Philip Kane
EXCERPTS FROM A JOURNAL
1.
We came from the darkest part of your womb. There is no heart that can bind us, no sex that can possess us, no river that can flow through our mouths. Do not despise us, because we are you. Blood motivates us. Blood, death, the skull of a prison deep within the ribs of a bear in the forest. We stalk the streets with faces of fire and a lost sonnet dry on our lips. We will come back for you, at last, as the clock rains down minutes in a slow dance of addiction. We are the stain on your sky, the ticking of clouds in rhythm with the street’s pendulous metronome. We are the lie of justice found like a scar on driftwood. Do not deny us the qualification that is our due, the porcelain ornaments scattered across your windowsill, the blue flower in your garden that is cut into the shape of a turning windmill.
2.
Wrapped in a shawl of birch trees, a woman burns with the discontent of angels. Her freedom has been broken like a toy. I write to her about glass and bright banners, about a tearing sound in the background of my heart, about the beams of congealed light that thrust insistently across boundaries. We are both orphans in the fields. Such a commonality of experience is an abrasion against the corners of our ancient differences. Fierce love, mad love, pushes us beyond the edge of normality, beyond society. Risen again, we have risen again, in the fever of rebirth we dance among the fallen stones of cathedrals, our laughter ringing out like silver. We are accompanied by a faithful okapi that chews on the grass as it skips into our slowly fading footprints.
3.
The glass has no bearing on the reflection. The wavering lights in the distance, over hills and under stars, show the way and guide voices like moths through the darkness. I have no volition wrapped in this velvet moleskin, burrowing deep like a child into the comfort of memory. I can find only resonances of order with my fingertips, something vague but not altogether forgotten. The journey will take me far away from this place, wherever this place is, and I will not be able to hear my own footfall in the abyss of changing worlds. My mind has already taken flight, an advance guard winging in the direction of nowhere. I am searching for a marble temple with a dome like an upraised breast, and the gold of its pillars shameless. This lies, perhaps, on the other side of death, down a long and overgrown path covered by a sheet of autumn leaves. The berries on the thorn bushes red with blood. I can hear music in the background, the pipes and drums of an army marching. Fields engraved with furrows, and the crows questioning my intensity and my intention. I am dancing to the rhythm of life and death and destiny. I am seeking to close my own circle.
