Reveries of Heresy

Lily of the valley, your lucent pearls glisten like stained glass reflected beneath the still moon’s crescent. Your gossamer petals curl, faintly crinkled with grief— their edges laced with soft melancholy. Your stem bows—drooping in a modest, bashful curtsy, as if to shield your face from the sun and its follies. Still, they pluck your petals— clutch your willowy stems, and wrench your downcast gaze toward the sun’s searing glare. Do they scorn you for not being a sunflower, so radiant, brazen, lively? Or a fragrant red rose, so elegant, poised, lovely? You bloom in winter’s hush and fade when spring arrives— so they dismiss you for thriving in solitude, a flower out of time. Lily of the valley, so soft, sweet, and tender— you may never win the sunlit pageant, but to me, forevermore, you’re my special soul flower.

In this life — or at least in my version of it, through my eyes, heart, and mind — I’ve perceived time and time again: there is no true rock bottom. To believe in some final stability — even in ruin — to trust the ‘rock’ beneath the ‘bottom’ is one of those comforting platitudes with which we soothe ourselves and others: a spell cast against chaos, always too tenuous to hold. Oh, Persephone in the underworld, does this resonate with your truth? Is the chasm closer to Dante’s vision: an inferno of circles within circles, spiralling down to a frozen core where Satan lies immured?  Or is hell more like cosmic anti-matter: stretching endlessly, devouring galaxy after galaxy? Has anyone truly glimpsed the end — or the origin — of suffering?  Or do false spring awakenings  seduce us with fleeting reprieves, drip-feeding hope like poison into our veins? It’s a cliché, but no metaphor feels truer to me: life has always revealed itself as a ceaseless plunge through the abyss. Vis...

The hinterland of winter births snowfields veiled in sea foam: stark as a petrified palm, searing as splintered bone, bearing scars etched by forgotten gods. Its harshness compels even the gentlest— hares, squirrels, shrews— to devour their young: wilting, writhing, still warmly pulsing in the permafrost. Is this savagery, or misunderstood mercy? A flaxen-haired girl, stranded in this glacial hush, crouches shivering in a warren hollowed like a tomb. Her lips, cracked: ancient papyrus. Her breath— a fugitive mist escaping in tiny gasps. Her shadow casts an omen beneath the spectral moon’s eye. Emerging from the den, she inches toward a battle tank— her gaze fixed on its ingot barrel. She uncurls her ghost-pale fist, skin trembling, and offers a blood-red rose: fresh, raw, tender. She has never known love’s warmth, only the frost of worship. Fossilised into myth, the winter solstice girl  was given an ultimatum: To dissolve into mist and wander barren lands— a rising wind to cleanse...