Your eyes.

Parchment.

The soul of all things unsaid.

Silences.

Voyages into serenity.

Dreams.

Shapes in a starry twilight.

Echoes.

Glimpses into an alternate reality.

Promises.

Words for a heartbeat.

Infinities.

Symmetries of an eternal embrace.

Remembrances.

Songs of a memory's music.

Absolution.

My beginning. My end.

For a man called David.

He is a footballer, first. Everything else flowed from that.

On that one, I could agree with Paul Hayward for once. For a man who was probably the most eponymous David of his generation, one who remained eternally grateful to a hard-earned gift that had gifted him all else he acquired in his life, battling constantly to be recognised for what he was first and foremost, a footballer, in a country that chose to devour him for all that he chose to pursue off the green pitch, that is indeed exorbitantly heartful praise.

His Achilles tendon may not be as critical to his country's sporting fates as a particular metatarsal once was, but then sport has an essence that transcends the triviality of victory and the tempestuousness of glory. It thrives on desire and the certitude of skill, the exaltation of the passing moment and the promise of eternity, piqued by the very lure of its impossibility. Sport is an art, if only for the unflinching passion it demands of its ardent practitioners and the diabolical heartbreaks it ever so enduringly alleviates, feeding on the fiery dreams it bestows its delicate wings upon, even for the hearts it so heartlessly tramples with the rigorous exactitude of the spiked imprints of its boots.

The world can, after all, be quite cruel to its conquerors merely for being what they are, its conquerors. Sport is not any different. To break a man so, life could be forgiven for giving in to its wily pettiness, its schadenfreude. The dream may not get another life but then maybe that's acceptable, for there's always memory to be turned to. For that's the glorious undeniability of sport, the immortality it confers on its everyday past, the spangled webs and the illuminated evening skies that constitute its history.

So long, David. You are, and always will be, a footballer in my heart.

On a dream of waking up by a view of the sea

Bleary eyes taken in by the distant din of wakefulness,

molten words, earlybird thoughts for a nascent day,

treading on the soft acquiescence of an ivory bedspread.

Dreams scribbled in formless feather,

fluid languages of a tranquil netherland

finding their feet in a morning's blue patience.

Rolling waves parleying with an open sky,

exchanging silent notes on a hard day's night.

Airy shapes drawn up by a bright blue breeze,

sliding through the slenderness of a balustrade.

A pair of half-open eyes

lost to the minty breath of morning's memory,

framed in the foamy evanescence of a wide blue sea.

[9:14 am | 10th Mar, 2010]

Labyrinth

A muddy road absent-mindedly snakes away into the distance. Beside it, a tree desolately crouches over its own weight, dripping the rain's excrement. The sun is nowhere to be seen, swallowed up by a ravenous sky. There are patches of abrupt greenery all around, like swathes dressing up a brown earth's moist wounds. My heartbeat sounds feeble and distant, almost as if from another body.

You're there, a trembling shape in lavender forcefully thrust into the brown callousness of the evening. On your knees, elbows bruised, stained with mud all over, wordlessly staring into the morphing shapes on the wet ground, delicate pain streaming down your eyes.

Time turns painfully slow, as if it already knew what it was coming to even before coming to it. I try to move towards you, call out to you, but somehow I know without knowing that none of it will work. I know my limbs will be nothing more than mere casts in hardened concrete, I know my words will turn heavier than my tongue, and I know the impenetrable vacuum that separates our shivering shapes. Your pearly pain pecks away at me like a searing scar inescapably burnt into the insides of my eyelids, as I helplessly watch the rain pour down, washing away your tears into the barren mud beneath.

Something tells me it is not true, that it is not happening, that it is just a bad dream, that these thoughts are mere phantoms of my imagination, curled up in the wet night's chilly existence but I refuse to believe it. Maybe it is, maybe it is indeed just a bad dream, maybe you are not there, maybe the pain is not there, maybe it will all disappear the moment I open my eyes, but what if, what if it was your dream and not mine? What if it was the reality my dream was supposed to wash away? What if it was your nightmare and I was an intruder, just an outsider, forever looking in?

And so it is then that I confess to my faint heart it is a picture I cannot escape, for it is my inextricable labyrinth, my kryptonite, the scorched eternity I have known all along and shall forever know until the moment the icy vacuum cracks open and the bleary tenderness of that lavender shape rests in the humble inadequacy of my arms. Until then, I know I shall be the unbreakable dream orphaned in the frantic nebulousness of oblivion, watching unblinkingly as my love eats into my heart like a slow sunset burning up an evening sky.

[3:07 am | 11th Feb, 2010]