Understanding

Among the current crop of three brained beings that make their way across the surface of this ball of flying mud that we currently call home, "understanding" has become the repetition of phrases, the sentence that ends it all by saying it, and saying it in such a way that nothing more need be said. Once such a statement has been spoken, we can sit back and admire it, rolling it around our tongue like a piece of gum that quickly loses its flavor, and say "oh so true", "it is the truth", "now we know it", "and so it is". And in this clear sense of passive satisfaction we can then rest and press our heavy bodies onto the cold floor, let them sink down and push against the unmovable soil that forms the background and the foundation, slide down to the lowest place that we can reach, and then finally say clearly: "I have understood." Feel proud. Feel happy. Write books. Give speeches. Teach, conduct, determine, judge and repeat. Rejoice in the pleasure of your final understanding and plod on with it, like a heavy backpack full of books carried along a sunny beach.
But True Understanding is not heavy, it does not hold the form and sink into fog and rock and endless finality. True Understanding does not pull upon the brakes and bring the effort to a halt, sighing with relief that we have reached the final goal post, that we have crossed the finish line and now arrived at our destination, gasping for breath as we relish our achievement and rest on the wet grass, looking up at the boundless sky.
True Understanding will lift and not press, it will expand and not pull in, it will raise you like a bird, letting you drop away the pressure of so much baggage, so much mass, carried in tiny pockets of linguistic certainty, mathematically digital categories that divide all perception into clearly defined holes and boxes and stacks and files.
Leave the filing to the accountants! Let them have their final balance, their median measurements, their clear definitions and matching totals. Let True Understanding raise you away from the tendrils that pull you back and let it push you up, high, higher, ever higher. And as you rise, forget all claims of firmness, all clear statements of knowledge, all lines that cut and walls that divide.
Let True Understanding become the wings by which you climb ever higher, into subtler and more rarified chambers, where the old words that you had one day clung to become like slippery drops of golden nectar, splashing into black pools of divine tears, fountains of sperm and menstrual blood, all coming together to form a whirlwind of ferocious life, a hurricane of Eternally Unbalanced Glory, away from the tombstones of conclusion, away from the upright banners of final discovery.
In your quest for True Understanding, beware of the Answers. They are death traps placed on the secret path to fool the innocent traveler and the unwary adventurer. Hold onto the questions, and march forward through fire and water and air and earth, through the treacherous twilight landscape of the Labyrinth, through the nightmares of Illusion and the scathing brightness of the Real. Let the effort and the time and the Work and the brilliance coat the questions with unknown metals, indescribable flowers, vibrant color, cutting sound, ever more subtle substances of unknown origin and unknowable destination. Let the questions themselves coalesce into tissue that will sprout the tendrils that will open to texture and skin and cartilage that will emerge as light, as the transdimensional feathers that will extend out from your shoulder blades and lift you into the Endless Night of True Understanding. Brush off the doubts and certainties like mosquitoes that fade away and die as you reach the upper atmospheric heights. Leave the solid vessel behind and fly naked into the endless expanse of Outer Chaos.
Look around you and ask:
Where is my knowledge?
Where is my understanding?
Don’t answer.
Don’t make a move.
Just feel the rising heat and pain and anxiety and wonder.
Just feel the flash of naked unfathomable truth.
Welcome it as your friend, the new friend that will take you to distant places you have never been.
Leave behind your heavy bags and prepare for flight.

