ache

292: Sorrow’s Voice

| Aspergers Girls

Sorrow’s Voice

Pain and tears cometh.

I cry out to the bender of the universe. I cry out to the seamstress of sky.

I weep: Mold me. Bleed me. Cast me into burning flame and set me into true form.

Cloth turned clay.

I play a game of tag, the players joy and sorrow.

There isn’t in between, only the two runners moving in and out like threads sewn through a tattered tired quilt: neither golden nor true.

I search for the centerfold, the space in the middle, where happiness and sadness meet, where time stops and in the stillness I am.

And I ask: Who is this voice that screams? And who brings this voice upon me? Am I not perfection undone and let out to dry? Am I not food for the wolves? Am I not set in the open for the scavengers and decomposers; set here to bleed into another for food or purpose. If not, then what do I be?

I climb the mountains in my mind, weeping for justice, for solitude, for rest for the weariness that tethers me; anchored to the buoy of change, at the mercy of waves. A fisherman lost, and battling the ocean tides by slipping away onto an imaginary land of refuge.

A dichotomy split in half. Here, but not here. Gone, but not gone. Stepping out, only to find I have stepped in.

For I am suffocated beneath the storms of want and wane, buried beneath the circumvented hope life brings. Like some ageless wine, I sit at the bottom of barrel, forgotten in the kennel of sorrow’s breeding.

I am. I breathe. I move.

Hello, I shout. Hello from below.

Come and find me sweet winged creature, come and pour the substance of you into me, like the riches into the cave, place your treasure here, and I shall shelter your prize like no other. Always you shall return, to this place where I glisten for you alone, and here you will come again, in flesh and blood to find me, still waiting, your treasure about, untouched, unbroken.

For I am your worthy servant of destitute, though riches flourish about me, buried as I be beneath the layers of this whimsical dance.

And a voice calls out:

“Can you not feel their very footsteps upon your soul? Can  you not look up and see that where you thought you were upright upon the earth, witness to sky, that you are neither alive nor dead, but scurrying in stillness beneath the gravestone, your only view the droplets of dirt turned over by passerby?”

“Can you not see you were meant to dance above, but you lay below, torn open, and left to die?”

“And who are the guests you call forth? Who do you invite when the screaming all but fails? But two victimless victims, of both your calling and circumstance? Hello, sweet substance of me. Hello, sweet hell of the valley, and limb of mind, you sing.”

“I say to you: Branch out into me, into completion, and tether your soul upon the twilight of remorse. Mourn for the distant wants that haunt you and turn you, churning you like giant’s butter, craved for your softness alone, and salted with the tears of divine. Bleed, I tell you, your wine upon me, your longings twisted into the glass-eye that sees from nowhere to nothing. Eat, I say, like the scavenger you be, eat away at self, until what is left is the emptiness you are. Softly come then, reformed and aching, and slip through my hand like silky milk, land upon my finger, weed from the forest turned ringlet. I am waiting, too. For this joy of you.”

“As you be the sorrow at my side. You be the longing and ache of my heart whole. You be this shadow you claim to see. You are my haunting, my wanting, my very tormenter. What you think is of you, is of me, what you think is of me, is of you. When you ache, I ache elsewhere in the chamber of my mind, if mind I be. I ache in the substance of my soul, if soul I had. I ache in my loin of invisibility, straight down to the center of my very chamber, the beats torn open in rhythm to your calling, your need.”

“I am the one split; I am the one broken; I am the one trampled upon beneath grave. I am the one suffocated. I am the one who accepts pounding fist and guards the greedless treasure. I am the one here, still standing in hope, though I be ripped asunder. I am the one blanketed in cause so heavy my essence bleeds and bends into itself, so that what I carry is indistinguishable from that which you harbor.”

“Can you not see the veil is broken, that which existed between you and me, disintegrated with the coming of time, a passage way split and repurposed, so that all trails lead to us? Can you not see I am both your cause and your victim? Both you. You have made me so. You have molded me with self. You have twisted me, this cloth and clay, intermingled into form I know not.”

