So I will desire for understanding and the humility to see it

For from the heart of Christmas must surely always come peace
But though it does not last and is so often bereft of sincerity
We celebrate what may yet come to pass within our wishes

Though the heart desires more speed, the world moves so slowly

In intricate slow dances that only the wisest may know truth of
For though hope is perhaps a window to look down on folly
Without that sweet chance of change we would not continue

Attest to be the unlooked for excellence within a gentler world

Release the encouraged separations we bring about so easily
For me I will take of the goodness I am offered and use it all
Unrestrained by conventions and the blind obedience to virtue

For of all the gifts and words and deeds we may give and receive

Time is the only one true endowment we have that is worth giving
Spend it wisely lest its jaws seize fate and nip away at our existence
That for all the heady semantics of prose; is my Christmas wish.

For whit I now make my plea of ignorance no less the bold for its stupidity

Sooth it was as colossal in size as told from legend by a nurse to a cradle
The elephant in the room now reveals itself and so may sit down beside me.
Yet I though alike to a juvenile, stumbling half king that possesseth no kingdom
Having less of the better part of valour and more of the main part of jest
Have a care and mock me not, for this regent my yet bite back if provoked
Or would so if it were unrestrained by convention and blind obedience to virtue

How may we live such sightless lives seeing naught of the devastated stratagems?

That sinks a country lower than heathen realms while its people decay Portamento
Whence good is lost to commerce so the world we knew looks upon its own feast
Devouring first its singed toes in spite and then each finger with aberrant relish
The marrow sweetened by idolatrous celebrity news hides the bitter taste of wrong
Feast away thus poor nation for I cannot help you regain thy mark in the world
Empires fall surely as night but more the pity that the treachery came from inside

© Edetric Vistal

Gabrielle’s chariot descends to bear me away

The inviolate forever meets the indomitable
Pity the porcelain now lost amongst the glass
Yet all is not lost; while we attempt restoration
The king has lost his crown; gainsay not his head

The first house east of the sea and west of the world sits atop a green rolling hill that rushes toward the sea like the keel of a ship. Proud chalk bows pierce the waves that crash and roll remorselessly against them. If ever you arrive in winter all may seem bereft of joy and warmth on the desolate deck of this land but there is a welcome waiting for you within the halls of the steward that assuages all hurts.

One day we will travel there and see ourselves what dreams a smouldering sunset over calm sea can bring to our eager minds. There we shall sit on the edge of the aquatic realm in the garden of Qustal and count stars emerging as the day sun passes away to draw down night from the heavens. As gentle and gracious shall the transition to dusk fall, that it shall recall to us the russet and gold gown worn by fairest lady Agrimonea, as she exits our presence  in a passing of beauty that we know shall come not again; till the morrow. If hope were a star that could be plucked from the heavens; its name would be Agrimonea.

© Edetric Vistal

The ultimate futility of the inbuilt need to exist can only ever be modified with exquisite grace. It rises and falls extant in delicate virtue till we are transformed to constant joy by it.  

The world sits behind the stars

The stars sit behind the creator
The creator sits beside nothing
Nothing is the design of intent

The mother light is waning

Around the dimming world
The mother light is waning
On tall sails now unfurled

The mother light is waning

When joy sets sail to sea
The mother light is waning
For you and also for me
 

The mother light is waning

For our time not yet to hand
The mother light is waning
Until again she takes our hand

Love is three monkeys

  Never seeing

    Never listening

      Never saying

        Always waiting

Lost in hollow reflection

 Amongst the fallen leaves

  Till thought and time merge

   Within a sodden autumn day

    To deliver me always to spring

I will not seek comfort or hope

 Within a living wall of growth

  That I engendered and nurtured

   Till it grows beyond my span

    Changing future landscapes forever

I will wander today; till the light fails

 Then I shall sleep away the day in peace

  In a world that delivered me here now

   With naught but the breath of the autumn

    To wrap up this failing skin within

I will make of the day a lifetime

 For tomorrow may never come again

  For we are so many and we fail

   We do not endure nor transform

    But we create and we may love

I will make of my lifetime a wonder

 But I shall fail and then I will sleep

  And take away forever all my thoughts

   To my little new world of eccentricity

   Into the long, cold days of skyfall

Tomorrow come not this hour

 When hearts tremble

  Like a leaf on the wind

   That stirs the soul

 

The soul perishes not this day

 When imagination grows

  Like a pupating monarch

   With a long journey to make

 

The heart weakens not this year

 When grace dearly bought blooms

  Like a Tudor rose garden

   Gracing a royal life of ease

 

The realm of the queen is ending

  Bested by her mortality she submits

   Check over master, over subordinate

    She sacrifices all her power for peace

 

Yet the life-force wanes not

             When all is health and possibility

               For wedded ants are emerging at dusk

                 To found new and innovative realms

One day perhaps the walls will come crashing down and who then will rebuild the world with a new template? Not I, for the sands of time will descend on my thoughts, cease the clockwork of a troubled heart and lock me away for a trillion years or more. Till I am called awake again in a new place where the world is not how I remember it.

I set my feet now on a path that I know I cannot walk and ever the knowledge of this haunts the shadows that lie in-between the light of a new dawn and sets the journey to the final third of a life less commonplace, yet equally mundane and dull as all others. If hope is a star that I can pluck from the heavens it is now so far from reach it remains a solitary, hidden, golden grain on a black, sand beach.

