If I close my eyes the memory's vivid -
screeching, circling, circling, screeching.
Overhead and all around is turbulence and chaos and turbulence
in a hellish cacophony that splits the night,
the night they came to caution me.

For no rational reason
an insidious seeping of terror and awe
slowly carried black, dank thoughts of impending doom
to exponentially darken the core of my centre

I did not then know who,
but I knew.

The Aborigine say the curlew cries the warning of death.

~

The canvas stretches and twists, did you know?

Carefully and impersonally they raped my soul,
uttered the Great Lie, stripped my heart from its breast;
unenlightened, unaware they were messengers from the profound
instinctively playing the role cast on their star's blueprint,
they told the equivocation with such conviction as to bury Knowledge.

I sank into an aberration of sightless oblivion.
In sticky viscous darkness I heard bloodcurdling denial,
felt the filmy fingers of transparent veils
that hide the confusion
of what is not really there behind the abomination
of the masked masquerade of things manifest.

I thought I would stay forever tasting the appalling aroma,
and breathing the fetid fear of the black nothingness of not knowing.

~

He entreated with a small, soft voice,
barely perceived in the quiet empty void
of mournful devastation.
Hovering, hidden, he manipulated every disbelieving crack,
to demonstrate tiny miracles
and whisper cryptic words
of kaleidoscopic wisdom
afire with the pungent knowledge of continuation.

He walked with me through
the relentless seeking of the malnourished,
steering my footsteps
from high windy cliffs of weeping worlds and words of despair,
to the sights and senses of manifest's gifts
interlocking with evermore in the eternal now
which is all there isn't
and is.

Then one morning I woke to harmonic birds' chorus;
variegation gliding through a cloudless sun birth;
a joyous dawn rousing to dance and symphony
and in the new day's air I sensed first light.

So I sat in stillness, to seek or escape, and felt golden warmth white-wax my soul.
A twilight journey; a tunnel travelled
and I touched Truth

as he casually strolled into the cosmos of my psyche,
mocking the Great Lie,
proving to me
we are forever somewhere in the timelessness of now.

~

He stayed until he thought I'd stopped missing him,
until it seemed I was ready
to not notice him leave.
But when I look back, I remember a moment when
my heart felt a fluttering hiccup heave,
of which I took such little regard -
being busy smelling a rose at the time.