Thursday, November 06, 2008

It is the time of falling leaves

The moon tonight looks like a crescent night light that someone stuck onto a huge canvas- a canvas painted in various shades of grey.

It is the time of falling leaves.

I am falling. Everyone leaves.

It does not matter.

The city calls me at night.

It has a tiny voice, disguised as static.

Sometimes the city answers my questions in the form of a passing car with a particular song booming out of its open windows. When I wallow in my melancholy, there is a gentle night bird urging me on through its soft, repeated song. The disconnected, shattered phrases I catch from strangers, while passing by outside their windows or conversations. There are nights I hear the stars themselves tingling as they pour out of the womb of the universe and adorn the fabric of the galaxy. Other nights I only hear my own songs, or sobs. But those too form the voice of the city.

If someone was to pull the fabric, what then?

Isis unveiled.

If I was to reach out and get hold of one corner of the fabric of existence and then try to pull, what then?

Would I discover I am pulling at the flesh of my own face?

I think of Dorian, my vampire serial killer, and of how he understands the night in the city. The songs he hears and I can only imagine. Human voices forming a huge tapestry of sounds, spread thinly over a greater, thicker weave of noises, man-made or otherwise. Animals must stand out in this tapestry like altogether different threads. Different colour and thickness. And there are also sounds that do not belong to any man or animal, sounds that come from very different sources. Can anyone possibly imagine how someone like him perceives this huge, collective creation? If it was indeed a carpet or tapestry one would be amazed; all manners of materials crisscrossing and drowning each other, from the most expensive silk and gold thread to artificial wire and humble straw. Patterns created from a spider on drugs moments before it collapses dead; holes, missing and broken threads, tightly woven parts, parts the whole thing seems on the verge of spreading open, held together only by breaths and times gone; parts thick and oily and grimy with the stench of human toil and despair. What kind of museum will ever hold this tapestry? Are vampires, in this sense, our lore keepers? Is this their true punishment?

When you step out, my predator, does the human smell attract you and disgust you at the same time, the way certain bodily odours do it for us humans? Do you stop by windows, listening to the same dramas being re-played a million times from the dawn of of humanity onwards? Betrayals and promises of forever, pain and ecstasy, first and last breaths, do you listen to them? Your ears are sharp enough to hear the sound of hair, sharply whipped to the side by the flirtatious turn of a woman's head. But do you care?

I wish I was as free as you are. Because there are nights I, too, need to kill. I want to push my nails into someone's eyes till I feel them pop under the pressure and my fingertips are covered by a wet, gelatinous mass. I want to run after a breathless teenager and grab them by the hair-long sweet smelling hair, supermarket shampoo and hopes of getting laid-, stopping the escaping scream with a single, sharp pull. I want to drag them home and tie them up and use knives to carve their flesh. But contrary to me, whenever you get one of those urges you act on it. You do the killings for me and I keep the balance for you. You watch and I keep watch. You destroy and I heal. I destroy in order to build,while you build for time to destroy. Time watches over us both; but I am the tumbling leaf and you the stone.

There is nothing more to say.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hello once again Mistress of the Darkness, my heart beats for you and your arcane ways.
i loved your song there - that was a nice emotional rollercoaster.
your poetry and prose is exceptional, you make me feel something.
will write more in today's letter xoxo