Philip received his Masters’s Degree in Psychology from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He has published four books of poetry, Mirror Images and Shards of Glass, Dark Images at Sea, I Never Finished Loving You, and Falls from Grace, Favor, and High Places. His fifth, Forever Was Never On My Mind, will be out Summer of 2023. Two novels, Caught Between (Which is also a 24 episodes Radio Drama Podcast https://wprnpublicradio.com/caught-between-teaser/)  and Art and Mystery: The Missing Poe Manuscript. His next novel, an erotic thriller, Far From Here, will be out Fall of 2023. One play, The Apparition. His current project is collaborating with a British photographer, a French artist, and an American graphic artist to produce a coffee table book with the theme of feminine beauty. Philip also has a column in the quarterly magazine Per Niente. He enjoys all things artistic.

Before and After the War

Sometime during the night, while I was sleeping, my head exploded. When I awoke, I saw myself alone. I reached for my hand, but I rejected myself. Thunder and lightning chattered emotional nonsense outside, their bravado wrapped in warnings about the future.

I shook myself once more. My body asked why? Is that me walking among the exploding bombs, unraveling before the alarm sounds? I see where I am still asleep, wide awake, having nightmares about dreams you can’t wake from. Over the radio, theatrical companies announce the death of sanity. Philosophers said it was a waste of time though bankers disagreed. Wearing a flowing see-through robe, God was so disgusted she walked off the battlefield.

 “Didn’t you know?” Is the echo from an answer I had given myself years before? My image slipped away from the mirror before reflecting my anxiety. Tears filled my eyes and rolled down my face into the consequences I would experience when I fully awoke or fell asleep, or was this the first step of madness? Sad about my absence, I continued to think about the dream I was experiencing or the life I was living.

I was gone, and my lover was alone. We were just a discourse my friends were having among themselves. From La Casa di Giulietta, I contemplated the history of the scalpel. No matter the circumstances, something pointed and sharp is always appreciated. Things razor-sharp make statements, create emotions, confirm punishment, and give reason to wonder, as blood becomes art. And art is the space and time between genius and insanity. An eclipsing river pregnant with tributaries has potential, but creativity is needed, and thoughts become too precious to share.

There is no revelation, only agony, and when you see the War through my eyes, the night becomes paralyzed and illusions confiscated. I looked at myself, drunk with ineptitude, filling no niche worthwhile except to kill. I sneered at the injustice of being me, though being anyone else would still carry the sting of insignificance.

I felt the softness of diffused light, leaving one reverie to enter another. You can see me, frightened as I appear as the brush moves from palette to canvas. I observed the sentiment but never acknowledged it. I absorbed what rational thinking deems absurd. Then like the poets abandoned by the evening sky twinkling brightly with dreamy stars, judgment stomped its heavy foot, the black door opened, and I was pushed out into the cold world where logic had a cost. I found a new hatred within a narrowed-eyed sorrow that embraced me. I became heavier than I was and dragged myself across fragments of crucifixes, stained glass, and rosaries.

As dogs barked, cats signaled angels on the brink of failure to fly from my dreamscape across the battlegrounds. Animals on carousals were wiped clean of their smiles and replaced with dawn’s shadow of death. Interrogations of the people dying who had never lived are given priority. They all wanted to be on magazine covers because their stories were visual, and words were something that War ignored. Words must be contemplated, but there is little time for that when misfortune turns to psychosis.

Friends questioned me before I was to be executed by my comrades at my adversaries’ request. I said, “All this is illusory.” But I didn’t understand why I couldn’t wake. There is no up or down. There is just what is and what is, is a fragment of barbed wire shrapnel embedded in my soul, so my outlook, like an old movie projector, jumps from frame to frame without explanation or reason. It just is, or is it the way it is?

Then a statuesque woman standing straight with cropped hair, pasty skin, one scarred cheek, and a book under her arm asked if I remembered our kiss when we were teens. “Only ideals prevail,” was my answer. She dug her lioness claws into my memories until I recalled. Chestnut trees lined the moment. It was Autumn, and the air was chilly as I hurriedly undressed her. Her lips and mouth were dry. She was thin and smelled of leek and potato soup. I put my hand between her legs, and the blood from all my lovers to come flowed and stained how I would react to being loved. I would never shake off the guilt of needing to accomplish something meaningful for corrupting her.

I was a sailor, but the rules of fighting, killing, and believing eclipsed the need for forgiveness. There is a similarity that is not obvious between being absolved and being resentful. Both took up more thought than they deserved. They involved interaction with others, which is unnecessary to advance. War is art, for death’s sake. The emptiness that questioning brings never disappears; you pile up the things you must get used to.    

