literature

Neverland Requiem

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The Green Man's going up. There's no stopping it- not now, if there ever was. Leaves wet with the previous night's rain smoke and curl before giving in to the blaze, and fruit fries in the branches giving off an obscene potpourri. At least all the animals are gone; they bailed well in advance with a foresight I should have perhaps heeded. It was a mass exodus in the face of something they could not bear witness.

Not that there's any physical danger, all still live who choose to stay, for Neverland burns unlike other places. Observers see not the destruction of form and shape, but the death of a dream, and even the lowest of beasts in a treetop flees before such a sight. Not me, though. I'm on the ground in the middle of it, listening to the eerie silence, choking on the sickly sweet scent, and I would memorize it all before it truly is gone. I can see the area where the flames have already passed through, still standing, all. Many might think that nothing had transpired, for under the quickest of glances all looks as it did before.

But Spring no longer blossoms.

The boys are gone, too. My tree was at the heart of the blighted area, and all are as far from me as they might get. Even the pirates set sail, and I'm surprised how much I miss them. A boys foil is in the deeds of men. I'm surprised they didn't hang about to witness a victory they could have never won themselves. They always hated us; would have taken from us our joy and replaced it with a mocking laughter that would be familiar to them. They would steal our flight and laughter as they do fortunes they lack the skill or charisma to earn.

I'm surprised it happened. I'm surprised to say that through whatever endeavour to goodness, I'll never be good enough.

I push my hands into the warm moist earth. She clings but embraces her prodigal son with no tenderness as I whisper "I would join you, Mother." What dreams I might yet have if you would allow me to lay my head upon your breast and sleep; one last dream to populate a world so quickly falling into ash around me, one last before I leave them forever behind. Before morning. Before there's nothing left.

A burning leaf falls, and from the corner of my eye I think I see a friend. But no...the faeries are the first to go. Nobody believes. Maybe not even me. The little girls that clap their hands are getting younger and younger and are so few. The older ones have no time for their faeries or their imaginary friends and their majic and their what-if's. I guess this place was ready to burn a long time ago and was just lacking an incendiary girl.

There's something missing from the air. I don't think it's the smoke, something's been removed from the very element, and it keeps one alive only grudgingly. There's no music in it, no love. I missed my last breath. I remember the taste of the air passing through parted lips, and when I drew in that last warm exhale, I never knew. I want one more, to know it for what it is, one last dream and one last breath.

The inferno is rather lacking in generosity.

I'm about to be born, I know. Thrust from the most perfect of embraces into the blinding cold where everything is terror and the very first breath you take ends in a scream.

I can see the path down and a bit to the left, but I'm not ready to walk it quite yet, a voice that is not courage saying perhaps it won't be necessary.

I don't want to walk at all, but there's little choice in the centre of a blaze that finds happythoughts in very short supply.

I started with nothing, and still have most of it left.

When the flames licked my skin, no sound escaped me, and so quickly were my brows lost and the few guilt laden tears I'd been able to muster boiled away, and this, my me as all things, must wither. Resignation is the wind of forever's autumn.

Perhaps.

The boy I knew sings a verse of Oscar Wilde like a rally cry, though it seems but now a lullaby:

     Nay, let us walk from fire unto fire,
     From passionate pain to deadlier delight,
     I am too young to live without desire,
     Too young art thou to waste this summer night
     Asking those idle questions which of old
     Man sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.

At the line 'I am too young to live without desire' the wound is struck and at last I cry out, the heat reducing my tears to nothing before they have a chance to escape, and my weeping is as steam. Wispy white tendrils curl from my eyes to the forbidden heavens, perhaps even unto the ramparts from which I was cast; some small part of me retreating to the elevated comfort which I shall be ever denied. Caring not if and that I burn, I rise and take my first step from passionate pain to deadlier delight for the worst of reasons, sick and eager with the knowledge that passing the vanishing point of the road that waits will leave me better, but inevitably less than I am.

The path ahead is, as always, clear but for obstruction of my own device. There are footprints worn into the trail, fossilized; every step I take leaving another locked in stone before my foot rises. I can imagine some child in thousands of years walking this same path, comparing his gait -two steps of his to each one of mine, before coming upon the tar pit into which I'd stumbled. They excavate the corpse and find the tar has perfectly preserved me in a rich black shell, but they can determine nothing of my internal biology; for in my last breath I took it into me, leaving no way to determine which blackness sprang from within and which from without.

Fallen I have indeed, but where I've landed is quite solid. In the stars that flash before my eyes I can see my lovely incendiary Salome dancing...and I, king and prophet, have had mine own head demanded. No blade is offered, and with fingers gnarled and darkened with flame I tear at the collarbone, skin parting so easily, the hair from the head comes out in knotted clumps matted in blood, and I gouge at the eyes to see not again the face of one I've so wronged. But it's not me that's bourn the brunt of this murderous thrust.

His body lays at my feet, but when I saw him first he sat by the roadside. Eyes on me never turning, he swayed to his hearts rhythm, the sheets that wrapped him swaying under his arms. A codex lay in his right hand while the left furiously wrote using a knife in an inkpot as a quill. Back and forth the body moved, eyes locked to mine, the frantic writing making the sound of mice crawling through a wall. Every motion was counterpoint to another in his stationary dance beneath disdainful glare, and the closer I got I could see how densely packed were the words upon the page. As I arrived beside him, I would not be the first to blink, but I did look down upon his accusatory scribblings:

IrememberyouIrememberyouIrememberyouIrememberyou.....

I don't remember when the rains last fell. There seems a time when the asphodel glistened with moisture and the birds were hushed beneath the thunder, but memory is something not to be trusted. The cracking road blisters the feet while the white sun above fries the brain into seeing things that never were or might have been and making also of perception something not to be trusted. The briers and bushes in which I try to hide me from me prove unreal, and I catch myself with barely a sporting chance. Nor do I remember the last falling of the night, the things I've done or words I've said in haste or in consideration; this is something new, and I know not if it be old age or youth for I'd always imagined that one exits from youth the moment that dreams of the future are shadowed by thoughts of the past.

And if all must change ere the day gives way to purpling darkness, what may one become? It must, I imagine, depend on what one was. Thrust away Motive and become Appetite. Or lie back, place coins on your eyes, and allow others to weep. Be not as your nature demands. Be now earth when you've ever been sky.

Or sleep, if night may ever come, but every flickering behind the eyelids has teeth now and predatory eyes and a familiar voice. Be then wrong upon awakening, fill the holes with words, but don't listen to them. The null space between the pendulum swings is a rapacious comrade; in a battle of zeros there can be but one victor, the only combatant being a flatline between the ears. So I eat the Time, pulling from it the petals and wondering how it might be not yet ripe.

Must be the lack of rain.
upon love's loss
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