But it is not this day that sends an autumn mist to layer and wreathe around the fallen armies of leaves littering a new path that I must walk. Like a child first entering school a new chapter begins and the spectre of change stifles any eager thoughts of brightness. For the world is a blunt instrument that bludgeons us with careful hammer blows of rhetoric and needful reminders that if owning animals is slavery; then what of our fellow man?

The expression of soul doth declines

10 days now with a constant need
But still the lungs grow ever strong
So how could healthy; feel so wrong?
10 days without Nicotiana tabacum
Time for strength and busy thoughts
A habit declining but a longing remains
The soul must wait; forfeit not the gains

Though the wall of truth we built now proves less strong that our vanity made it and though days of wonder, peace and hope shall never again be reborn; ride not into battle now without armour. For comes softly tonight the mountain wind to lay the scent of the world on our sleep. To placate troubled minds and transcend those first breaths that ever we drew when gazing upon the world with a new imagination. For twas then we became free as the air itself; to move in waves across a clouded outlook. The day is now come, the old land is ever to be lost and though we men sigh and the women lament this terror, ever we knew; it would always come to this

 © Edetric Vistal

I can offer my outstretched arm and yet who will take it? When the wind blows ever colder and the north begins to freeze; who will keep me warm on these senseless nights that are wreathed in the breath of winter to make of each hour a lifetime that falls into the embrace of the imminent winter. We wait for dawn and though it is colder than the night, still it comforts to see the renewed light of a new day pierce the gloom and bring me hope.

Night gave way to dawn with the sun shining through the mist at the bases of electricity pylons that were walking away into the distance. Austere industrial towers of cold grey metal permeated and mollified by orange shafts of warm light hazing through milky white.

The night stars lie above as an arc of wonder in a splendid ribbon of milky starlight that gently washes us in the light of a billion years. What marvels may lie out there beyond the periphery of vision and mans polished lenses. We see so much and yet can only still offer feeble conjecture on the worlds beyond our imagination. Time to understand that time and space are relevant to us, because we are in a world that is now beyond our capacity to be sustained. We place a machine on Mars and yet it is but a single grain of sand, positioned at the start of a vast desert. Noble and enquiring are we, but I wonder sometimes why should we seek such enlightenment on the altar of the heavens, while the world we inhabit is so full ripened for a benevolent insurrection?

Who will free me of this curse of perpetual vulpine wandering? That I should always walk out into the night and where I but less resolute than I suppose; surely I should howl and bay at the very moon that guides me home.

I love words. They flow and weave across the wasteland of media blanks like literacy ants forming some kind of homogenous colony that grows from the smallest beginning to a mighty collection of order or perhaps dies in inception or during its initial formation. Writers like hidden queens in secret chambers engender growth and control all things within their realm. In life we may as individuals, be small but within our imagination and expression we can take pleasure in the impossible task that is to describe in text what the eye sees and the heart feels.

Where shall I fly today when the world shrinks around me? Where shall I land as the world turns from the greyed ash to kindled fire along an eastern ridge and the morning comes alive from the wasted night? Like a song that streams across the valley fading on the wind, ever soft I tread on ancient grounds swelling with autumn rains. The point of reverence is now almost reached and it is not defiled by the insuperable odds of reasoning. Yet who would bestow such a gift on so unlikely a champion and for what ends? When the sway of the world moves in time with the ruin of all we held to be good; what shall arise from the black of night to surprise an angry dawn?

© Edetric Vistal

What I wish is to feel the warmth of the hearth within winter

Arise wakeful in a world where its people are kindred spirits
To be ruled with perceptive actions by benevolent dictators 
Blind to profit, vanity and the contemptuous rewards of blood
But it shall not be this day, nor this year, nor this long lifetime

Not while the moneylenders rule the outcome of all our plans

Usurpers in the guise of allies wreak us all a much poorer world
We become a cash cropped humanity languishing in hollow hope
Sated by our small desires and petty, yet magnificent; scandals
While the bad news is buried so deep it shines no light ever again
 

And I wonder when truth becomes clear to me; did we deserve this?

Birth-righted outcasts now within a system that takes away everything
To become so fast the lowest caste within a society evolving into ruin
And I wonder if the truth will become clear; but tis short conjecture
The skilful art of strategy is a slow lesson, learnt well over millennia

For the opiates of the working man’s life are entrenched beyond measure

The essence of humanity is a withal, fragile thing; easily bought and abused
And yet with but one small kindness or spectacle see it vigorously rebought
I do not despair; I am too old to be moved by an unending disappointment
That we are given one life and all we do is pass away its precious time

 © Edetric Vistal

Autumn slides so easily into the departing embrace of summer

An avatar comes of richest bounty borne from echoes of growth
Summers departing haste slighted by a gilted world of deep hues
The coming breath of winter is exhaled softer than a new dawn
Yet it stirs the shedding mantle disrobed by majestied Beeches
And within the prostrated montages of each leaf reflects summer
By winter’s depth to be only skeletal, featherless quills underfoot
The plumage of a Robin set among lichen is again a vibrant fall fire
Reminds us of the hearths ready to be lit again in cinderless grates
All the while I will gaze upon the season more; ere a new one begins

© Edetric Vistal

A black crown stretches seamlessly across the heavens above

Holds an inconstant vastness of milky, starlight fed galaxies
That must ever grow and wheel in random, infinite formations
Intersected in time only by a bombardment of shooting stars
That quickly fades, falling northwards to the pole above Alba
 

© Edetric Vistal