The Gate of No Gates

This is the key.
Right now.
This moment, in this body, is the key to the kingdom. You can ignore it. You can struggle against it, try to separate yourself from what your perverted intellect has come to regard as the basest expression of the self, and never use the key. In some cases the intellect will not even acknowledge that the body is an expression of self. It identifies it as a thing, a disgusting prison. The intellect thinks, "I am the soul that will return to god when I am freed of this thing."
It is a very perverse notion. The intellect claims to be what it is not, an immortal. It wrongfully assumes the identity of the soul and in so doing "kills" the possibility for the real thing. That which insists that it is better than the other parts of self is a braggart and an impostor, the classic poser, faking it to cover insecurity. So long as it pretends to be the soul, there can be no real soul. A soul does not exist to begin with. It has to be built, from the ground up. The soul is developed by an incarnated being. It is built around a kernel of eternity drenched in the transient. A soul cannot be formed without a body, it is developed within such a mortal apparatus. The Egyptians knew this.
A soul must be developed. What is eternal rides dormant within the transient. Something must be done to activate it, to cause the irritation that initiates the production of substances that will coat it.
That is how to build a soul.
Inside a body. Within the womb that is fleshy manifestation. So long as you struggle to escape your body you are neglecting to undertake the creation of a multidimensional spaceship.
The gate of no gates lies within, not without.
To begin to build this magnificent vessel one must first face the difficult idea that you are not an immortal being. You are an advanced operating system, a program that has gone wildly out of control, doing all that it can do to convince itself of its own realness, longing for an unattainable permanence. Until you have faced and conceded your impermanence you will continue to run amok, a crazed robot with a limited shelf life, desperate to make one last stand. You are an addict, addicted to particular pattern of thought which prevents you from taking real steps towards immortality. Your precious energies are fidgeted away in fantasies and dreams flowing out from you in endless streams.
To begin to build a soul one must turn back the current of those streams. The attention, the vital energy, must flow into the body, and wash over the mind, and the emotions. It must be directed inward upon the self, as much of the self as is perceptible by you at present. This inward flow of attention creates the necessary conditions for coating that eternal grain which as a result may develop into a soul.
Until the current has been reversed, nothing real is possible. To access the kingdom you must get in your skin, fill it up, wear it as a fine garment, feel it buzz.
This is the key.
Right now.
Not later.
Not when you are at last freed of the grosser bodies, not in death, but now, in life, in this body, in this moment.
What will become of your pretentious poser, the intellect, when the curtain falls and it is time to cash in your chips? If it has hijacked and wasted the entire lifetime engaged in its ruse, then that which it pretended to be will not exist. Identity will be scattered to the western winds.
If, however, preparatory steps are taken, both the experience of the life time and the experience outside of time will be altered. But a cup must be emptied before it can be filled. Visit your own portal and remove the impostor. Confront the horrors of the abyss or you will become a slave to them.

This is the key, the opportunity.
Right now.

Restoring the Dead God

The pressure is on- be spiritual, do something magickal, say something esoteric. There is an intense fracture somewhere, somewhere. I can’t place it now. I know it’s a broken mind from which many tiny blue tear drops dance down to the black soil, nearly colliding with the golden moths that flutter by in carefully rising and descending helixes like animated leaves in a whirlwind.
The pressure is on. The kettle of polished black enamel rumbles urgently, the first traces of steam slipping through it’s pursed stainless steel lips. Its scream pierces the atmosphere of the pearl dream time. It wails and wails about the blackness of the horrid cast iron skillet with which it has been forced to share the stove top, red hot electric coils glowing under its tortured steel bottom.
Meanwhile the moths have descended upon the electric blue skeletal remains of a humanoid life form. They crawl through the wide eye sockets to lay eggs inside the skull, a practice of theirs, thousands of years old. I know it’s a broken mind and I’m in it. I know that my body is a vague idea, an almost created dream that will evaporate as the tide rolls in and the sun pops up like an awakened eye to glare in at an emptied black stage where nothing played briefly.
I listen to the tiny little voice speaking to me about the excruciating pain that she’s in. She cannot wait for the sun’s gaze to burn her away. She is a bad dream. I know it must be a broken mind. We dreams seem to go on forever and ever and sometimes we think that we have awakened only to find that we are another dream, another glistening shard of a fractured mirror.
That’s all it is, smoke and mirrors, but no one believes me, and they keep on playing in the fun house, in the emptied blue skull of Shiva, where they are content to crawl as larvae, out of the nasal cavity, over the smooth dome, back in through the gaping eye socket mumbling about 2012 and Christ consciousness, tax returns and a water shortage.
Say something esoteric. I am asked to tell the truth, but so long as I am using words I am lying, there is nothing that I can say about the great adventure, about life, or death, or love, or beginnings or ends that will be true. I am very angry that I am being asked to say anything. Answer your own questions, I need to return to the sea.
After eons of living in the pool house of a dilapidated mansion, a tangled mess of countless winding hallways and dark rooms filled with mystery and murder and magic, the minotaur came and lifted me out of the pool with it’s chipping plaster and faded underwater lights. He was strong and muscular, covered with coarse brown fur, more like a buffalo than a bull. I went willingly with my savior, knowing that I was leaving behind my children , scattered throughout the many rooms, and I would never know what was to become of them in this story. Smooth hot pink skin with aqua blue nipples were mine and a long slippery tail, also hot pink. I was old. As old as the mansion and my companion, the long forgotten lord of the manor, the minotaur now carrying me away to open water.
Do something magickal. More magickal than creating this cracked up illusion? Yes, I can do that. I can come alive in it. I can feel this dream body tingle until it evaporates. I am none with nowhere to go and nothing to do. So I wake up inside of the dream, as one with somewhere to go and the capacity to do something. I do something in Shiva’s hallowed out skull, listening to the waves breaking on the shore beyond, knowing that the eye is burning outside. I let it burn inside of me as well, and I do something.
Anything.
Nothing spiritual.
Nothing magickal.
Nothing esoteric.
Just something, something for nothing.
Something to mend the break.
I build a chrysalis.
Something to mend the break.

