I Am Santo

Fiction, poetry, music and mindscape pictures by creative artist Jason Santo

Heavens Dim

This love blooms
With galaxy center force
Shaming light-stealing lusts,
Rewriting time’s relativity.
The past writhes
Slick and parasitic
But with its nebulaic charms
Birthing shimmering futures
From dusty tendril grips
And oh how the firmament
Pales in its white-knuckle press
Leaking spent wishes between
Void clogged fingers.
Lofty simplicity summons suns,
Questions quasars,
Pronounces pulsars
In weak-kneed comparison
To the heated clutch of these heavenly bodies,
The undulating fission
Where sweat and greed
Sting tongues,
Where ardor’s salted urgency
Slickens, stirs, softens.
Just let that universe shade green
In rambling, cheap verse
Because behind all that black
Are these blue dreams
Purpling with every flinch,
Each quivering vision
Of the beyond
As heights seize, crack, open
And rest sweeps celestial reach
Beneath mingled eyelashes
Clichés are forgiven,
Pasts are revealed as stepping stones
Run smooth, eroded
By the torrential bliss
Of now
Reigning like sunlight.

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Why beat? Why strum the soul wire and set time with chest drum, the bass of your footsteps approaching like a solemnly timed dirge that creaks floorboards like dusty ivory keys in an abandoned house, deserted by a family on the run, the way rotting organs flee the dirty bones of a ribcage. It’s the music of loss, singing sweetly in the morning hours that spill soft light over the one side of stirred bedsheets, the other pristine like a home awaiting arrival. That home. Voices caught in the dry plaster springing from wallpaper tears, echoing cries setting cadence to a flipbook story replayed day after day, the deftless duty and failure of earning, the deep longing for connection, the fear of missing out on bliss at corners unturned. It’s like song, searching for an ear but revealed to be tone deaf; such malice hiding in the tides of life, those unreasonable forces pushing and pulling the hands of the needy into fist and open palm and then fall, fall, falling from such grace, winds of passion swirling in like flashfire let loose in deeply inhaling lungs. Explosion or fizzle, there’s char left behind, the stubborn soot of together covering every faith, staining thoughts and riding lyrics that drift through day and then, at the sun’s molten sleep, haunt dreams of lost kisses and sweat-stung embrace. Those footsteps make the floors whine even as they soften with distance, on the turning away, a tune better left forgotten, but as insistent as that circadian rhythm reminding always that this is a melody unsung, but beaten into permanent memory.

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I want to dream of you
I want to wake to you
Thoughts won’t be enough
But it’s all I’ve got
A pocketful sleep
To bring me nearer
The hours blinking by
As eyes close night away
And these longing thoughts
Of your perfect breath
In my ear
The sigh of your pleasure
An echo from certain future
That cannot arrive soon enough
Like birthdays for children
Or the first trip to the beach
An expectation like thirst
In the desert.
We’ll stretch the edges
Of faith
And bend them into
Bought time,
That pocket of loose change
Spent on today
So it will race to tomorrow
And treat me now
To you
while I await
You.

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Careful. Don’t press this day like a nail underfoot. Watch each step. The pain will relent once the weight shifts, left, on the other leg, away from the sun and its perilous truths that stitch across a bruising sky with short arcs; seams leaking longing. Be mindful. Bring full force down and pain will shred the sacred fantasy propped up in between the hours of toil. Those are longer moments, right before the needlepoint hex creases the softest part of the sole and bleeds spirit dry. The warnings wail like claxons at cloudy British dawns, night stolen away by fear of everything, but mostly of that sick wraith called loneliness lurking in the incongruent madness of shapes haunting shadowy bedrooms, the covers pulled under chins and the eagle scream outdoors a reminder that standing behind every terror is alone. And then the pace ends, slow as erosion, and the knees feel like crumbled sea cliffs and the ankles like washed away shorelines. Surging, burning, present churning, volcanic disdain and a past aflame, tearing skin reaching up, deep, waking, taking, staking a claim to the woe of making any deep love that lures from the agony of one foot after the other, of pushing ahead and choking down dreams. Let that smoke waft through gray sun from the ruins of hope, the progress of yesterday turned to the blitz of today; the dreams of tomorrow just sweet steps without pain.

