There was a time when I believed in the power of words, magic, and the naked nuance of love, but I shattered ’em with a pickaxe that screamed through the face of every thorny shadow and every orphaned memory. Not outta rage or disappointment but outta survival. Life’s a bastard journey filled with an endless stream of breakdown and renewal, breakdown and renewal. Skin regenerates and is shed over time, akin to the layers of the soul – peeled away like the burnished flesh of a peevish onion – slow and steady. The tears that follow, inevitable and necessary.
Through the mornin’ haze I gather scraps of dignity hangin’ from the clothesline, air-dried and ebullient. A medal of oxidized virtue selfishly steals pebbles of sunlight from the windowsill. I venture out and through the late winter’s gossamer of lost time and regret, seekin’ a few ounces of justification – and blood. On a messianic mission with no direction, a touch of vertigo and just enough self-esteem to power a small caravan through the craggy desert of introspection.
Through the shades, worn more for the aesthetic than the glare, the thin glow of a gladiator’s gaze throws heat back at the insouciant city. The echo of past glories hit the bowels of the boat with combos she ain’t felt since she was birthed into a tepid sea. Sea gulls tussle with my thoughts as they straddle the spume of rebellion, all manner of devilry considered and devoured in the shiftin’ mist. My love affair with mischief and a side of violence started before the womb. The twisted desire to break and be broken woven into the moth-eaten fabric of Vitality.
I maunder through the depths of Gotham’s bi-polar underground – equal parts mausoleum and circus – as it chides my hubris for enterin’ without a blood offerin’ of magic or malfeasance. The last prophetic passages of a tenement messiah, scribbled across a ceramic tablet, sink into the dense, rollickin’ chambers of my heart. The bones of ancient sailors clatter and clang along my mind’s undulations. Delusion is hard-won and bitterly defended and almost always instigated by life’s tendency to get the important shit wrong. That’s how we get here and why we always gotta raze, rebuild and pick-up the journey anew.
Art’s disingenuous method of re-ignitin’ an ignoble light with a sparkle of grace and invention never fails to surprise and confound a reformed criminal, a pod of wayward strangers or a clique of fugitive souls. Even in a consecrated room haunted by ghosts as disparate as Tom Arnold and Tim Yip, there’s hope for the hopeless, a hearth for the homeless – or a selfless act of love for a spiritual drifter bein’ dragged slowly into a vortex of hate. I sip from an hourglass elixir of Sono’s manifestations, meltin’ into the senses like a waft of smoke through a shimmerin’ burlap dress. It replenishes enough of what was stolen, burrowin’ deep into inspiration’s gurglin’ marrow. Enough to get through the night. Enough to shed the madness. Enough to lasso the mind’s darkest angels before they capsize the moon.
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