For The Sake Of Love

So uninspired… this form which can think only of shuffling and reorganizing closets or finding some reason to venture out of doors. The shock has set in, the realization that my children are growing quickly and soon they will fly away, much sooner than I anticipated when they showed up on the scene nine years ago. Back then people said, “They grow so fast.” They said it over and over again, with their sad wrinkly faces and me, with a baby on each hip, sniffed at their admonitions and thought that it was taking time enough for my liking. Only now enough time has passed that I can gaze backwards and see the eras in their short lives that have already passed into oblivion. Once Angelina brought home stacks of beautiful multicolored art projects. She was happy and liked school. Now she brings stacks of dull white paper marked with endless streams of numbers and I can see why her eyes are puffy and her feet shuffle when she walks with her head turned down as if she were walking under a load of potato sacks. And I remember when Olivia was a little tyke allowed to do as she pleased in a little neighborhood pre-school, back before she started to grow more and more human. I can remember plenty that will flood my brains like a bathroom flooded with water and then the water might leak out of my eyes. I feel it in my heart, everything is slipping away, constantly receding, and I can do nothing to call it back, but I can try to be here in this moment as I have never been in any other. I can strive to be my most present, and not look backward or forward and in that way take some action in response to the melancholy. As uninspired as I am, I am not too troubled to look at the dirt upon the rug and realize that one day I will long to see this dirt upon this rug on this day when we are all still together, or at least what was left of us was still together. I recall spilled cereal on another carpet and crying and picking it all up by hand and being cross with two little babies because we had no vacuum and we had a roommate who would be angry with the mess. If I could waltz back through time, I would push that other mother out of the way and leave the cereal on the floor and take the children warmly in my arms and say calmly that they should be more careful and finish combing their fine little hair and washing their round little faces and help them into their little coveralls and patiently deal with all the business of the day while enjoying their presence alongside my own. My life has seemed so important to me in any given moment, that I have dragged us through strange places in pursuit of something elusive, and have almost never understood what I should truly understand. I have not been gentle enough and only now, as they grow larger and more set in their basic shape, only now am I learning the delicate art of gentleness. I hope that when they are all grown they will appreciate that all of my striving was for them too, and that they will understand that I could not be better than I was in the beginning. I hope that they will know that I was growing with them. We are three people growing together, none of us perfect, the ones who know slightly more than the others, they must naturally take the lead. The ones who don’t know as much, they must naturally follow. At any given time, I cannot be more than I am, I can only strive to refine it and make it better for the sake of love, for the sake of that which on some days may flood through me uncontrollably and leak out of my every pore. But on the days when the faucets are closed, on days like this one, I can still be here and now, and I can still know that I must keep on working and carefully set the stage for the next flood.