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(at Two Step)

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Petie listened to the engine of the car. It was late afternoon and mom had been driving for forever. They’d stopped somewhere during the night – he remembered waking up and seeing the long white lights of a gas station overhead through the back window – but he didn’t believe they’d stopped since. And mom wasn’t talking or singing, wasn’t playing the license plate game or counting blue cars, but instead kept her attention on the road. She seemed scared and sad. Petie wasn’t sure where they were going, but he knew it was away from Da. He called his dad that because when he was little he couldn’t say the whole word. But now he was a big boy and it was okay that he and mom left Da behind. Petie was five years old, watching strange looking trees and fields blur by the back window. He wasn’t scared because he could protect mom. Petie thought so because he knew how to fire a gun, had watched it on TV plenty of times. And when Da hurt mom that night, when he heard mom crying and saw her bleeding nose, Petie pulled the trigger. Da was still breathing when they left the house, but they didn’t call the hospital. They left and drove very fast. Petie didn’t like Da, but he missed him right now. At least he played road games on long drives and sang in the car. This was boring.

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C’mon baby, drown in this
C’mon honey, surf on bliss
Watch the sky change
Burn this grass blade
C’mon sugar, give a kiss.

Refract my light, girl
Into prism glee
Rainbow sheen pearls
Your skin is free
Wear this stain coat
Sap from this tree
The path chosen, babe
Accept this need.

Quiver, quake, shake, doll
Underneath it all
Beneath hungry breath
A starving little death
And salt licked while in thrall.

Magnify hurt suns
Skies clouding again
These oceans of longing
Tidal blankets of sin
Blank days carry ire
Somber nights rolling in
Hands absent warm sex
Mouths denied sated grin.

Let go, sweetie, forget the wait
Let go, darling, deny that fate
Sweat glistening with effort
Singing moan, screaming comfort
Let go, love, we’ll illuminate.

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(at Split Suns)

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What a bright burn it had, incendiary ignition to propel the stars within reach and the past behind like scrolls of bad wisdom. The light danced and played like promises of great hope, hearts speaking loudly in the quiet spaces between then and tomorrow, but what’s next was always the gutterball toss down the alley; a limbless reach for the rungs of a ladder to happiness. The pins reset, the dice cast, a game of worship spilled skill like milk and tears spotted the lane, the table and the sky where the sorrow divided, prisms of carved light like a deitific etchings drawing thin beauty from the failure of day. The storm raged nearby, but if there was a way to lasso the sun it was attempted, until it too departed. Like dreams. Like need. And soon night drew the untended fire to smoke, the thin whisps of words uttered and sighs intermingling in twilight, unheard, without echo. Somewhere there’s a wonder if it ever happened at all, but then there’s the charred scar of the land behind and a dented sky punched by ardor; all of it the wrong kind of grip on the remedy of now. Were there a way to stow the sun, trap that heat and burn bright forever, eschewing the plays at color on blank walls and in monochrome slumber. But the rules persevere and the lovers adapt, grinning like clowns for an audience returning their tickets to a show that never started. Endings are always the toughest and made most tragic when they have no beginning.
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A hand on your throat
Did you know it’s a note?
To a melody shaking,
No this isn’t a joke.
Can you carry this, lover?
Over shoulder, lost hope.
An understanding, a lesson
And learn how to cope?
All reason’s stung, bleeding
Into moments misspoke
Into climates arranged
And desires like smoke
Disappearing in ether
When the gallant are broke
This world unhands us,
These meanings connote.
Soul fires igniting
And nothing is rote
A blasphemy of hours
Time’s kindling afloat
In a celestial flood
Star currents elope
Wailing arias from Heaven
Tightened nooses of rope.

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The skull crack violence of an August sky allowed warning, and yet still it trapped. Were they not aware of the overhead boil of the atmosphere, they couldn’t have been less prepared. But they knew. They stepped into the storm together, fingers laced and knuckles white, and stood at the edge of tomorrow as if it were a cliff overhanging the crash of an agitated sea. And he knew to jump would be uncertain flailing, but he believed he could fly. And she knew that to leap would be discovery, but she wanted to seize faith. The rain took up all around them then, the howl of Summer’s lust catching them before they could make any decisions and still they hung on to each other. Spun, tossed, unmoored from familiarity, they hurled into the rot of serenity, hands locking as their limbs bent and broke, and they screamed from the sweet pain of comfort being ripped from them. They were blessed, moved closer together, stared into the eyes of God and found themselves staring back. The gales shuddered into breezes kissed by sea spray, and the salt of the air cushioned their descent. They landed softly among the bones of old hopes, spines of volumes written in deference to old dreams, and they breathed together, into each other. Today had ended, becoming yesterday, the pain of now yielding to less harrowing tomorrows. They drew strength in embrace, but untangled, pulling their broken faith from the fresh memory of their fall so they might climb, grip and be swept up again, tiny paper hearts willingly tattered in the maelstrom of desire.

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