Gather

Now children gather round, its time for some learning. Now gather the children round around the center of learning. Around the place and around the pole that rises from the center and from which our flag forever waves. Around the children gather the walls, heavy with brick and sealed against the air. Gather around the children walls and hold them tight in strictest embrace. Time for some learning. Time for some capitalist Christian infused indoctrination. Place your right hand over your heart. (Forever wave flag.) Ready, begin. Gather round children, it’s time for some sitting and some lining up, and some sitting and some lining up. Hear the bell ring. See our flag wave. See our Principal smile. See our walls shimmer in the noonday sun. Repeat after me:

I pledge allegiance
To the flag
Of the United States
Of America
And to the Republic
For which it stands
one nation
under god
under god
under god
One nation under
one true god
Indivisible
With liberty
And justice
For all
For all who pledge
Pledge allegiance
Under God.
Pledge allegiance under God.

Please be seated. You will raise your hand. You will not speak unless called upon. You will keep your hands feet and other objects to yourself. Ready, begin:
Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow.
Everywhere that Mary went her lamb was sure to go.
He followed her to school one day which was against the rules.
It made the children laugh and play to see a lamb at school.
They skewered it and roasted it over an open flame.
The teacher saw over it and supervised their game.
"Why does Mary love the lamb so?" the eager children cried.
"Well lamb flesh tastes so sweet you know." The teacher did reply .
"I’ll take a leg." Mary said and she began to smile.
Teacher carved the lamb right up grinning all the while.

Please rise. Put your right hand over your heart. Ready, begin:

I pledge allegiance
to the clan,
to the mutton chewing rosies,
pockets full
of dollar bills
worthless
fistfuls
of posies.
To one nation
under God.
With apple pie
And mutton for all

Yes gather round under a hungry God and there will be abundance for all who sit down at the king’s feast. Bones tossed to the dogs at his feet. There will be plenty for all who will please be seated. There will be reward for all who will please rise. There shall be peace for all who will place their right hand over their heart.
But what…What if we will not be seated?
Then you naughty kittens, you shall have no pie. Better to sit dears, see here, see here or your happiness will be lost.
Gather round the tables children and gather round the lambs with knives.
This is the learning time children, marching in straight lines to please be seated and ready begin. Gather round and take your seat under the rippling flag.

Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done
on earth
as it is in heaven.
Give us this day
our daily bread.
And SLICE go the carving knives.
And Baaaaaaaaa cries the lamb.
And the walls tighten their grip,
sucking the last breath from the little children’s maw.

Ruler Of The Kingdom

When first they gave me the poison I was told that I must be careful and do certain things so that it would take hold. I call it a poison for I can presently think of no better description, although it is more like semen than poison. But semen is after all a type of poison, a thing which comes in and causes change, causes the death of the young woman and the birth of the new babe and mother. This that they gave me was like semen, filled with new hidden life, a type of life which I, as I then was, could not even fully comprehend. Like a person asked to take a mysterious package to an unknown house, I cannot know whether the package delivered means life or death. Certainly it delivers both, but whether it is for the benefit or detriment of your cause all depends on which side you’re rooting for, mobsters or coppers, guerillas or soldiers. Some, like myself, agree to carry the package not because we are partial to one side or another, but rather because the dangerous opportunity has at last been either ferreted out or stumbled upon, and the chance that it could mean death for the courier is promising. I did not care to be what I had been anymore. I did not care if I lived or died. No, that is not true, I preferred to die if possible. Suicide would be the choice of a more reasonable person, but I have never been reasonable. I had decided that suicide was for the weak and I wanted to be strong, strong or dead, and there is only one way to meet one or the other of these two fates. One must jump into the fray. So that is what I did.
It was described to me in a variety of ways with the usage of a variety of terms. They called it a lineage, they called it a way. There was talk about the transfer and transformation of substances. At times I thought it was like being sprinkled with pixie dust, it was a mystical something which might effect a change upon me. Most other times I simply understood that IT, rather than I, was the most important part of the equation. Yes, there were times that I understood that, in theory, I was a host for something. A host just as the mother is host for the human embryo as it grows within her, for it is a fact that throughout a pregnancy the developing fetus functions as a parasite within the mother’s body and it is by a clever and necessary internal trick that our body is swayed into harboring this guest. I understood this theoretically, philosophically. I was comfortable with this "idea".
And then I changed handlers, went away to another master. At that time, the talking stopped. The idea was forgotten. I was given things to do and I did them. I stopped thinking about the transference of substances. I was kept busy doing things which would seem to an outside observer to be perfectly ordinary things to do. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, I walk. I write silly nonsense stories. I make love to my handler. I cook and clean for my handler. I make love to my handler. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, and I walk. Perfectly ordinary things to do. I did them, and I did them as instructed. Time passed. I felt differences in my appetite; in my appetite for company and music and movies and books and yes, even foods. I noticed these changes, and I even imagined that these were signs of success, but silly me, I didn’t think to make any predictions with regards to what such signs might foretell. Perhaps it is not so strange that I did not wonder or guess at what might lie ahead. Very few animals do truly posses the ability to foresee what effect they may be causing in the present moment. For example, many dogs will run into the street to bite a tire without expecting to die or cause an accident, and teenage girls fuck as they please and are shocked to find themselves impregnated.
I did as I was instructed to the best of my ability and shifted little by little into being something other than that which I had been. I did not understand that this difference in me was just the beginning, a preparatory phase.
One day I felt uncommonly sleepy. I lay down to nap and began to dream of mating with the Bistea Neptunis, which looked to me a bit like one imagines Poseidon, bearded and muscular with a beastly fin. It was not how it looked so much as how it felt that seemed monstrous. Its presence was alien. I was suspended in the water above this creature and my heart was wide open and golden love seeped from my heart into its own heart and with its tail, it fanned that same love back to me, it spewed from its genitals into the water which carried it into my tingling vagina. It all felt so good. Then I was abruptly awakened by some heated quarreling taking place in the room adjacent to mine. My head began to hurt very badly. It hurt for three days, and, by the third day, my stomach also hurt immensely.
In the afternoon of that third day, the pain was unbearable and I laid down upon my handlers bed with my hands folded upon my chest. I was alone in the room. I felt myself shifting and moving out of my body, reaching with many waving tentacles from my center. The pain in my body seemed to be a disturbance caused by the discord inherent in having this subtle many tentacled thing within me rubbing and moving about within a body that is the wrong shape. We were both very uncomfortable, myself and my alien occupant. I decided that it was a sort of growing pain shared between us. Something would eventually give, my invisible body would stretch to accommodate it or it might slowly devour that body and take its place. I could not, of course, be certain.
My handler was unconcerned by these developments. His only instruction to me was this: "Stay calm."
That was when I knew that the time had come for me to be careful and do what was necessary to ensure that this delicate bloom of the netherworld would take hold within me. This is what I had agreed to do, whether I had understood that in the beginning or not.
Somewhere along the way I became the whore of Babylon. Somewhere along the way I had picked up a package and now I walk with it, unsure of whether I will survive this little voyage, not knowing what impact its delivery might have. I look to the outside observer as if I am running an ordinary errand. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, and I walk some more. Ripe with poison and rocked with shock, I do the little things I have learned to do in order to nurture the life hidden inside of me. They have become habit, so that as this new thing eats away at the old and eventually replaces it, it will already be accustomed to walking upright, to snapping its fingers, and scratching it’s head, to making love and writing silly stories, and no one will even know when it was that I died and it took my place as ruler of the kingdom.

