ANTITHESIS CRUCIFIX: JOURNAL OF AN AMERICAN MELANCHOLIC (Penned in my 20's)

     My dreams are steeped in prophetic doom. I rise from them, doused in pensive lucidity, to beach the ghost shores of shame and nameless indignation, having long ago learned to fear the inevitability of others' wrathful reciprocity. I must change or perish. My armour has become too conspicuous, too heavy to bear. We are the slow death of ourselves, forgetting all too easily and eagerly how to garner our Courage instead from the tender, reverent hands of Virtue and our true Valiance from Heart-Tenderness. Have I the strength to be kind in a world so quick to turn vicious and cruel at the slightest gesture of self-defense? For when everyone bears Sword & Shield, the defiant act of self-preservation becomes a death-wish, the Stoicism of only Cowards & Fools. It seems no longer to be, that the only way to truly survive is by turning the other cheek.

     What have I become? Where has my faith in the saving graces of Discretion & Humility gone? To forget the self used to be the basic tenet of saving the self, yet now seems the stuff of Delusion & Tomfoolery, creating within the human will, an even more toxic core than ever before. In the Herculean grip of Loss, Alienation, Disillusionment & Loneliness have I still the will to kill this sickly beast? Have I still the strength to stand apart, with purity of heart? Just how far have I slipped? Have I slipped enough that this devil-mind could never again bid adieu to irreconcilable Rage & Disgust, however righteously spawned they might be? Will I settle for the cathartic yet disastrous camaraderie of Fear & Loathing, only to return, a prodigal orphan to the Hell I have bore, into the arms of my true blood-father, Lucifer. Or shall I return to the merciful arms of my soul-father, God and give into sweet simplicity, to be loved merely as I am in His eyes, a humble newborn babe?

     I must die to all of this. Oh, Heavenly Father, if You can bear any more kin, I wish, to be born again.



                                                                        *



     I feel Time, even at this tender age of youth to be on my side yet a thorn in my side. I feel each minute as if it were an hour, each second, an eternity. And as I recount all of the years I have thus lived and reach a mere sum of 21, I feel within my soul, a cry of deep Despair. I feel I have already lived far too long, and have come to know both too much and too little. When will I be granted relief? Father Time, as far as I'm concerned does not know best and has grown quite exploitive and abusive to this Temporal Child, shattering his hourglass against my world weary cheek letting it be known just who's in charge and just how quickly Time might be running out. He then positions a scythe down low to let me know just how many more fields of time-grain I have through which to sift before I am released unto a much more tolerable Guardian & Eternity. I realize that I have a limited time here upon these earthly plains, yet my threshold of bearing this agony seems almost breached. For I gain and yet all at once, lose all concept of Time when I remain stuck and sinking fast, within the muck and mire of the Past.

STILLBORN TO LIFE: a Novel by Valerie Stephens (Prologue)

     The infant's cries rang silent throughout the dark, misty alleyway. The woman lay huddled, quivering and broken as her contractions slowly increased in duration and intensity. Her cries for help echoed with more morbid reverberation than the infant's non-responsive birthing as the blood on her hands glowed with the red siren pallor of a death, still undeclared. The woman, fumbling, took the infant by the heels, vigorously smacking its backside with the force of a mother's instinct-but still, no sound.

     She cradled the babe in her trembling arms, praying but if even for a faint wisp of breath to be suspired onto her mascara-streaked and rouge-mussed face. As she attempted for a second time to grant animation to this ill-fated child, a voice, disembodied and strangely androgynous rumbled and sizzled through the alleyway like hot, molten lava: "Is anybody alive in here?" it inquired, just as quickly retreating. And it was only then that the stillborn child stirred, still for the time being mute, but forevermore crowned very much bright and alive. Yet despite the answer to her heavenly supplication having been made manifest through the child's fruition of bearing, would both Mother and Child would henceforth be left, in question.


www.open.salon.com/blog/sphinx365 for complete novel...

METAPHYSIC IV

I could get lost in a eagle's eye,
for the reflection of his mastery and divinity
lulls me into a blissful slumber
of selflessness.

He seduces me with his majestic wiles
and the image
of beauty, grace and superiority
henceforth eludes any congruency with my being
and I weep for the promises I have spoken, then broken,
for the eagle always feeds their young,
always finds a home.