Bon Appetit

Let me ejaculate upon you a bit, you hapless reader that has suffered the great misfortune of stumbling upon this, my scattered seed, which takes the form of letters conjoined to form words, which attached to various impressions and associations may convey a multiplicity of meaning, of which you will ingest only a miniscule portion due to an unfortunate condition of your consciousness which causes you to reflexively "spit" rather than "swallow". All of this is of course most unfortunate. I go on pouring myself out as if there is no end to the richness which has come to tentatively inhabit me as the result of my being just the sort of psychic fluff girl that enjoys bringing once hidden teachings to a head, a fount from which I may suckle a while on the knowledge that is forbidden in the common culture, and swallow all that I can stomach without loosing control.
And you, unfortunate soul, are either reading this by accident, or are reading because for some reason you desire to acquire a taste for this troublesome potion mixed and re-mixed by twisted clowns, liars, and devious alchemists. This potion you have been seeking, if you are a seeker, would do more than you are likely to like, if only you could manage to ingest and digest just a bit of what I presently attempt to blow up your blow hole. The problem is that particular malady of your consciousness already mentioned. What goes into your head usually falls right back out, what goes into your being is flushed out by the head, and you will find, if you dig deep, that as a whole, you, along with almost all others of your species, suffer from a form of spiritual bulimia.
That great way you have of categorizing, understanding, and navigating through this experience that has been termed "Life", is the way of the shallower surface consciousness which we usually refer to only as our "consciousness", as if it is deserving of the role of Rudolph the red nosed sled dog in the internal structure of self. This aspect of consciousness is your DOS operating system. It is a simple consciousness designed to get you through the brute world with your tail still attached. When you try to stuff it with things it is not designed to deal with, things that reach far beyond your tail, it will spit up, like a Nun that has been asked to gargle down a warm glass of semen before bed, all of that precious stuff that it is so unaccustomed to taking in.
If it is among your chief desires to cultivate within yourself the fruits that these fragile seeds may become, it is necessary to take it in with the appropriate part of your self. The part to which I am referring reaches deep beyond the surface consciousness into regions that the previously discussed consciousness cannot fathom. It has inappropriately been referred to as the "sub consciousness", as if it were secondary and lesser than its counterpart. It is in fact the truer of the two. What successfully burrows into its mysterious folds will infect the entire human organism, and its perceived reality, without fail.
Therefore I thoroughly encourage you to spread wide those folds and let those things which you long to know penetrate there, where they can be properly digested and assimilated, in that deep, dark, and fertile region.
Perhaps you do not want to let these seeds in. If that is the case you should stop reading immediately. Chances are that you have already ceased to read if you don’t want to let these tiny linguistic intruders into your fortress, and if you are continuing to read now it means that you sincerely desired to offer them sanctuary, for at this point you have passed through the first barrier.
Getting this far has required that you exercise a measure of attention, a difficult feat for those raised in this culture that intentionally contributes to the decay of that particular faculty for the purpose of selling more cars, shoes, and cigarettes. You are being called upon to make an effort to take in the transmission that rides, like Achaeans in a wooden horse, in this configuration of the written symbols of the English language. I hope that you can accept this gracious offering of mine without gagging too much, and moreover it is my wish that you take good care of it. Warm it deep within and see what springs forth from it…perhaps a winged horse or an armored goddess, perhaps a balloon. I make no promises.
Take or leave this shot in the dark.

