Ashes with Antidotes – The poems from the audio album in text form.
Tracklist:
- Journey Inward Outward
- Into Darkness
- Lock and Key
- Nowhere, Now Here
- Ashes
- Antidote
- Missing, Missing
- Transformation
- Desert Lands
- Vigil (Night Mirror)
- Flame Light
- Meaning
- Journey Inward Outward
Your voice now lives within my voice and heart,
Your light now part of mine, as shells did break,
Distances crossed, and thresholds overcome,
And as I speak, I speak as us in one.
For ages remained separate, apart,
We journeyed closer over starlit trails,
Still unbeknownst to me, you took the shape
Of dreams and whispers, warming like the sun.
The more I speak, the less I feel I say,
I thought, as no one seemed to hear or see.
With nothing for my hand to hold but air,
The world around me seemed now far away.
Shadows not strange to me would overtake,
The outer and the inner world went numb,
Faint wishes were the sights and signs and tales,
And only dark distinguished night from day.
I felt, this time the shadows would not flee,
Who held me shackled with a poisoned cuff.
My past enclosed me like a whirling sea
That was at once too much and not enough.
And then, a voice, a whisper through the din,
A gently glowing warmth close by my side.
It sounded like familiar arms spread wide,
Like wings beneath a midnight coloured cape.
Your shimmer softened every piercing glare,
The poison teeth and talons bared at me,
With light too fierce for dreams alone you lit
The archipelago of my Within,
Its sights and tales now bright again with life.
Echo and source of what I had long known,
Your starlight-coloured voice dispersed the dark
That once had been my poison and my knife.
Forlorn amidst the masquerades they held,
No hand or heart to hold, I dreamed my own.
Both then and now your voice the cold dispelled,
A strengthening and deeply trusted spark.
At first, your gentle words came from a dream,
Faint shimmer of a long-forgotten light,
The way towards you dimmed and blurred with frost.
Surviving deep inside, yet never lost.
Winding away from rackety allure,
With shadows, if not thorns, now out of sight,
The path to meet and merge, so long obscure,
Shone rediscovered in your newfound gleam.
I followed as it beckoned me beyond.
With every step, your light and voice reached mine.
Through stars and skies, this journey’s course unfurled
That leads both inward and into the world.
In whispered words of warmest glows you shine
That sing of visions waiting to fulfil
Are you my heart, my soul, or something more?
As one, our dreams grow wings, prepared to soar.
From now on inextricable, a bond
With every insight woven stronger still.
Your voice now lives and breathes inside of me,
I speak our voices flowing as a We.
.
2. Into Darkness
With the path obliterated,
The search for it a memory,
Its remnants thorns and splinters that were shards from the start.
Endings all what tales seem built towards.
When it takes the mere weight of it all to close up a throat,
When laughter is mockery and smiles a monster‘s grin,
Who knows where to seek its insidious face, around me or within?
With a heart stabbed a little too often, the crowds’ din a little too loud,
Nighttimes never this endless,
Hope followed suit by its undoing,
When darkness means silence, both within and around,
Once shelter, now shroud…
Hear…
Fear. Jumbled. Jagged. Torn. Numb.
Not even ground left to shatter upon, after falling for what seems like a life,
After gazes became poison, humility weakness, each day a glistening knife.
When this shell pulls me down to the ground yet again,
Tethered too strongly, too weighted to become.
When holding out a hand is like holding a memory.
When all held together by breath becomes just a mite too much to bear
And the grasp for a lifeline, words and a hand ends, oh, time reconfirms it, nowhere,
As I hold my own hand again.
Breathe…
Leave: now every thought’s refrain.
I ruminate on all that’s lost
And everything that never was,
A pattern inescapable,
A vicious cycle too well known,
I watch myself and how I yield,
Again fall victim to that void,..
Dark place, dauntingly tempting to set off for a place even darker.
Absence my measure of time.
Lost like this, alone in the dark.
