Song Lyric: The End

All the stars shone as we stood beneath the heavens
And you whispered that you loved me in a soft impassioned tone
While the sea in all its glory murmured slow and deep of danger
In a voice that broke in waves of sand & foam
"We could sail upon this sea of love before us
Without fear of shipwreck," said I in a soft impassioned tone
But a shallow sea is love that drains itself for want of filling
As the castaways are tumbled on the stones

All I wanted was to never be alone
All I wanted was to never be alone
But now I stand upon the end of land and ocean where you left me
As the midnight tides will sweep away my bones

By the moonlight in the midnight starry darkness
I had whispered that I loved you in a soft impassioned tone
As the earth beneath us fell away in precipice and echo
In a voice that rang with depth and height unknown
"We could soar upon the heaven that would take us
Without fear of falling," said I in a soft impassioned tone
But the cruel chain that binds us to the grass and rocks will keep us
With our spirits longing for their astral home

All I wanted was to never be alone
All I wanted was to never be alone
But now I stand upon the end of land and heaven where you left me
As the canyon wind will lift away my bones

All of Life we set before us as a witness
As we whispered each "I love you" in a soft impassioned tone
But the cold indifferent Universe, unfolding ever outward
Never shook nor even trembled at the sound
"I will give you all my heart and soul as fortune
Without fear of its loss," said I in a soft impassioned tone
But those thieves, Desire and Loneliness, made off with my possessions
Given leave to enter into heart and home

All I wanted was to never be alone
All I wanted was to never be alone
But now I wait upon the end of life and death where you have left me
For Eternity to carry off my bones

©2015 B. W. Flatley ASCAP

"The Decision"

