scarlit ephemera

enter here. An existence coloured, lit by scar: the scar of memory on skin and on self. The ephemera of existence, of remembering--wispy recollection. I offer you a breath to sustain a moment’s respiration: scar lit and redder than sunset, blood, or roses hanging to dry from closed venetian blinds.

Intransigent steps, a solitary path, severed feet walking a lonely waltz into the distance of mist and fog enveloping the erect body. You are enchanted, enrapt, encircled by… night polluted by light, and cold, clearer than day, and the lamp that illuminates your bare feet on the smooth stone floor.

A strange welcome; the journey promises unravelling intrigue. let the mystery begin.


It begins with a break. The startling clang of glass on pavement stone splitting into reprobate shards that wind their way into skin under skin drawing bubbles of blood scarlet to surface. In time, with the wearing of days and hours of minute healing, the scab loosens to reveal the smooth scar beneath, waxy pale glowing in inconspicuous light. Here is memory forged in flesh.

Glass vase travelled from exterior space into microscopic lesions of your body where matter lies inert, waiting to be recalled.What do you remember?

Sound. The sound of falling. The sound of breaking. Water spilling. Glass wet on stone wet on your bare feet.

Scarlet. Roses bespeckled with water, smooth resplendent red against textured grey stone. Thorns hide amidst luxuriant leaves. Green blends into grey into invisible glass, clear water to meet scarlet petals and a fading red trail that leads deeper into distant interiors.

Here we begin again forgetting self and other, entering a newly created world; die beautifully to reality in order to grab hold of new life, a novel taste of the extraordinary. Here I am rambling through rain and clouds behind the dusty window sill of my cluttered room , trying to die in order to remember, relive stories sitting dormant in nail beds and bones, trying to call them out of their slumber into my waiting open palms cutting the humid air into wistful slices.

This is an exercise in dying. You live by creating worlds within worlds so powerful that the one you live in fades away, allows you to step out step away to fall into a gossamer brilliance so fine you will be walking on air, water, and fire at the same time. Laugh, cry, tremble, and witness miracles in the black box of the mind. Enter the fantasy.

You cannot look apologetic or uncertain; there cannot be a question of ‘can I do it.’ Repeat after me: it must simply be ‘I can do it; I am doing it.’ In moments of weakness, I do not believe in the fantasy I profess to create. And there, I die, never to awaken. It is a question of ownership; inhale the space into your body. Give birth to movement, stories, emotions, and images splayed out on the body’s malleable canvas. What do all these realisations, this constant repetition of knowledge do? How do you remember? How do you forget the halter of doubt, insecurity, paralysis that pulls stridently against mind, body, spirit?

It almost seems sultry outside, even though the air is grey, the streets wet, and the rain intermittent. Sensuality pervades the gloom in the heavy dampness. What does it mean? Where does it come from? What is it saying? Maybe, it’s always there, tucked away in the shadowy crevices of dusty corners, beckoning the bored passerby to slide a finger along the vertical line joining two walls, palpate the grey film that now coats your extended index finger. What do you do with this extraneous filth, this settling of air particles, sawdust, and dirt? Draw patterns on the swept floor: circles interrupted by squares and trapezoids trip triangles that revel in their sharp pointed edges. Step away when it is done. You open the door. The street reappears in its grey jungle, a jumble of cars, lethargic pedestrians, the swish of water falling from whirring wheels. The maze opens before you, green hedges give way to gaudy storefronts, restaurant windows filled with hanging poultry dripping with a tawny golden glaze. You turn the corner and disappear.

When you write, in your confusion of images, subjects, thoughts, you are mapping out stepping stones. But understand that one line will not lead to the next in the correct chronological order. Still, you set it down, mark it with ink, a coloured pencil, a magic marker. Hopefully, this will allow you to go back in, peer into the cryptic symbols you left for yourself, clues to some mystery you have yet to realise.

Sheets of rain sliding down the windows look like a molten glass curtain. Quick percussion of water on glass on brick on pavement. Contrasts with the wild grey smoke puffing thinly from the candle burning within a glass cylinder; wax pools still and liquid smooth.

Darkness breaks before you a little lighter with each word that falls from your lips: a deliberate exercise in sound. You are trying to speak, to think in another register, a language that has closed its doors on your exposed wrist. Caught in this vise with your veins running perpendicular to the sliding doors that now cannot quite meet, you utter a fragment of thought one syllable at a time in a voice you never knew you would hear rising just beneath your throat. From the other side, you are a faceless hand on the edge of the road begging for the gift of speech. Your palm grows heavy as veins threading the narrow expanse of skin over bone turn bluer beneath the mute weight of descending sky.

You recede reside in such interior worlds: a mysterious and muffled existence where you distance yourself from the surreal reality that permeates the humid air. You are conscious of the scent of flowers rising from damp earth stretching just past the black painted bars of the small cathedral next to the prison. A jumbled triangle of stone: basic brick chapel, synthetic stone prison, magisterial marble courthouse and the snaking uneven river of pavement connecting their cloistered walls.

Darkness lights up with your blistered steps, setting off surveillance motion censers and illuminating the uneven asphalt road behind the prison. Thin oblong windows are cut into quarters by thick round bars that slice light with the shadow of a cross. Darkness closes in behind you as you leave behind empty pools of light to blink off as stillness descends.

Enmeshed in street-lit darkness, wrists rotate in undulating circles, fingers follow to meet palms, meet air, meet each other, bearing the silent weight of day and its labour. Shadows settle onto your skin; ink drips from your extended fingers, leaving an invisible trail on dirt-laden pavement. You are painting a black on black self-portrait using the city as an unprimed canvas, stretched across a frame of air and water.