Desert

I am in a desert.

The wind rushes around carrying everything from me. Every grain of sand leaps into flight to leave me behind, so thirsty. Once I was a magician. I commanded the forms of things by manipulating their essence, the data riding in the invisible blood of the manifested. Like a child, hands immersed in paint, I moved what flowed, what already yearned to move, directing it, commanding it with the attention of a lucid dreamer:

Go forth from me now!

Like an electrode touching down upon a color spattered pane of glass, I commanded:

Go Forth!

Did I make the shapes that the minds of men desire to see? No! But they could see what they wanted in the shapes I wrought. They stole my worlds away from me. No matter… let them have them! More will come. Ah Zing! Zah. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…
I should have known better what fate awaits the magician. Have I not seen them? Sitting by garbage cans, coddling books of geometry, sketching unsatisfying graphite drawings, begging for change, sleeping in bushes, screaming at no one. I have seen myself, and still I bend the waters of life in devious directions, turning the holy cross on its head, rending the render. I will not stop, though I am warned.

I see myself in the desert, a ruptured vessel that can hold no more water. I am a desert. All that I had become, blown away when the vessel shattered. And yes, the desert is eternal. There is no end to my time of cracked heart and blown mind, a parched husk of life, of isolation, loss, and exile.
It is forever, like every moment.
It is forever and never.
I am there, a broken machine, a failed experiment, a tear spilled onto sun scorched earth, a soundless scream. Every desert was once an ocean from which life sprang, once wet and rich with the invisible blood, until something which boiled deep within the earth’s core, hot and volatile caused a rupture upon the surface. Each moment is the death of one thing and the birth of another. When the ocean died the desert was born.
The moment in which I am the magician touches the moment in which I am the mad. Beginning and end; distinct and yet knit one to the other like the heads of the Ouroboros. When the many were sacrificed, the one was born, the demon Azazel. Azazel, assassin of multiplicity, forever bearing the pain of the singular.
Beware these teeth of mine which bite at everything that seems other than me. Like any trapped animal, a demon is made fierce by its agony. A thing which does not want to be and yet cannot cease to be, even having devoured all those things which were its mirrors.
The only escape from the desert of singularity is death absolute. The one must be sacrificed so that the many will rise up again, a flood of possibility. A deluge in which a magician can spring into action once more. A deluge fed upon the blood spilled from a demon.

I am in a sea.

A tempest rages, carrying everything to me. Every drop of water finds another and another so that they congregate as ferocious waves which I may command:

"Go forth! Go forth from me now and change the face of creation!"