   “I want to show you something.”
   The text glared at him from the screen of the phone, inscrutable words from an unknown sender. His mind reeled, scrambling for an explanation he could not have right now.
   The phone let out another bloop-poink!, the silly noise he had chosen for incoming texts.
   “Look out your front window.”
   “Who is this??” he typed furiously in reply. Then, bloop-poink.
   “Look out your front window.”
   He moved to get up from the sofa, then stopped himself. Considering for a moment, he decided to go into one of the bedrooms instead: it was dark in there, and the shades were drawn, and its window faced the front just as well. He parted the edge of the roll-down window shade from the frame ever so slightly, and peered through the slit.
   In the shadow between streetlamps across the pavement, a dark figure, hooded and featureless, waved – towards the bedroom window. Then it beckoned him outside. He jumped back into the darkness of the room, heart slamming.
   Bloop-poink.
   “It's important.”
   It was impossible, it had no explanation...and he found himself completely drawn in. Wary, but too curious to ignore it.
   “Why?” he typed. “Who are you? What do you want?”
   Bloop-poink. “Trust me. Okay?”
   “I have no idea why I'm doing this,” he typed, “but...okay.”
   He slid into his heavy coat (the cool October day had turned into a preview of late December somehow) and made his way to the back door. He wasn't quite trusting enough to go out the front, and the back provided at least a few seconds of cover. As he reached the front corner of his house, the doubt and fear took over entirely.
   Bloop-poink. “Seriously. just come across the street. Stop hiding.”
   It took him several moments to unglue his gaping eyes from the screen, and another moment after that to readjust to the relative darkness. “Damn,” he muttered to nobody at all, his breath a grey plume caught by the amber streetlamp glow. He stepped out of the shadow of his house and started towards the shadow figure across the street.
   As he approached the curb, the figure turned and began to walk away, up the street. He was confused until he saw the beckoning hand rise over the figure's head, waving him onward. The road rose for several blocks, where the houses then began to grow sparse, the streetlamps ended, and finally after a small intersection, the last of the street itself dithered away into gravel and then a field.
   By now, almost two miles later, his legs were tiring and his curiosity was wide awake. The two continued across the field to the far end, where the figure stopped at the cliff that was its border. He stopped as well, afraid to approach.
   “I don't...I don't know what comes next,” he managed to say through his trepidation and cold-numbed lips. He was perhaps ten feet from it – him? her? IT – when again the beckoning hand rose. It was facing the cliff; he was facing its back. “No,” he said with some small authority. “No, I'm here, that's enough, tell me what this is all about.”
   Bloop-poink. “I want to show you something. But you have to come over here.”
   “I've lost it completely,” he muttered to himself. Then, with every nerve a live wire and every instinct howling in confusion, he stepped to the figure. “I'm here. What –”
   THIS, he heard, a voice clear and clean and warm and sweet, a voice like falling into water that is such a perfect temperature that you can't even feel it, a voice that painted the frozen Autumn night in the bright hues of Spring. As the sound washed over him in its single syllable, the figure turned to him, lowering the dark hood which had obscured any identity, and for just a fraction of a part of a moment he saw –
   A blinding light pulled him from the ground, not fighting gravity, but into a state devoid of any notion of it, and as he expanded into this new impossibility of light, he began to see: not with his eyes, but in images far clearer than human eyes could ever see. He witnessed days of his life gone by, moments of joy, of confusion, of sorrow, seemingly random, all coming to him in a great symphony of singularity, as if his life were compressed into a length of time which had no length at all, a durationless forever entirely comprehensible and impossible to explain. At once, the visions of moments shifted and he saw all that was his life now, the vast weave and tangle of existence, relationships, jobs, home, every single aspect of what would never again occur to him as simple existence. Again the visions – the light – shifted, and now in another non-instant he saw all that could have been but never was, all the Other choices, all the doors left unopened, all the paths untraversed, all the words left unsaid, and he felt a sense of joyous doom, as though he were his own eulogy at a funeral for a life that had never existed.
   The light vanished. He stood at the cliff, alone.
   After a few seconds, he realized he was not only quite cold, but also that he was not at all light-blind. Every facet of the dark field stood out in clear relief against its slight shadow on this moonless night.
   Bloop-poink.
   The sound startled him so that he flinched, dropping the phone. He sighed deeply, then picked it up and read the message.
   “Close your eyes.”
   “No,” he said to the weeds and the stars, in a tone that was both defeated and defiant. “No, tell me – tell me what's going on. Who are you?”
   Utter silence. A slight breeze animated a few spent maple leaves.
   “Okay, okay,” he relented. He took a deep breath and shut his eyes, tight.
   The light again exploded into existence all about him, only this time it wasn't visions that came: it was feelings, sensations. The heavy atmosphere of a Summer storm, the electric confused bliss of a first kiss, the deep infinite swelling rumbled murmur of the ocean, the ethereal connection of holding a firstborn child, a thousand other instances that are the synapses where perception and emotion, mind and heart, meet.
   He tried to speak and had forgotten how; but his thoughts resonated in the light, clearer than speech ever could be.
   “What is this? Am I dying? Am I dead? Do I get another chance? Why am I seeing all this? Who ARE you?!”
   Nothing. No ethereal voice. No text messages. Just light.
   “Please!!” his mind screamed. “Why is this happening?!?”
   The Voice came then, its sound a gentle hurricane, full and invisible and vast and immediate.
   BECAUSE OF THIS.


   Long before the mile-deep reverberation died away in his mind's ear, he realized he was again on his sofa, in his living room, warm, alone.
   Bloop-poink.
   His gut tightened at the thought of another inscrutable message from an unknown sender.
   But this one was from his daughter.
   “Daddy, are you OK?”
   His eyes shifted from the phone to the gun and back again, welling with great hot tears of understanding and shame and relief and love.

*

©2016 B. W. Flatley

Scene #15 "True Story"

     She sat at the end of the sofa closest to the window, the throw blanket wrapped snugly about her. The light was already fading outside as the early autumn night closed in. It felt good: the cool air out there had just begun to make its way into the apartment, so she had put the heat on for the first time, just low, to chase that chill away. The smell of it – a sort of hot-dust scent – was comforting in its announcing Fall's arrival. The candles that were the only illumination in the apartment added their warm primal light and their various scents to the whole ambiance of this evening, the kind she loved and looked forward to each year.

     Sounds from the kitchen drew her attention away from the fading light and slowly clouding sky outside. He was finishing up making some tea for them both, a final touch that made the warm autumnal coziness complete. He stopped when their eyes met, and smiled at her. He never could meet her eyes without losing whatever concentration he had. She smiled back, relaxed and sweet. That stopped him completely.

     “Is the tea ready?” she asked.

     “Hm? - oh, yeah,” he said, remembering himself, slightly embarrassed.

     “I thought maybe something had happened,” she said with a touch of kind sarcasm as he picked up the cups and made his way to her.

