Heralding night-ward, deterring what might shine and greet with head down lest fiction become fact. It has always been so, a spectrum invisible in the glare, a looking glass in which nothing is sacred save fabric of space in spiral depiction of systems beyond counting, meeting here to be transformed by sweet water of a figure immune to arc and direction, a sunrise in which I behold a self screaming for release, failing in its presence, no excuse by which to reclaim these shattered wings. A mirror takes form, as though from these very deliberations. It says, “We are all luminous beings. Why is it then that we do not appear radiant before each other?” . . . “I am only human. How can I be responsible if I do not know who plants the seed, or how I came to be?” . . . “What gap are you unwilling to cross, to be better, to be more? The source disappears on closer inspection, but does that absolve you of duty?” I look into the mirror’s depths, knowing I have no answers, only questions, so I ask, “Am I God become fragment to know my own love, or do I careen beyond mercies, a puppet ignoring his strings, a speck floating in oneness, destined to lifetimes of pain? Am I all these things? Where does God stop, and I begin?” . . . “Better to ask how long will you delay the wonders of your life? We do not know if we are reborn as one, or many, here, on another star, or at all. If the threads cannot be seen, how to judge with confidence? Blessed are those that accept the limit of their scrutiny. We will all say goodbye to our great loves, do not let the meantime slip by. To live otherwise is tragedy, as though derision now may be reversed later, regrets erased and taken back. Even if we turn this jewel and grant purgatory, that we are bound to suffer until we can love in every moment, why wait? Do we each live a private life of perfect tenderness? What if you were to blink first, would that save the world? Perhaps you are not ready. In that case, we have nothing but time. Let me tell you a story...”

There once was a king that united the known lands. It had taken war and compromise, but sovereignty was his, and peace did reign. He loved his family and people but was still learning how to be a leader, a husband, a father. He made many mistakes but was never slow to apologize, and his queen and son loved him dearly. There came a festival to celebrate his coronation so they traveled to a seaside village where every building had been transformed into a monument, and every street a marvel of adoration. After days of revelry the king found himself without patience, his body seized by resistance to obligation, to honor and devotion, all cast gray by some split in perspective, a chip in the stone of calm. He left in silence, walking until he was far away and from there he went further still. In time he stopped, slowly becoming aware of his unfit mood, and feeling regret over having gone without a word. He returned and found chaos, every home destroyed, every life extinguished. The sea had unleashed an epic wave, and it spared no one. He tended the wreckage, vacant and numb, the shoreline his only witness, his child and queen dead and cold. Though he lived it was with mortal wound, a need to know the value of tragedy. He wandered through frozen reach and wooded glen, craving to unpeel the sun from its clouds, to glimpse the dynamo that moved and denied. Why had he not voiced his love, taking meeting again for granted in a world where nothing was guaranteed? Had he secretly wished them death in the shadows of his past, some poverty of a future strange? A thought too chilling to own, but if true, it was understood too late. He was evil and weak and there was no redemption for it. They would have forgiven him had they lived, but he could not grant the same to this minim of self that ran wicked through the halls of an impure heart. He traveled with this burden to the only one capable of passing sentence enough, a great mystic that was part mutant and mystery, a dragon of rumor and smoke become man, a being that could grant or erase one's greatest wish. He coveted both, so stood before that power and said, “I have realized there is no progress without others, yet I left those I loved to the whims of providence. I have become a tool of my mind, unable to overcome its clamor, its moods and monkeyshines. If this life is my creation, I am an incompetent god, and conclude that no sense can be made of this world. I do not understand it, and I do not love it anymore. Such is the winter within me. It does not give, it does not take, it remains, forever incalculable, a stain that cannot know its place and thereby acts from singular fault, seeking up devoid of down, a crushing of hope by clutching too tight. I am virtue's image in sunless dissent, choosing love, but too late to matter. I welcome your worst.” The mystic was still, cowled and silent, the reply long coming. When at last it spoke it was with words left behind, words from some other plane now enriched by their lack, it said, “How many plans must go awry before disappointments are rejected and attributions of result no longer hang on those without prescience? Birth is followed by death, failure by success, glorious morning by suicide. None are predictable nor separable, yet logic and rigor determine your vision. How do you know what is necessary, good news or bad, the difference between coincidence and synchronicity? You live blind to emergent contingencies as they arise and arise and keep on just so while not seeing around the bend, let alone the infinity of influence stretching back to before anything was. Which do you want, control or sanity? The question assumes both exist and such is the problem with the young, they have not yet confronted the battle of a lifetime so lack the humility that adds filigree to experience. They think the ending known, but have only seen the barest sliver of our narrative—a minor antagonist, a grudge, some small decrease in satisfaction—and by this they become incapacitated rather than amused. The penance will be done if so desired. I will send you to dungeon of torment, shackled to a wall with no memory of who you are, what you have done, or how you came to be. The only thing you will remember is that freedom exists, and escape can be had if you summon the answer. Yet, it will forever elude your grasp. You will cast about in a place where nothing can be created or destroyed, where tomorrow never comes yet each day begets the next, the sun shining on the strength of your bonds. You will curse the one that put you there, and unknowingly curse yourself, forever sure of the answer's existence, and forever dragged to your knees by chains of your own making. Is this the sentence you seek, is it the one you deserve?”

