Cymbal #54:: Under the Willows

You lit into me like ten thousand candles. The soft fleece the moon was wrapped in caught fire, and burned silently. Its ash rained through the world. Oh love, you pulled no punches. Your fingers in my mouth were casual like I was an old chipped inkwell you owned.

K.Flay – Blood in the Cut - 2017

 

You broke something, darling, and you know it. You broke that dam in me which held back a boiling wave. You reached into a thing that I thought was dry, and destroyed its borders. What gushed through like floodwater was brown and dirty, incoherent and foaming. Love is horrible, love is a dog from hell, the man said, drooling and red eyed. It has the power to make you feel ugly in your own sight. It makes you want to break mirrors. It has the power to bring you to your knees time and again. It can paint a face on you, a broad cherry lipped smile, teary eyes, jealous, blinking in the wind. 

Van Morrison – You Don’t Pull No Punches but You Don’t Push the River – 1974 

What could be sadder than that stock character? What could be more pantomime – already written into comedy thousands of years ago? And having mocked them all the years through, clapped and jeered, here I stand in exactly that paint, on a stage, staring into the lights. It smells like chalk dust. The world snaps at my ankles. 

It rained all the end of the year, and the leaves were beaten off their branches. I lived by the river, in the rushes, kneeling with the beasts. But I know one day I will wake up, the year will have turned, I will be standing by the water, it will be running and I will not be thinking about you. The greatest thing in life, says the river, is to reach for something with all your flayed and naked heart and fail. And the most overrated, whispers the willow, is to win it.