Never leave you alone in the dark…
A whisper, indiscernible…
Just breathe now, softly, softly now,
Just breathe and hear its ebb and flow,
No need to be or do a thing,
Just breathe, and know that all is safe.
You’re here and now, and not back then.
Here, peace will fall like soothing rain.
Til out of it a light will grow
And you can feel its warmth again.
And I will stay here by your side
And hold your hope and heart for you
Until you find your light again.
Just listen, breathe, and know I’m near.
Let wings and will and hope regrow,
Trust they will carry you again.
No words can grasp the strength it takes.
Just breathe and know this too shall pass.
I see you still, and always will.
You broke the walls, you rose, you grew,
Became. I know. And so will you.
No dark will make this fade away:
Just breathe and know, we will endure,
A breath, a heartbeat at a time.
Something is… mending. Slowly. Ever so…
.
3. Lock And Key
I stand before a bolted door.
It holds a dark I know too well.
I ran from it, full speed ahead,
Almost believed my own pretence
And let it fade to memory,
Or better, into nothingness,
As if unmade by ignorance.
Too often did I flee from it,
And ran from it, a headlong race
Between what was and could not be.
When silence shrieks and bares its claws,
The now swaps places with the past,
What fell away still seems to last,
I topple, reach, feel myself slip,
My maelstrom holds me in its grip.
Drowning within, I dissipate,
Become unrecognisable.
Yet here I face the door again,
Stand paralysed before its height
That looms, expanding black as night
And as the darkness locked behind.
And nightmare sounds seep through the cracks
As lightless numbness slithers near:
Their words a never-ending sneer
That meant a shell and never me,
They hissed a name that wasn’t mine,
My voice belonged to someone else.
I made it through and I still am.
I still know of a sky to reach,
Where suns and stars sing, calling me.
(…When reaching out is nought until I reach within.
So far away from my self, I fall back into myself…
Heartbeats fall back into place… )
To banish this darkness, once and for all,
That held me in its talons long enough.
I dare to face it as the me of today.
And yet, the shrieks, the howls, the claws –
The words that dripped from poison teeth,
The eyes devoid of sympathy…
You, no one else, can turn the key.
Your whisper brings me back into myself,
Tied to the promise of a different time
Beyond the dark behind this door.
Still locked and barred and bolted shut
And seemingly unreachable.
(Don’t want to face the truth it locks. –
This knowledge is the price to come to life again?)
Yet here I stand, and time stands still.
My silence is my ally now,
My heartbeat slows, I take a breath –
I turn the key,
Unlock the door
And trembling, grasping at the walls,
Step through.
.
4. Nowhere, Now Here
We come from nowhere, everywhere,
Invisible, from all around,
Where spring-green trees grow lush and fair
And secrets, spells and dreams abound.
On paths of mist through grass and fen
We pass the veils between the worlds,
On foggy roads beyond your ken
We enter realms of waking dreams.
Bedecked with dewdrops’ silver pearls
We hear the woodlands heave a sigh.
Fae-eyed, we walk on moonlight beams
Before the witching hour draws nigh.
Willow, hazel, oak and birch,
Hawthorn, rosehip, ivy green
Grow where doors and pathways lurk
Leading you to lands unseen.
As within, and so without,
As above shall be below,
First betwixt, and then between,
As we weave, we cast all doubt,
For this tapestry to grow
From threads of lifespans yet unseen.
In a vale of moss and springs
We glimpse the future in a lake.
A faceless voice of secrets sings
And of the ones who life will break.
When tomorrow you will flee
What you sought and craved today.
What you once had yearned to be,
Lies forgotten on your way,
Sighted but chose not to see,
Fickle mortals gone astray.
So many tried to find our land,
Unknowing of how close they were.
We slipped away like grains of sand
And watched those wanderers deter.
Vines and secrets interweave,
Build a bridge for us to climb
Past the mists that might deceive
We cross the worlds that lifetimes spanned,
Their moments woven, etched in time.
Erstwhile called the spirit land
Was our home, a glimpse away.