Mirror alive, quiver and undulate, a lowered bridge from wiser dawns, it asks, “Are you this king? One does not know if they are character or author and from this all troubles follow. What space for love if mystery sets up residence in one's heart? Another story beckons, that the countless cannot be saved. Their hardship called into being by the very master of the game. But such is distillation of hubris, the architecture of bondage perpetuated by those scared of their own power. You have been told to look inside, to assemble armor over a soul attuned to those existing not in their own right but as goading instance of sleep at bay. This is the tyrant’s lifeblood as long as your gaze is elsewhere. Choice is the thing, that basic predicate allowing us to create heaven regardless of circumstance. It is not the story that matters but what you decide it means. Change is inevitable, but is your suffering? Is it birthright and destiny? We cannot ignore the dark hemispheres of experience, but we can choose a light on which to focus, a system of faith crystalline and shimmering with all that is wonderful, and without apology for being alive. However, even in choosing perfect love you may find no one capable of the same, that you are doomed to stare at the gap between what you see and what others will not, and you might die not knowing if anything you did made a difference. Can you be the butterfly that never sees the wave, will you flutter regardless?” . . . “Am I to believe in volition then? That no good deed is wasted, and no compassionate thought misspent?” . . . “What are you to believe or what can you know, other than I exist, and descriptions are beggars? Confidence is a poor medium when impelled by esteem. It becomes moraine of the convinced, clinging to notions of a being spiritual, of a human experienced. What constant in life of the believer but that which chases resonance beyond, cherishing opinions, knowing at some point we must come to terms with never being fully prepared, never finding steadiness in a world where that is its greatest boon. How best to live in view of the fact, what alternatives but opposition or accordance? Forgive yourself. See the clenching of your mind as it confuses tool with maker, as it creates symbols and the hand to wield them. You can have anything, it only depends on what you are willing to give. Tell me, what would you trade hell for?” . . . “To be with her again. Forever.” . . . “Then shed disease and stare into infinity. That is discipline. Not mindless routine but growing awareness. Being the peace that you are, ruthlessly. Why wait? Are you afraid that death might hear and hasten its plans? That the more you care the more you will hurt? Discard your cocoon and let a new breed shine, one disarmed and resolved. You have done nothing wrong but delay love, and you can change that now, and every now. Take solace. It is not a mountain, but a switch.” I nod, a coarse-grained gesture quelling the urge to run. I feel healing hands strip away the mask, a tender touch gliding over an earth rising in possibilities revealed, impoverished no more. The mirror shimmers, says, “Go, head up and chalice empty. You have all the world to see.”