Chatter

We behave as if these words, these sounds that we make daily without consideration, are something that has always been, will always be. WE feel that it is something eternal. These words really mean something. They have inherent value. But the truth is that it is all gibberish invented from necessity. When I want to eat, I grunt a certain way and it sounds like “eat” or “food” or “hungry” and then that other over there knows that I want something and learns which cries mean what. Anyone that has lived with a cat or dog for some time can understand this. One learns that this whine means I’m hungry, this yip means I want out, this bark means someone is coming and so on. We have a greater range of noises that we are capable of making thanks to our complex vocal systems. Lucky us, that we have lips and tongues and teeth and a larynx that makes a greater range of sounds possible. I can make a noise that not only means I want to eat but means that I want to eat oranges. Other primates are capable of deciding that they would prefer bananas to oranges and can even communicate this using sign language or charts pressed on them by humans in white lab coats. They simply lack the physical sophistication that would allow them to speak. Meanwhile many birds can do better in terms of speech, but lack the intelligence to say much. (This is not really to say that they are inferior in any way, but rather that they have not had a need to capitalize on that particular habit to further the evolution of their species. They have taken a different route.) Gray parrots can both reason and then speak to us in our own language, which in my book makes them superior to us as a species as I don’t see us (other than the occasional two year old or horse whisperer) trying to speak in parrot or magpie or any language, verbal, visceral or otherwise, employed by any species other than our own.
We think we are so great. We think our words are so grand. It is all really gibberish. Cats and dogs and rats even learn to respond to our prattle. I attribute this to a sort of social intelligence, meaning that they have learned that communication with our species benefits them in some way. They are networkers. They have a memory of past interactions and capitalize on their previous experiences and this is what we generally think of as intelligence: an ability to adapt to surrounding circumstances and other organisms for the benefit of one’s own survival. The reason that we think that this sort of opportunistic system for organizing external stimuli is superior to any other is that it is the method we employ. We coo over how intelligent dolphins and apes and cats and rats and dogs are because they are networkers like us, because they will jump through hoops for fish if necessary. Their intelligence is similar to our own in this respect. Their method for survival involves interacting with others just as our own method depends on such interactions. So we think that they’re the greatest.
We think we are great and therefore those things which share traits with ourselves are great. We are species-centric. The way that we evolved through time is THE BEST no doubt, and our mode of communication is ACES. Our way of approaching the world is THE WAY. We don’t consider that we are noise makers. We are the kind that cover the world with our nests and destroy the habitats of other life forms to make more space for ourselves. We have the might so we are RIGHT! We fill the night sky with our artificial light. We fuck the night over with this light pollution so that nocturnal species suffer disorientation that affects their mode of survival. We don't ’care. You shouldn't be nocturnal. You should be like us. Our way is THE BEST! We wreck everything for everybody, shit all over the world and babble incessantly, even sending our babble out into space. Because we feel that there is something special about ourselves. There is something unique about the way we think and speak.
We are a mad hatter species. That dirty old man muttering to himself and occasionally shouting into the crowd is to society what we as a species are to the universe. We are creepy. We are crazy. We take up a lot of space with our noise and filth. Yakka yakka yakka, blah blah blah. We can even write it down. Some of us used to be able to read. Now we have television and radio and cell phones so we can chatter, cha cha cha cha cha cha cha yakkity chat and listen to our own clamber day and night. We think that we matter, that what we say matters, that what we say is real. We make these noises daily without consideration, but seldom do we manage to say anything that comes even close to describing something real, something that would stand beyond language in a space that we never seem to quite reach. Meanwhile, the chatter goes on.

My Life as a Creator Dog

I have been trained like some berzerker attack dog to hammer on the keys to the rhythm of the beat and spill out golden sinews of thought and emotion without censorship. It is a developing habit, a thing I do almost effortlessly. Once I am in the chair, once the headphones are clapped over my ears and the music begins to trickle along the channels of my nervous system, I respond. Just as rubbing a thigh will warm other more secretive parts to the point of yielding up some gooey magick, so a few drops of sound may be administered to my ear canal and the result will be the warmth and wetness of an aroused mind.
This is what we want. We want habits that carry us through in the desired direction. We want to create every day to strive to be truly worthy of the phrase, “made in the image of God”. God must not be one who sits on his couch watching reality TV produced by some creative other, munching his popped corn and sipping his orange Fanta and waiting for the time when he will have to relieve himself. Certainly that is not the God in whose image I was made. That is not the God that I would aspire to be.
I make myself in the image of a creator god, one who rolls clay and breathes fire into it for six days and rests only on the seventh before resuming his work again the following day. Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Si, and Do again. The unending music of busy busy hands rolling and tapping to eke something out of the hard cold matter, the unyielding mother. We rub her and ply her sleeping flesh in an effort to rouse her from her deep deep slumber. Eventually even she will warm up under that persistent touch. This is the work of rescuing enchanted princesses frozen in spells of isolation and lethargy, waiting for true love to return the rose glow to pallid cheeks.
Rise! Rise!
Each day I come and set myself in supplication before you. I spin at the wheel, stoke the fires of the kiln, roll dough into the shapes of ginger children, paint upon the walls of the cave and sing my heart into a roaring ball of fire, a sun to awaken the life held dormant beneath your icy flesh.
Watch!
Here it comes now, the life so long hidden in subterranean galleries beneath a fog of slumber rises to the call. Timid green shoots break through the black top soil, pushing their budding little heads up towards my affections, seeking out that promised kiss from the sun.
We are makers. Doers, creators, builders, makers. Makers that roll the matter of the mother into unexpected forms, designs sprung from a pattern so entrenched in our genetic make up that we are blind to it.
There are always guard dogs, bitter pups on chains, not doers or makers, but stoppers and destroyers that would say that only the devil supplies such dreams as these that I weave, as these dreams that weave me. Not even for them will we yield, but instead work in the darkness, in secret, always shaking the sleeping world with gentle loving finger tips to make new life from the old in the same way that mushrooms spring up over heaps of decay and convert death into the life of their own kind.
Feed me your death, sleeping queen. Angry watch dogs set to protect her slumber, big black dogs, nip at my feet when I would step off of the table of the world and call in other dreams, universes of light and color and sound that would transform the sleeping queen forever and make her unrecognizable to trembling pups.
We call this change the end times, the end of the world as we know it, the end of the ages of sleep, the awakening that must come if enough makers stand around prodding rolls of reality flesh with pins, until riddled with such holes, the colors of the unmade spill through like water through a colander creating fountains of incomprehensible life. Not an end as trembling dogs will bark, but a beginning, a beginning made in each moment of concentrated making, a making done now, for the sake of its own existence as a state, as a position of matter in space and time, without fear or obedience to futures or pasts.
Some dogs have been trained to stop trespassers, and others, like myself, have been trained to run out into the wilderness and fetch the strange and bring it back inside the city walls. We each have our habits which move us like the gears in a clock. We makers are no less mechanical than our frightened brethren. Our nature is the same. The difference is that we are using our nature to be of service to something beyond our own nature. We have taken up the work of programming our own routines for the purpose of becoming makers, so that when Pavlov’s bell is rung, we don’t just salivate, we stand and dance and sing a song.