Come find it in the dawning grey,
In midnight’s stillness, twilight’s sway,
And hear then, faint beyond belief,
Unearthly laughter’s silver chime.
.
5. Ashes
Emerging from the dark, venturing into something akin to twilight, I have no more tears, let alone words.
Mustered the bravery to tell what almost could not be told,
For only the strongest blow to await me:
Don’t expect to be believed after you tell. It requires a will to hear.
Voicing the unspeakable. The wordlessness. The numbness. The inner freezing.
Learn to not be understood.
Was it true if it hurts?, the endless question spirals.
So speak up – some call this the hardest part.
So tell, and watch them turn away.
Back then, in these rooms of hollow silence and scripted speech,
Trying to hold myself together from one timespan to the next,
Failing to unsee how they made themselves at home among their deceits,
Almost believing their own repression,
As long as they keep the gleam of truth submerged.
Overloudly silenced, like the furtive rustling of vermin behind ornate walls.
Back there, in those prim rooms bleached of emotion, this prison without bars,
Where my face hurt from smiling and holding in screams,
Any line is crossed the second after being drawn.
All of what I was – shrugged off like raindrops, swatted away like flies.
A no is a laugh, Revealing one’s heart equals mortal peril.
Numbness enclosing me like an armour, caging myself in cold and void,
As I already see the cracks spread,
My darkness populated not only by nightmares.
They walk like their own puppeteers,
Unable to bear their own silence, so they banish mine,
Pointedly ignorant of all that lies beneath.
Rejecting the surface, refusing the depths,
For it calls upon thoughts they much prefer to drown,
Til they don‘t hear or feel themselves anymore,
Lose touch with what might be them,
The inner world that lies in wait
To be discovered with its shadows and lights.
But they refuse the faintest glance,
And shy away from stepping close,
And thus from me, with baleful eyes
For I see through the smiles they wear
And walk my inner coastlines still.
Back there, strings attached to all and everything, the strongest invisible,
That became their and my unravelling.
Their voices tangled in my thoughts.
Their presence shouting down my mind,
Until no inside remains, only a moving mask,
While their mouths say: Be who you are, but, please, not too much,
Merely to the edges of our mould. –
All else an unforgiven nuisance.
My smile wants to slip off my face,
But it must not.
Scripted words crackle on my tongue as truths yearn to burst free
But they must not.
And no one would hear or see,
For they decisively insist on staying unencumbered.
My outstretched hands pushed away time after time,
Cries smothered, ridiculed, thoughts frowned upon, no traces of tears or shadows allowed.
Nothing but masks of worth.
And I choke on the truth, unable to unsee, unhear, unknow,
Fail to join this dishonesty, even towards myself.
Never truly part of their world, nor the one I lived in,
I emerge, tentatively finding what might become words.
While their disappointment alternates with accusations,
Each piercing gaze, each poisoned word
Has turned these rooms, these years into ashes,
Into ruins of what never could have been.
Yet I refuse to add my own fire to their endless storm,
Refuse its heat to lead my steps as mindless rage,
Still the memories and scars remain
Though perhaps, one day, vines shall sprout
From these ashes, and grow, and live.
Tried so long to be seen and heard,
Stepped towards them with an outstretched hand and heart,
To have one pushed away, the other stabbed with the icicles they wear for words.
Within me fire grew but mot from hope,
No longer warming me, but burning me,
While they left fields of ashes in their wake
Laced each breath with poison, blame and spite.
Now I shall not give them that much room within me anymore,
Let them or myself burn and freeze me.
Instead, I shall soon thaw, warmth my cloak, not fire my armor,
Or my own sword to draw,
To join their ceaseless demolition and leave as many ashes as they did in turn.
Instead, I step away from their clamour and strife,
Away from my hope of what they won‘t become,
Knowing nothing makes them see me differently.
Neither forgetting nor excusing, merely seeing.
Yet not leaving the ashes as barren as they made me,
But slowly planting seeds for greenery to grow.
With it, this heart and its parts that may heal shall live once more.