     “When you look at me,” he said, sitting close and handing her a cup, “the world goes someplace else. I don't even care where it goes,” he added, sipping. The flicker of a few of the smaller candles winked shadows on their faces. He set his cup on the little table in front of the sofa and pulled closer to her. She took her free hand from under the blanket and put it around his shoulders. In the soft orange candlelight he looked into her mysterious grey eyes and she looked into his searching blue eyes. She leaned her forehead against his and sighed deeply, closing her eyes for a moment. He ran his fingers gently through her hair.

     She sighed again then sipped her tea, looking at him. “Comfy?”

     “I have no idea how I could be more comfy, or feel more right.”

     “True story,” she said.

*

© 2015 Brandon W. Flatley

Song Lyric: "What The Hummingbird Said"

What The Hummingbird Said


I was listening to the sound of ancient rivers
And the whispering of the breezes through the leaves
Got mixed up in all the chatter of the sparrows
In the dark incessant humming of the bees
Stood there for forever waiting to be found
But never really understood I wasn't lost
I could see a thousand miles stretched out before me
Crystal clearly
But within reach everything was out of focus


Then swift movement caught the corner of my eye
A tiny thing of beauty came into my view
And the hummingbird said:
“All I ask is something small and sweet that will sustain me
If you can give it...can I ask it of you?”


I was wandering through the labyrinthine mazes
Of the days as once I knew familiarly
Treading hills and fields and streets that long since yielded
To the slow decay that everything must see
Looking for a sign in all I could behold
I longed to bring its deepest meaning to the light
I could see a thousand facets of the past
But not a single one convinced me
That the future would be alright


Then swift movement caught the corner of my eye
A tiny thing of beauty came into my view
And the hummingbird said:
“All I ask is someplace warm and safe that will protect me
If you can give it...can I ask it of you?”


Then swift movement caught the corner of my eye
A tiny thing of beauty came into my view
What the hummingbird said was all I needed to sustain me
And if you'll listen...I'll sing it for you.

© 2015 Flatomatic Music Publishing ASCAP

Scene #37 "Supernova"

     She stopped in the middle of the front yard and looked up, at first watching the thin ghost of her own breath jetting out in hot angry bursts, rising and vanishing into the dark. Then the stars caught her eye. Beautiful: chill and clear and so incredibly present, the ancient light of long-gone suns seemed almost within her reach. She let out a long, shuddering sigh, and the tears that had been threatening finally came. Gravity won its struggle too, and she collapsed, arms hugging shaking knees, sobs coming in bursts too powerful for her to mute completely. She didn't bother to wipe the tears away, deciding instead in some hysterical tragicomic way that they were her mask, her saltwater mask, and she was melting it off. At the thought, a humorless bark of laughter escaped her and she turned her eyes again to the heavens. A blaze of light burned an ephemeral path across the sky, first white, then blue, then yellow, then red, then gone, all in an instant. After a moment she noticed that she had stopped crying. After another moment, she realized that she was musing on the shooting star. Maybe that was it: everything is only a flash, gone before you know it. Or maybe the beautiful things are almost illusions, like the fiery brush-stroke across the night sky was really only something burning to cinders in the pull of its own gravity. Nothing left but a memory of light and the notion that there must have been something of substance there, once.

     “No,” she said to the unhearing night, the ghost of her word tracing its way up towards the silent constellations. She would not be that: not a quiet, almost unnoticed flicker. If this was the end, the breaking point, the first moment of the next Life, then she would be damned if she'd play the role of the meteor. She would not fall. She would explode.

     “Supernova,” she said, again to the senseless dark. A star that has blown up to unimaginable proportions, destroying old worlds, blasting out the beginnings of brand-new worlds, the engine of change in the Universe. It was time; it was well past time, she knew now.

     She stood, brushing herself off and wiping away the last bits of her mask. She turned towards the house, knowing – finally – what must come next.

     The stars were, indeed, beautiful tonight.

*

© 2018 B. W. Flatley

Scene #31 "A Beckoning"

   He turned off the TV and listened intently to the silence. There was something about it, this late-night quiet of the house, the single low-watt lamp in the far corner, the handful of aromatic candles here and there...it made the hour different; it made the clock a liar. Suddenly the night was more present, more immediate, more aged. The synthetic drone of electronic fiction had kept it disguised, at arm's length, unnaturally young. As the fatigue of that drone relaxed, all the subtle ambient nightsounds that go as unnoticed as the color of paint on a ceiling began to rise and meet his awareness.