A beautiful sculptress with sometimes blue, sometimes green eyes smiled at the men lined up to touch her. She found her body a hindrance and thought we should communicate not with our mouths but with our eyes. She drank wine from a chalice. She spoke loudly so others could hear, “I know it is impossible to get my nakedness out of your mind.” It was true; either way, naked or serving the powerful, a flame burned every commitment I made. A sharp remark sliced open my heart when I protested about context and violence fueled with shame. There was no blood, only a short story no one would ever read. This artisan said, “See, I told you. Dying does not always mean death.” She knew me well enough to know it was the cruelest of all punishments.

The War raged, but the marketing for the War raged more fiercely. I restlessly tossed and turned. A silver mist blew through the dream. My mother had a miscarriage she thought was me, and my father gave out cigars and drank whiskey. Standing at a slight angle staring through the glass, I saw the nurses wrap an infant in white towels. I screamed, “No, I am a fighter, fighting to remain unambiguous.” They did not respond. They were exhausted from the War, but one nurse noticed what looked like a shadow. She had blood on her hands and lips. With little sympathy, she said to herself, “You will never be tired if you are fast asleep.”

After being out at sea, sinking ships, and watching snakes crawl into the mouths of the innocent, I needed to wake up and trade this frightening dream for a striking sunrise. In some filthy port at the curling of a nightmare, a whore wrapped her bare legs around my face. That smell of jaded encounters gave her away. Her friends in pressed uniforms marched into the streets, where leaders demanded money from those who could no longer breathe. They pleaded with the dead to fight harder. With her legs tightening, I gagged on the lies, and all my misdeeds pushed aside any charity from my past. My mind filled with multiplying uncertainties. Sadder depths became a wilderness where killing is a vision, a refuge from real life. However, none of us are free from weakness, and morality doesn’t overcome fear. Suddenly, the light pattering of gentle rain gave background to the silence. I checked my gun. I checked what thoughts I had left. I checked the conclusions made when stretching to reach for something, missing and falling into a place darker than the bloodied stain left when slaughtering prisoners.

In pain, I thought I was thinking about thinking, but I was not. What I desired crawled from the edges of my mind. I could hardly think about the thoughts I was experiencing. It seemed incompatible, yet I yearned to verify if love and War were siblings. Vengeful military gods called me insolent, but I knew I was being faithful. I wanted to unlock the trapped memories inside, memories too undignified to resurface. But are they memories at all? Was I a memory of who I once was before the War? T. S. Elliot, in the corner of a destroyed courthouse, wrote on a blackboard, “There will be a sequel to this War.”

The wind whirled, suppressing evidence and dismissing deficiencies. Repelled, I retreated into the disillusionment of being alive. Jesus walked across my mind to the water. My questions rode the waves to him, but his vague replies drifted into crumbling cliffs and disappeared between the acts of knowing and the impossibilities of understanding.

The menacing eagles attacked parachuters, taking away their ambition. Falcons followed with razor-sharp claws taking away their drive. Once they hit the ground, the crows and ravens separated the cowards from the wounded. Black is the color of anger, and blackbirds are never content with the simple pickings the eagles and falcons leave for them. It’s not nature’s way to be satisfied. I learned that hatred is the tyrant among emotions. It is deception, the myth of depending on the natural world for sanity. Among the dead, I saw those who continue to lay prostrate to all the delusions greed has instituted. Conditioning works. When the trumpet sounded, the hungry birds savagely devoured the victim’s tongue, then the heart leaving the prey with little more than an inkling of a world without War.

I shed my old skin among the false definitions, casting off the sins my mother said I never made, but my father laughed about. In a War where words never connect and distress substitutes for time, the cleanliness of hope never approached the me posing as myself. At night I looked for the sun that saved the disregarded, but I was trapped in a play as a character trapped inside a task. I faltered to recognize my presence though I knew there must be an exit to this dream, this madness, this life.

I surfaced in a bombed-out barroom with a thousand stab wounds, yet one more was needed. A red, white, and blue neon sign reminded everyone this was an enemy drinking spot. I ordered all the things I needed to be whole. I was stripped, whipped, and told compassion was just an equation of judgment. There was no existential need for fools enamored with words that string together atmosphere with passion. Death by suicide or War is the ultimate obsession to get back at yourself.

In the distance, in her dream, not mine, a graceful woman with skin like milk and silky blonde hair who seemed to float dealt me into the game. She had me play against all the characters I have told myself I am. One card followed the other. All were blank. I remembered the truth hurts more than not knowing. Was truth part of reality? Is the proper cycle sanity, madness, then clarity? Then it occurred to me, with the smell of spring mingling with gunpowder, what if thinking is a ruse?

“What is the best hand you could imagine?” The silky blonde asked with a sincere smile.