Meanwhile, those ashes will remain, no longer but a source of pain,
Rather, from now on, an unforgettable reminder:
To never become like those I’m letting go.
.
6. Antidote
No ghost, no shadow here, but even less,
I stand forlorn amidst a vacant land,
And sadness slithers near to take my hand –
Its grip not company but emptiness.
This great black plane that knows no light or greens,
Where breathing takes what little strength I kept,
Where all that lived now lies in smithereens.
Regardless of the hours I have slept,
Depletion keeps its leaden weight on me,
The ashen wasteland makes it hard to see,
Or to remember when I last have wept.
Long since this hollow darkness wore me out,
The essence of this plane I know as such,
Has weighed me down with anguish, daze and doubt
So somber that I disregard how much.
Like sinking underwater, all grows dark,
Though on the outside, I don’t make a move.
Merely one spell lends me its words to prove
Its might to light from nothingness a spark.
Sometimes the words come like a surging stream,
As breath would flow from an unburdened chest.
Their only rightful form a shining beam,
And line by line its glow put to the test.
Sometimes I tear them out, and one by one,
They leave me drained when I have just begun.
I have to carve each word out of my heart,
Their meaning lies a million miles apart.
Words torn from silence, pain, and memories,
And each and every single one a fight,
A sculpture cut from bone, a dawn from night,
And forming them means healing from disease.
No longer merely seeking to survive,
Words now my alchemy and antidote,
I free them, hear their song in every note,
But now with the audacity of life.
.
7. Missing, Missing
From here to you, the same moon shines, they say,
And if we look up to the sky, we see
The same sun, here, and burning where you are.
A lie to think it makes you seem less far.
The vastness of “if only“ weighs on me,
Of chances missed, held in a single day.
Brief visions, moments, wishing they could last –
If caught in amber, I could hold them fast.
Despite how often memory betrays,
I recognised you early from afar.
I knew your light, though not yet who you are.
You shone and whispered like a distant star
And soon I knew by heart your thoughts and ways.
I treasured every flicker of your gaze
And bore its remnants like a jagged scar.
I hope to find your light in every flare,
And pass through whirling crowds enrapt with glee,
Their sharp-toothed grin a foil for my despair,
Their sequins, masks, and precious finery
Transfixing in the neon coloured air.
It is the kind of turmoil you would flee –
And now I know: I will not find you there.
Cloak me in silence, lend me all your calm –
Your voice, your words remain both knife and balm.
Yet nothing but the glimpse of you remains –
With it, your absence courses through my veins.
With every dream collapsing, you are gone
Again, your words remain both balm and knife.
As years and journeys led me through their maze
I missed you quietly throughout my life:
A muted sense of loss from early on,
A certain slant of light on wooded hills
At eventide of long-lost childhood days,
The breeze a harbinger of coming chills.
How can you yearn for what you never knew?
Beyond all words, this feeling stays distinct,
Of summer evenings in twilight blue,
Something I never had, but always missed.
With time its pull grows harder to resist,
In dreams I see the signs that lead to you,
And the conviction, fierce and bright and true,
Of you and me inexorably linked.
.
8. Transformation
I cross the bridge between my then and now,
To finally call forth what lies below,
To break this shell, if only I knew how,
To free the secret, give it space to grow.
Who I am now exceeds who I have been,
When face and voice won‘t show what lies within,
Clear to the outside world but strange to me,
The mirror shows the lie that they would see.
Told who I was, it felt false from the start.
Stuck in a skin I have no means to shed,
Unspoken knowledge clangs within my heart.
For years the words to name it came and fled.
They spell and speak a name that is not mine
And yet I answer to it as I must.
I wish they saw the truth within me shine
Too soon its glow is dimmed with flecks of rust.
Raised voices haste to silence, choke and blame
The one within me whispering my name.
A name they shove away and call unfit,
Try to expunge this ember barely lit.
A truer face than that which I have worn
Unfolds itself, though still invisibly.
This winding journey of discovery
Shows me a life unlived now mine to mourn.
They try to glaze the waters I have stirred.
