xjwsforChrist

COCO SAID

Scarce in my youth had feet touched on earth,
Intent, so I was, to vanquish all that held me
Painfully fast to misery in flesh and a sorrow
Cutting deep since my first breath an age ago.

Floating above the masses beneath - this with
A sure aim - never did I want what chance had
Wrongly conceived for one like me, I who was
Housed in those haunted, dread realms below.

COCO SAID

I watch from the box into which I was placed so
gently, with such reverence ...

Despite their kindness and love, they shut me out, insisting
that I am no more though will exist, for a time, in their own
fading memories.

My time, truly, had not yet come; they were wrong to assign
me early on to the dark and damp and decay of this wretched
place.

In my heart and in my mind youth reigned eternal and the reality
of advancing years had never been more than a mere whisper
swept aside.

Please, look in on me and see that you acted too soon; it's not
too late to redress your wrong and bring me back to where I
do belong....

COCO SAID

I want the warmth of hearth and home. It is natural.

The house that draws my heart and mind away from all reasonable and natural desire, however, is desolate of any ember that might be kindled into a passionate flame. From yet so far a distance my imagination conjures up interior walls blackened by the oily soot of poorly trimmed kerosene lamps and a dank, poorly drafted fireplace whose tepid fires never quite took. The windows, likewise, are years and years gone unwashed. The now opaque panes distort through their dried-on grime views from within, visions from without. Paneled ceilings, somber and bleak, drip decades-worth of filthy webs downward toward stalagmite accumulations of swirling debris that reach upward, grasping tentatively, from warped and gaping oaken planks.

A grand and spiraling staircase takes center stage but startles me as its wide and toothless grin reflects the loss of many a baluster. It dares me any further approach. I draw back instinctively yet am morbidly fascinated by what is gently swaying in shadow ...

In the dark, at the top of the stairs....

LEANN SAID

Love.

COCO SAID

Thanks, LeAnn! Hope you enjoy this, which came to me when I stayed in a beautiful but forlorn house ...


Tonight's sunset is as spectacular as any I had ever viewed from the kitchen window in my former, beloved home-sweet-home.

A tiny abode it was compared to my current habitation. No longer within a mere four wooden walls of plain aspect and diminutive scale, I now am lost in a seeming infinite architectural spread that reaches toward earth's four points, an edifice of four expansive levels that demand I walk, climb, explore every one of thousands of hidden nooks and crannies. Compelled to do this, I find no joy in discovery. I want to go back, go back to the simplicity of my earlier life.

I cannot.

It is becoming dark out of doors, a furtive, watery sun having limped its pathetic course through the closing chapter of a gloomy and damp spring day. Its brief, craven appearance has created more shadow than illumination, and this has tended toward my unease, prompting me to turn on each light of every room on all floors. I am alone - sometimes it is all right to be alone - but not at this time. This dwelling space of loss and loneliness holds me captive, and I want only to walk out the door and go home. I can never go back.

I have been locked up within. Who hears my cries for help? They are swallowed down whole by the grinning and cruel emptiness of an outwardly beautiful home that has no soul so has stolen mine.

No one hears my cries for help. They are growing fainter. I am silent as I watch the sun sink deeper and deeper into an eternal night ...

It is beautiful....

SOFT/GENTLE SAID

thank you coco - very poignant, moving and beautiful at the same time

COCO SAID

Greetings, soft+gentle! Hope all's well.

Here's some more:


I am pulled as a moth to the flame. Yet, there is no warmth, no light as from a flame. Darkness has seeped into my soul and consumes me. There is no redeemer ...

Though the dark house on the hill won't reveal her exact location to me [is her existence only in my declining state of mind, a floating mirage that toys playfully but cruelly with what few shreds of my questionable sanity remain?]. I am ambivalent regarding this unrelenting draw to an entity whose domination over my servile soul has unhinged me. An entire year of anguish, all for naught, so my more practical self admonishes. Curiosity has become compulsion, a ridiculous and deadly drive to learn what should not be wittingly learned. A lethal affliction.

It was difficult to conceal from my other more objective, discerning side my feigned, casual indifference when given a pair of Bushnells by a friend. My surge of enthusiasm for discovery up close and personal was keen. This hideous dwelling has mocked, distracted and disturbed me mercilessly.

