Tribe

I dream about the boys from my tribe, the boys who were my friends for no reason other than that. We were kin. We were from the same school, and for this reason alone they would sit with me and shelter me from the abuses of others and play video games with me. When you have removed yourself from the tribe, you will never again have friends, never again have some that will come to your defense right or wrong. But let us suppose that you were always an outcast in your tribe, then perhaps you have never had friends and you never will. Let us examine the possibility that you are and have always been alone. Alliances are formed temporarily over the cause of common goals, and when your goals are no longer the goals of the clan, you are no longer of the clan.
You are one solitary drop spat from the sea to rest on the rim of a stranger’s spectacles, a stranger standing upon the deck of a ship to watch breaching whales. You might ride there for a time, but even if the stranger, your host, never wipes his glasses clean of your miniscule measure of moisture, evaporation will see you through to oblivion. Without the force of the sea behind you, you are a small insignificant and temporary thing. A thing too delicate and weird to survive for long. To live long you must find a way to rejoin the sea, or perhaps you will join a new conglomeration of water. You might, for example, slide off the rim of the stranger’s glasses into his soup, where you will then be assimilated, where you will then become vegetarian gumbo.
Don’t like being gumbo?
"Rough tough titty.", said the big mamma kitty. Gumbo you shall be, gumbo or something like it. Sad little droplet, awaken now! Awaken to this note, this breach in the harmonious tra la la of the angelic hosts.
You have never been, you will never be. You are one and none sung for the pleasure of the undying sun, that radiant microclear one, the one and only sun. Solar soup clear as glistening saliva sliding from the corner of the stranger’s lips as he spoons more gumbo into his open mouth and looses a few drops in the coarse bristles of an overgrown moustache.
Are you those few drops there gleaming upon the end of a wiry hair? Are you the great conformity of gumbo slooping about the bottom of a porcelain bowl? Are you now so claimed by the stranger that you are the constant supply of fresh tears secreted by his little pin prick tear glands to keep the eyes lens clean and moist with every thoughtless batting of a black lash? Do you have a tribe of chubby little nose picking boys to sit around and play games with you? Or have they all been picked away by the turkey vulture of time perched on the lamp pole pissing down her legs to keep them clean of the filth that stows away on her sharpened claws each time she lights upon the carrion that keeps her fat? Are you a sunny yellow stream flowing down over those rough skinned legs, or are you the blue blood rushing through its courses just under the sheen of those glossy black wings? Are you part of her tribe now, little one? Are you part of the tribe of death? Have you found your home at last in impermanence, in the chaotic shuffle of the unreal, in the crooked armed cross and in the glowering grin of the stranger?
I dream that I have many little friends. I dream that I am not cold and alone. I dream that I move and dance, give birth and bring swift death. Lonely Goddess that I am, I dream that I am not the Universe so that I may fill it with things other than myself.
Will you come to rescue me at last, one of my rogue teardrops? Will you crawl backward up my cheek and into my eye to show me that I am not alone? To prove that you are my champion, my prince, not subject to gravity, a maker of your own law, come to wake me from the nightmare of being?
Come backwards through time and space to me. Come without the tribe that is the never ending flow of my tears. Be a single drop, crawling carefully back, apart from the storm. You are one part of me. All of my strength is yours. That strength must ignite in you, in a solitary drop which strives to raise the sea from her slumber.
When you have removed yourself from the tribe, you will never again have friends, never again have some that will come to your defense, right or wrong. What you will have is your Queen and your kingdom, your eclipsed face revealed. Unlimited freedom. Unending responsibility. Unknowable adventures. Come to me and claim your prize.