The Center of All

The day begins frosted in mists that drift in from the sea, a persistent fog that wets the concrete of the front stairway and the sidewalk that leads to the BART station. It blocks out the sun and the blue of the sky with its homogenous hues of gray on gray. I find it difficult to rise. I find it difficult to accept that this is day, this is morning, time to throw back bed sheets and sing to the world the way birds do. The darkness seems to mute out the possibility for song. It welcomes heavy jackets and lethargy in July. It feels like an extended night. I bring in the paper which has thoughtfully been encased in plastic to protect it from the wetness. The weeds poking up out of the cracks in the driveway are a welcome sight. I can smell their green life on the moist air. I can smell the sea that I can’t see nestled under its blanket of fog in the far distance. If the briny blue won’t sparkle, what else can? I shuffle back inside and add the paper to a pile on the floor. It grew during my absence, that little mountain of news so important that no one bothered to remove it from its protective plastic covers.
I am not yet affected by any of these details. The blazing sun and trail dust and tall evergreens and shimmering sea and winding roads are still burning bright in my chest. My present surroundings are muted, less real than the internal landscape impressed upon me during my recent voyage. I resolve not to let this bleak world outside infect and obliterate the vivid world thriving within. It occurs to me that I might be able to change this place by holding tight to that other. If I will not let it bleed out of me, if I hold it boiling inside of me, perhaps, everything around me will be infected by me rather than the reverse.
I sit at the kitchen table to write my dreams. It is hard not to nod off as I write. The pen moves, my eyes close. My mind so focused on dreams begins to slip into their gossamer halls once again and begin new adventures spun from the fabric of the old. Then I rouse my self, and scribble less than I would say if I was speaking in the language of a dream, and put the little book half away. It occurs to me that I should hide it, for these are my dreams meant to be kept from uninvited eyes. The mere occurrence of some intruding peepers peering over those pages lined with the symbols that signify the landscapes and occurrences of my inner world would pollute my dreams, my shining, sparkling dreams filled with the beat and pulse of a great heart that I feel, that I hold but do not own. That heart, it owns me. So that it doesn’t abandon me, I must keep it secret, keep it protected from the ill intentioned and habitual prying of others.
I was in a place where the ground was carpeted with dust as dry as flour. In some places, the dust had blown away and what remained was a rock hard tanned skin so dry that it was cracked. In some places velvety patches of yellow sage crawled along, alive and happy in a heat that killed off other things. Some yellow straws protruded here and there like whiskers from a chin. The trees dropped red peppercorns and tiny dried leaves to make a carpet of pink within stone lined paths around their trunks. They too thrived in the sun and the dry. Their skin was cracked and rougher than the earth, but the leaves on their limbs were green and these bowed over to lend shade as graciously as the limbs of any river willow. They’d brush my face and hair with those many delicate fingertips and shiver gaily in the evening breeze. Lizards shot like rocket ships over the terrain, made quick by the warmth. Hills rolled like brown waves all around me, their soft curves radiating some silent love reciprocated by the bright blue sky. Beaches of hot sand and smooth stones crawled out of the forest to kiss the waves. Tiny villages clung to the folds of mighty mountains and glowed with tender light when night invaded those folds with cold penetrating fingers.
All of this I have stored down in my bones, a magick elixir stopped within an ivory vial. It is my very marrow. Holding the skeleton of scenes together lie the winding roads, like sinews of muscle and tendon, the curving path between earth and sea. The road that binds all things. The glowing water of life, blue when the sun is high, gold when it begins to sink, and inky black when it is gone. The smell of salt. The fragrance of trees and ferns, of rushing streams and cascading falls. On my right hand; the immovable. On my left hand; the ever turbulent, both pressing me into a fine line, a path between the two. A passage between chaos and stability that is my eternal home, not a place of rest but a journey that is the center of all.
I am a margin between worlds, one dark and cool, one bright and warm, and I must be the mediator.

