:tidaldeluge:

Lay down your ragged head

Here beneath my quivering fear

To concede defeat

Is at times the only way forth

Let pass this torrent

Water

Under a tired old bridge

Surrender that turbulent heart

Raise up those empty hands

Dispense with your weapon

In absolution lay repose

There’s so much

Water

Under a decaying bridge

For whom the bell tolls

Not yet apparent

Pale threads fray in homage to the fissure

Do not resuscitate

It’s too much

Water

Under the bridge

Once the dazzling big picture

Now strangled in a deathlock

By a frame too obdurate

Faces stifled by time

The river floods

Water

Bursts its banks

image : chris mcconville

:achromatic:

Sometimes the questions are too much. The thoughts one length too consuming, one level too exhausting, one degree too debilitating. Sometimes the mind condemns the body to physical paralysis, subjects its chemistry to chaos, asphyxiates the heart into a thick and suffocated silence. From the alchemy grows a pernicious anarchy.

Sometimes it’s the slightest of things: a familiar gesture, an avocado sliced just so, a rainbow sunset painfully alike a former rainbow sky. The breath catches in your throat, ragged and shallow. A particular pair of boots. A throwaway comment from a taxi-driver, harking back to the days of yore. Your body flattened and forlorn against a rapidly spinning earth, vertigo long revoking the freedom of forward motion.

Sometimes it’s the eye falling on a date now passed; the mind casting forth kaleidoscope memories all and sundry.  It’s the notion of your future renounced, your past erased, your present slain. Your happiness extinguished.  The summer garden weeded before the flora has come to bloom. A diary flipped open to an unfinished entry, the pen still smarting from the warmth of its master.  A canister of film perished by morning’s first light, precious moments now exposed beyond repair. A future unknown, yet a mind still wondering, regardless. But a future is a perennial unknown, a past a poisoned chalice.

image : ying ang

:tideline:

Communication

Conjugation

Adulation

Dedication

Veneration

Inclination

Affectation

Revelation

Mutilation

Elimination

Disintegration

Isolation

No explanation

Alienation

Trepidation

Devastation

Lamentation

Realisation

Resignation

Abdication

Excavation

Reformation

Cultivation

Elevation

Affirmation

Growth

:thechrysalis:

She spins her cocoon

Weaves the layers thick around her

Inch by inch

Fostering a cushy thickness

Loosely at first

Building a delicate shell

Layer upon layer

She who hungers

Who ploughs and sows and reaps and bides

She who bears the glacial brunt of bodily rime

And withstands the capricious change of season

Who reserves the right

To be three parts hot

And six parts cold

She who plays animal kingdom

In the glorified and giddy human realm

Turns bilious beast upon threat

The tightened strain of her falsetto shrill

Disarming in alacrity

She who lay in wait

She who is

With seasonality comes change

Firm footed in the conviction of her own love

Yet blithely unaware

Of the magnetism of her newly engorged marrow

Be it a hegemonic push

Or an overtly oppressive pull

Influenced by stimuli one way on first glance

And another on reinspection

She is doggedly plagued

Finally assuaged

My heart isn't always consistent

But it's always right

It never fails me

And that's more than I can say for you

Because you've failed me enough

And fuck you if you can't abide that

Because I no longer abide you

image : ying ang

:shacklesandstitches:

Some mornings I have weights on my ankles and other days wings on my back. Tumbling, bumbling, stumbling over words, I rumble.

Knit one, purl one, hold tight that yarn, never drop a stitch.

I catch my shin with the razor and watch mutely on as my entire vessel is choked of all blood, seeping indolently across a naked bathroom floor.

Engulfed by a congealing pool of dropped stitches I lay, weighted by the shackles of lost dreams and waylaid hope. Wallowing in a remorseful tide of bloodied regret I droop, tempering my once flaxen locks with the darkly hollowed hues of pain.

Setting my intention, I brace against the terminal vertigo of eons spent itinerant. Atop shaky legs I stand. My trailing red fingertips smear the curvature of the porcelain rail, evoking in the splintered veneer a newly crimson finish.

The famine of love has broken; I torpidly feel my way. Rise, I start. I circle once, twice, clocking the fading misery of the witching hours. Retreat, I must. On the floor below, the gushing red deluge dissipates into nihility. Repent, I have. The door stands open and defiant, aghast at the scene. Resurrected, I am.

     image : ying ang

:onceadreamer:

Once upon a dream, I was in love. With plans so grand we’d run away, shave our scalps and warm each other; someday we would return.

A dream it seems it must have been, for this unseemly scene was not redeemed. What now remains is in between, life and something else. What now remains is me.

Alas the sun is long since set; nevertheless, I think fondly of its glow.

        image : ying ang

           

:metamorphosis:

It’s a sky the shadow of suicide's lips

The boisterous curls of defiant youth

A faded colour swatch

The instant recoil from a fiery furnace

An ashen face licked clean by childbirth

The dewy flush of opportunity

A second-storey window seat

The oppressive gait of an old man diminished

A devastating change of heart

The tolling peals of twilight laughter

Thievery in the abbey

The rigid resilience of an early bloom

Your father's eyes siphoned dry of grief

A love anchored and bound

A weary sun engulfed by belligerent ocean

A pleading surrender

All the heat you've ever known

At once reduced to frost

image : mel tjoeng

:startfromhere:

Speak the truth, even if your voice is trembling and barely audible. Even if at first it’s only you who hears. Truths that grow greater in quantity and magnitude inevitably force an audience.

