Sheep Roll In Soul

They show me that we are good sheep, sheep who walk in neat lines to be counted lustily, sheep who roll by in cars. They show this to me. They say, “You are a sheep. Sheep need to have this.” And that is the advertisement; sheep in lines, sheep in cars. They call it the soul. They want to sell me, a sheep, a soul. So ludicrous that my mind is dropped from its usual turbulent fury to a complete silence. I needn’t dig deep. They put it right out in the open. We have become so hopeless, so used to the manipulation of life and words that we don’t need the message to be too discreet. You can simply tell us, you are sheep, you want to fit in with the herd, you want this car, we will give you soul. Soul, the thing that flies or the thing that makes you rock and gyrate to the music. Soul. Yes. I told you. I can say nothing more than what they said, it was so plainly put in pictures and animation and words. I am left silent. Why fight it? Why suggest to a sheep, “Hey yew, they’re just trying to eat yew? They’re getting fat on yew. And yew are getting fleeced.”?
They want to be sheep. They want to be herded. They want the bearded man with the bo-peep cane to stand over them and smile with a heart pinned to his dress. They want him to tell them where they should go, when they should go, they don’t even need a why. Glad to accept that father knows best, they’ll do what they are told, because after all they are sheep, and the shepherd is much smarter, far better suited to make the best choices. He leads them to the greenest grass, the sweetest pastures, why object? We get what we want. Listen to it. You don’t’ even have to worry about your soul. You can buy that too. All you need to do is consume. Feed in the green pasture and the shepherd will give you a soul. He is looking out for both your material and spiritual well fare. He is loading you up onto the conveyor belt and watching you disappear into the dark depths of the light crushing machinery. You will be dust. You will be ash. Immortality is for Gods, not for sheep. You are a quick snack for the Cannibal God and his brood. Yum yum, they taste so good doused in Christian Doir and wrapped in lycra, served on platters of satin and oak. Down in the earth six feet deep your soul will roll along the black asphalt above with a new sheep at the wheel ready to go and earn a paycheck and hit the online stores and shopping malls. Ready to sign its life away, holding a pen clenched in its bovine maw, yes on the dotted line, thank you, and here, here, and here by the X , yes, thank you. Pockets full of plastic and we all fall down. Ring around, around, around. I know it’s true, I’ve said it before, I’ve sung it in nursery rhymes and set it in words and pointed and hopped up and down. And this time I mention it with less passion, with less concern. You are right after all, we are only sheep. If you’re only wish is to feed in greener pastures, then bon appetite. Enjoy it while you can. Because that soul you bought, it won’t roll where you’re going to go. The asphalt reaches only so far.
(A note to the reader- if you find this more than mostly confusing you may need to run a Google search on SOUL. The very first listing will help find a Kia dealer where you can buy your very own.)

Zicky Tabby

600 words of witch light. Switch light for the might of height , so bright so bright, the rafters right. They say meow wow hay mamma hay, but no, no we don’t go, no way, no we stay, fixed like star fish on ships bellies suction cups sup, sup, sup. Rainbow bright me, me hearties yo ho. And we don’t go, no, no, no, no, no. They sing it like weeeeeeaowww, meowwwww, like daisies dancing on days of delight, de light, dat shine so bright, so rainbow bright with blue windmill turning, the stars are burning, the child is learning and loosing the way of the zicky tabby ooob da, the secret language of the stars, of the gum stuck beneath table tops, pink and blue and gray whispering of days chewed by, mouths once explored, the secrets of the zicky tabby ooob da, the white haired lady dressed in black downstairs and the bright red and yellow plastic tea set up stairs, and Robin hood and Little Jon and a dress that never gets worn, oooob da. That is the life of mankind, the womankind with him, that’s the life, the life of the dress that never gets worn. We have it here, but we no gonna use it. We knows its special so we gonna let it waste away unused. Afraid. Afraid is the people of the word, And stuck, stuck like the gum under table tops. We got the little box what fits in the big box what fits in the bigger box what fits in the biggest box, Oh my! Oooob da! Sometimes in and sometimes out, then we come back and see that we grown bigger, that we learned more words, we got us a bed spread, shiny and pink and dirt under our finger nails and holes in our trousers, and dogs sniffing at our holes and big mountains rising high like the pie in the sky, we all do die, sometimes, we die. We cry an we cry and in dreams we fly but somehow we can’t get unstuck dubby duck, we can’t get back to the free jazz, just being this little body growing on macaroni and cheese fuel, like little sticks of dynamite going down yum yum, and we are sad but we don’t know why. The peoplez all around us is droopy eyed scraggly haired. The dog has got burs in her furs and frozen rattle snakes for Frisbees. We can’t play in the sand box cause iz full of earwigs… you know de pin c h e r bugzzzzzz. There be some big trees out in the autumnal breeze, swaying, gentle hipped, murmuring songs about the baked land and the poisoned flowers all pink and white. Got them words running over my brain, got my A B C D E F G and my SH and CH and TH and PLEASE, and THANK YOU and AMEN and I APOLOGIZE and I AM SORRY. And glub zub dub I am sorry, sorry I kant make no one here happy on this green earth. Green and brown and yellow gold with sparkles and purple and white butterflies bleached like the bread and we got the TV. The TV got me. IT got me so I can only dream in cartoonzzzz. I don’t remember how I dreamed before. Now I am black and white cartoonz and I am stuck running in place and the big bad wooolfe is coming to eat me and I try with all my might but I iz stuck in place, in black and white cartoon space. More to be afraid of the longer I iz here. Don’t remember when this song got started, don’t remember what we sang before. Oooob da’s gone from this song. Zicky tabby is now 1 2 3 and 1 5 1 9 6 LAGUNA AVE. 909 678-1169. Goody bye Zicky tabby farewell oooob da. The witch light, once so bright now burns dim in the sad gray grim. Might of height won dis fight, so we say goodnight to the light. What iz right, what iz right, is might, iz height. Iz goodnight Oooob da, goodnight and bye byes to de light.