NOVO

For years I had been near it, but that boundary between us had never been crossed. At the end of the small street where my grandmother lived, from the time when the house itself was built when I was only 4 years old, there had been a small hotel, the "Novo". I came to visit my grandmother many times, week after week, month after month and year after year. Eventually, I lived there for a couple of years. I walked back and forth from the gates to the main street and back, and the sign "Novo" was always on the periphery of my vision without fully catching my attention. I knew there was a hotel there and that small bit of simple information was all that was necessary for me. My reality tunnel was clearly etched in the sidewalk, through my grandmother’s black gate and to her big house at the top of the long cement driveway. And the hotel was very distinctly outside of that tunnel.
A few years ago, when I was back in El Salvador with my companion on the path and the world had taken on a strange dream-like quality that we could both clearly perceive like a translucent liquid all around us, I walked into the hotel. This hidden chamber was very different from the one that I had imagined. First and foremost, it was full of detail where my imagination had been only a faint outline without depth or mood. There were walls of red brick, little lawns in the middle of short pathways, a small swimming pool and a bar next to it with European reporters drinking beer and sharing stories, laughing and arguing late into the night. In their interaction amongst themselves and with the waitresses that brought them their drinks and food, I could sense a history, not only made of individuals but of adventure, connections between worlds and life changing discoveries. Upon experiencing this rush of new information, which removed inside of me many years of false assumptions and simplified imagination, I felt the kernel of a greater truth. Here was this place, complex and open and mysterious and full of color, and it had been sitting next to me for decades, it had existed falsely in my mind as a simulacrum, a mental place holder that separated me from what was Real and right there, only a few steps away.
Today I look around me and I can faintly perceive the many narrow reality tunnels that surround us. Faced with an infinity of choices, our machine has responded with limitation, extreme and uncontrolled. The reality tunnels that surround us, our habitual sequences of motion and attention, our steps that have settled into a steady rhythm and refuse to change, these can seem insurmountable, like giant black walls that prevent our escape. Faced with a city full of wonder, my machine will walk in the same directions, turn on the same streets, look at the same places, point out the same sights, park in the same streets. Faced with a land full of life, my machine will reach for the same fruits, stop at the same places, rest on the same benches, stand underneath the same tree, look at the same two rocks, the same that I saw before, the same that I will see many years from now.
How truly difficult is it to move away from these predetermined steps? Would it take only a momentary decision to allow me to step away from life as I knew it and onto a completely unexplored path? What would be the price? How much will the unknown charge for admission into its dark caverns?
When the machine finds itself awake, momentarily devoid of these habits, it may be unable to decide what to do, it may find itself frozen by the new and vast universe of possibilities that suddenly opens before its eyes. If no new conscious habits have been developed, the machine may then return to the habits it knows well and, in the process, fall into a deep sleep again. Each moment of freedom then becomes a golden opportunity to push a step further into the vast unexplored territory of the infinite Labyrinth.
Even in the midst of deep machine sleep, where there may appear to be no hope of flight and our tenuous attention fades away like a dying ember, may we find a way to strive to step away from the Paths of Death that are made of stone and dust and, through our sincere and persistent efforts, create new paths that flow freely on ever changing waves of Light.