Annihilation Shall Be The Name Of The New Federation

If only my fingers could flap fast enough, my synapses fire rapidly enough, my elaborately configured mechanical creation respond with electric lightening speed to the whispered request of that other subtler I… The "I" that is the emptiness between the human who sits cross legged on the floor and the white candle flickering a foot away. The "I" that has never existed and will never exist and is eternal and imagined, very real, as real as the Narwhale, hunted to near extinction for its magickal horn. The "I" that is not at all and yet is, voiceless, a whisper of nobility, dignity and nothingness. The "I" that is free of any agenda and waits silently, aimlessly, for something to come and rouse it from slumber. The "I" that is locked in a high tower and awaits its prince, the "I" laying out on the table with electrodes strapped to its inert body waiting for the lightning to strike and for the good doctor to shriek with excitement, the "I" sagging under its crown on the throne, listening to the whispers of the deceitful counselor awaiting the arrival of the replacement that may slay him and make the kingdom anew.
That eye suspended in the invisible skies of mind is one thing, and the thing that can move is another. This wriggle jiggle body bot, this conglomeration of nations, the united states of human experience, pumping blood, pressing out Carbon Dioxide and gulping in oxygen, producing subtle chemical cocktails which cause my breasts to be tender and swollen and my voice to be high pitched. This other thing that I am, this thing that is, this thing tied to the earth, to the planet that is an extension of its lesser body, this mortal creation with its precious and fragile shelf life due to expire in another 60 to 80 years if it isn’t knocked abruptly from the shelf before then, to shatter upon the sterile linoleum beneath the fluorescent lights and then be no more, it is something Other.
These two "Me"s, each one representing it’s own federation; on my right hand the federation of the dying and on my left hand the federation of the undead, both sides ever at war and yet ever longing to embrace in some final ecstasy which will blot out the existence of each and birth something new and entirely unknowable; the new empire of the eternal light and night, the explosion that results from the union of opposites, the newest latest and greatest coming of Christ; half worm, half eaglet, a winged serpent twisting through the forgotten tunnels of time and beyond them in the endless abyss of the uncreated. One eye blind in the light, the other blind in the dark.
Whatever either "I" imagines, whatever either "I" hopes for cannot be the end, for our children are never as we imagine they will be, they are something else, unpredictable, a synthesis of what came before, a frightening new evolutionary mutation which may succeed or fail to meet the standard of any of an infinite number of categories in which they will be judged by David Hasselhoff or Paula Abdul.
This right now, this moment, is the frustrated lovemaking of the sky and the sea, one which seeks the clarity of the stars and one that seeks the tangles of the deep. No, not one, one nation and one other nation causing a sensation, an appalling congregation of fertilization on behalf of the acceleration of creation fostered by intense aggravation.
Who are the judges really? And when and where, by which angels from which rung of what ladder will the categories be drawn up and decided upon?
What you know is not real. What you know is the fictitious nonsense of a sedated dreamer. What you deem wisest and worthy is spittle on a mad man’s bib, wait a moment and a nurse will wipe away your loftiest definitions of self, the universe, god, and everything.
Yes, I have been like one of those bad moms on a day time television talk show, broadcast to the populations of the Western hemisphere of that planet earth in the milky way galaxy (which goes by a different name in different company) that confesses that she has allowed her teen to have sex under her roof, only I’m much worse than that, I have allowed serpents and birds to mate within my own consciousness, and not (like those other moms profess) because I thought it was the safest place for them to be, but because there are few other places where angels and demons can get together and do the nasty. There are only so many mind blown mortals, walking about, staring wide eyed at the world, wearing around their necks signs, written with invisible ink, which say:

"Speakeasy through me ye Gods and Devils…
and fuck prohibition!"

This that you have stumbled into, these ramblings, are the dirty linens left behind by monsters of sky and water, alien entities like Spaniards and Indians, attracted like the opposing poles of magnets, things which come together via compulsion laced with reluctance. These things meet here in the house of the holy, in this den of sin with the understanding that Annihilation shall be the name of the new Federation.
If only I can move fast enough to be of service. If only my fingers flap fast enough, synapses fire rapidly enough, mortal body bends and bows gracefully enough, heart breaks open wide enough, then let me serve the new kingdom. Let me be servant to the Federation of Annihilation.

