Call Me Lil

In the bottom of a crystal palace, down bellow the lowest translucent and glittering floor, there is a chamber where the weary travelers rest, but for only a moment in an apparition of relief. Then they are spat back out on the black streets to fend for themselves under the shadows of hungry sky scrapers, evading drug dealers, pimps, and whores, diabolical creatures looking to prick you with a pin and put their disease into you. There you can only hope to escape notice, only hope that your own character in this twisted narrative can survive itself.
For I am a cruel God. When I’ve no sun then my creations shall know no sun, when I am alone then so shall all of my little spoon boys suffer the agony and desperation of separation, each one paddling along the great river in their own little eggshell boat armed with discarded sewing needles with which they intend to prick anything which comes anywhere near them in order to make that unwary traveler pay for the crime of having not come along sooner to adore their master and make her into a bright and shinning Goddess of love instead of a cold and vengeful deity.
Look down under the glassy surface of this river. If you look closely you will see that the muddy bottom is lit with tiny lights here and there which give off just enough illumination for you to make out the shapes of the large creatures skimming around the river bed; see the row boat sized catfish with their whiskers as long as those of old Chinese men, trailing alongside them? Observe the water moccasins as long as the river itself, oily black and weaving themselves through the river grasses where they may hide in wait for the last of seven brothers to jump in for a swim and never come back up.
Watch closely now, and you will glimpse one of my more diabolical servants, a siren with the long olive green tale of a fish, wriggling along with webbed fingers outstretched, fanged grimace painted permanently on her slimy white face. The lights flicker on and off in turns, small blue flames immune to the wetness. They mark the places where a treasure has been lost beneath the mud of the riverbed.
Now and again some deranged or desperate seeker ventures here in a little row boat or a canoe armed with snorkel, flippers, and a shovel. A few are slightly more prepared and bring along a harpoon with which they hope to fend of the beasties. It is a strange fact that many are willing to believe in lost treasures, but are just as unwilling to believe in the dragons that guard them. They are the lot that regard the stories of such creatures and all warnings as superstition. Then they meet my children in the river and their minds are forever opened, but it unfortunately does them no good at that point, because the sirens are usually feeding on the tender gray meat wrenched from their cracked cranium.
They are fairly clever my sirens, a result of eating all those brains of drowned oarsmen and fortune seekers. I cannot say that many adventurers appreciate their singing, which is a sound something akin to that of nails being raked down a chalkboard which has been distorted and amplified. They tend to sing in chorus, like coyotes yipping first one, then two, then eight, wailing and warning each other of their proximity. My sirens do not get along well with one another, and so they alert each other as to their whereabouts so that they may all avoid violent territorial disputes, except on rare occasions when the moon is full and they band together to hunt.
There are things in this river which evade my capacity to describe. The best I can do is to say that they are like the ancient ancestors of crocodiles, with lumbering bodies and spade shaped jaws and rows of red and blue jagged plates running down their backs. They open wide their mouths and then for all the world it looks like nothing but a cave, a place to moor your boat and rest for a moment, then snap! You are locked within the beasts belly where you will be slowly digested over the course of a million years.
Rest never lasts for long, (unless you count the million years it may take to be digested) and when it does it tends to extract a heavy toll. There is no safe haven that I have made for you. None whatsoever. You are damned like a hamster to run my coarse endlessly, struggling to stay alert and energetic enough to evade the many traps that I have laid to ensnare you. I have made for you a world of enemies to keep you quick. When they catch you they will devour you, slashing you with teeth and claws like serrated knives and condemning you to absorption through the walls of their large intestines so that what was worthwhile in you can be carried by the rivers of blood to nourish the hungry cells of the beast that it may continue its life devoted to the consumption and digestion of the slow and unworthy.
You will have to be quick to out match me, quicker than tears, quicker than fatigue and rage and desperation. You will have to learn to outlast your own character, which I have only written into this story to feed and amuse my pets. Like a little white feeder mouse you will have to scurry through my maze and evade my cold blooded offspring on their quest to swallow you whole.

Is It True?