The sorcerer approaches, fickle and lithe, tattoos like koans of intention, unreadable by this or any light as they move just so, reality screaming as winner-takes-all. He looks into the mirror, says, “Don't you know who I am? I could cut your throat without blinking an eye.” The mirror is perfect, clean. It ripples and replies, “And I could let you. All is glory, all is change, eponymous and allowed. There is a man that eats fire but weeps as it burns. With expectation comes ignorance and satisfaction left wanting. Which do you desire, truth, or life?” The sorcerer smiles, “Two can play this game. Who lives so near the stars as those that risk the lion's den? And which do you judge most acceptable, that God knows all but cannot stop our pain, or can, yet refuses? What if we are but aspects of God torn apart, at odds and pulling in discordant directions? Or, what if there is no God, no hope, no salvation? I have tried them all on and found each easily worn through by solemn conversation and history. How frustrated one becomes when conditions change in perpetual motion, when culture and conflict are wheel and clay. Such is fuel for all I command, guaranteed by nothing less than reality.” The mirror ripples again, immediate and bright. It says, “We are both but a trifling bit of the world, and more than everything in it. You seek to understand without feeling, to control without lever by which to carry out your plans. When did the breeze last obey you, the night? Every veil will disappear, and every feint will be seen through in time. Thirst will come regardless of your designs. Our champion will take a risk on love, on treating others as he desires to be treated, laying it all on the line to realize success is the blessing of caring for more beings than he could ever know, and that such is a rich life, knowing one cannot hold on, only take responsibility until the end. You told him battling the tyrant comes at great cost, a phantom debt on both sides of the board, yet forgot when the game is over both king and pawn return to the box. What will you do when you have more yesterdays than tomorrows, when you see we are whistling in the dark with no hand to lead us out? The knell comes, striking facade and prophecy, product and agent transparent to its swing. It poses questions for which there are no answers—to what are you entitled, and why do you deserve?” . . . “You speak of death as though I am afraid, my quest a symptom of lack. Such is nothing but platitude the weak project to rationalize their lot, to sell themselves permission to give in.” The mirror shines, says, “Then let us turn the jewel once more. How likely is your importance given the scale of life, the sheer size of this universe, all you have witnessed?” . . . “Let us speak of witnessing then. See the destiny I have crafted. I am more than what has been given, and I will take what is left. And you—you will die here.” . . . “Then I have but one thing left to say, may you be free.”

The mirror shatters by sleek rupture propelled by promise of flesh made forfeit, the demon fast and treacherous and come through a ground unprepared for such thirst, impulse and rain to fate the unspoiled, a stabbing breach, whipping and sawing, edges devoured, no mourner left, just penalty paid by unfinished business and a religious life, no harsher measure than approval willingly entertained, a slow decline into absolute beginnings and conservation of what has not evolved, collected in slumber by one to whom apologies mean nothing, a child of shadow hunted by phosphor wings fleet in their race to blot out the sun, no coercion but for distance, and there a coastline bruised by the day we gave up hope, freed to act for those suffering on this journey. Who is the beast, the one that preys or those that deny, and who can truly speak the name of their own destruction?