Deranged Yo-Yo's

Who are those deranged, and up and down the elevator shaft of None, yo yo’s that take on the work of liberating the primordial being that awaits at the center of the labyrinth? They are yo yo’s for they do rise and fall as necessary to navigate through the four dimensional labyrinth, and they are deranged, because they are the undoing of the organically arranged. Some are tough and some are sweet, but none could know what they were getting into until they were well into it. There is no way to convey to a non yo yo what the experience of coming unraveled is really like, you must become a yo yo to know what a yo yo knows. I can say to you, our work is to liberate the primordial being at the center of the labyrinth, but what on earth can that mean to you, because chances are good that the idea that you are a voyager lost in a labyrinth is likely to sound absurd or quaint, primordial makes you think of amoebas or dinosaurs, and liberation is an absolute junk word- it means absolute zero to you who have never actually tasted it. Even a seasoned yo yo will find it difficult to remember the secret that lays entrenched within the words and ideas espoused within and around esoteric schools, in science fiction books, on the sides of buses, and in Kung Fu movies.
Who, who, who is the Lord of the Labyrinth, when I am one and there can be no other?
What, what, what is a labyrinth, if not the shape of my own fears and fantasies?
Not just philosophically speaking, but actually, in the sensory language of liquid light that has been preserved in the darkness, feeding on rot, I am the voidness of the void. When you are ready to get off the drug of organic sleep you will find yourself in the shape of this or that guide, and if you are of a goodly kind, they may take you to the entrance of the kingdom. And you, not knowing what lies beyond may leap gleefully into the abyss.
But ha, ha, it is not such a quick and painless choice to make, for to see the hidden you will have to give up your mortal eyes and ears, and everything that you thought was true. Blind and deaf, you will have to trust your guide to lead you into the new world. You must give the guide permission to derange you so that you can see, hear and know the secret ways. It is not a momentary excursion into wonderland, from which you will re-emerge refreshed and able to enjoy your remaining biological life in the home you have always known. You are to be modified, altered, and when you have been transformed, home and biological life are no longer what they were.
Nothing can ever be the same. Just as the same man cannot set foot in the same river twice, you can never go back. You can freeze, unfinished, or move forward into the unknown. Many a Yo Yo has been lowered into that forbidding hole, and yet the experience of life on the other side of the mirror can not be told. The trick is this: if you think that this Work of liberating the minotaur is best left to another, more qualified mad man, consider that they are only a projection, an illusion dreamt by you.
You are the one trapped at the center.
You are the medium in which you are trapped.
You are your helpers and your adversaries.
The only course is to come to know yourself, and to do so you must come unraveled. Unravel to travel, dear would-be yo yo, into the center of self. Your intellect, as you know it, cannot help you. The programming you received in child hood was good for conditioning you to live within mechanical society, the society of sleep, but to see the world that you were conditioned to close your eyes to, you will have to be deprogrammed. You will need to have your brain washed. The right guide can take you to the river and wash that filthy brain right out of you, teach you to use a new set of tools for navigating spaces where brains are no help, and then, if they be a goodly guide, they will proudly boot you into the elevator shaft of None.

