Floating through a sickly grey.
The remnants of a barren cityscape,
coated in ash.
Myrtle grows through fissures in the concrete.
Dilapidated monoliths penetrate low-hanging clouds,
the atoms of which act as mnemonic devices
bursting with treachery.

Lost in the liminal space
between invention
and recollection,
I feel the residual of your touch.
It lingers over me like dew on the early-morning grass,
or perhaps like the roar of passing jets,
drowning out the chorus of cardinals that
once perched on our windowpane.
The telltale signal that a new day was upon us.

Dusk.
Distant footsteps come to me
as the faintest suggestions of life.
A quiet cacophony.
Hushed intimations.
The sad fate of peripheral meaning.

I press on regardless,
beset by some unknowable obligation.
And yet there they are.
The foul tendrils.
Dendritic branches slithering down my body,
tenacious and psychotic, or maybe just resigned,
castigating a form that’s not all there.

In this stupor I am met with an image.
What could it be but that which most defines me?
The atrophied limb.
The vestigial skin.
Calloused and calcified.
Tumescent and putrefied.
It festers in the crumbling darkness,
fetid, overflowing with bile,
carrying with it the memory of satin,
a pale violet mass awash in
that familiar orange glow.


  A sleepy hello.
A restful smile.
Loving eyes peering through interlocked fingers.


Was I not the fool who spoke too much?
Spoke so much yet said so little.
But for a time, we traded stories
using little more than subtle gestures,
conducted symphonies with nothing but sideways glances.
And yet I still let you believe that
it was only you who couldn’t sleep alone,
the death rattle of an ego in denial.

One year removed and I’m sleepless still,
lost in the liminal space
between rest and exhaustion,
recollecting tall tales passed down
in a dead language,
a dense tapestry of symbols
built by and for two.
It grows more faded as our worlds continue to pull apart,
further, further, further still.

And though it brings me no solace,
against my better judgment I can’t help but wonder:
Do you still speak it?

The Liminal Space // Dead Language (Midi Demo)

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