Flash Story – Modern Romanticism

Flash Story – “Pensive Deliberation” – 1,000 words – 1/30/2022

Cracks in the Walls

There is always love that dreams. Even then, those times when the eyes are closed, when the mind has entered a shutdown phase, the soul is screaming. The soul screams, as that is all the mind hears. The same as an infant owl having a powerful sense of hearing will be frightened at thunder, there is, when the body rests, the same example of restlessness. Since what is familiar to the mind are those screams, is the same for the owl’s innate perceptions for loudness it eventually grows accustomed to.

In the scream, the mind listens, the heart is the conductor, while the soul is in agony. Whom, in particular, is repeating the blaring chorus in heated vibrato and carelessly driven congestion? It is one man whose eyes look up, though stare at eyelids. In his sleep, such a face has been showered in pain, as though a collection of clouds, unwilling to scatter, are sending down to him the stinging droplets to walk him through the corridors of remembrance.

To that face, there is the obvious display of tension. From wincing brows to grimacing lips, here are revealed the symptoms of discomfort. More than that, however, is what wrinkles and folds to his skin. These finer details deserve more notice, enough to lead on for apparent understanding.

We mean love. We do, when we can look, even for a mere moment, apart from the face of this man to a folded paper that has been dropped from the bed to the floor. A paper of its own wrinkles and folds, blended in with the dark ink, remaining rounded enough to be the shape, the cause of this man’s grief. Then, upon returning to the face of the man with running across the arm to his cheeks, there is a road that heads to his pensive countenance. There is a path that enters the darkness of his complexion, up through his sleeve with fear’s perspiration as a wet street after an evening of drowsy weather.

Those words, from the paper, despite the dark of this room, can always be said to be what is causing the signs of visible pain. A depression, one dark walk through the deepest of memories, as one pebble can fall into a geyser to find the depth hotter as it descends. It can be those written words, or it is them, when the path that leads from his hand to his face is enough for guidance’s sake. A subtle waft of perfume curtains a glaze over the apparent emptiness of this room, while a discolored stain is nestled in quiet ease into the page of looseleaf.

A wide array of thoughts. A vast depiction of what is hurting. His love resides upon the other end of town, while there are a multitude of cracks to the infinitely less walls in between. All walls with a great many more cracks, to shopping malls, factories, warehouses, apartments, single-family houses, bookstores, conveniences stores, bakeries, salons, restaurants, cafes, hospitals, theaters, drug stores, supermarkets, gift shops, hardware stores, and a great many others. All places with walls that hold the thinnest cracks, though love can wait an eternity to see each structure collapse that two beloveds will not have barricades to withhold shared sight.

There is the question for what drives the life mad with love. What does, other than the knowledge to how love leads to the rush, the impatience of life to grasp what it needs to live? We fear to lose what is most valuable, as it is the heart possessed by love that can recognize value before it becomes lost. Through the rush, there is the stammering heart, the nerves for how they affect body language and speech. There are those glimpses, viewed upon the face and hands of this man, while he is embedded in the most restless sleep that soothes no inch of flesh about his limbs.

When Love carries Ropes

All to the madness to love, there is, for bystanders, spectators, and ardent supporters of simple pleasures the endless questioning of it. They point out love’s meaninglessness, its uselessness, and its lack of functional worth.

We cannot pray apart an illness from the form, though the uselessness behind love is its point. If we can state our prayer to God can hold functional outcome, then we cannot also claim that God is loving. What point to love, besides no point? What use to it, other than none at all? The same is spoken for a man who sleeps in restless dreams, viewing landscapes without color. Since, when he comes to awaken, he will still see monochrome in the sun that has only begun to rise. Even then, the color will bring back his sadness. Color will remind him of what is, again, utterly pointless.

It is within his dreams that he sees a tree, and then has noticed himself carrying a rope. In his dreams, a feeble sort of serenity has surfaced. He wants to lose everything at the hanging of his heart.

The tree may as well be the growth of his life. The rope may as well be the gathered strings of his heart, now dried into mere twine. Waking would make no difference. A woman on the other end of town would not see him place his head out of the window to feel the wind gust against his cheeks. It can be said of this man that more fear and cowardice has captured his heart, rather than love. How much madness? How much despair? It would not be known, though love is said to wait.