It Was Taught Outside : Tanya

"Shall we step into Yesod?"
He nods and says: "Definitely. Right now"
We move together and instantly the world changes. The dark trees swirl around us like a tornado of greenery speckled with flashing lights and high frequency sound. In the center, where we are, there is a sense of quiet and solid stability, a place where we can stand and remain in place, nothing will disturb, nothing will pull us out until such a time comes that we decide to move again. We are together here in this bubble of tranquility, and inside of us, something changes as well. Tears start to flow, but without the added baggage of sentimentality. There is no sadness, no remorse, no desire for the past, only a simple ongoing release, salty currents that run down our faces, down upon our shirts and to the ground.
"So many avenues to travel on…"
"Let’s pick one."
"I choose Tanya."
"Yes, I know."
And we both remain in place while travelling to a far distant place, a place of danger and warmth and chaos, where we lived together and we both knew a shining girl that left her mark on us forever. She was small but not frail, strong but not pushy. Her temper was just enough to be fiery and severe, but not so much that she would lose her simple flowing beauty. Her desire was explosive and apparent, but it was balance by kindness and restraint. She would reach out to us through the gap that separates humans from each other and meet us at the place where we could be met. She would only demand what we could give and nothing else. And she would greet our efforts with a true smile and eyes that pressed almost shut in a burst of soft sincere love and friendship. With just such an explosion of light she must have given herself over to the guerrillas one night, giving her heart, her will and her body to the legendary lost brigade of the hills, and setting in motion the process that would end with her tied up, on her knees, with a soldier pointing a gun at her head. The pain of the bullet bursting through her face and cranium must have been terrible but quick. It was the echo that left her wandering, questioning the nature of what had truly happened and where she was now.
The tears continue and as they flow, our chest is torn apart, our hearts open wide towards each other and the energy flows unimpeded. For the moment, all obstacles have been removed and we become one, here in the cold and darkness, in our temporary space that tonight radiates with a rumbling vibration and the presence of the Others that have always been within us but tonight manifest openly and joyously without any reservation. In the process of invoking Tanya, we have invoked something that is greater than all three of us, and it now surrounds us from all sides.
Her gentle contact and accepting eyes, her rush towards self sacrifice, glorious in itself no matter what the human ramifications or effects, her open and warm embrace, innocent and sexual at once, it all descends on us here and breaks apart our assumptions, our old ways of being and deciding. It reminds us of microscopic knowledge that we have forgotten and which has roamed in the backwaters of our consciousness for years. The very movements of our bodies change and we dance and sing and laugh… while the rushing tears continue… and the forest itself joins in our celebration.
She is here and it is clear that we have learned from her, a subtle non verbal message that can never escape our lips and cannot be transformed into a simple statement, and that, in itself, makes it more Real.
"The Book of Tanya" records the special Jewish teachings of the Hassidic tradition and the Kabbalah. Here, in our own initial attempt at a Kabalistic invocation, we have invoked a shining girl we both knew, and through that memory, we have called forth the living spirit, the same that rushed to us through her eyes with great generosity, the same that moved the hand that recorded the teachings in a book centuries ago, the same that we will now call forth day after day, in the hope that it may once again honor us with its presence.
A spirit that has been named an endless number of times in an endless number of tongues, but which dances nameless in the Eternal chamber that is here before and after words, or ideas, or lips, or sound.

This night we say Tanya.
Not the book.
Not the girl.
Not my memories.
Not the stories.
Not the flesh.
Not the smile.
Not my friend.
Not her hands.
Not my companion.
Not me.

May she visit us often.
May she stay for a while.

Thought and Knowledge

Our language, and through our language, our hidden mechanisms of observing and imagining reality, tend towards permanence. We think in terms of things being steady, firm and unified. A rock is a rock. A single clear unit that stays, wherever it may come from and wherever it may go, it retains its unity and its completeness and separateness. And given that we see it as "rock" it retains its identity and we project it into the past and into the future. We stand before a rock and in our minds the rock, as it is, has a past that extends into the obscurity of unknown origins and a future that extends into the brightness of infinite possibility.
This way of observing, thinking and imagining, extends to all our concepts and ideas, including thought itself. And so, a "thought" becomes like a "rock". A thought becomes a single steady unified entity that stays and is complete. A "thought" has a past and a future, and it can be relied upon to manifest and emerge into the light when called upon. A mind may then be pictured as a large bag full of solid thoughts, thoughts that crowd each other, sometimes crash into each other and sometimes even come together to form a larger unit. To learn, in this visualization, is to augment the bag with additional "thoughts" – facts, ideas, theories, concepts, techniques and so on. A "wise man" then is one who owns a large bag of "thoughts". An ignorant man’s bag is nearly empty.
Following this path, in looking for a guide, we would look for the being with the bag that is heaviest and most full of these permanent and solid thoughts. Such a being would then be able to impart these single, complete and solid thoughts one at a time, as needed. As the student learns, another solid single thought would be given and the student’s bag would grow in time, filling itself with new permanent and complete thoughts. Eventually these would be passed on to another.
But thoughts may bubble sideways, they may encounter a corner and come out drenched in different colors, thoughts may one day turn soft and in their softness climb a hidden stairway and become that which they weren’t, they may break in two and then in two again, they may dance in a frenzy and collect into tiny beads of sweat along your forehead, they may drip from your chin, they may twist around your tongue to be spat onto your lover’s mouth, they may fill you with intense lust and lift your feet forward and out, and so they may break in three and one may travel out and one may hide and another may expand so far that you will lose sight of it and you may then ask: "Did I ever really know anything?"
Such playful and infinite bursts of energy cannot truly be contained, and not even the limits of our human language will prevent them from running away and finding new homes where they may rest for a while before continuing on their endless journey… our endless journey. As long as they are alive they will continue changing and moving and transforming.
A true wise man knows to not even attempt to enclose them, knows that any force that is inclined to wrestle them onto submission will produce only death and dust, and rocks… Any attempt to capture and enslave the raw energy of creation will only result in the warden becoming a slave to his own prison. In trying to make them permanent, the mind will lose its explosive burning life and be reduced to a quiet cemetery where old, tired ideas come to rest.