Hark. Heed.

:theoriginalgypsy:

All your life you've never seen a woman taken by the wind. Enchantress extraordinaire, Mother Music, Stevie Nicks. And although she may be referencing the sylph-like sorceress Rhiannon with this particular lyric, there is no question that the woman we really love to love is Ms Nicks herself. Well I do, at least. Needless to say, I near-on wet myself on hearing today's announcement of her forthcoming Australian tour.

She's made magic with Ringo Starr, Tom Petty, and Rod Stewart, and there's that little old thing she had going with Buckingham, Fleetwood & McVee; her music has been emulated by acts ranging from the Smashing Pumpkins and Hole, to the Dixie Chicks and The Corrs, such is the breadth and appeal of her artistry.

Ergo, I had to post a clip. Despite not being a Nicks' original, it's one of my favourites. A tad intense if you find the dialogue is hitting a little too close to home, but still all-time.

*Sheryl Crow also rules. As always.

:ashowofhands:

The woman could be you. A pair of long, thin arms hang limply at her sides, not knowing what to do. Not knowing when to move, where to go, how to feel. Idle arms are they, who have in turn given life to idle hands. Empty hands that might pass as things of beauty, if not for their profound uncertainty. By all accounts timid hands, meek and unimposing, yet not altogether boring. On the contrary; hers are hands that know too much, have been too exposed, too involved. Hands lacking not in wisdom, but in compassion. Closed to the world, fingers coiled around one another, clenched hungrily against a wrinkled palm. Delicate and diffident. Vacillating. Aquiver with ravenous fear.

     (the most beautiful hands i know)

:songofsongs:

Holy fuck Justin Vernon. I need to quit your music, at the risk of it becoming the number one soundtrack to my sorrow. Yes, I’m well aware this latest track is a cover, but you elicited enough tears with For Emma that I’m on a self-imposed ban.

And now you up and get involved in this.

Bon Iver: I Can't Make You Love Me

:thebitterpill:

Sometimes there is pain. 
There just is.

:thishereheart:

There’s a lot to be said for following your heart. For knowing its each and every nuance. For riding out the skipped beats, leaning into an impending corner; for letting the rhythm become deafening, even when it’s more cacophony than harmony; for bathing it in warm sunlight, removing the splinters with equal parts love and determination, swaddling it in fleeced cotton; for watering the garden and being open to both weeds and roses. For regarding the lines as cracks, and not faultlines. For gliding with the wind rather than bracing against it.

There is, however, more to be said for not following your heart. For ignoring it, for building a defence and creating a case and finding loopholes. For arguing against this tortured heart that bleeds and beats and burns in blackened bursts; for relegating it to the backseat, silencing it, slipping it a discarded pacifier. For dismissing its express wishes as little more than romantic virtue.

The mind hungers for logic. It will seek reason, will run you ragged, deplete you far beyond the reaches of exhaustion. It will find ways and means, justifications and excuses, analyses and contingencies. Launching plans of attack and assault on what is ultimately your own person, assailing your last remaining vestiges of happiness. It is a labour in vain, the mind’s furtive attempt to restore harmony by renouncing the heart.

Even when we can never truly know the heart of another, we can know our own. Know its depths. Its yearnings. Its restlessness. Its torment. Its true motivations. The same cannot be said for the mind, which, in times of turmoil, is oft known to resort to trickery and deceit.

To accept the emotion of the heart is to know the deepest self-love imaginable, one that the mind could never comprehend. Feel first. The greatest lesson I’ve ever learned.

images : mel tjoeng

:loveisanoldhat:

Love is an old hat

Celebrated like a brilliant yellow sundress

On a retiring spring eve.

She, swathed within the diaphanous cloak

Likewise he who stands regarding her

Contented, sated

Love is a cerulean stone

Calming, tranquilising.

Jagged to the eye

Smooth to the touch

Enduring.

A beauty staunch in the face of time

Love is a deciduous oak

A sunburnt pile of aureate leaf

Gathering hungrily underfoot.

Beautifully barren of foliage

Before oncemore flourishing robustly

Methodically

Love is a driving winter rain

Its bitter, brutal chill unavoidable

Wrathfully lashing all and one.

The agitated darkness eventually remits

Recoils

Giving way to a resplendent rainbow sky

Love is a holey old sock

Of whose pattern you will never tire

Its warmth impervious.

Deeply ingrained yet not unpleasant

Its nonpareil odour

Yielding not to the vigour of a continuous spin cycle

Love is an old hat

Well worn and familiar.

I say

Fetch my old hat

:thetimekeeper:

Time waits not
Alas,
It withers

Whilst we wane,
And waste
As she wilts,
WailsWhile he weakens,
He wavers
As they watch,
And whine,
And weep,
And wear

Where,
Oh where, slips time
For here,
It is not waiting