linger on they destroy. What now?

It used to burn. Burn, the command issued, and it burned. We had to run from it, it overwhelmed us. Mantra stopped us, chanting haunting sermons all over, and the house melted into the lake of fire. Peace is empty; burn, burn. Wood splinters cascading down violins and bows pulling their stretched strings - where the surreal orchestra explodes into a thousand sparks of pale, the individual fireworks and their green-gleamed flames up for sale, their essence not. Everything is falling and so are we, lines disjoining and un-forming out of order, tapestry of collection and coherence breaking apart so violently upon contact with this fire, burn the closed eye closed the mantra silent...

Burn, and the fire extinguished.

The red dress, that of rose red, shimmering so far away. Pinkish crêpe with white thin cloth - a divinity of sorts, that dress that shows. I took to treasure it. Dress with breasts streaming honey that spewed all around me, the power of phantasm imagining the midday sun alive, the house that stood proud receiving its radiance, the embers within its grand fireplace silent, cold. I would never receive it. The dining room with its plates on a cold wintry day, rain snow sleet cascading down and tormenting beggars not within the safe house, the confines of our soul. I would never wear it, this dress - I place my braids, my tie, my suit and necklace atop the drawing table, they are gone, are gone - I am both and I am none.

Summer's night - we were in the reading studio, I reminiscing the memory, the merry widow with soft aria voice permeating the carpet-laden walls. I was upon the patio, and we talked about the soft fresh air of the still night. A flower blossom dripped onto our hands, a rose, and I made it bloom once more. The scent... it lingered upon the patio, in the study - still I hear the music play and it soothes - and in the bed, in the bed and in dream, the scent of roses... One dreams through flight, around the petals of flowers, one moment, one moment, and awakes... We sit there and we dream, and I never ceased to rest my eyes from their twinkle. Their twinkle still prime.

Rose redden the lips, plump and expressive, they are cruel. Walk, and the symphony quickens; stop, and it stops and starts. The heels treading the thick carpets of memory... the lips... they are cruel. Harsh, cold winters to come; I have never been left so alone. My necklace, my tie, my letters... irrelevant, whatever they may be. Expression precedes doom - presence precedes expression. Unreal symphony, be what you must be, and transcend. Red door that swings open, and forever takes to shut. Confinement that is laced with leather and the smell of rust and rustic leather. The black suits and the mass - gone to the fields; what wonder! No past no future, to think of nothing. I would gladly.

The house that stood proud and lofty - it has broken down as dream succumbs. The spark of innocence of chaste means; it started all. All has broken down. The wood of the opera box, the study table and furnished chairs with tapestries and carpets and silken clothes has been set on fire, and they burn, with a ferocity so magnificent - whirlwind of implosion and explosion that births and kills the cosmos. The cosmos like all things will end. Rise, and fall. Fall. The fall to escape fire; the patio atop the second floor that surpasses the ground - one is driven to madness from fire, and seeks to run, to leap, to escape. Jump the balcony, and the green shades of bushes that will haunt you await. Jump

and the fall you seek and attain. The null one's fain. Fire crescendos and shatters terribly, all notion of sweetness and sweet romance in music lost. Golden violinists, golden, filthy gold with its shine, so lowly, vastly beneath the lustre of rose and rose lips. Stone pavement in garden; the music congregates in the garden, finally climax appeased and diminuendos to silence, a surreal buzzing fading from the burning house, only sound left are flames crackling, no meaning, just crackle hiss where things combust. The onomatopoetic quality to the dead fire, dead but undying - it persists without definition, without a proper classification, unreal and destroying. Finally fire is left alone when I emigrate, leave, deep down. Earth over Fire.


Stop all the clocks. They continue ticking. The parlour, the room. Cleaner or manservant with disgruntled broom. Struck one; midday sun permeating clear window pane, false azure, mourner's lunch. Fare well, you who settle for Sunday brunch. Lunch's pond streams poetic music. Congregation possibly over, as seen from the flocks of ravens with monocles being transported out by an ever-increasing inertia. Scientia potentia est thinks the flower atop the overlooking tree. Trees see.

The unseen, the unreal. Flocks come out deviations. That divine rose; its divinity, and another sense of ordinary phantasm; beneath the earth it cannot be registered, it cannot be perceived. Blond with slit-eyes. Weak, meaningless. Together surreal.


'O fire, thou splendidst act, that makes known life

Which seeks to blossom madness not short'f pain

O streaming spark that proves a bond and strife

Stay still and silent, lest misery we gain.'


'Nature wills us take this short and mean path

For life is spurred on by its simplest wants

Those still speak up no more, their trust they hath

And so forget, we turn to pristine hunts.'


[together]: 'Hence we obliged to bask in this warm day,

Live on, away from pasts we do not say.'


The illusion has dispersed. The sun rises and shines once more; the ravens must on their bellies towards living crawl; the fire of life lights no more.


When you are mine alone,

All mine alone.


Shattered ruins come shattered music. No, it is gone now, it is past the time, it is no longer real. Harden hell's seal. I am floating within fire; we used to do so too, in a fire-bed of quality, of true perception. I knew what everything was; I knew the lips and dress inside out - they were the beginning, but they were not everything of matter. I could see everything, but never the hidden aspect of coldness - knew it not, I formed fire, and in fire I burned.

Peace - has it been seen, been allowed to absorb through the spectrum of raw emotion? Essence - no, but yes, for does coldness and its lack of perception and subsequent hubristic creation of warmth not persist? Gardens will be rebuilt and their green shades restored, their peace, their terrible peace and beauty. The wood that splinters and shatters, leaving behind nothing but ruins of style and simplicity, undergirds complexity. Essence - I was the shadow of my dreaming slain, by its false azure in its windowpane.

The fire that haunts me still even when under the roots of earth. I wonder... is it ever weak? That to kill it requires the termination and eradication of this earth, to face, to confront the shadows and illusions... how can one say of its outcome? I am inferior to style, to power, to the implicit realm - I must and can only dwell within the base, that of which escapes me. No - we were never allowed, and I was never meant to confront fire. I was meant to be chained within it.

Fire symphony. Red rose dress and rosy lips. Why do they persistently appear through the looking glass and the window, where I push through it and morph into the glass? I have become glass, enslaved, entrapped, within the transparent medium of eternal immobility. I am all-seeing. I am unmoving.

No - the stars that shine on this summer's night, during the warmth of that aria, they are bright. They do not die, they twinkle, in, out, in out... to wait, to seek the bait... the stars that shine; just like my shadow, they who shine. Where is our right, my right? I see all bright, I see bright in spite.

I have no right.