Maps (silent)

These silent maps, a Mute cartography,
Tracing forgotten journeys of dreams and solitude.

Etching contours of valleys and hills that none have in flesh traduced
He relies on the taste of the air hidden beneath the tail end of the trade winds, the known routes through territories delineated by impossible events, veiled rumours, unspoken struggles.

To read his maps one must have fingertips as light as forgotten snow
Dancing up and over and through, the drop just one of the thoughts of freedom that sidles alongside the rest
There is no sound to share the stories yet untold, unlived – to break this vow a risk; a shattering of lips
Cracked and parched with the raw essence of life lived in salt, brine blood
Within each, its own, unheard

What music, then, what notes do we allow?

The moon for one, the milk of eternal renewal, that waning breast that feeds us until we, with it,
spill

From over the side a splash a splash; the ripples of a time that stays a beat ahead of our best guess

It takes more
It takes
The silent awareness of patience and time
The place where they meet and sketch out lessons to take to heart and slip into crevices
Safely stowed for the time that follows time
A pencil scrape
Nothing more, no less, a graph of the space within
Where our own leaps and splashes go unseen by most until after we’re gone

Beneath the surface we spend the rest
We can see the air they breath but it’s not for us. When we do, finally, dare to taste
we find it for what it is – a promise broken before uttered

Theirs, though they do not see it. It had been ours, too, but we let it go
To taste the other side. And what do we know about where we are? Less and less until the smallest snippet
Becomes so important we lock it away so nothing more can be taken from it
There, starved, of light, touch, belief, it grows in the eyes of others as it dwindles away to nothingness.

The less it is the more they believe until gone, they demand its release, to see it
Too late?
They won’t accept they can’t accept they won’t accept that
They invested their dreams hopes lies into its story, carved etched and burrowed every vein they could and let it bleed in, bleed out.

They thought they knew. The less they remembered the more they grew sure they had the essence in their eye
But blinded to the hollow heart they see a glow brighter than a million suns

And what of the map? Its mute glory
A work of peerless breadth.
They turned it over and began again – none trusted its silent truth
A new truth was drawn, loud and clear – a single kernel spun round and round until it resembled this one small thing – the everything it promised.
How to explain its contradictions and crossed paths, contours in twists and tangles – words.

Words that glossed its impenetrable heart, that slid in and filled, every groove that grew

Matter not that the words had no trace no truth no understanding
Matter not that the words fought amongst themselves for attention, to blindly lead
Matter not that the words no longer bore resemblance to the immutable heart, for they no longer cared

The words chose to ignore the map, to leap off and enter the very world they believed their own
They danced a merry dance they did, believing themselves king
What fear was there of overthrow when they had drawn the rules
What fear was there of falling off when they had drawn the edge
But of course, boys and girls, you know it’s not that simple
The rules they drew the edges they knew
Were nothing like the world that existed beyond the page that had been the world in which they grew
They tumbled and fell, twisted and yelled, slipping into the abyss
The end was swift and merciful – and in their wake; silence

The silent map, the mute cartography, outlived them one and all
It had no need to assert itself against that which it knew so well
Content to live and breathe the air that coursed across the plains, that dipped from mountains high above that fell with fresh new rains
The stars they knew they smiled to see

The taste, now, of earth and clay, stale before its time. The smear of mud and blood and gore of metal twisting
The barren shore, the desert wreck, scoured of the fleeting life, that tricked itself into believing
It knew the answer

It did not