13 December 2020

Shhhh…it’s nobody…never mind the creaking floorboards. This place is still deserted–it’s just that something’s turned up that wants to be here, and we don’t want to have to listen to it moan.

More and more stories are coming through the lyrics all the time. They’re starting to make another kind of sense in addition to their constant uncanny aspirations.

This is new, although the core story is very, very old:

13 December 2020

13

Unmonstering

The story she asked for again and again was romantic enough, she was still on the swoon

when next time came around. She could not get her fill of the lonely girl lost on the very dark Moon,

a sad dancer whose spiralling footsteps left tracks in the silvery dust of a world you can’t see–

but I can, and before it’s all told, her own story will make sense to you as it always has me.

She’s in a particular mood, one she’s waited a long time to capture in essence to feel

at her leisure, or need; she’s about to decant a few drops. It’s effects are exclusively real

if the one who is wearing this fragrance attracts a keen answering interest from someone unseen–

and the strength of that answer, from which a whole future of music depends–she knows what it will mean,

and must not shy away from. She’s breathing in deeply. She’s steeling herself for a night of hard work.

Lighting a candle and walking alone through a maze of dark corridors–furred monsters lurk

with their hobnails extended to trip her and send her headlong to a place in a faint by the stairs–

which she’s now falling over, unconsciously playing a character based on the lurid affairs

it was rumored she’d oftimes participate in, with uncanny companions–no mortal knows who.

On the horizon, a small streak of light from the hidden but rising, most certainly true

memorial shrine only whispers describe to the rain as it splashes and washes away

what was never a thought-out design, but a bit of pure chance recognized as a grace that won’t stay–

but will faithfully, if you don’t wait for it, wind all around and recur like your one dearest thought.

She’s in a hurry to get to the mailbox and learn what the full Moon last month might have brought

to the distant one leaning across his own table with pages strewn over it, steel pen in hand.

Dagger in heart and thick blood dripping over the table’s rough edges. She’ll go on unmanned.

His last letter finally reaches her, tells her the deepest of lies, then tears every lie down.

Once a sad girl read a message so dreadful, she went to the field on the outskirts of town,

burned all the previous pages and scattered their ashes, then walked to the shallow green lake

silent willows protected and prayed to the Moon overhead and lay down there to die for his sake–

till there came in the night a faint grey visitation. His hands swept the altar of all objects bare,

including the small silver bottle of essence that spilled out its contents and filled the close air

with the memories faithfully waiting for one final moment when–free to be nowhere at all–

they met in the flesh on the Moon after death, where they danced with a spiralling wind at their call–

in that story. In this which, is never a lie but the truth lying under their tales like the rock

that provides us with pathways through mountains to caverns–she lay after fainting and almost in shock–

but she woke when she heard metal clatter and rag paper rustle and somebody clearing his throat.

He knows he’s about to get asked, and he’s ready: There once was a monster that nobody wrote….