“An apology is but a symptom.” Fell from my mouth.

“Best to know, not feel.” She continued after showing me a mushroom cloud on the underside of her right breast. “It seems all of you are incapable of winning.”

With a bottle of Bourbon in my hand, I spoke of the mental anguish in Crime and Punishment. She looked at the carnage beneath the opened window. “Time spent between my legs is neither pleasure nor pain but an unfurling at the furthest fringe of thought. It is thought conforming to its own existence. An exploration that tears away the veil between lust and apathy and then dismisses it. The most dangerous quest is to attempt to think about thought outside of life and death.”

“Going from epic to modernity is a mournful stream. It is an adaption, not a translation of life.” I said bitterly.

She laughed. “Thinking is the escape that got you here. Stop thinking, and the War will end, but to grasp what is beyond madness will continue.”

I was convinced after insanity must come clarity. Is there another stage after? I needed to find another body to crawl into. It must be a woman because man is a failure compared to God’s ultimate creation. I had proof. The dead were all around me. But are the dead just dead to what we believe is death?  

Athena appeared in a sheer robe. I crawled beneath. I was fascinated with the relationship between context and form. It was easy to be awestruck. I realized the epitome of art is a woman’s body. Her legs spread. The beauty of purity was overwhelming, and I moved my lips to kiss the void between me and myself to reach her, not knowing whether for desire or War, how much pain I could endure. I hated having these thoughts. I wanted my mind to have an off switch. I wanted this War to be a board game, but if so, what I am experiencing must be real.

When what you see can’t be explained and what you feel can’t be expressed, the inquisition begins. The sky filled with loud planes—carts and wagons packed with children, headed for propaganda farms. The jets opened their hatches and dropped bombs on the houses of those who could not afford them, missing the gateway fountains of the War’s financiers. Investing in death was profitable.

What remained was a shattered mirror reflecting me as a teenager reading “The Bell Jar” next to the furnace in our basement. My three siblings, whom I had never met and were murdered by fate, wondered why I didn’t wake up to end the War. Salvation and contempt were relatives that danced together only at churches and battlefields. I knew I was guilty of something more grievous. When I shed all the personalities I hid behind, who was I? I could not promise I would be aware enough to grasp this if I awoke. That is if, if I were dreaming. Maybe I was mad. If so, where is the escape to reach beyond madness?

Frightened that heaven would blacken and fall, the battles grew fiercer. The storms were relentless. I was asked what my purpose was other than a killer of men. I shouted, “I am a prism, fractured, lost in contemplation.”  

Angels descended, but they needed devils to give them voices. We were in a courtroom Goya painted. I said it was never an apple but a strawberry Eve gave me. Hooves pounded the earth, and a tempest raged. Cannons fired, and the dead were laid before me. War never struggles for inspiration. Dark wrinkles, hooks, and daggers are the armament of fearlessness. Thought remained a chrysalis for those that needed to be sacrificed. Worse than a traitor, I was accused of thinking. There was a thin line between visionary and dreamer, was my defense. Poised Gudrun, from Women in Love, gave her summation. It was for death by freezing in a snow bank at the top of a mountain.

All the lyrical beauty around me disappeared, and only a  pencil sketch remained. Alone in the courtroom, I meandered from here to there on the outskirts of my thoughts until I spotted an artist painting clouds. She stood on the darkness in me. I realized I never knew when I was happy until I was not.    

The War continued to be promoted by those who never spoke honestly. Their portraits combusted, but their images remained unscathed. After the accusations that thinking had become the chaos of human dignity, the verdict became law. Eve and me, I in my mind, and Eve, even with a touch of sanity, knew rejection was neither a consequence nor a risk but an action to make language extraneous. Proud to be naked, Eve commanded attention. She rejected the righteousness of the trial, the War, and the words in the beginning. She shook me, “Awake.”

I sat up on the bed. Eve took her moist finger and put it in my mouth. I immediately became aware of feelings, images, and sensations—all pathological conditions.

Famous authors crashed into my subconscious. They cut deeply into my mind until what I knew became what I would struggle to comprehend about what is real and what is beyond a touch of darkness. Eve held up a mirror to show me I am a dream in my dreams, and living is the slight overlapping of awareness and imaginings.

Before leaving my bedside, Eve said softly, “Words are dangerous. Truth is expressed through thought, not War, but vigilance is needed because omitting truth is the same as lying.”

I awoke, sweating, feeling exhausted yet somehow refreshed. I saw through the abyss and the stretch of time before and after the War. I saw you, I saw me, in the distance like it was, I saw lanterns in the misty forest between the trees, I saw me, I saw you, I saw us revealed in a dream that will never have an ending.