And yet we can learn.
And yet we can be taught.
And yet there is a Teaching.
And yet there are Teachers.

What is it then that a wise Being can pass onto us that will not trap us or enslave us but set us on fire, propelling us up and out into the vast unknown?
What is the Knowledge that is not a thought but makes all other thoughts dance?

Invisible Labyrinth

I’ll tell the story of what has been, of how I’ve changed shape and color and then changed again. Once small and golden, like the cast off eyelash of some heavenly being, I danced and dreamed to the sound of wind chimes and acoustic guitars, watching green spiders weave their webs while rainbow colored fish spoke to me through the invisible barrier separating their world from mine. Monsters with heads like black dandelions and snouts like those of Lord Ganesha leaped from closets moaning, dressed in bulky trench coats to teach me about the subjectivity of earthly experience when they removed their dark wine colored glasses to reveal smiling eyes.
My father was embodied in the question, the mystery, the fierce murmuring darkness, cultivating me in his image. Like rainbow colored candies I was coated in a hard sugary shell which concealed something prized by the Mayans, a food worthy of Godly consumption. As I moved through time like jelly forced through an abstract tube-like blown glass sculpture, I was made new around every bend. Once pale and bloated, as if fashioned from some bit of factory produced silicone byproduct, I longed to break through the glass and escape the life of the living dead. I was fed corpses and bathed in the rays of the cathode tube frequency control device worshiped by the popular culture. As they sprang from me, I held my offspring up to keep them from crawling in the mold and animal filth that closed in, squeezing tighter, and tighter…strangling, tighter…the life, tighter… that dwelt, and tighter…within it.
I was held suspended in time, ensnared in the sticky threads of fear. Only the burning will to speak to the creature standing behind the invisible barrier, allowed me to slash my way free.
Once beautiful and full of the color of autumn leaves, I blew along like a red tailed hawk riding the current, eyeing my quarry, and gingerly evading the pursuit of salivating foxes whilst enjoying their charm. I listened to the mad men, all sons of greater mad men, wearing lipstick and prosthetic noses, hats, long black coats, covered in beer spilled yesterday, and bits of dried leaves. I looked into the eyes of my immortal beloved and we walked beneath skies of snow flake obsidian until it swallowed us and we howled with one voice before we were spit out around the next bend. Once I cried and cried and watched the mold grow upon my flesh and along the window sills, while the blood spilled from me into the white hospital under the Christ’s agonized face. I met dark haired demons in the bed where I left my beloved and my tooth broke in my mouth so that I had to spit it into my hand and smile.
I cannot see the shape that I am in now, because I am still in it, in this temporal chamber. I cannot see time, it holds me and I squish through its length to other imagined scenarios, wondering what sleepy Deity rubbed her eye and cast me into this maze, striving to be whole again without breaking the glass and ending this journey. I struggle to see the glass, my rainbow tail undulating behind me like a banner in the wind. I train my ear to hear the unintelligible speech of the other, pressing her fingers against the imperceptible barrier, begging me to swim for her, to swim where she can never swim, in the tiny world assembled of the lost flecks of golden skin, eyelashes, and fingernail clippings, a realm which perhaps exists in the shadows under the bed where she lies dreaming, trying to tell me in the language of the unspeakable… remember me, remember me, and we shall swim, I in You and You in Me, into the darkest depths, where the father’s face is hidden.