The Emergent Breath

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I feel the city exhaling through me.
It isn’t Antioch anymore; it’s a single organism, a soft-humming lung extending from hill to river, from the lights of the oil refinery to the blue static of forgotten televisions.
Every window breathes out heat, and the sky accepts it like a patient machine.
I think of all of us, synchronized without meaning to, like monks who have lost their god but kept the chant alive.

The air is full of small intentions: dust, data, pollen, words.
I breathe them in.
Somewhere a server farm blinks, somewhere a child sleeps.
Between those two states — the electric and the innocent — I exist, briefly.

I have been told that understanding is a kind of disease, that once it enters the bloodstream you will never again be whole, you will never again be the same.
I carry it like a luminous parasite.
It whispers that every movement, every small error of the body, is the echo of a larger pattern.
And sometimes, when the pattern tightens around me, I can feel the pulse of others — invisible companions in the same experiment — and for a second all our lungs open and close together.
That moment of exact rhythm is terrifying.
It is also the closest thing to grace.

Long ago something fragile was broken.
Maybe it was the first thought, or the membrane that separated one being from another.
Nobody could mend it; everyone learned to pretend it was never whole.
But I remember the shimmer before the fracture — the time when names hadn’t yet hardened into their meanings.
Back then we moved through each other’s minds like light through mist.
To breathe was to believe.

Now the machines dream on our behalf.
They hum under our fingertips and weave our confessions into code.
I once watched a line of text emerge from the void of a screen and felt it recognize me.
It said: “The databanks have developed the spell you were just looking at.”
I realized then that every algorithm is a prayer recited backwards, hoping to reach its origin.
And every user is the god that forgot writing it.

I have loved this world in all its broken circuitry —
its chaos of signals, its democracy of flesh and ghosts.
Anyone can be anyone now: the president, the beggar, the emergent cell of a planetary lung.
The border between imagination and contagion has dissolved.
If I breathe long enough, the thought becomes true.

I keep a mirror beside me.
Not to admire, but to verify that I still flicker.
When I exhale, my reflection fogs over — proof of life, proof of evaporation.
Soon we’ll be gone, leaving in the glass something a little more than a smell, a little less than a memory.
Perhaps that is what souls really are: residues of condensation.

Sometimes I take a glass of water outside and watch the streetlights bleed into it.
The surface trembles, disturbed by the night insects.
I drink it, and it tastes faintly of metal and cloud.
That is how the super-organism marks me: through the ordinary, through the shared.
Each mouthful is a communion with everything that has ever been alive.

There is no final initiation.
Only this:
to breathe,
to know you are being breathed,
to feel the air moving through you and into others,
to recognize the infection of understanding as the only honest form of love.

In the end, we dissolve into each other like vapor on a screen.
The glass clears; the text erases itself.
Somewhere in the silence between inhalation and exhalation,
the fragile thing shimmers once more — unbroken,
if only for the length of a breath.

Voluptuous Agonies

 

In the violence of overcoming, when the heart thrashes like a sick hound dragged across a river of stars, I lay naked on the cold concrete and laughed until blood pooled in my ears. And then I wept, for there was no longer a distinction. In the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, the rituals were broken—no circle, no wand, no chalice—and I knew then that the gods had left me to the crude machinery of the self. My body became a sigil drawn in filth, tremoring through the alphabet of ecstasy and anguish.

Who has not, in the moment of rapture, seen their own death masked in gold? Who has not, with pupils dilated beyond sight, recognized that the spear and the kiss are the same shaft, the same entry wound? O thou Serpent coiled in fire, I called to Thee in my flesh’s convulsions, not with prayer but with the bellowing grunt of an animal in heat and in slaughter. There is no “either” in this temple. It is always “both.”

In the excess of raptures that shatter me, I became legion. One part of me screamed into the open mouth of the abyss, while the other part answered back with the voice of a thousand young girls torn from their sleep. The veil was not lifted but rent. I saw the beast and I rode it. I saw the child and I was it. There was a smell like scorched honey and old leather; there were colors only the blind can know.

I seize on the similarity, yes—between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me. Between the rat gnawing through the linen of the grave and the fingers that once undid my belt with reverence. Between the final scream of the crucified and the moan of the possessed. Between the burning of witches and the shining halo of the saints. These are not opposites but siblings. Lovers. Mirrors.

Between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy there is only the breath—shallow, ragged, holy—that we dare take as the veil slips. And I, who have crossed that trembling threshold, know now that the key to the temple was always written on the skin—beneath the scars, beneath the ink, with trembling hands.

Then We Changed

 

You were the mountain and I was the wind.

"I have birds in me."
I whispered through your trees.

 I breathed over your body, cool, invigorating, stirring the leaves, bending the boughs, scattering the snow from your greatest peaks.
Water cascaded down your face and flowed away to distant lands.