Survive

Drip drop go the secretions of certain glands that help me to modify my view of reality. REALITY.
The Real. That is what we are searching for, some of us, not all of us. It is important to understand that not everyone wants to discover the Real. Some who do seek it, find it and recoil in terror and never hope to see it again.
I am a robot. I am a bio mechanical doll. Just because I am made of meat and not metal does not indicate that I am something otherwise. I am a sophisticated meat doll. What I like, what I dislike, these things are not ME, these things are programs that I run, or that run me, most of which are programs that nothing which I would call “I” had any hand in creating or choosing. Most of it is quite accidental. Accidental programming.
Strawberries are good, black licorice is bad. Men with facial hair make me wet. When the sun is shining I am gay. Cats are better than dogs. It is never okay to steal. It is okay to lie sometimes. Killing is okay when I am threatened. Christians are good and Muslims are bad. I must sleep in a bed. The bed must have sheets and blankets. I must make at least 30K a year. I must have a car to drive.
All of these things are arbitrary. None of these programs represents something that is objectively true. It is just something that came into me, a demon that inhabits my temple and sways me to do this or that, pushes me to do things in a way that comply with the program’s directives.
Everyone around me is the same. We bounce off of each other like bumper cars. No one is better merely because they are the Hebrews or The Romans, or The Barbarians. One preference is not better than another. One genetic trait is not better than another. Some things serve the perpetuation of the species. That is not “Good”. That is serving the perpetuation of the species, neither good nor bad, simply a thing to see as it is, a thing that need not be colored with intense moral implications. So often it is. Survival is all. The survival of the meat bots. We think we are superior to every other thing that bops around on this planet. We are the best!
S- U –P- E -R! Super! Super duper biological machines, turning oxygen into carbon dioxide. Whoo hoo! Somehow, what we think to explain our own presence here, is what makes us better than the rest. Better than dogs because when we fuck, we do it within the bounds of holy matrimony and produce children to please GOD. GOD, a construct of our bewildered and imaginative minds. Or it’s better because we do it facing one another, so then we can LOVE one another. We are better because we can see the difference between right and wrong. And we decide what is right and wrong based on what is best for us.
There is no objective right or wrong. We cannot objectively be better than any other organism. We do not conduct ourselves in service to these lofty morals that we dreamed up, we dream up these lofty morals to serve our real master, the master program, the uncontrollable urge to survive at any cost.
Whatever threatens ME is bad, is evil. If I need to step on Negroes or Jews or Palestinians to have what I need, to secure MY safety, then that is okay. I can crush whatever stands between me and my survival, and even my quality of life (quality of life = comfort, as in I need control of the water supply so that my children may swim on a hot day while yours are seated in the dry dust pleading for a single drop to drink) and that is GOOD.
Is that really the BEST? Is this what makes man the crown of creation? Are we worthy of the praise we bestow upon ourselves while we slaughter dolphins and crush children and trample trees?
It is subjective.
It is subjective.
We are machines run by programs created by un-named authors.
We are ruled by Accident, Chaos, and our main directive, our impulse to survive at any cost