I walk to the promontory, binoculars in hand and put them, trembling, upon the bridge of my nose. Focusing in on the darkened pane, all I had wanted finally - at long last - to know comes sharply into view.

Why, my dear Lord, couldn't I have trusted in you and cast aside the things of darkness? It is too late.

There is no redeemer....

Immersed in shadow, though the blazing blue sky is without cloud, the massive dwelling compels me to accede to her unspoken but very real demands.

I cannot put down my glasses; they are glued to eyes red and weary but forced to stare in close-up detail the growth of this hideous cancer of wood, stone, glass and whatever evil bond holding the disparate pieces in place. An energy unfamiliar to me has seized hold and will not relinquish its purchase upon my frantic, captive soul. Now, inexorably, I am beholden to the one Father said steer clear of, him whom in nightly prayer we beseeched our Lord to deliver us from.

I am convinced that he dwells there (try as I may to deny the reality of this sordid fantasia) as the Chernabog who made my impressionable 10-year-old self shudder in my then naive innocence while inhaling Disney's masterpiece of music and image.

Innocence is long gone, and culpability - guilt by association - has entered into the room of my heart and soul, and, still, I cannot look away ...

There is ... no ... redeemer....

COCO SAID

I awake in a place that, clearly, is not home.

Looking about in a blurry daze, the expected trappings of bed, chair and scuffed, dirty walls have somehow disappeared during my wretched slumber. All the familiar has slid away, swirling downward, but not swallowed, into an eerily black vortex above which my stiffened body floats unaffected by the devouring maelstrom.

My immediate surroundings are an atmosphere of greenish hue that is part of what appears to be sky. Not a sky like I've ever seen before: emerald and iridescent. Suspended amidst the shimmering splendor of undulating waves of a surreal firmament is a golden sphere, which I take to be a moon. The gentle but steady rays of illumination it sends forth warm me. This I find puzzling, as this celestial body is not a star.

I continue to have no control over my body, yet I am not uncomfortable nor do I sense any imminent danger. Something has changed regarding the direction put upon me. A force - like what I would imagine to be a tractor beam - draws me upward and away from the strangely silent but malevolent whirlpool below.

Coming into focus at a distance seemingly close, but probably an infinite space away in light years, is an incredible edifice of glass, porcelain and adamantine steel - a veritable temple of a night's vision, most likely dedicated to some constellation's mercurial god. Opalescent double doors of extraordinary height and hung upon hinges of gold begin to open in protracted slow motion.

Blazing through the widening expanse of the closed-become-revealed is a brilliance like that of Earth's noonday sun. I gaze directly upon its supernal glory; in the manner of a dream, I am unharmed.

I startle as there emerges from doors now fully opened the likes of which nightmares are made ...

COCO SAID

A stream of congealing blood-red water gushes with ferocity through the newly opened doors.

With frightening abandon it rises and falls sharply, wildly to the accompaniment of an initially unidentifiable, shrill blast. This cacophonous herald blares forth like shrapnel from what appear as outsize trumpets played by a dozen rampant jackals, goose stepping in strident march tempo upon a trail of stars. Their hideous aspect in this unfamiliar role of court musicians is repellant yet singularly alluring; I cannot look away, much as I wish. I am nauseous. As the wash of roiling waters loops round and round the monolithic plank of stars, it disappears suddenly into a crevasse torn into the fabric of this swirling, greenish sky.

As though nonexistent for the din of the screaming trumpets, I perceive a harmonious but somber backdrop of a passacaglia pouring luxuriantly from some impossible celestial pipe organ, rising steadily from pianissimo to piano to forte to fortissimo ... FORTISSISSIMO.

At the zenith of this divine explosion of purest sound, the jackals and their brassy salvos implode. Gone, swept forever into the abyss. I wince, attempting to cover my ears. I cannot raise my hands from my sides. My innards commence melting from the insanity of this deafening, gorgeously decimating sound attack.

Of a sudden, I am enveloped in a blanket of a snow-silent landscape. My guts are restored to their rightful place and I look up from my prone position …