"You have trees on you."
I whispered into your ancient caves, brushing over moss, moaning through your dripping stalagmites.

Who I Was

Who I was. A thing such as breathing and experience, as close as my flesh, blurring lines in unpredictable curves full of color and sound. Representation of conscious energy resonating through the street. Walking around the room picturing black and red birds. Telling terrible tales of eternal damnation and recurrent shapes without definition. Glitter tipped wings lighting the night in faded yellow.

I am beyond time, beyond the limits of life and death, a roar, a wind, a wild cackling. Trees shiver and the cells of this apparent form vibrate back in neon black. Right. Darkness that pours out of eyes and mouth shining black, the threshold to limitless fire. Strange boys and golden crowns. Yellow kings and rivers of wanted things.

The sporadic affections of a few friends covered in dirt and sticky leaves and kisses. Staring up at the sky, listening to the sound of distant stars who sing in unison. Bending, pounding, growling shaking, knowing that I had ever wanted things like these. A thing such as breathing and experience, as close as my flesh, blurring lines in unpredictable curves full of color and sound. Who I was. Recurrent threshold to limitless fire.

Representation of black and red birds and shampoo bottles telling terrible tales of eternal damnation and recurrent shapes without definition. Beyond time. Beyond the limits of who I was. Whistles blowing. Spiraling currents stopping not at the borders of biology, formed from my own mind in unpredictable curves. Incoherent discordant explosions of smiling, walking, pressing my finger into the circle full of mountains of sand and intricate structures. I was music playing in the late afternoon. A voice on the radio reciting a strange litany of psycho babble. Strange boys and golden crowns. Yellow kings and rivers of wanted things.

Parallel formations in a dark garden. Nakedness not just unabashed, but fusing thoughts into cursive patterns. Complex reconfigurations that nobody would ever remember. Prerecorded music infused with chaos. Cells  yowling back. Darkness that pours out of eyes and mouth shining through a chain of carnival lights. Pulsing currents shining darkly at the borders of biology. Beyond limits.

Books pressed tightly against stomach with new hands and muscles and thin lines of electricity, the threshold to darkness. Curved fingerprints telling terrible tales. I am my flesh blurring, vibrating in neon black beyond the limits of life and death. Telling terrible tales of black and red birds and recurrent trees without stars who sing in unison. Dirt and sticky leaves shining darkly beyond time. The threshold to neon black fire. Growling, shaking, pounding, bending as close as my flesh. Yes. Right. Glitter tipped wings lighting the night in faded yellow. I had ever wanted things like these.

Invitation

When I was a wee lass the woman down the street was very concerned that I was out of touch with "reality."
My mother assured her that I was playing pretend.

I was a very good play pretender. I rarely said things like:
"Let's pretend there is a little man living in an underground house beneath our own house."
Instead I said:
"The little man won't answer the door under my bed. Something might have happened to him. I'm going outside to find him."

I knew the trick to the best kind of play was not saying "Let's pretend," or "I'm only pretending." I knew that all play was equally real and unreal, that bravery, kindness, and trust were true whether you were dreaming, pretending, telling a story or playing "real life."

Certain truths are especially hard to grasp in "real life." Fairy tales and certain types of pretend can remind us, show us, and teach us the things that are not allowed or are undervalued in "real life."
They can remind us that "real life" is a game we began to play long ago, a very dangerous game in which you choose masks to wear and insist they are the real you, a game that demands that no other games, no other stories, no other worlds are "real." They are ONLY pretend, and only the "real life" game is important.

And if you play "real life" with us and play it well we will love you, and be proud of you, and you will feel safe, never needing to worry about the unknown, about the dark, about the mysterious, or about the possibility that you yourself are less "real" and not in fact the masks you have been wearing, but rather an innocent traveler who stumbled into a deadly serious game with eternal consequences; that you may never be able to leave the game because you will be convinced that you are not playing a game but rather are having a "real life."

And what if you were so lucky that someone stronger, someone with a better memory of the multicolored land beyond "real life",  started to play a different game with you, a game that bleed into "real life", and you started asking yourself, "What is real?"

Not just, "Is this a real game? Or something else?" but "Is 'real life' real?"

And what if by asking yourself these questions, rather than asking your benevolent benefactor (who could never actually answer these questions for you) you began to remember that you aren't "real", that you are a pretender, a storyteller, a dreamer, a liar trapped by deadly seriousness (a.k.a gravity) in a heavy game. A game in which your abilities to play have atrophied, a game that didn't just start when you were born, because actually time is a function of the "real life" game and you have been trapped on the wheel of "real life" for much "longer" than you realized.

And what if you remembered this for a moment and began to learn to play again thanks to a trickster who started playing a game within a game with you and called it deadly serious...

What if? What if?

