nobody knew where he came from. nobody knew why he had chosen this place to live. he may have had a keen sense of the fragile balance of builders and destroyers in our polarized environment. his soft, well-spoken manner was reassuring to many; yet he hid in him an absence, a void, a focal point of some dark energy. perhaps he was just another mirror of the world as it shows behind the veneer of politically correct prizes and praises and all the let’s-do-good bullshit. monsieur Ducasse knew where he was going without having to stare at the shiny lentil of a compass. he functioned mentally both in an archaic past and in a future not yet foreseen; yes, it was indeed a most disintegrative and perilous position but he wouldn’t be limited by restrictions of linear time, he used to say. what was time to him?  a form, a number, a structure, a sequence to anchor a greedy, life devouring beast in the noise of semantics and representation.

we built together a house for the birds: a fragile glass dodecahedron inscribed in a sphere of glowing mist. it was winter and many birds needed shelter and dreams to feed on. the moon breathed icy silence on our heads.

many sleepless nights followed the ascent of the shadows; the veil was lifted and the fragmented soul revealed. I was left bereft and ashamed of my past. ‘I could have done better’ was a stab in my heart. I became a ghost. I looked arround, measuring the emptiness.

monsieur Ducasse was still there, walking barefoot on broken glass, eyes closed. 

you always try to elevate circumstances to a symbolic level,
turn them into metaphors studded with pearls of universal wisdom;
you make the same mistake over and over again:
you gild the all-too-often, you mourn
the tragedy turned grotesque by the breaking news,
you seek meaning in the rant of fools,
you commiserate with the icy despair
of those who cannot love
and pretend they are heartbroken.

sometimes facts are just facts: they are not the truth;
they are the premise from which minds weave reactions and 
map the road to follow in response to what is expected of them
not according to their own nature but to the rules of the many,
to the blueprint of the maze they were born into,

waiting for the puppet birds above your head to come alive,

to spread wings and fly.
you keep saying you would die for truth;
you believe it is essential - a gift 
worthy of your love for those you cherish - family, friends;
you cannot see that your quest for truth, the constant delving
into the black maggot-filled earth of family secrets
casts the beam of madness over your honest face.

you see redemption for those who seek none;
they lie to you; they’ve lied to you before;
it is how they survived your idealism,
it is how they watched your fall without blinking:
they believed you deserved it as punishment
for not being able to fit in - an isolated case,
outlandish, theatrical - the predictable story of a born loser.

there is a new harmony - heavenly, abstract, immaterial presence,

glimpse of a new order elevating dissonance,

translucent, transparent, weightless bodies,

gravity defying scaffold of light beams in the heart of waiting;

imagine music you can see, colours you can wrap around your trembling fingers,

a fragrant breeze healing all wounds, bringing ghosts to life.

do not oppose the change: be permeable to the point of no resistance,

let this soft wavering feeling flow through you; it is the shimmering river of hope;

you can now look back and see your past with new eyes:

the broken cup was full of light.