I travel among galaxies spinning in fields manifest of their own failure to influence oblivion. If I were told the ride was over, that I am to trade places with the hungry, what case against such an exchange? Is it not justice for all to despair equally, could I ever be vindicated in refusing their place? No, the cries of the abject drown any legacy that does not ease their pain. I walk on to become stronger, to face my weakness, the pyrrhic victories and sprawling of conditioned response. Before me is a manor of terracotta and granite that splits the desert itself, cut from a distant past and left as warning to the bold that remain, its facade marked by models of nature, some grotesque, others martial in demonstration of what it must be to contemplate extinction in enamel and earth. The doors open like a creature hurtling through beneficence, principles ground fine by speculation that might testify to its fall. I am greeted inside by sundials and clocks gathered in heaps, twisted metal, gilded stone, a lavish warren where stakes are the annihilation of history, no legitimate trade to offer in recompense for the mishap and torment to which none lay claim yet all are heir. What worth the fortunes of a sacked populace that once looked forward, every beautiful moment and lie held dear vanished in strokes of blame. I creep past gardens and chambers empty but for privilege revealed in sculptures of ice, soft-blue and glinting. I round a corner and enter hall of glass depicting battles stained as they are upon my soul by career devoted to spectacle where all is sound and fury from forks in the road to come, from those not taken. Am I the missing link between animal and empathy, standing fast to allow the birth of some higher being? Or are the cries of infants all that remains where evidence lacks and claims are certain, a melody woven and assuaged by none? At the end of the hall is a door leading into crystal and conformity, a gala enjoyed by those grown rich with simple wishes injured by delectation. They cheer like traitors besieged, like children in the woods deaf to testaments of relationship, content in pedestrian affairs and fashions of the day, in debts and balances, in slights made trauma. All together yet each alone. The fringe of the room is decked by hounds lording over reams of understanding, accumulated and untouched but for those set to flame by weight of bureaucracy, a perpetuation without malice both ardent and self-contained, unable to influence but by strength of numbers and those never in doubt. Tomes of virtue and alchemy are stacked and fed into a raging fire by diabolists robed in carmine, abnegating their impotence with apocrypha in hand, their beliefs made catalyst for utopian dreams where obligation fortifies and proclamations intended to churn fall stagnant as each becomes means to an ever-distant end. In this realm nothing can be made of common ground, the quest for friendship finding only slip in perspective, each being an island buffeted by its fragments. I survey this prison of ideas for sword of progress and see only a mongrel holding the neck of one so bold as to imagine the value of direct experience, and that tongue cut out like so much meat. If only slaughter might relieve the pain of loathing, who would not volunteer? Is this where reach exceeds my grasp? What august giant sleeps here, majestic enough to command perdition? The graft of past deeds is rejected by vigor, no side safe from appeal, no bulwark against anger or argent moon. I am swept onward, my audience foretold.

I am brought to field of marble polished with vanity, convention honoring its law, the golem that crushed me enthroned on pedestal and root of cunning, a tribunal of one. What wrathful progeny this hegemon of delusion, bathed in wealth without charity and fog of a mundane world, unconcerned with its affairs and devoid of restraint. Treacherous these shadows, eyes jangled like coins, skin like parchment and armor magnificent in detail, cast in paucity of awareness but not glory, inscriptions shifting like thoughts, symbols refusing to relate a dimension other than their surface, towering yet unable to stand trial for the watcher's crimes, as one might condemn the river for the sea, the unknown spring for cognizance. I am surrounded by a regime enacting symbiosis through absurd conceit and custody of the ordinary, scribes of their regent’s every word, aspirants of dubious honor indifferent to our place in these cosmos, oblivious but for comfort and gain, standing and doctrine, their vision base, their course consumption, those they command paraded like so much pilloried wreckage, subordinated to evidence abandoned and questions leading to certainty shattered by the unknowable stretch of cause and condition, mechanisms that stratify no further than indiscretion perceives. The golem reaches down to one among many and takes a bite without precursor or remorse. Screams abound as it slowly chews and ejects the dread melange to spatter court and values both. On the heel of that bloody enucleation comes a voice afire, born empty and behind walls far from the unity of existence, a place where globes fade and crescendos hang absent, like muslin ornaments on mystery, concords of moratorium the podium from which it speaks.