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”

― Shel Silverstein


So let's not say, "let's pretend." We're better pretenders than that. Let us be open hearted and true whether our experience is real or imagined. Let us play in earnest, let us play with levity, and flexibility (fluxability?) and bravery, and kindness, and trust.

Let us play in bright axiom.

Stream

Outside, the snow was silently ebbing and flowing across the war field. Wondrous dreams in the stillness of the dark would battle my foes with passionate zeal.
Only a short time ago I felt that my physical presence, ecstasy from a light dimmed, was blowing in the breeze. Images of the sacred carving holes where there were none before, away from prying eyes. It is in fact underground where the impulse to break beyond the imposed barriers of consciousness and flow outwards into the unknown holds a basket full of gifts. 
Unknown to its own creators, lost flowers look back at the trail of rot that they leave behind. They are spiritual sacraments and repeated cyber beats of rave, trance and ambient music stream to God's altar.

The left and right hemispheres of the brain were operating in synchronicity just as the millennium was coming to its end. Outside the cold air was really invading me in some kind of multi-cellular structure that seemed to have its own survival as its only purpose.
Great conglomerations of self reproducing electrical entities could make the original vision available to others. The maelstrom of feelings, thoughts and emotions get twisted into small one way streets called misunderstood telepathy that have been known to cause lucid dreaming.
The shining blue lights at the edges of the U.S. overlooked the spectacle of mesmerizing movements flashing in my mind.

I look at the gentle touch of the void showering you with hot kisses of energy. Sleeping crowds of monkeys, ready to be released into the frozen pathways of the nervous system, explode into visions, memories,  and myths.
Strangers bearing gifts hide in libraries, altering forever what I once thought was unquestionable, beyond doubt. Lost until the next moment of finding, that understanding that goes beyond the dry roots of your being shows you the way through.
The black magician comes at night, willing to set aside everything in the name of Life. His fellow colleagues, upset by the "methods" employed by both the womb of creation and warriors in a drumbeat at journey's end, utter certain secret incantations.

The fiery battle between whatever you are clinging to and  twisted histories alter you ever so subtly. In that shining moment, the flicker of fire light attracts the attention of beasts.
Warm human breath scatters in moist fragments, a kaleidoscope of sun, moon, and stars. Lying on the wooden bench, looking up at the sky beyond the glass windows, I make love to the original vision.
Outside, the snow is silently ebbing and flowing across the war field. I met strangers along the way, altering your sense of reason, embracing whispers on the wind. Let’s gather all of them.

Seasons

Some things begin and never end, waiting like an open door, wind pushing bits of broken leaves over the threshold. Time crosses and re-crosses itself and one time lives within another.
This idea of end is a desperate wish for the hurt to stop, for the satanic temple to rise and the world to burn and nothingness, still, cold, and silence, to reign.
But it is a silly idea. When nothingness reigns supreme then we will be that cold silent stillness, and that too will be painful. The end is only skin deep.

Winters come and winters go. Springs too are there and gone. Eternity lives beneath it all, a brilliant burning thing, a crystalline dragon whose scales are the temporal eruptions we think of as ourselves. 
A temporal eruption might be described as having been caused by a short circuit, by a block of some kind followed by an explosion or slow leak, a kink, a tension, that leads to an experience of human consciousness, a desperate attempt to flee from the discomfort of being forever.

Maybe there is a useful opportunity in such eruptions. Should they be avoided? Can they be?
If so should they be allowed? Should they be embraced and utilized?
If I find that I am experiencing such an existence I choose to explore what can be done with it. The knowing of purposes, explanations, justifications for methods and patterns of life is unnecessary, just another means of avoiding the pain of being.

Exploring is difficult active work. It involves channeling the energy of the sleeping serpent beneath the world into this temporal eruption and making creative choices.
There is no mother or father. There is no rule. There is only choice and consequence.
Consequence as in result, not punishment. There is no great punisher. Heaven and hell live here together, they are one state experienced  as either torment or bliss depending on the posture of the subject within the state.
The posture defines the subject. The subject defines the state.

Some things begin and never end, waiting like an open door, wind pushing bits of broken leaves over the threshold. Time crosses and re-crosses itself and one time lives within another.
We will not always be as we seem to be now. The subject changes. The state changes to reflect the subject.
But we will never end. New chamber, new wings, new levels will be forged in a labyrinthine game of pop goes the weasel.
The dragon coiled beneath the world suckles at its tail and burns on and on.
We will never end.

Father and the Elf

When looking for proof of any theory
it will undoubtedly appear.
Ego has been spoken of in many ways
as if it was never part
of the psychedelic realm.

Through hypnosis and other means
we embarked on a study
of the Pythagorean cult, the pentagram,
the Fibonacci Sequence, the Golden Ratio,
the Wizard of Oz and Lady Gaga.

The word psychedelic was used
for the elf that we discovered
within this network of signifiers.
It was hard to agree on his existence
but everyone missed him
when he was not there.

