An Ode To..

by Lance Li

Looking beyond the dark silhouettes of the towering pine forests was the firing red on the horizon fading out into the blue, cold morning sky.

I see in the flowing dunes of muted blue and silver gray under the landed clouds, a sun as dim as death, recall a time when you mistook its plasma for hell’s fire and melting lead.

Memories are like your own fading shadows as you walk past under the streetlights, encircling you, riddling you, imprisoning you, haunting you.. hunting.. you..

Witnessing from behind the windows are the scattered lights in endless darkness, some trapped and others just flashing by. How can you tell if they are not light years away?

Every single day seemed the same, as if you were born just yesterday, as if a spiral of nightmares in which you can’t be sure if the reality you woke up to is merely another dream.

Reflected back in the windows were the tears and laughter of living ghosts, sitting among travelers whose direction can’t be told, all looking down into a black vertigo.

But that girl who once served you empanadas and espresso at the closing hour.. It’s what she’s smiling at that still lingers, troubling you: so Strange is that smile; so Abstruse, like no other.

Pity you wrote..

I smiled, Because you pretended to smile so joyfully, So realistically, So.. wholeheartedly, As if you threw the whole world away, For what I have already shared with you just a second ago.

I gestured, And you pretended to nod for recognition, For acceptance, For a seemingly good idea that will forever imprison its very fruition.

I smiled, But from your gaze I escaped, Unrelentingly startled, Never before realizing the sheer amount of violence a simple bending of those muscles carries… Such a marvel, Such a catastrophe.

Pity that you found yourself trapped inside your own mirror, the image of which reminds you of an illness for which there is no cure except hatred and horror.

Pity, not that in a life you never consented to, youth and ambition silently died, but that you’ll never know if it was you who choked them while they were asleep, or the void that smothered them when floating in sea.

Keep on dreaming, keep on losing.

Ascending above you is a cloud full of cancerous smoke freed by the very law of physics that marooned you down on this island. So light, so hopelessly light.

Navigating down the skin of her face, oiled by the minutes of aimless haste, wrinkled by all those days of fruitless pain, stifled by all these years of fretful daze, those teardrops shined most daringly. Without shame yet full of pain. Without sound but full of glory. How you Longed to feel their temperature. And how Utterly impossible it would be.

All the guilt in that ‘goodbye’, All the coldness of her face, as the warm liquid escaping down her face: ‘I love you, I love you, I…’

Far and away, a star just died, and all it seemed to us was a sparkle in the sky.

Should you think freedom is a lie, Listen to the Song of the Seagull:

“Smell of iron, Blood or Shackles?

Sight of an island, Cargo or Lifeboat?

Color of orange, Fire or Afterglow?

Taste of milk, Love or Evil?

Blindfold me With a blood red cloth around my eyes. Keep me

Violently high for almost a lifetime.

Bury me Together with blinding sunlight. Save me From my life” If you don’t mind…

Now you realize the ingenuity of the astrologer you spurned, for intertwining stars light years apart, for fabricating webs out of the mad poet’s lies, for making sense out of the nonsense that is our lives.

Striking the retina of your eyes, colors of the garden mishmash into impression, as the sun shines high and the clouds seem light. Somehow, lost is the grip of their shapes, and somehow, all reality starts fading away.

Pity that you looked back at the watery reds and greens on the shiny asphalt, diffused by the rain yet clearer than the darkness forward, for that the faces you see will soon never be again remembered;

What a beautiful day, To be lived, To be wasted..

Evening in Rome by Alisa Augdahl