Sidereal Stories

You’re hurting, Olwen, I know, and the glass is empty though it’s full. You’ll find little hope there; at the barrel bottom only dregs reside. And you might cower under the bed, shirking in shadows whose shapes you know; you shiver, under blankets piled high though the night is warm, and the wind stumbles against the shutters with drunken abandon, a sound you know and yet it frightens. This is it, you know this fear, this comfortable sickness whose poisons slyly sit near, known since the drugs of depression took hold.

I see it in your eyes, and remember mine as distant things.

It’s not only in dreams you can fly; it’s only in flight you may dream.

So leap with me, out the window into the night, past the breeze blowing across the waters where the lady waits, garbed in silver stars and moonlight, her fingers reaching through the ripples whose grasp we’ll evade like a whisper.

Trapped in the mirror of the waters, look down, we’re dancing on reflected stars.

Beneath the shadow of the mountain where the dragon sleeps, tiptoeing over his hoard of melted gold, our fleet figures bent in gilt reflections – linger not here, dear, roads await.

Into a thick and grasping wood, whose long-limbed mysteries and webs do collect uncertain travelers, we are not caught. Two roads, and no return, a cottage, a hovel, candle-lit faces in a bog – choose, Olwen, with love not fear.

Tell me you still yearn, you still burn with pain; tell me you must return beneath the covers, to Harold before the world, and I’ll let you go. Or follow me beneath the sea, where kelp forests wiggle like green worms, and orcas sing of the ocean’s melancholy weight and depth of being, and everything hears and agrees.

Little lasts forever; most worries are tomorrow – let’s glide across stars lupus and orion tonight, the bear lumbering over the pre-dawn sky whose tail is not yet lost to fear’s unknown, and leo and the little old lady whose rocking chair groans with eternity. I’ll tell you their stories, if you’ve lost yours in the struggle for hope, and Olwen, you’ll find the universe is not always whole, but it’s ready. Let it be, and let your heart soar, string-less as the bird over the storm, for there’s a time for rain and a time to be reborn, in red, in white, in black.

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/05/sidereal-stories/