I shall withstand, unyielding to their word,
To make me finally appear as me,
Seen as the one I was not raised to be.
.
9. Desert Lands
My former chrysalis is cracked and torn,
Mere chunks and splinters left of my cocoon.
Perhaps the time was right, perhaps too soon,
As here I stand, alone, but not forlorn.
My journey’s winding path resumes at last.
The night sky spans a desert plain and vast,
Its stars not darkened by a single cloud.
From far I hear the noises of a crowd.
While vying ceaselessly for strength and wit,
They found no meaning, so stopped seeking it.
Their mayhem likewise laughter and distress.
It is not up to me to join and stay.
Like wolves they run in packs and hunt for prey
And howl against the silence they repress,
Ward off the countless wonders it can hold.
Their voices pierce the stillness, faint and cold.
Their distant faces walls of stone, they seem
No more substantial than a fleeting dream.
The firmament holds embers thousandfold.
The night is calm, my mind devoid of fear.
As moonlight rays form pearls from grains of sand,
I turn my steps away from all I hear
And venture further through this desert land.
My path stays quiet, spared from cold and rain.
My thoughts my company through every storm.
And over time, I realise: every grain
Of dust and gravel had a prior form –
My chrysalis turned into miles of sand.
A glimpse of foresight makes me understand:
Just like a heart, an ocean shall expand
To fill this drought – its spring lies deep inside,
That waits for inner landscapes to be born
Among the everlasting changing tide
That streams from dawn to daylight, night to morn.
It seems a vista known from long before:
A sea will make this land an ocean floor,
Interminable skies and waters flow.
An archipelago of isles shall grow,
Each one their own, yet all of them combined,
With mysteries and insights left to find.
And so I walk through night and desert air.
I look around and see a world take shape.
Faint like a silhouette behind a drape,
But soon imbued with colour, bright and fair.
A figure wearing midnight as their cape cape…
Each step reveals that I will find you there.
.
10. Vigil (Night Mirror)
Out of the dark I came to know so well,
That drips into my soul like blackened dew
On snow-white petals withering away,
I rise as visions hold me in their spell.
Nocturnal shadows merge with midnight blue,
Moonlight reflections on a mirror clear,
Its silver sheen almost as bright as day,
And in its gleam, you seem alive and near.
The mirror‘s silver makes me faintly see
The contours of a face that bore my name,
A sketch in a nocturnal gallery.
The more I looked, the stranger it became.
The moonlit mirror paints my face with frost.
My heart that clamours on at any cost,
Clenched with an ache too shadowed to define,
Of something maybe missing, maybe lost.
I hold my breath in yearning for a sign –
And quietly, your face flows into mine.
Your traits are moonlight, night became your hair,
Your eyes an endless warmth I know so well.
Your whisper-words the faintest sigh of air,
A solace that transcends all speech to tell.
Behind your face, an endless archway leads
Into a dimness hidden in the night,
An otherworldly row of doors that reads
Like promises beyond all grasp and sight.
As night and moonlight draw me close to you,
I fI find my dreams of countless seasons true.
The time has come. This vision leads my way
Into your world that shall take shape and stay.
Reveal the key, the words that let me pass,
To reach beyond the mirror’s silver glass
As if it were but mist I’m passing through.
Now finally, I know where you will be.
I lift my head and see the star-filled sky.
In countless dreams I saw you soar and fly
Among the stars as one of them, so high,
A wingless flight magnificent to see.
Entranced, you float among their distant songs,
Exalted, far from earthly faults and wrongs.
Your singing joined their endless melody.
Their spheres and course to you a work of art.
A little more conjoined and less apart,
Now moved to tears from sheer serenity,
I let them calm and elevate my heart.
Sing down your vibrant light into my soul,
A song of peace, and dreams, and being whole,
All thresholds crossed, while soaring, flying free –
And finally, I hear you sing to me.
.
11. Flame Light
At first, my light appeared in distant dreams,
When eons, worlds bloomed in my reverie,
Unprecedented, pulling at the seams
Of what we’ve come to call reality.