Magick House

It is a place lost in the past, denied a present, buried in the midst of a buzzing metropolis and weighted down with hopes for a future. The walls have been battered again and again until they are only a fine powder of golden sand blown across the vast hostile desert. They have been built again and again until the people can think of nothing else but building them one more time, raising the walls so that blood can flow and appease that thing which would dwell within. That thing, that secret treasure, invisible to the eyes of men, capable of twisting their hearts into many strange shapes like animal balloons forged by the hands of a clown. Here is desire and jealously and rapture and grief and hatred, and joy, like a host of shadows dancing through the willing flesh of the people, so that they whirl and twirl and bow for that thing, though it cannot be touched, nor it’s name even pronounced. The people are always reaching for that place where they keep their covenant, where they can shuffle papers importantly like children imitating the misunderstood rituals of adults. They play games that are the shadows of the games they once played there in the house of the invisible, the magick house. Now some others play their games where the magick house once stood. Some others have come to play, but the people will not play with the others, they will not change their games on purpose, only by accident. Only when they are scattered like the golden sand hammered from the shattered walls of the magick house will they change the rules of their game to get by. They will refuse to share, refuse to play with others until the others push them out, out and away so that the others may have their turn, their time in the place that the people want so much. But however far they go, they find a way to remember. They find a way to covet the past, to reach back with hot little hands and try to pluck their special place out of the rubble. They try to play as they did once in the magick house. They wear their dress up clothes, they sing their clubhouse songs, and mull over the promise of a place all their own. Their heart, the center of the universe, is something outside, something that can be demolished, erected, taken and retaken. The people, as they have scattered regrouped and scattered again, have changed. Their games have changed. They no longer recognize one another but view each other as THE OTHER, but each other wants to have it back, have their magick house where secret things happen, where special things are kept. They want it even if they cannot remember the nature of the secret things. They long for it even if they are not the real people, for in fact none of those who want to be the people are the people. The people were cut down long ago, a final sacrifice in the original magick house, and their rituals, their mystic secrets died with them, bled out through slit throats to be sucked up by the thirsty sand, to become the invisible. There are no people who know the rites and the reason for the original magick house. There are only others, many envious others, who would be the people and claim that they and no OTHER are the only people. The chosen. The righteous. The worthy. They love not the invisible, but the letting of blood, the endless orgy of violence that may be called penance or promise. And the place, that elusive house where all that the imposter people desire can be called the will of God, remains remote and near at hand, non existent and very real, lost forever within a deluge of jealous dreams.

The Story Gets Worse

Ed wood said, "Just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."
This is God’s philosophy. The story keeps getting sorrier and sorrier, the same themes emerge again and again in an ever downward hellish bent spiral, and yet there will be no end. God wants no end. There may be an end to your personal happiness, an end to peace within a certain region, an end to the old neighborhood, an end to chivalry, but there will never be a final THE END. God doesn’t care what happens to you or to me or to Palestine or Israel or the blessed United States Of America, God just keeps on writing, using the elements to further the plot, to continue this operatic telling for the furtherance of its own perfection. What makes us think that God would be an author who spices a story up with pain and conflict and then resolves it by THE END, by proceeding those words with, AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER?
God is Phillip K Dick motherfuckers. Your story has a sad ending and so does the next one and the next one and the next one that God churns out of his rusty old typewriter and lonesome mind. Something worthwhile is transpiring through the unfolding of all the stories, but there is no rainbow crossing the sky and happy couple raising their goblets in a toast surrounded by their faithful companions to close the tale. That may happen somewhere in the middle, that one breathless moment of bliss. Then the faithful companions gang rape the bride and steal the booze and smash the cup and murder the groom while the rainbow fades, simply disappears like magick dissolved into the unblinking blue. That’s how the opera works. Then perhaps the bride births a bastard son having barely escaped with her life, and then he will seek his fortune and hope to avenge his father’s death and his mother’s honor (because his mother will swear that he is the groom’s son). He will find the fattened leader of traitors and end that life while the guilty old man squeals for mercy after the tortures wrought on him by our new young hero. Then on he goes to continue his own burning and raping and pillaging under the banner of revenge so that whole new heroes are made of the sons of the villains, and on and on into infinity.
The myth, the crude and basic outline of the story tells you about the shape of the mind of God. But his real presence is down in the sordid details, down in the single tear shed by the bride when they leave her for dead soiled and broken beside her one true love, down in the drop of blood that splashes onto her son’s cheek to replace that tear as he slits the last antagonists throat. It is down in the dirt under his fingernails and in his malformed heart aching with the longing for a peace that never comes. It is in the endless dusty trails lined with thieves ready to further the story with their unbrotherly exploits. It is in the clear blue eyes of maidens that believe that God made for them one true love, it is in the way that they wait and throw their arms around the first character that seems likely to be the one. It is in the trees that sway over tombstones where old widows drop roses. It is in the worms that eat the bodies of the heroic villains of passed chapters that lie beneath those blankets of roses. Look about you, it is there in the filth crusted upon the dirty dishes in your sink and in the air around your bathroom vent stained by the smoke of the hash you have smoked to ease the pain of existence and rejection and broken heartedness, lost youth and shattered innocence.
Existence is suffering. I read these words in Herman Hesse’s Sidhartha when I was 11 or 12 and couldn’t fully comprehend their meaning, couldn’t fathom the course that they highlighted. To be written is to be made a wretched hungry ghost, and the mystical schools along the way, the ones just off the dusty trails, behind the lines of thieves, are waiting to teach you how to un-write yourself. They are waiting to show you the way out of God’s opera. Not to new life, not to better places, not into heaven, but into the nothingness, into the abyss from which you were called by a fevered creator that hoped to know itself through the endless wriggling of your ancestral line. In the secret monastery there are Sherpas waiting to show some how to help God know itself and to show others the way to annihilation. Some will choose to pass through the door that says “Willing Servitude” and others through the door marked “Liberation” and the rest are left to have their bones and memories powdered into dust.
You were not written to praise the writer. You were written to serve. You were written to taste the wine and succumb to passions and resist temptations, and strive endlessly. Your story will get worse. And God will grow infinitely more complex through its telling.

