January Was the Wound by Simon J. Charlton

3. & THE STARS THAT DANCED IN YOUR EYES WERE A CONTAGION OF SILVER LAUGHTER - coiling me closer to you than flesh... more intimate than death... bathing our eyes in the blue lustre of moonshadows... a drifting melancholy across the melting snows... beads of blood washed away into the warming soil... a sorrow sweetest imagined in the dreaming beds of innocence... blanket deep winter’s jagged edge is fractured... the barren earth gathering its song to birth a pale green promise... tenderness striving towards an unknown sky... & we by silent communion banishing reason to that wilderness of sorrows... Corrupted Saints & Tarnished Angels gather at the shadowed edges of faded fires to mourn the passing of such innocence... the attainment of experience... a grim wielding of yet grimmer knowledge... a falling of shades... erasing the word... silencing the song... but the moment trembles & by merciless white light a realization is agonizingly hatched... the moment deconstructed with stark brutality... that was another time... that was another place... that was another world... where each day we laid claim to history... laid waste the scars of winter... asserting dominion over all things unwritten... all songs unsung... how could it be known that such dreams as we shaped we did so only in water... the surface broken our indelicate touch... ripples ever expanding... eventually to fade... beyond vision... beyond time...

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4. & AS BEYOND VISION SO BEYOND TIME - a mirror’s surface darkening... your face lost to the gathering gloom in this room of absence... yellow wallpaper peels through years of desiccated silence... windows lost beneath time-deep shrouds of dust... the tousled bed that once held treasure beyond kingdoms... & laughter that unveiled the rainbow’s weave of shimmering wonders... a fool’s promise... now shadow-shrunk abandoned... I can no longer dream... no longer cup light like water... my hands a shy child’s awkwardness of gesture... no longer to trace the wilderness of your flesh with a feather’s grace... no longer to close your eyes... their secret depths of sweetest sorrow... these hands are corruption... knuckle swollen & crooked... a grief of agonies... their gathering of prayer a broken steeple... their gathering of sleep a dreamless mercy... silent of thought... absent of fury... void of frenzy... instead the welcoming of dark tides to drag me from this weary surface of masks & illusion... of deception & division... ladders of smoke ascend to nowhere & ropes of wind lead to nothing... cradling me into the soundless roiling depths... ghost children mourn the memories of their own deaths... drifting aimless tides of unknown oceans... whisper soft & sad of lives never known... their murmurs the night... their nights eternal...

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5. & OUT OF THE ETERNAL NIGHT A CRUST OF SHADOW SMUDGES THE MOON - we gather our reflections from shattered mirrors in the half-light murmur of dawn... we charge headlong and howling into the pit of grinning teeth that gnash through spittle fleck snarls... chain- checked they bristle & roar against the imposed limits of their ferocity... until choked they slump whimpering... only their eyes telling still the truth of their dire intent... on lolling tongues eyes of blue fire illuminate the forgotten & unwritten who splash the darkness with song... lash starlight to their drink deep dreams & understand the siren’s sigh as the signature of all sorrow... its aching beauty of betrayal riding the wind across rocks formed to a scarring of broken teeth... a wilderness of broken glass & poison rain... those unmapped regions of the heart where strange birds explode their iridescence... the air tainted with the stench of burnt feathers... the traces of which hang in acrid suspension... become a sordid rite of passage the dreamer’s demise as he conjures the thread that will lead him to a grief older than time... stories rise with the smoke of abandoned fires & the smouldering ashes of song still strive towards expression... fated always to fail... mere smears of sound that gain no purchase on the dead-weighted silence... dreams cool in the white light of a pitiless moon...

Author bio:

Simon J. Charlton has recently had work published in Great Works, Inclement, Equinox and Angelic Dynamo and has provided a lyric to be found on the 'Oh Yes!!' album by Ben Rusch.