And so have I, within the eagle's eye,
as it now soars down
to the jagged ranges,
carrying aloft,
a lone tear.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

We all long to get lost within sanctified Madness,
loosening our Mind's tenacious grip upon the world.
For it is only through what the world deems 'insanity' that we are truly free.
Our senses are weary from the constant barrage of the profane from day to day.
We see everything yet feel nothing.
We taste everything, yet the Soul's tongue has grown coarse and numb.
We hear everything, yet do not get its meaning.
We smell everything yet still remain insensate to all but the malodorous.
We feel the sun upon our flesh and the wind, gently caressing our skin, yet remain emptied of all Sentience.
Where is our Soul, where has it gone?
The pain is so constant that it has become all-too-familiar.
Yet we are no more stirred by it than by anything else.
We no longer glimpse of God's face.
We are no longer imbued with His spirit.
We have grown lukewarm and He has spat us out of His mouth.
We long to feel the fiery tongue of the Holy Spirit-and this alone, is our only redemption.
For we belong to Him and will never grow cold beyond thawing, hardened beyond malleabiliy.
Somewhere along the way, we lose sight of ourselves as He has fashioned us.
And it all begins when we turn our backs upon the worlds which we have created for ourselves-
the worlds which seek to preserve us from the snares of The Devil.
For the world outside of God's love and grace have nothing to offer of true sustenance or lasting value.
Yet that private inner sanctuary within every human soul fighting The Good Fight is special.
Yes, it must remain undesecrated, for it is the Kingdom of Heaven within us.
Yet until we regain our sight and our agility to surrender & blind Faith, we will dwell only in this Hell.
Perhaps we often just fall asleep and forget how to awaken.
We are still asleep and dreaming upon the crude laps of Indigence & Insolence.
And our Treasures, once abundantly and generously shared with all,
must strive only to stay hidden away for safekeeping.
Yet we know we must give anyway-this is why we suffer as we do.
We can bear the weight of our own private worlds, but of the other world?
We must weigh the costs and decide which world to commit to.
Until we commit, our infidelity will run amok and we will bear the consequences of our sins of omission.
We are wedded to God's world, yet will always lust in our hearts after the other.
So, shall we just give in and consummate this lust for the other world?
In this matter, must one serve both masters?

THE ELEGY HAS BEEN SUNG

How does one fight an enemy that is oneself,
without incurring any casualties?
But perhaps all things must die in that they may live.
For truly, there is no creation,
only annihilation assuming many forms-
Life is Death as Death is Rebirth,
a continual requiem.

The elegy has been sung,
we merely lie await within the desanctified Tomb
of this earthen expanse.

What will we call The Awakening?
Or will we never know, that we have been sleeping?

WINGS OF DESIRE

They say that angels gather on the shores at sunrise,
and that they hear music we cannot,
and that they dress in flowing robes of black or white,
and that only they know distinctly what's "wrong" and what's "right."

They say that the only thing angels cannot understand
is how mortalkind often seeks as much solace in hate as in love.
They say that angels can walk the earth but seldom "feel" it
beneath their feet, cool, firm and inviting,
feeling instead the "gravitas" of the world within their hearts.

They say that when angels are near, we rarely know it.

It has also been said that there are, as we speak,
angels among us secretly wishing they were us.

THE FRUIT OF THY TOMB (Originally published in Dream International Quarterly)

An overripe fruit falls to the ground
as rusted pages of coffee-stained Sanskrit
loosened from a fig tree,
whirl wild, reckless, shimmying and free
up to the blackening skies
after knocking the fallen fruit into a barren cave
a snake pit
that long ago served as a tomb
where only the living dwelt,
waiting to give death to birth.

A black crow nearby with a broken wing
descends upon the tiny, broken carcass
of a decomposing dove
as lightning flashes above,
frightening the crow away
where it seeks shelter beneath a weather-beaten bench
that was crafted by the callused hands
of a bearded man
with the flogged flesh of an ancient tree which stood,
bleeding sap near a plantation
many storms ago.

Another rancid fruit falls to the ground
as a peal of thunder shakes the earth
and the dove, unravaged by the crow
suddenly trembles and composes back to its former state
of animation
while a rattlesnake winds its scaly body against a mossy rock
outside of the barren cave,
shedding its skin in one shiver.

Suddenly, the rusted pages of the coffee-stained Sanskrit
emerge from the pit in the beak of the dove
as the snake, now strangulating the branch of the fig tree
hisses and strikes at the wind
which has taken the form of a woman,
welded into the air by the smoking ashes of now incinerated pages,
feathers of a crow, and resurrected seeds
swirling up now to the haloed sky, wild, joyous, shimmying and free.

The cores of the barren fruits hurl themselves
into the dark, moist womb of the tomb,
which still serves as a sanctuary where withering serpents gestate and dwell,
waiting to give birth to death.

THE LAWS OF INTEGRATION

To never allow life to dissect you is to risk never being put together just right. Integration thrives upon fleeting yet profound moments of disintegration. For what desires Unity must first allow fragmentation to assert its form and force so that Psyche, the Master Sculptor, may bring to fruition the realization of the Self it seeks to substantiate, the personage it envisages within the realm of Divine Projections.