Now

For one moment the world is startlingly clear. I can see it, beyond the veil of senseless brain chatter. The world is a bathtub, the kind that doubles as a shower, and I am staring up the tiled side and at a square air vent. I can see the fuschia towel hanging over the frosted plastic doors that roll on their aluminum track. I can see a bottle of ginger beer, green and perspiring on the ledge, but most of all I see the tile wall rising up on one side of me, I can see where it gives way to drywall and turns into the ceiling and pools around that square vent.
It is the most beautiful world. Strange and alive. I stare at it from the bottom of the tub where there is just enough water to warm the back of my neck, head, shoulders, buttocks and feet. My knees are bent because I am too long for the tub. The water level is too low to reach over my breasts and belly so they are exposed to the pleasantly cool air while my back side soaks in the salty wetness.
Then I close my eyes and drift back behind the veil to visit ghosts of princes past, I can see their eyes, angelic eyes, so sweet and troubling, (we know what angels do with earth women when they’re rambling down around the upper crust, the bible tells us so), and I wonder why they rode off into the sunset without me, when we could have seen the world as I have just glimpsed it together.
Whatever other ruminations blanket me are lost when I open my eyes to see again. Let me see again for a minute. My eyes go wide and look upon the ivory chamber encapsulating me and everything is silent. My mind holds its breath.
Then again I close my eyes and my mind exhales a torrent of thoughts. The first few bursts are poetry, words winding around the experience I have just had, like weeds choking out a garden, but lovely flowering weeds just the same, the sort I will use if I ever leave the bathtub and find a place to write them down, if I can remember them then...
Poetry gives way to crystallized theories, ideas about what it means to be alive, to perceive what I have just perceived. Courses of action are suggested and examined based on these new theories and then it comes down to a simmer, to a vaporized mass of memory and desire.
But for one instant I pulled all of the desire overflowing from my cup back into the vessels and let it boil. Too much. It overflows like water from a bubbling fountain and my focus is lost, a sailor adrift in the fog, waiting for the disabling conditions to pass. I do as much as I can with the situation as it is and wait for the mists to clear again, some time.
I sit up and drink the ginger beer. I slide back down into the water and it sloshes over my face, disturbed by my movements. Again I gaze upward, but this time I am thinking about what I saw before. I am thinking about the previous experience so that even if I am having a similar experience now, I don’t notice due to this trick of effleurage.
This is how I birthed my children; by rubbing my fingers on the bed sheets so that the sensation of doing so was carried to my brain, and due to the extreme sensitivity of the nerve endings in my finger tips, that message was received and processed by my overwrought nervous system before the notification that something tremendous was going on below the navel, thereby deadening the sensation of birth pains. In the same way, the mind froths with postulations based on the past and makes projections extending into the future to escape the intensity of NOW, the now that, like a star, is too brilliant to hold onto for too long. But if you can manage it, then for one moment the world is startlingly clear. And deathly quiet. And starkly radiant.