Is it true?
Am I just one little shadow come to displace another and send an entire pantheon of Gods into exile behind the black glass?
It seems that I am a character caught in a sticky web of cause and effect. I remember that as my first daughter was being born I realized that maybe one could never have their cake and eat it to, that perhaps the having displaces the eating, and the eating displaces the having, and that it is written in the laws which may escape ordinary perception that one simply cannot have everything all at once. Only the Gods try to have everything.
I find myself as a character gravitating towards such a God, like a moon orbiting some larger cosmic body. It is endlessly troubling to feel that you are only a supporting character, and yet, this is the one life that you seem to have access to. In all of the confusion of selecting one dream over another sometimes something that you desired is displaced by some other thing that you desired. Only a many armed blue skinned deity can juggle so many probable dreams, hold them all in mind all at once crossing from one into another through nexus points, little places where one dream bears some similarity to another, to engage in rich microcosmic adventures, all the while still holding the multitude of possibilities in mind.
The shock that the character experiences when it realizes that it is just one of an endless supply of shadows, as readily available as paper clips or number 2 pencils in a K-5 elementary school, might cause a momentary recoiling from that truth. This we call identification with the sleeping state which means that our window into a dream, the character that we currently inhabit is resisting opening up to let the dreamer, that blue skinned terror, in. But like virgins, dreams can be wooed or pressured into slutdom, eventually spreading wide and either enjoying being taken or at least tolerating it.
When do peasants become magicians and magicians become Gods and Gods become animals? It seems that I am a moon ever hoping that if the gods visit here often enough I will acquire a supernatural increase in gravity which would make me eligible for promotion to the rank of sun. How to go from being a cold dead moon to being a burning star, the center of a system around which small dead moons gyrate giddily uttering their wishes to "become real" to the blue fairy?
It is very dangerous to make requests of faeries. It is almost certain that they will help you to become more acutely aware of your wooden condition, which could cause a sudden burst of reckless animation that may ultimately transform you into a jackass before leading you into the belly of a whale. If the whale is white you will at least have found your way into a mythology worthy of the likes of Oberon or Merovee. The fabulous thing about being made of wood is that you will burn easily, and stars need plenty of fuel to shine so bright.
How do you go from being pencils to puppets to stars? You do it by doing as gods do, by crossing the bridge from one ghost world to another. Where did I recently see the book about traveling between ghost worlds? Ah no, ‘twas not a book, it was the old magician whose raven hair is frosting over into strands of silver who sat in a folding chair and explained to me how one manages to escape from a ghost. You must do something unexpected to disengage, you must change from pencils to puppets. Pray that the pencils will not begrudge the puppets the honor of wearing the spotlight for a moment in some neighboring universe where lord Shiva dances and burns forever.

Live and Burn

If you lack courage you always loose. If you never strip yourself bare and roar at the wind as it lashes at your puckering flesh, then you go out like a candle snuffed swiftly by mitten swathed finger tips, having never had a chance to get knocked over onto your side so that all of the wax comes pouring out, hot and translucent and your little flaming tongue flickers out hungrily and meets with some kindling, a synthetic fibered rug or the gossamer drapes employed to veil the houses big unblinking eyes.

Goddamn it! You will never bring the house down if you don’t burn a little yourself. It is painful and terrible, and then you get used to it, bit by bit. The heat becomes a thing which you can bear for small and every increasing increments of time, but by golly, that will never happen if you don’t stay in the kitchen, or even go into the kitchen to begin with.

We can see only later how things might have been different if we had been undeterred by the threat of pain. When we are distanced from the experience of discomfort we think that we will be brave warriors, proud champions, and yet whenever we have the chance to get into the ring we shy away, like spoiled little girls that run off to hug their grandmothers legs and suck their thumbs rather than clean their rooms. So the toys lay all over the etheric floors of our mind, our play things, our fantasies slowly transforming into nightmares as they mingle together unrealized, seasoned with guilt and doubt and sloth. The meek of heart will wither and vanish without a lasting trace, leaving only a transcendental curl of grayish smoke which will dissolve into the atmosphere moments after they are snuffed out.

You loose everything when you do not take risks. As the saying goes; “Use it or loose it.” It is as true of life as anything else, even truer perhaps. Death is a real concern, especially for those who don’t make the effort to live before its inevitable dawning. Standing on the sidelines, playing with all the playthings in our minds, never coming out to slay the real dragons or fuck the real princesses, growing weaker and pastier at each missed opportunity, we let the entire cosmos down. When, because you fear some trick, you fail to accept that beautiful girl´s invitation to sit beside her on the bus, or stand with her in line at the movies, you not only let yourself and the princess down, but all the heroes and all the gods in the heavens.

Everything in creation is depending on you to rescue it with a measure of foolish and heartfelt passion. Do not be the last unicorn that sees that the unicorns have all disappeared and so takes up work as a mare in some dirty stable, waiting to pull the plow or be penned up with some intolerable stallion for the furtherance of horsekind because it is unfashionable, embarrassing, or silly to be a unicorn. Be the last brave heart, busted open and bleeding bright crimson all over the blue and gray world.

