Triad

Triad

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

-William Blake

He is on his hands and knees
and his breath comes in gasps.
Eternal grey stretches around him, the grey of nothing, of the
void. His hands are raw and bleeding
the red streams and lines like a disoriented, sickening map
with confused alleyways reeling into darkness. He is dressed in the rags
of his clothes, the rags of his sanity, and the rags
of his heart. Pale skin shows through the rips and tears,
as if an invisible whip of torment has opened him and pulled his insides
out. He cannot stay but cannot move, frozen
in stone. The cords are too tight; they cut him
off from himself, and the unnatural blue fingertips pulse
with the eerie writhe of maggots
in their transformation into wriggling pupa,
without ears and blind to the world.
Trapped inside his own mind like a cocoon, he thinks
of all the butterflies that he has ripped and torn apart, capture, tortured,
and let go, mutilated.
The air is filthy with his own sweat and his delusions.
There is no sound except for the suffocating grey masses
and his own doubts and fears.
He stretches out a hand. The cord dangles and he falls.

She has her back turned, a cloth behind her
back stained with the invisible blood of a human mind.
A face contorted by the trials of her life, facing something she despises
yet has to look upon. Her nails dig into her palms, and she keeps
silent. She bleeds elsewhere.
She bleeds by and into the thirsty sword she carries,
she bleeds into the eternal convolutions of her brain, and bleeds into
the child within her womb that is not a child but the last vestige
of the battle between fear and rationality.
She was innocent, the virgin earth, the unrained cloud.
The rope around her waste echoes the delusion but for her is something else, something remaining of her life before,
before corruption and silence
and ruin. Immortalized and unable to bring her own sword down
upon herself, forced to turn her back
on her life by the unforgiving hands of the artist,
ordered by the lifeless corpse staring at her out of dead eyes.

He towers in front and behind, omnipresent.
It is not his armour and not his glory, but his stance
say what the grey face does not show. He is a chimera
born out of the old and the unchanging, a monster with the power
to topple a nation. It is he who has made
himself, the ruler of his own mind and the minds of those
ever after by a commission
to haunt their minds and change the perception of history.
The fur on his back is from those metaphors of beasts
he has slain, the impure, the drastic, and the traitorous. His eyes, old
as the hills out of which they have been carved, are pitiless
and ruthless, seeing centuries into the future, spreading
his gaze through time and space and planting the seed of doubt
in the hot, midday minds of the people with neon signs
and gaudy paints over their doors.

You, who picked up this eternal scrap of time out
of the magma of your fancy, have at last seen through the grey
stone and perceived what is shielded.
You are not tricked by the utter modern indifference, you know
what goes on in the souls of those long dead and whose who have never existed. Your art, your imagination, has refuted the blinkers that
he has tried to instigate, and extracted the precious
gemstone from its matrix. The confusing truth,
gripping your mind and scarring your heart, to see the kneeling
man, to force yourself to write, to see the truth and to
be unable to reach it – yet you know what you must do. Based on and opposite
the evidence you have created for yourself,
feeling as if your heart would break with the magnitude and the direction
of their turbulent feelings, you grasp for something
greater than yourself and hold it for a moment.
For history is not fact and figures,
it is your invention and you must invent the truth.