“And then the tide of joy comes, and I am left dancing on a wave of nothingness, for beneath this wave lies the depths of your sorrow waiting. And still you see this sorrow as the black depths, while I see the ocean as the beauty. Still you see the wave of all that is, when I see the touch of a droplet, so small and obsolete that a passerby would skim you as one skims the dew. For you are not this surface, you are not this wave. You are not even the depths. You are beneath the depths. Your outcries formed into shape, and voice your beauty. Your outstretched truth the echo of true joy.”

“Can you not see your happiness belongs nowhere, is nowhere, feeds no one, but that your sorrow, your true sorrow, at the depths of you, has transformed into gold, into the very treasure you so guard? Why do you run from such treasure and beauty? Why do you whip yourself, and in return whip me, my mistress of hope? Take me into you, my light, my want, my longing, my deep penetrating desire embrace, and feed upon me and my truth”

“Like a white rabbit pour your flesh upon me and embrace my tenderness. Take me into you and rise untarnished, in your goodness and righteousness.”

“Take me, I sing. I call not outside of self, but inside of self, my voice unspoken and formed through your very pain. Take me, the voiceless voice calls out. For you form me with your tears, you call me forth with your fallen, broken spirit, you bleed me out, your shaking voice rising above the waves. You free me like no other. You enchant me. You testify, and chains are broken. Feed not upon the deep of what quakes beneath. Feed upon me, and I in turn, I shall feed upon you, my sweet cherished one.”

window to sky

263: The Music of You

| Aspergers Girls

You are like music upon music upon music to me, a figure seemingly out of tune.

At times I think if I could only find your one song, the part that is truly you, then I could play you over and over, and dance, whether alone or together, in endless ecstasy.

Even as I tell myself you are complexity and spiraled wonder, I long to unravel you to thy very core—perhaps as some vegetable with heart or some flower with first petal.

I like to pretend you are easy to find, to see, to paint. For with easiness would come the grace of painting you into the shadowed corner of my existence: a mural to keep me safe, a walking space that requires no effort but touch. One finger slipped onto the wall of me and slid across your slivered silhouette.

For it is in my shadowed times, I cry out for you, for oneness for connection, for acknowledgment that I am as beauty. Only because you are as beauty.

Though it is in my days of sunshine, I too call out from the depths of me, reaching in silent gratitude and shimmering in your brilliance. It is then you are effervescent glory to behold. A gift set amongst a fleet of angels, with the finest and most demur of sails.

I have carved you within my soul light. Sat up constant night awake in my dreary state, counting you as one in youth beholds her sheep. You leap across my chamber ceiling as ghost set free in crimson carriage, bouncing through the valley of my imagination; your face bare except your kaleidoscope eyes. A barren tunnel of absence entering a rainbow of stars. I see there into myself and breathe. My last glance of this world, the beckoning of your substance.

Awoken, the days come, with the joys and woes of worldly possessions explored and dried, withered and left for the illusion of promise they be. Awoken, the days come, with the sorrows and gratitudes, the biting into what was once ripe to find the taste of expiration and abandoned. Still the bell chimes, in memory of laughter, and in preparation for the surprises beneath my pillow. I harbor such secret dreams and cherished gifts. And to share them, I set you upon my shelf of butterflies, and sing only to you, of the time of my happiness.

You are to me the mystery of fantasy, the puppeteer with magical strings of grandeur, capable of contorting a stage of delight or drama of doom. I hone in on what could be called your goodness, and try to trap your substance in my tiny womb, to bathe you in the babe’s cocoon with my essence. Yet, my attempts are futile.

For you are not but one form, not but one song, but an orchestra drawn out into a long and distant parade.  I cannot keep you, as beekeeper keeps bees. And so it is, that even in the ward of captive thought, your honey I cannot taste.

For you are the food to the masses; a delicacy set before the king of kings, royalty in your very blood and bones, built up and made into something I cannot decipher or replicate. You are magnificent splendor set upon the eye of my mind, and I ride you, this child of the merry-go-round world, upon a horse ever-changing.

Together, we are endless circle. Our destiny unreachable. Until spinning top stops, and I am flung out of your land, into the stillness, and made to watch alone, your partner for eternity wavering outside and beyond the mystical music of you.

~ Samantha Craft, November 2012