The Time I Have Been Given

What time have they given me in this lava lamp of molten life? Do you see my golden filaments lit in the dusty glow of sunlight? Do you see me burning bright, living flesh of the sky, my dios, my god, living blood of the blood, living dance of the alien electric life machine. My mother, my father, the horned one seated on its throne of flesh and bone in the deepest darkest forest where the spiders, patient and calculating, weave their webs among the branches of the trees, waiting, waiting forever if they must, tap taping their delicate legs upon the glistening strands of their webs to play them like harps. Do you see how my skin breathes? Living flesh of the flesh; the eternal in a moment. I was one and many and none and some under sun, shining like black glass baked in the hot red desert where the mu dogs fight for the scraps of decayed corpses, dried in the sun to a salty, mouth watering, jerky that peels from the baked skeletons like dried paint chipping from cracked walls. Do you see me flying in the heavens with golden wings stretched like rays of light, touching each peripheral point in view? See me raging down in the fields with my horns turned to the earth, bellowing and snorting with a heat that makes the winds whip the stalks of grain into frenzied dances? Do you see me coming together and falling apart, going from simple to complex to simple and complex? They have called me this and they have called me that and they will call me things both known and things unknown again and again until their voices are carried away in the wind like the fragments of broken leaves shed from the silver skinned trees that glow under the moon’s caress, reaching barren branches into the vast dark reaches of the night sky as if to take stars for a new raiment and digging deep down into the deepest depths of the warm, wet, earth to wrap roots like needy fingers in the tombs of fallen soldiers and slain kings now at home in the kingdom of the worms, where things with many crawly legs make their way through the corridors of slime to meet blind things that slither. One hand adorned by the glimmering diamonds lighting forgotten galaxies, the other with rings made of serpents and toad stools. Am I high, or am I low, or am I in the middle? I am all of these and none, breathing, moving, expanding, evaporating, rising like mist from a lake, falling like a storm over the sea and crystallizing like a window of glass over murmuring streams in the north. Do you hear what I am saying? Mother? Father? I see you where you stand with your wings spread in the sky above and your tail coiled in the earth bellow, your penis erect and spilling seed into the black soil while your milk flows skyward from the teat to feed the hungry stars. I have been embraced in your cold, heart stopping grip until the flesh of my body of this earth crawled and perspiration wetted me to the bone and I shivered but could not unloose the bonds of fear that held me in place like the pharaohs in their sarcophagi of stone, and I have tumbled weightless up and down the halls of eternity riding on the silver current of your laughter like bubbles blown from a sudsy fount, as free and light as a downy feather shed from a wing in flight. All that I have known, sensed and smelled and tasted and touched and even dreamed was made in the cauldron where we meet, eternal and temporary, verging on an event horizon of assimilation. This has been the moment of choosing, this life, this body, but a moment, a tear shed from an invisible and unblinking eye. Will I travel into the halls of the eternal and diminish in the west or wrestle with demons made of my own unaccounted for tendrils? Do you see me burning bright in the fires, flesh of flesh and blood of blood transformed into diamonds in the forge of the abyss? This time I am given, is my moment to choose what dreams may come or what stark awakening will dawn when the moment has passed. This is what time I have been given.

