Gareth Couper (Garet)

3am Dreams

Time like flowers of eternity
Recursive dreams of where I used to be
Silver tinsel seems to spiral through my mind.
What does it mean ?
Time like flowers of eternity.

Garet

Manifesto For Dark Skies.

Come and join the dark side.

There is a war in the heavens, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.  Unfortunately the forces of light are winning. They have the biggest guns.  The sodium street light, the back yard floodlight. The 500W floodlight is the terror weapon of the light pollution war.

Its victims are nocturnal animals and astronomers, and anyone who enjoys the night sky, or is simply trying to get to sleep at night.

The dark side has only weapons of propaganda.  (Rumors of a secret division of small boys armed with catapults  - remain rumors.)

So, will you join the dark side?

Turn down the lights (and save money) direct it down, where it's needed and not at the night sky. Thank you.

Garet

Masmouchard

Arising again, I return once more to Masmouchard.

Masmouchard, if your stones could only speak! What tenderly held horrors clenched inside your towers. Horrors outlasting beauty, held so long. Truly there is little now to see, The last occupiers left only a shell, one great wall, two stubs of towers, some rubble. Yet the peasants do not forget, the land does not forget.

Strange that the foreigners should have been drawn so instinctively to the old chateau in the forest. The German invaders not expected to have such sensitivity to our dark history. Perhaps it spoke to them of Bavarian Gothic horrors, or more likely, its privacy, hidden away from the roads. The great straight old road from the South, up which rolled the tide of the invasion, past Limoges, on to Paris, and eventually back again.

Like calls to like, the master race exploited the dungeons of the chateau, and the chateau exploited their cruelty, breathing again the blood of prisoners. Yes, the stones remembered. Yet at the end the castle was unsatiated, and fed on the screams of the German officers just as happily; none escaped. Some said the Maquis blew them all to hell, but I know better. It was the ancient terror awoken, not patriotism, that drank the foreign blood when the towers fell.

Now the old wall stands gaunt and silent, few come, the tourists pass by unknowing, only the very old still remember the ancient legends from the days of the revolution when I, the old Count, set up house in Masmouchard. So long ago that none remember that we were the foreigners then. Drawn by the great terror, invulnerable to the pitch forks and flames of the peasantry - we always walk where death walks. Though whether we follow it, or it follows us is debatable.

But now I must return to my new home, I live now at the sanctuary on the peak of Mont du Gueret. Fools! they think they wanted a wolf sanctuary - what they got was a sanctuary for me and my kind. And who cares if the occasional fat tourist gets mislaid.  

Compte de Masmouchard.

The Forgotten
 
For all the things that never were
I mourn.
Denied even suffering
Denied existence.
Love, hate, beauty, horror,
The treads of life's staircase.
They tread none.
Yet who cries a tear for the Unicorn,
The Cockatrice, the dead - unborn?
When He made man
Did He unmake the Basilisk?
What provision for the world of myth.
Now "man is the maker" - so they say,
But why do his creations fade away?
The wonders of a scientific age
Now usurp the province of the mage.
Technology is the new thaumaturgy.
Let technology beware,
Man is fickle; your time will come.
 
Oh woe for man's creations -
Pegasus beat your downy wings in sorrow.
Man neglected to give you a tomorrow.
What has become of the missing links?
The Cyclops and the sleepy Sphinx.
 
Man's imagination gave you life on Earth
But when that fails there is no second birth.
Once monsters roamed the land in constant strife.
We made them, yet made for them
No afterlife.
 
And so returning to the void of that which is not -
They cursed us as a parting shot.
So if there is a justice greater than man's
Might each of us not come to find
That heaven plays host
To the forgotten creatures of your mind
Monsters from the id.

Garet.

My Window

My window looks out onto the country.
A green and hilly land.
A lonely buzzard turns and swoops in the stiffening breeze.
I gaze with indolent peace at the trees, the fields, the sky.
A cow bends its head to graze on the grass.
Hidden in the shadows a deer surveys with solemn eye,
then steps into the pooled light of the sun.
Flowers bud, bloom, die.
For a brief moment time stands still, and then...

Night falls with whispering sighs and calls
the translucent moon to rise and sail through vapid clouds.
My window frames the myriad stars that spin into infinity.
I breathe the fertile air of my green and hilly land.
I am part of the whole... but separate.
My window is an opening into what I am and what I see.
My window is the barrier between man and the land.
My window makes me a part of what is.
I close it and draw the curtains.
I am blind.

Garet

Portal

When man builds a structure, a house, a theatre, a church, any building, something is enclosed. What is inside becomes a separate universe from what remains outside. And a window stands between the inside and the outside. It is a portal, things can be summoned through a portal. It's an edge, strange things happen at edges, the boundary between night and day for example is always a magical time.

Garet