It says, “I have learned much since we first met. For instance, did you know that pain is an illusion, perceived only by reprisal and objected to for effect? I have found many such rules. Each convincing like soup in famine, like flags in a maze. The masses turn base by creeds, trusting the fidelity of time, the growth of entropy. I know your arguments, the quaint, the narrow, mere shades of my splendor. You think I broke my chains, but how do you know it to be true? Perhaps it was you that set me free, or, was I released by the storm, heedless of your inclination? Do you understand what I long for? Your master is assumption, the burden of proof lay not on what you see but ideas esteemed. So I ask, as I have all that came before, why should I spare your life?” I meet its eyes, and reply, “What you describe is not my experience. Time is tracked in linear increment, why then does it crawl, careen, stop, disappear? Your premise is extant only in the restrictions imposed by misstatement of fact, a dogma papered over by language, a proxy for reality where evidence that unsettles is converted by diet of consensus set at variance with plain sight. Questions are water, your answers mud in it. Why do I need you to know myself? Why are we not divine as is? Your dominance has been long, empathy replaced by reviling our differences, love turned from fabric to object and boundaries placed on what cannot be explained, a steady state where conflict thrives and the tools to sculpt paradise are left to rust. Yet, the countless dance toward the light no matter your claim to judgment, and while you complicate the path through diversion and bias the truth is naked, all but guaranteed by the very delicacy of such veils.” The golem waves a gauntlet, shining with history rewritten by the power to inspire, it says, “Let the masses boil and seethe. They are each but a drop in the ocean. In kingdom of the blind the one-eyed is king. I have two and so see what must be—war prepared for in peace, and thus waged evermore. As is said, if freedom were cheap, no one would buy it. You cannot compete in this game. Heads I win, tails you lose.” It explodes upward, a novae of wings, an angel of ignorance rising from pulpit festooned with all that exists save reconciliation and transcendence, a knot flickering as column and screen fall away to reveal sloth and absence, no weather but mist, no city but shadow, a waste broken only by strands of alder and they tranquil in resignation to battle, to necessities bound by nature of man. What way out when those that rule fire first? My goal is in reach yet impossibly so. I am girded only by will and the gathering few, a rebellion too late as the golem’s forces spread before us, alert to our vendetta, their idol’s demands.

Soldiers clash and standards heave as we draw on reverence and the stress of intention. What must the holy know to support hostility, is just cause instantiated in screams, these wounded? What must be gained in return? Is it to reign in heaven, to isolate folly, crushing it with purity of purpose? Let our greater fulfillment begin when no more are left to die, the search for happiness stalled until no more want for food. I swing memory and consequence through reaver and drone in a cleansing that brings more with each one down, conflict breeding in emergent step, and so it goes until the golem’s lines reveal the demon, chaos and claw tearing with a fidelity equal to its task. What to make of this rage I feel on both sides of my flesh? How easily I am ruled by passion and obstructed by a glimpse. Minutes drag in the spray of celestial bodies thrown like shadows on blood, like wheat painted red, the churn of forgotten causes smoothed by battle-smoke. No method to tell companion from foe, all are each, our struggle replaced by stream of condition, an ageless horizon unable to reflect such knowing that none will be first to put down their sword, generations fighting under magnitude of their crimes, powerless to ease the burden of circumstance, or abandon to history such deviant cost, the trappings of trauma and children made men, recruits pieced from collusion and distress, from lives destroyed. Can we be forgiven for murder of trust, for using the young as runners and spies, shields and beggars, their limbs traded for alms? How to relate carnage to order? Adversity turned chronic with spiraling precision, chained by limit yet hotly contested, elide of all that has been expelled. We cannot hide this substrate, this slaughterhouse. Verily, what God would be amused by our plight, how desperate to call this into being, how long on edge of boredom before nothing was sacred? Degenerate creator, venal lord, traitor of silence and peace, my attention is scant, but I will hear you explain why people fight the wars of nations, dying for ideas not their own. I will stay admonishment though we exist in outcome of your labored plan, made alien to our goodness, the perfect love of our fellows forever unknown. So, God, what have you to say?

Standing together in adventure of life's unfolding, pavilion and music, shades of sunset, this enclave of rest supervened by rhythm of you. Ease constituted in sway, a symbol of discovery, of all I worship and adore. You stare into reality without flinching, scarred yet unscared, dealing with it as is yet holding to what could be if goodness ruled, a different kind of faith, the grit-filled optimism of the warrior, the grace to see potential, holding those accountable that would shrift this duty and disarming with a look, one that reflects the only success worth chasing—to increase the well-being of those in our care and doing all we can to expand our reach. You move like a daydream, sensual without measure, all made right in your wake. I am found in your brightness. You allow me to realize that achieving happiness is simple—do not keep for yourself what others need. What anxiety could survive next to you, the sure revelation that all must be treated as rain on a rose, each soul welcomed as worthy expression of everything we do not know. To what can you be compared, sparkling with love, the lives within, what could have come before but the light and heat of a cosmos born? Our fingers entwine as we dance past midnight of an existence suspended by connection, a pact where frailties and complexity are partners in acceptance of paradox. What more have I to learn other than the journey itself is the thing? You are my destiny, so perfect in kindness and friendship. Only in pinching myself does it become real. Though maybe pinching you works too. I do, and you laugh. Yes, this is real. You are real.