The Structure and the Noise

Long before that beast, THE WORD, came and turned its yoke and whip on us, there was a subtler, more insidious structure that bound us, the primal ancestor of that beast, THE WORD, which captured our ever present self like so many silly butterflies in the shimmering flower scented threads of its net. That which was before and other than THE STRUCTURE was free and wild like warmed up Jell-O and camp fires painting naked mud and blood crusted skin with an orange glow.
That other place; we still go there through little wormholes, through the noise we make which slices through THE STRUCTURE like a hot blade through canola based margarine. That matrix which holds us captive and enthralled is a structure of sound, music as the west thinks of music; melodic, harmonic. THE STRUCTURE is a piece of music. It holds us in place with its attention directing grasp.
We tell a story, because it tells stories with us. We are made in it, encased in it like the tiny pebbles of some drug locked within the gelatin capsule that we perceive as just "the pill", when in fact it is many tiny beads of something encapsulated in a thin layer of some odorless tasteless boiled down remnant of animal ligaments.
Someone invented it, that structure of sound. Not a someone like you think of a someone who wears a tie and who bought a desk at Ikea or even a someone like a caveman who picked up a bone and whittled a whistle. Someone who was there before the structure of sound. Something other than what you perceive yourself to be.
THE STRUCTURE is the meta-form of civilization. It is a crystalline matrix constructed by the choirs of singing elohim holding us here in suspended animation. It is the grand daddy of all the forms of organization with which you are intimately familiar. It is a holographic UNI VERSE. ONE VERSE of song in which you live and die forever.
But there is a way out, there has always been a way out, because there always was something other than the structure, a place that is not a place any more than the structure is really a place. A nothingness, the marrow of a bone, a nowhere that is somewhere as far as the something that crawls at the core of us is concerned.
A warm wiggly wordless noise.
Something that you can never talk about, never hold in the palm of your hand, never remember as it is as long as you are locked within the gelatin capsule. A secret. A secret because it cannot help but be kept, its expression is pure experience.
The knowledge of it is a happening. One is initiated into its halls, one lives there for a moment, for an eternity, then one awakens with the realization that this life, this existence is a sham, a con. It is a prison of sound, a labyrinth of sound, a confusing and captivating structure, MADE OF SOUND. We can not tell truthfully what is outside of it because the words themselves, the thoughts as we know thoughts to be, are a part of THE STRUCTURE itself.
What we can do is recall that we are now inside of something and that we once were outside and might be again at some point. What we can do is act in a way that is in accordance with our deepest intuition, the subtle remains of this ephemeral recollection. We may not know how or why it was constructed, how it came about, what it means to be held suspended within it. We may only know whether or not we wish to strive to be outside of it again. We may only know if we long to be of the noise once more.
We might be just electrons drawn through these crystal filaments perhaps in an effort to generate power for something we cannot imagine, and perhaps we work for the structure, and it works for something unknown, Perhaps we are pulled by our yearning to come out the other end of the crystal conductor we call a lifetime so that we may be whole again, one with the noise.
The misery we think of as our life is a small thing. A little trick, like the trick that lights a phosphorescent bulb. I, for one, only know that I love the noise in the deepest truest sense of the word. I would go back to it. I would serve it. I would slip out of the structure again and again, making little holes in it like a worm making holes in an apple, I am for the noise.
I am for the noise.
I am for the noise.
And I am against the structure, if only because I am for the noise and the noise negates the structure, eats through it like warm water through a castle build of rock candy. And so it is not malicious, it is only what noise does. It is only what I want to do, and what I have discovered I can do with this life as a pill, whittle away at the STRUCTURE and free fall in a cascade of tiny beads.