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.