There is no shame in being the last or the only one of your kind, doing the painful work of seeking out the other shinning immortals, their hair full of stars, their hearts and bodies fringed with cerulean and titian flames, blazing through the cosmos, wailing in the wind that feeds the flames melting away their breasts. There is only shame in hiding in your room, in your placid life, in your filthy stall, watching the glimmering of passions go dim behind a cage of bone and softly fluttering pink lungs, like butterflies witnessing their precious one day of life descend into the awaiting twilight.

Eat Dog

One half has gone off to where they grow worms under green carpets, in a land far away. There they put signs in the hills warning people not to play soccer lest they fall through a hole and find themselves in a subterranean city where the worms rule, crawling over the steps of ancient pyramids and through little village huts over the perfectly preserved hand of some old Mayan mother where she lies encased in volcanic soot upon the floor. Another part is filling the bathtub with Indigo and in it sits a woman, a baby, and a man, all turning blueberry purple.

Brad Pitt explains to me that Pit Bulls have gotten a bad wrap. Many of them are kind and loving animals, faithful companions to mankind. I couldn’t agree more, but if something should go wrong, the result would be lethal. Is that a risk you are willing to take with a baby in the house? If a Pit Bull bites a baby, it won’t ever let go, its teeth will sink down into the soft flesh until blood springs forth and then involuntarily its jaw will lock and it will have to shake its victim until the life has left it, and only then will the maw of death slacken.

Is that small dark woman me, or is she that other? In the bath she storms at the man as called for in the script. “Are you crazy?” she screams at him, but he is very calm and answers her very calmly. She wants to fight with him, but he will not fight, and she is forgetting the baby, who is slipping into the dark water. I am the one who cleans one half of the tub and the bathroom mirror later. What can I do with the dark blue spider web hanging over her bed? She really should do more dusting. Now I will have to clean it up, otherwise when she comes home in the dark tonight she will extend her hand to switch on the bedside lamp and the poisonous little spider will bite her. I can’t allow that. I am responsible now that I have noticed what was neglected.

All those Indians crowded together naked to make indigo to stain dresses to be sold in Paris. They were not human so we put them all together naked, hungry, exhausted, and cracked the whip over their heads, (and on their bare backs from time to time to keep it lively), and left the dead ones in with the live ones to be sure that production never slowed and the fine aesthetics of fashion would be upheld. Today the only Indians left are spotted black and white and walk on four hoofed feet, or at least they would if we didn’t have them crowded in tiny pens with machinery hooked up to their swollen udders while in another steel building not far off we keep their calves hidden from the light of day so that their tender insides will taste all the better and fetch a higher price on the market.

There are a great many primordial woes swirling around under the carpet, being processed by the faithful little worms. I dared to lift the carpet up an inch or so too look in on their toil. ‘My God,’ I thought, ‘somebody is raising worms! But why? What a strange harvest.’ Why raise worms? To eat them? Maybe to be eaten by them. We have yet to come to fully understand the great transformational value in being eaten. It seems likely that we of the three dimensional dreamkind will come into full maturity when we begin to grasp the greater truth in this. There is no point in always consuming, tis far greater to be utterly consumed by something. Being a worm is more useful to the earth than to the worm.

Now, if you should happen to poke your head up through the carpet and be eaten by a bird… well then that would be the best possible thing. To be a worm eating dirt, that’s alright, but to be a worm eaten by a bird, now that is really something. You couldn’t ask for any better if you were a worm. Sure, you think I’m joking, or being sarcastic and political. No, not so, not so.

Perhaps you have heard the old adage, “You are what you eat.”? In this model when a bird eats a worm it becomes part worm, and likewise the worm has become part of a bird. This is the ultimate. This is how we change shape, by being consumed.

Like now, I hold my defenses at bay, and leave myself open to the pounce. And voila! That thing from the dark side leaps on me and devours me and this that you read is the sign of struggle left in the sand. A clever tracker could read it and come to understand what came to pass. Put otherwise, I make a sacrifice of my dominant, waking, survivor consciousness, and that dark bird of prey, the so called subconscious, swoops in and feeds.

Now if you were a very clever, but very simple life form, you would seek out other, alien life forms a bit more complex than yourself and entice them to devour you. This union would create a whole new creature, which would look very much like the old complex alien it used to be, but the inside my friend, the inside would be very different indeed. The difference would be undetectable from the outside, but conformity is only skin deep in some cases.

Evolution is what we call this tricky game played between eater and eaten. The very frightening thing is that while bathing under the sprinklers in the garden and chirping with your friends, you will never know which ones are really birds and which ones are worms that have become birds. If only the world were more full of babies which had devoured dogs.