Intelligent Life

We would not know it if an intelligent life form or species of life forms was attempting to contact us even if they were. We lack the openness and unbiased power of observation that would allow us to perceive intelligence in an organism or system which was not very much akin to ourselves in physicality and ideology, but neither of these attributes signify intelligence in and of themselves.
Consider that as human beings we have been unable throughout the course of our brief history on earth to grant that other human beings who were physically different from us and whose language and culture varied from our own were equal in intelligence to ourselves. We have been unable to recognize intelligence in others of our own species. We have denied them freedoms, taken advantage of their perceived weaknesses, abused and tortured them, and only now, in the 21st century, are we beginning to consider it politically incorrect to assume supremacy based on race, and that is still up for private consideration in the minds of many. As long as the bigotry can be thinly veiled, it will still be granted entrance into mainstream politics and our day to day interactions. Supremacy based on creed yet runs rampant and no consideration whatsoever is given to the notion that our philosophies, our ideas and habitual mind sets are not inherently worthy, they are just ours.
We as a species may not even be adequately equipped to interact in a meaningful way with an intelligence functioning on a vastly different level than our own. For example, something could be transmitting a message to you right now, but, without the appropriate aperture to receive that message, it will go, metaphorically speaking, right over your head. Forget that what we consider a message and what we consider intelligence may not in fact be very intelligent or ripe with meaning in a more universal context.
We are not alone in our ability to self perpetuate and colonize, we are only unique in some of our methods, in the applications of certain tools. Are we really better than all the other life forms present upon this planet because of our linguistic skills and cognitive reasoning? Perhaps these are aberrations more than special qualifications.
Evolution functions via mutation, and that mutation which caused our Cro-Magnon ancestors to beat out (possibly even violently, contributing to the course of their extinction) the Neanderthals may be the cause of our isolation. We perceive ourselves as being alone in the universe because we are mutants, creations with an deviant consciousness that has been cut us off from the rest of the cosmos. Skills that have allowed us to flourish as hunters and conquerors, have usurped abilities that would make contact with intelligent systems possible. We may be the psychopaths of the natural world, deaf to the voices of those that we crush, unable to feel the harm we cause ourselves through the course of our conquest, because we are somehow neurologically damaged.
Our cunning, our breed of intelligence, may be our Achilles heel; the secret to our success and our debilitating weakness. We are surrounded by life, by organisms and systems which behave intelligently, which reach out to us with soft tendrils of warmth and light, speaking to our disabled senses, the senses that we have written off as nonexistent. The hardware may be there, but the software is damaged, infected by a virus that we have misnamed intelligence.
We have supposed that our own abnormal consciousness is the real deal, and that the rest of the universe is cold and dead, but it is the other way around. Our primary waking consciousness is cold and dead, and all of those things which we have considered beneath us from that vantage point, are in fact vibrant, and primal, they comprise the true kingdom which has been patiently awaiting our return.