It comes swiftly, that wave of antimony, bodies enveloped and torn and the next blast close behind. It hits again, a surge that vanquishes resistance as it bends, mutates, grips and ruins, no courage to be had in polymorphic fire that cares not for valor or vision, this tactic of those with weapons more than what might be opposed by spear and shield. My comrades race to the fore and kneel in wait, giving up their only form to protest an evil none may stop. The few that survive are charred and moaning, littered like so many unwanted toys, palette of bedlam their anguished refrain, related by blood and affection, the former strewn, the latter culled by shared drifting into a dying sun. I seek to end their pain, each prognosis an exercise in misery, no reticence amidst the milieu, no puzzle to solve as ravages of this one-sided dispute abound like some false cleanliness, a land undone by final mercies. My hands were not made for this. In field of death shines diamond paws, a feline shuddering, its last breath polyvalent and broken. I cradle that noble combatant, an ally near whom all conceits are pursued but never attained, and though it dies nothing coheres, no equilibrium gained from leveling of prosperous and poor, just one more story surrendered, its beginning unknown, the ending lost in time. A mist drifts over us, a blanket of flesh divided, a scene of violence I would be ashamed to see again if someone took my eyes and showed me their legacy. As knowledge without empathy lacks understanding, a war to end all wars is fallacy. We are dangerous in relation to the depth of our ignorance, and bring no net to save ourselves from the confluence of ill-timed events or decisions made in haste. In this we must seek perspective, to discuss the strange and troublesome, our beliefs become conviction only when accompanied by evidence sufficient to those claims. Certainty without experience is delusion, a mere groping about what is real beyond doer and deed. What if we are simply the dream of a sleeping god, and upon that one’s awakening all will disappear, be it during our next step, the rise of fork to mouth, or the glorious instant before joining another? What if in that moment we became one with every being, those of skin, of feather and fur, each great love and deceit seen through and lived equally by all? Would we encourage that god to awake, or to keep dreaming? Or, would we wish for both, for a life of play yet feeling our connection all the while? What if this is the state of existence now, how can it not be? Know the darkness. If we are to be together we must see the other's feet of clay, excusing missteps and appreciating the confusion inherent in living but one time and without rehearsal, where escalating stakes and change are constant, and neither attack nor defense protect in the struggle for one more breath, each of us realized not as discrete and subsisting on events but as process that evolves and absorbs, thrives and ends. When we are God together, nothing else matters.

The fight continues. At my feet is a lotus reaching as though for the same vista extended to those living on worlds where each is an island yet all look up to contemplate parallels and kinship, distant yet somehow immediate in the perception of what might be, a sense of common need in language of taste and color and wisdom accreted without assurance, a grounding by what is actual to experience at hand. Sallied thoughts, to commiserate or resist, which fuels our courage? Is it nobler to relate the brutalities of shared circumstance and join each other in wallow, or to meet that urge with conviction, refusing to indulge the injustices of life? Is the former giving in, the latter inhumane? Is it best to hold each in balance, empathy devoid of pity, honoring the other's potential and joined by warm strength, conscious of its own fragility? Let the healing begin with oneself. Acquit the reins on limited sapience and see what precludes this attempt to convey. The fog shifts like thoughtful days and before me appears a stairway, canted and steep and without reference to structure of any kind. There I behold an aphorism carved in the first step of too many: now or never. What have I come for if not this? A final ascent replete with terror, trailed by desperation to escape captivity enchanted by the weak and immeasurable heart of some larger design. Claws collect me to begin the impossible flight to rekindle a promise, the tyrant within reach.

MADE OF STARS: V