In his dreams, he faces near to the end of them. When he does wake, as eventually he will, he will find the paper upon the floor with the engrained words built into them the same as walls. He might linger his eyes upon the sentences a moment more than before, when he had read them the first time. He might listen to the rhythms of his heart closer, as a curious child inching up to a window to gain an opportunity to view something it has before missed.

To see cracks in the paper that surround the words and letters, imagine cracks in the walls that separate himself from his beloved, or to feel the cracks in his heart that invite the invention of a rope; and this man will wake to discover what will not erase, nor collapse in time, nor completely heal.

Short Prose – 400 Words – “Bleeding in Purity” – Erotica – 3/15/2021

Echo. Echo out, and then, remain sad.

We say to you, a little fog cannot blind those eyes. Hold your piercing scream to the wind, and then let us breathe of you. Allow ourselves. And then, we will dance to your tune. We will dream of what will sometimes never reach. Then, we will keep remembering. To hold upon what shouldn’t be dropped. Just skin. All of yours. Held in the puddles, massaged in the dirt, washed when no one looks.

Keep bleeding in this sadness, for such a sight is so pure. A virgin whoredom. A Christian banquet, with dust to every mile of your privileged beauty. Would Christ ever soak himself in your blood, in these tears of a watering sorrow?

And then, we leave you alone. And then, the shores show themselves up as empty. We go, for a minute. We depart, for a second. You suffer. You whine. And then, we return to your loneliness. And then, all the shells and stones wash up. A great defeat, all over your bones. We all begin to echo. We all take our turns to be sad, to dream of the birth of more deserts, more of the desertion of our dreams or our great stretches of the softest thing which is water.

To your tears, so pure, though it comes not always as the splash from the sea. It comes, at times, from above. We are then forced to look up. We are motioned, of our minds, to keep ourselves comprehending that you are gone. Though, the tears do not disperse. They simply add to the ocean.

Raindrops and teardrops, with sadness to soak and to bury. To conceal, for is that not where you once were, in this world?

A face of grime. The woman, a whore, one beauty with much to destroy in yourself. You left the world open, when your legs were parted to birth all of us. To your breasts, plump as they were, with nipples as the lighthouses to guide our ships, we landed at your flesh. We gave ourselves to grace. We breathed of your neck. We dined upon life, from your hips.

You were the endless surrounding. The ocean that tore us open, as well, to be like you. You let not a tear be missed, nor a droplet of milk to be left not drunken. We travelled throughout you, only to be left without you.

Should we not always be grateful?

Short Prose – 300 Words – “The One who Grieves…” – Romanticism – 3/8/2021

He believed more in betrayal, than that of love. Watched, as the stars kissed his cheeks. Waited, as the haze melted him into a portrayal of surrender. Laughed, as the clouds mocked him among their height.

He kept something. A locket. Of a face with two roses for cheeks, blush for the sake of the lips, and two eyes that always made him weep. What a love that lays frozen before the petals. Skipping heartbeats and sadness that stirs in the trenches of his own veins. Blood flows, though to him, remains idle. Just a face that no longer moves. Two eyes, that never truly look back.

Standing before a lake, his heart is now just one more stone at the bottom of it. He wishes to know the world, for its end. Bending a knee, and his hard entrance to the earth will cover him. A minor leak from his eyes, to then regret.

Pangs of dread reveal him to motion, of nothing near. Bright crystal upon the lake that evokes the frozen tension, keeping him drowned. Stillness and itself, of a man with his locket, wastes seconds on the beach where pebbles are scattered at his feet. Precious moments, that could have been given to sheer recollection, rows a boat across this lake of his repeated sighs. Of sighs that whisper, of those that speak themselves in their repetition to shift with the faint hint of fog upon the lake’s surface. He is endless, both in thoughts, among his grief.

Where is the world to embrace him?

Where is the shouting command, from a Heaven that looks down? Where are the waiting arms, to welcome him back to warmth?

Find all else, and then he shall shatter.

Walking without sunlight, battered by the moonlight in his heart, and watered by the endless raindrops that shower from nowhere, he finds himself trapped in the debris. Wasted, with no mouth to truly speak, as there are no eyes to ever read.