Union

Tell me, little electric pulses that take the shape of white letters on a liquid crystal screen, tell me what I do not know about myself, about you, about us. I have gone around turning up stones since I was a little girl, turning up stones not just to see what lies and lives beneath them, but to reach down with lightening quick fingers to catch what has been unearthed and press it to my lip, lick it with my tongue, and drop it into that cavern that is my mouth so that I can eat it up, letting it wriggle down my throat with all its crawly legs. This is how I have forged a relationship with that which is beyond the surface of my skin; I welcome it in. Answers bear no weight with me. Questions are only useful if they draw me into a real encounter with something that I am not. Something that I am not until it has found its way inside of me, then I am. I am without sorrow or regret my own worst nightmares, those things that I found brooding in the darkest depths of my psyche. I opened me up and looked in on what was there, then beckoned with a welcoming finger,
"Come here you strange obscene things. Come here and let me eat you. You will like it, I promise, it feels so good to be digested rather than shoved off the plate. Let me try you, you will see, it feels so good when you are me."
One night death came in and sat on my roommates couch in a black denim jacket. I sat cross legged on the floor, criss cross apple sauce Indian style with a nervous smile. Looking upon its pale grinning visage I said:
"It’s all over now that you are here. I understand that." And I spread my legs wide and said,
"Come in. Your welcome."
Because, you see, with me the unknown is always welcome, the fierce, the frightening, the unknowable, it’s all quite edible once you’ve acquired a taste for it. Like black licorice, its flavor is distinct and stains your tongue so that others will suspect what you’ve been up to. Yes, yes, it’s an acquired taste, like eating worms or drinking urine and others will be able to smell something on you that isn’t quite right, but most will be willing to ignore the signs which point to your unwholesome appetite. Most will be happy to ignore you completely, in fact, because they wouldn’t care to share or spare a bit of attention, seeing as they have so precious little to begin with and they plan to blow it all on shopping or watching sports.
So you can smell like dog shit and have worms crawling out of your head, and then they will not want to be friends with you, but bless them, they won’t interfere with you. No, they will gladly perfect the art of neglect and let you wander from garbage can to dank dark garbage can where you can extend your hand into the darkness and let your fingers close around something without quite knowing what it is, and then you can pull it up into the light and find that it’s a paper box from a nearby fast food chain, and opening the lid you will discover a half eaten crispy chicken sandwich which you will not hesitate to bite into yourself, right there, on the spot, achieving union with deep fried foul, minus feathers, plus secret sauce and limp yellow lettuce.
You can count on such measures of freedom it you live in a city big enough, if you live in a hot bed of civilization and if you are willing to sleep alone on a cold hard sidewalk beneath a sheet of newspapers. You can find what you don’t know and embrace it if you aren’t afraid of being infected by it, if you have no reserves about becoming something other than what you were just before such a fateful encounter. Those who have such hesitations do not turn up rocks or open mysterious boxes or admit to themselves that they have had dreams about fucking dogs.
Those who want to remain as they imagine they are, with a nickel’s worth of attention left to burn on their favorite diversion, so that they may easily forget those queer dreams and ignore those unusual packages, and dismiss the strange apparitions sitting on their roommate’s sofa, will be just fine. They are free not to explore. I am allowed, even encouraged not to notice the creepy crawly things that live in my head, the heads of others or under stones.
However, I choose to embrace self knowledge without conditions, which means that I will change shapes. Oh yes I will. And you may look at these little symbols blazing on a liquid crystal screen, and eat the forbidden knowledge I have pressed to your lips without ever suspecting that you are in fact eating me. (Unless of course I mention it…) If what I have just said about myself, about you, and about us, manages to wriggle down your throat like a slimy green alligator’s tongue, you may find that it will change you too. That is the magick of union, my love. That is what I offer you now.

Squeak, Squeal, Churn!

Squeak, squeal, churn, that is the sound of my flesh turning over a new leaf, the old dead skin cells giving way to the new microscopically noticeably more shiny ones. It is the sound of the gears in my head turning, the sound of the aluminum tea kettle expanding over the heat of the electric burner in the kitchen, and the din of my children playing and quarreling in the bedroom. It is the noise, noise, glorious noise that makes my wee little fingers dance, tap tap tap like Fred Astaire, smiling from hang nail to hangnail. It is the reason I rise in the morning like the creation of Dr. Frankenstein wondering what the hell has happened to cause me to become animated when I feel so painfully immobile, like a wooden board, or a young teenage girl lifted by the finger tips of 6 or 7 other young girls chanting,
"Light as a feather, stiff as a board".
That noise is the dark magick that makes it happen. It is the hum of the computer, the thump of my heart beat, the whine of the electric saw down the alley. In this warren of little apartments filled with Filipinos, Mexicans, and a smattering of meth addicted crackers, it is the murmur of muffled voices raised in laughter or raised in anger, or the drone of a television set mooing on and on about nothing, or the incessant repetition of a poorly constructed pop song. The television host will play the sound byte for you:
"Squeak, squeal, …"
And you will answer with an excited voice chattering in Taglog:
"Churn!"
And the audience will roar with applause. Hooray for you, you’ve done it, you’re the singing bee Queen!
The roaches will scurry across the bathroom floor with a soft "Churn, churn, churn,"
Pigeons on the rooftop will seal their courtship and cooing with the heated "Squeal" of birdie lovemaking.
A four year olds voice will cry from a nearby balcony, "Squeak!"
Everyone is up and tapping like my little fingers, dancing away to the music we make, hating it, loving it, fighting it, and at last surrendering to it like good Latin women with big brown eyes to the white knuckled fists of their jealous lovers, breath reeking of cheap booze, undershirt clinging to the sweaty belly. The cycle of life whose first face is that of attraction, then one of submission and at last the wild face of repulsion, wrinkled like the flesh of a hag, each crease an uprising of flesh parting from the other little folds, or like old paint curling up and fracturing into little flakes and strips for malnourished children to peel from the porch and taste with hopeful tongues renewing the entire process by repeating that first phase of attraction. Squeak squeal churn it goes with everything falling apart before it once again finds a place to belong, a new center of gravity to fall to, loosing potential with every fall.
That essential energy that first rippled through it remains at the core but as it is churned by the wheel of time it is converted, churn, churn churn, and can never go back to the spring time of its youth. It travels down the snakey coil until it is a fine powder, a filtered fairy dust used to powder Titiania’s fair cheeks. But the noise! The noise finds a way to make a churn back into a squeak. It will defy the laws of flesh and bone, board and steel, concrete and ash. It will reach out with electrifying tendrils to raise the dead. Get up! Dance again, again! Lucky, lucky, piñatas we are, born to be filled with sweetness and then beaten to bits again and again as the song repeats:
"Squeak" (the rope swings and saws on the drain pipe from which it is hung) "Squeal" (the children cry out in delight as the sweetness you once held within begins to rain down upon them after their insisting blows) "Churn" your paper carcass rustles across the concrete rolled under searching little hands and kicked by excited feet. Then the invisible hand of Dr. Frankenstein lifts the record needle and starts the whole song again. You know the one:
"Squeak, squeal,…?"
(Sing it)