   A breath of late summer night wind whispered in his ear from the half-open window behind him. A call, a beckoning: he understood its ancient and untranslatable language; he closed his eyes and sighed deeply, smiling softly.

   The grass wore a sheen of moisture as the heat of the day, vanishing hastily up into the silent constellations, had left it holding a cloak spun from the very air that surrounded it. He shut the door as silently as he could: the soft clamor of such human machinery seemed unwelcome, even anachronistic, in the pale blue moonlit midnight. The stars arced with the inexorable grace of the cosmos as the Earth swung with slow certainty on its constant hinge. Crickets trilled their songs among the bushes; katydids sang their passions through the trees. The breeze itself was an invisible dance of a billion years of Life's ebbing and flowing tides.

   Some time later – whether minutes or hours, he couldn't have said, and the clock had at any rate proven untrustworthy – he lowered his gaze from the heavens and passed it over the nearby houses. A single dimly lighted window here and there attested not only to the smallness of the hour, but to something warm and safe and common to the human experience. Not a thing of overt dramatic gravity, but of quiet sameness: an agreement; an arrangement; a tacit defense against the profundity of Eternity.

   Later still he lay in his bed, sleeping peacefully, dreamlessly, kept company by the slow soft whisper of the summer night wind.

*

©️ 2018 B. W. Flatley

Scene #30 "Babbling"

   “So what's it supposed to be?”

   She knew he didn't really mean to interrupt, and she didn't mind him watching her paint. Some artists do: they want solitude, aloneness, quiet, no questions. He was lucky, however. “I don't know yet,” she replied. “Something...beautiful.”

   “Ah.” The single syllable carried quite a load of dissatisfaction. A few moments of unquiet silence passed. “Brought you a glass of Merlot. I know you like that when you're...creating.” He offered it to her.

   “Thank you, sweetie,” she smiled, hopping off the tall padded barstool she used for painting. She took the glass, kissed him on the cheek, and had a sip. “Bored?”

   “No,” he said with a shrug, “I uh, was just...yeah. Bored.” A shy smile crept across his face. “Sorry. I got to thinking -”

   “Dangerous.”

   “- yeah, always. Anyway, It's not like I haven't seen you paint, draw, sketch, whatever. I guess I just got wondering. How do you know what you're making? I mean, obviously I've seen the finished product.”

   “Well, as finished as it gets, yeah.” She sat again on her painting seat.

   “Wait, you mean the done ones aren't done?”

   She slouched a bit, a quizzical look on her face. “Yes. No. I mean, yes, they're not done. Not to me. There's always something I feel like I left out, or missed, or could've done differently,” she concluded, straightening up confidently.

   He crossed his arms, raised his eyebrows, and grunted “Hm.” After allowing the weight of this profound reply settle on the room for a minute or so, he added an echo of himself: “So, what's this one supposed to be?”

   She turned towards the canvas, sipped the wine, crossed her ankles, leaned back a little, pondering, studying the embryonic scene. “I didn't give it a hell of a lot of thought. I just started to paint – I do that sometimes, just kinda babble with a brush. See if anything coherent happens. Haven't you ever done that, maybe writing a note or an email or some kind of more creative thing? I mean, I know you've written some poems and a story or two, even if you still won't show them to me after all these many months,” she smirked, giving him the side-eye, “so I guess I kinda assumed you do this sort of thing too. This?” She pointed the brush at the work in progress, “this is babble. Hopefully it turns into beautiful babble. But I don't have any grand design, nothing profound.”

   He had moved close to her, and now put an arm around her shoulder. “I thought art was about being profound. Explicate the meaning of existence, and all that.”

   “Is that even legal?” A wry smile.

   “Only in four states. This isn't one of them.”

   “Hence the wine.” She raised the glass in a mock toast and sipped. “Seriously though. Is every artistic creation you've experienced profound?”

   “There's a lot of thoroughly unprofound crap on the radio and TV.”

   “Right. We create because we create. We're wired for it, I think, in a pile of different ways. Sometimes we make something that stands as a testament to a deep understanding of the Human Condition.” She took another sip, dabbed her brush in a bit of purplish paint, and drew a few strokes across the canvas.

   “And sometimes we're just babbling.”

*

©️ 2018 B. W. Flatley