[when i was a child]

god is not a white haired and bearded old man. god does not live within the spaces between words, leaves, the wind - god does not listen to us when we are at our worst, breaking down in showers, buses, in classrooms, wide open spaces, it does not live as close to you as your aorta, it does not forgive you, or forsake you.
god, like death, is not.

do you believe in god? he asked.

no, i believe in life.

-

it's all existential, post modern, modernist, enlightened, positivist, apologist, structuralist, linguistic bullshit anyway - deconstructed and reconstructed, in seven different flavours, sold to you the citizen/consumer/human being, built by you the angeldemon, burnt up to a deadly crisp by you, the collection of senses and organs that is called (in this symbolic system of signs and concepts) a human. hu-man. namuh. huwoman? wohuman?

it is so very, very easy to destroy something beautiful. all i know for sure is that i am the only one in this orange neon room, watching the yellow lamplight spill itself all over the carpet. we're all just spilling ourselves out, after all; again, and again, and again. and again.

[of cold floors]

not every man has gentians in his house,
in soft september, at slow, sad michaelmas.

bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of pluto's
gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as demeter's pale lamp gives off
light,
lead me then, lead the way.

reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself within the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where persephone goes, just now, from the frosted september
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness
on the lost bride and her groom.

- bavarian gentians -
d.h. lawrence

it was only as the sun was slowly swallowed by the waves, extinguishing itself in the hazy blue-orange horizon, that it dawned on him that he would never again be surrounded by her scent. his fingers turned ashen, wrapped around the railing, white as gravestones, as this realization made its way through his body, traveling up his strong, brown arms and pausing, for a moment, at his chest, where she had marked out a place with her fingertips to denote his heart.
he stood there, for a long time, remembering how those self-same fingers would travel up, and down, her arms, each fingertip lingering, in turn, for just that single moment longer than desire would allow for. he thought of how he had never believed that people of this earth could turn to smoke, be breathed in by one another, twist around each other like the thin tendrils of a quiet fire - as if human beings were, really, only flame and ash. and as he stood there, his body stuck rigid against that railing, he realized that he could not, and would not, leave.

an old man played a sad, soulful tune on his guitar as this young man looked out over the horizon, finally realizing that he had known all along what it was that love smelled like.

some say that it is roses, the wet earth and thunder; but they do not realize that even curiosity has a taste, and some are not quite as feline as others. perhaps all that we were put on this earth to do was to smell our scents, to discover the tastes of our lives.