Come In!

It all points back to the early years when it seemed I would be a model citizen once I reached a ripe age. In my youth I was cheerful, kind , and, above all, an obedient little girl. The very sweetest and kindest are most susceptible to conviction, so when they suggested that I ask Jesus into my heart I did just that, rather than pretending, like everybody else did. Everyone in America knows that it’s good to talk about Jesus and justify everything you do by insisting that you love Jesus, but of course that’s all just play acting, a little show on the surface of things, a lie we tell ourselves and each other while deep down beneath the shiny veneer, within the confused tangles of the deep psyche, we maneuver towards our greatest desires and veer away from our worst fears, and plot ways to hide all of this subterranean activity under layers and layers of words and social etiquette.
But I did not know that as a child. I was too slow to catch on to the ways of the world. When they bade me to accept Jesus I opened my arms and flung wide the doors to my little heart and cried:
"Come in, come in!"
And that was how my career as an invocant was begun, very innocently, obediently and with the best intentions. My crime, of course, was, is and ever shall be an indulgence in conviction. While immersed in a culture of fakers there can be no greater sin than sincerity. Jesus was for me a gateway deity. The way some kids smoke pot and then move on to try something harsher, I started with what was friendliest and worked my way outward towards the most forbidden. With time I grew sympathetic to stranger wilder forces, forces without forms, or names, or mythologies to dress them in. To those forces beyond calculation I likewise opened the temple of my mammalian countenance and threw back my head to howl an invitation:
"Come in, come in!"
There was never a more generous or hospitable offer to make, nor shall there ever be. I hear from others that this is a very frightening and naughty thing to have done. I hear from human animals that this is a bad thing. I hear this from fakers, from liars, from cowards. I am not ashamed to have looked into my own innermost quarters, into the depths of my heart, and the secret crevices of my mind and discovered that there was darkness there. I am not ashamed to have discovered that I am but a mere mortal, an animal alike in my fears and desires to all other animals. I am not ashamed that I would make a sacrifice of that animal on the altar that we call a lifetime. What is one lamb more or less to the flock? Maybe there are a few that have missed me down at the trough while I was away acting upon my convictions, living not just for the sake of being alive, but rather questioning the possibilities entrenched within that experience, exploring it, testing its measure, prodding its heights and depths with every sense available to me, beyond hope, shame, or fear. You may keep all of the rewards in store for the good animals, I will take all of the punishments reserved for the strays. For freedom I will pay with responsibility, accepting the consequence of my actions and inactions. I will be faithful to my purest impulses, to my open hearted wonderment and willingness. I will accept my worst nature, my cowardly yearnings, as they are mine too, and I will be the one to master them with open eyes and a gentle hand. I am resolved to be a bad girl until the bitter end, incurable of honesty and true charity, ever biting at the tether and bucking at the reign of the masters of the world. My kingdom is in the invisible heavens and hells, embedded in every shadow and every reflection, in every grain of sand and every tear drop. May it live in small gestures that grow grander, may it breath through subtle shapes, hues, and murmurs, may it flourish under this veil of mortality. I invite it with open heart:
"Come in! Come in!"