When I am flight and night wind, starry sky,
Mild summer breeze and rushing autumn gust,
So wide, almost vertiginously high,
This pygmy heart seems but a grain of dust,
Then, when I find myself spread out too far
Across a vastness that defies all names,
Diverging as a burning, tumbling star
From life and all its puny, wondrous games,
There is a flame, the shimmer of a light
That calls me back into this life and breath
Whose ebb and flow reshapes before my sight.
A rapid fluxion marked by birth and death.
At times the light, when I find myself weak –
Each thought a traitor, days a cruel laugh –
Illumes lost meaning that I fiercely seek
And calls me forward on my journey’s path.
When pain and tears weigh down my soul again,
This light sheds beams onto a landscape rife
With purpose, secrets still beyond my ken,
Enfolds me, warms me softly back to life.
In darkest times it keeps me sane, afloat.
Its voice lives in my heart, the closest bond,
A whisper-tune with worlds in every note:
“I’ll now, and still, and always shine beyond,“
“Beyond those thoughts that long became your foe,
Past faults and flaws, regrets and old despair,
Beyond illusions’ glinting veils, I know
To find your soul, as sure as breath needs air.“
My light, once dim, now fierce in haze and mist,
My inner and my outer world aligned.
Without the other, one will not persist,
Just like a ginkgo leaf’s two halves combined.
Sometimes it‘s hidden, far, so hard to reach,
This brightness in us all that I call flame.
In others and ourselves it’s found. For each
Of us it bears a different shape and name.
It lives and grows, just like a plant unfurled.
Its finding is a journey just begun.
When lit, it holds the wonders of a world,
Is lifeline, meaning, freedom fused in one.
It can connect us, sometimes it can burn,
Destroy and be destroyed, or lit to mend.
Fen fire-led, we struggle to discern
At times deceit from truth or ill intent.
Through kindred light and our very own
We recognise each other‘s just as bright.
A treasure each, unique in glow and tone.
Our task: to find and keep that flame alight.
.
12. Meaning
Do you know what it‘s like
When, your heart too full, you grow all silent, words fleeing for they might not do it justice,
This gossamer immensity in your chest?
So light and yet so vast, how it still resonates within you for long times
Until it becomes part of you:
The light of connection that shines, and shines, softly, warming,
Even after shadows may have again fallen long since over your day,
To shimmer on over a lifespan,
Beyond the memory, with meaning.
Leaving me to return into the world, eyes warmer, heart warmer
With the gentle glow of understanding
And feeling oh so seen and head,
Seeing, hearing in return.
You know how not every space, every second needs to be filled with words –
Silence like a cloak around your shoulders, quiet strength and grace.
And I begin to grasp what it contains, the vastness of the word: soul.
With thoughts and words and silence, you seek meaning;
Ardent search, compelling lifetime‘s quest, quieting in its unconscious grace,
Heart-wrenchingly beautiful in its liveliness,
And i begin to grasp what it contains, the vastness of the word: alive.
Meaning, always returning from sound to silence, carrying the echoes of murmuring seas and wind and ancient rocks and trees.
Heart wide as a sky, drowning out the silent storms within, the hungry voices, the feverish haste, the tinny din around you with an ancient not quite thought.
Perhaps serenity?
Meaning: meeting in words and in silence with you,
Tightrope walker, light, so light…
Perhaps lighter, shining brighter for the dark you know?
Understanding, and feeling understood,
As I call you friend.
Sea and sky and stone
Recognising their own eons behind your eyes,
(While your heart remained so young),
Your eyes, blue with the horizons they lay upon,
Silver with the dreams you dwell among,
Golden with the suns you see sink and rise,
Shadowed with those memories of your very own you hold too dear to voice.
I don‘t know of the times your recollection will always paint brighter than sunlight for you.
You know but steps of my path that led me here,
But glimpses of the truth behind the name,
This flame not seeking fire most may crave, but milder starlight.
Yet, I know, as certain as breath flows,
That here, now, we both see each other.