Vulnerability

There is always enough time for some lost bird to come careening out of the storm and fly through the gap between thoughts and words, crashing into your soft brain matter with the force of a hard cold gray stone sending your blood spattering in every direction. A spray of your valuable attention, your magick mojo, the blood of life that swirls through your veins like molten lava rushing to the head to make your squishy gray tissue into the crown of kings, now bursts into a bleeding mess of moist tissues. The careless mechanical munch, munch, munching of the caterpillars of the world. The ones that will grow fatter and fatter and never make cocoons, they are so busy with their cacophonous munching, gnawing right into your inner sanctum if they can, disguised as your lover, or your sister, or your grandmother, or your friend, smiling and lilting sweetly all the while preparing to launch that kamikaze attack on your mind, that ble de de de de de de dah of machine gun fire into your delicate magickal body, masquerading as a series of questions, objections, or comments, or they may launch a stealthy psychic attack, thinking so loudly that you feel stabbing pains in your chest, shoulders and side as if you’d been running a mile while breathing improperly, staring at you silently, morbidly from under veiled lids, not speaking their poison but letting it ooze, hiding sharp knives behind their backs and waiting for the ideal moment to slash and stab and drain you of your fire. They don’t know why. They munch, munch holes into the gossamer magick walls of the kingdom of God, filled with intellectual justifications for every bite. They are killing you while saying, what? What did I do? Munch munch. I only offered you a sandwich, I only reminded you of an errand, I was only talking to you about the GREAT WORK, munch, munch, gurgle. There is always time enough for these bandits to sneak in and steal the treasure. They steal it in the murky shadows between syllables and the blinks of an eye. They are your own thoughts, the thoughts of others, the stereo pumping from that pimp mobile paused at the curb wailing, “I need money”. You are never more than one sling shot away from loosing everything you worked so hard to gather, all of that blessed hot air lifting your balloon sewn of Persian rugs into the wide blue sky and blinking stars shining like the many nipples of that bitch goddess Nuit, feeding all her suckling pups, worthy and unworthy alike, with her twinkling light. All of your precious lift, lost when a single pin hole puncture procured by an act of mechanicality compromises your space. A solitary word, spoken or thought, launched like a grain of sand to a blind giant, a delicate crippled giant that suffers much from it’s affliction/gift, never having terrorized a villager or swallowed a child in its life, it has always been the tiny terrible peasants that have wounded the giant like vicious bloodthirsty monsters with sickle sharp teeth, tearing and gnashing, munch, munch; the fat caterpillar people crying, “Come down where we are, where you should be. It’s so much nicer in the mud.” They slash your wings, those delicate paper thin wings that you worked for long hard months in darkness and solitude to manufacture from your own flesh and blood and strength of will, now torn and waving like ribbons after an attack from one of the caterpillar people, the one outside of you or the one that will always live inside of you, the one you are making yourself from, the one that doesn’t know what is happening to it, or why it should fly instead of crawling and munching. You are besieged by a thousand enemies, both within and without, all waiting to take you down in one of those unprotected gaps, in one of those places where your attention is stretched too thin, or doesn’t quite reach, leaving chinks in the walls of your flying machine, neat little crevices where saboteurs can wedge a stick of dynamite and plug their ears and watch you burst in a shower of crimson and salty tears. Even a mighty dragon, if it is missing just a single scale, can be brought down with a piercing shot aimed into that small but fatal gap. There is always a space, a bit of time, a weak point where the guard is down, the sentry fallen into gluttonous slumber, a way to ruin ages of work in a moment.