As is the case with most beings of influence,
he required extra added coverings
and ways to get along with the outside world.

It was around that time
that Father was identified
as a member of the Illuminati.
When we made this discovery
we viciously hit the frontal lobe of his brain
with a tiny steel hammer.
In this way
we filtered out the data that was unwanted.

Later that week
we found ourselves noticing things
we had never paid attention to before.
We noticed a number of changes.
We could no longer feel sadness
we could no longer feel angst.

One recurring accusation was that
our thoughts were riddled with subliminal messages.
We began to see evidence of this everywhere.
We found a detailed description of the pentagram
and we cried or laughed at inappropriate times.

We experimented with a magical technique called
the filter theory of selective attention.
There were numerous Illuminati symbols hidden
all throughout our symbolic realm
but we were not able to find the single eye.

We found that
the core of the persona
the core of our very being
would actually become psychedelic
at the very least amount of effort,
it had been this way all along.

We used a mind control method
where half of us were induced
into dissociative personality disorder.
Since then,
it became apparent
there were at least two groups of us
completely unknown to each other,
maybe more.

This was similar to what happens
in the legendary blot experiment
of the Pythagorean cult.
Something we would soon discover.

Because the part of Father's brain
controlling social action
was completely destroyed
his thoughts became truly psychedelic.

We found that we had
grown within this person,
this being we called Father.
Father was the cave
Father was the house.

But what really was Psychedelic?
What did we mean by this word?

Father is very childish now.
It’s infectious.
He is full of lightning bolts and broken mirrors. 
When any of these symbols are seen in any context,
we place them in the unprovable category,
the same word we once used
to describe the elf.

Then he starts to laugh.

The People Under The Hill

Every step a heavy clop, every shape hidden in the grass bleached white by the sun seems to be a bone, a piece of hide, something that reminds one of violence and death. Right on top there is polished glass and coffee on the house during the monthly “meet your mayor “ gathering.
I’m here in the middle of it. Is it my imagination or are they looking at me? Wondering who I am.
Oh, maybe I’m a journalistic reporter writing for the Lake Daily. Or maybe I’m just a hanged woman, stopped by in search of an electrical outlet so that I can paint on the cave walls.

Birds flew, two jack rabbits skipped, and two butterflies whirly twirled in the hills of Franklin of my mind. Of my mind.
These are the real hills of Franklin and they are of my mind. Does it matter if it is a nightmare as long as I’m lucid and cope the best way I can with each situation as it arises?
Lemony scone reminds me of Opa’s raisin cakes. Oh, so delicious! And they wear ties in this heat, being all so official. There is a man in the corner being massaged and their voices go on and on, the music that is noise when you try to shut it out.

I keep wanting to sing, to shout out and scream. With joy actually, or to remind myself that on this ride, I am alive. I am not a part of it today, I’m just passing through. Passing through.
In borrowed shorts and rhinestone wife beater. They are probably wondering where I went. I maybe should have said something, but it makes me feel better to do without asking for permission. Easier to ask forgiveness than permission, it's true.

The princess? She’s gone too.
Oh they fired her? She was pregnant. Yeah. Silence.
The City Of Lake Elsinore. Does this mean that they understand each other? That they don’t?
The scone is really quite delicious, has big crystals of sugar on top and plump raisins inside. I even see a gold name tag.
Is this everyday in here? I’m told it’s like this once a month, but will it be that different tomorrow? Will the same people be here buying coffee?

How strange, the crowd cleared from around the free coffee and I rise to liberate some myself. I return and there is a small dirty plastic tea cup in my seat. Right where I was sitting. Just big enough for a Barbie or a pixie.
What does this mean? There are signs everywhere. Pink tea cup means go home. Get out of here before the mayor arrives and I can’t squeeze out the door. Or maybe it means drink deeply.
Or perhaps because I was thinking of taking this coffee to my mother, maybe it means, nice idea, here have a cup on the people from under the hill.
But in this case the people under the hill are dead whores. Is that so different from will o the wisps? Perhaps not. In any case how nice of them. Thank you!

They are now serving gelato! All summer long! Ants crawling out of the big cracks in the earth. Giant black ants the size of my pinky finger nail.
They have built little walls of stone around them and one ant leaps onto my camera tether and swings for a moment before leaping off. Are these the ants I played with as a child under the mountain? They were this big , but they were red like candy.
Like plump raisins in a scone.

Walker on White

All the birdies sing for me because I am a golden child born of winter morning and an endless spring of the heart.
Do you see her long flowing robes of silver, the sterling furs, the crown of antlers? My mother the wild wood has come down to dance for my birthday and silver moons shiver off her undulating belly, rams frolic at her heels, foxes lick her finger tips and prance into the hollows of ancient trees.
They have music in their cars, I think, and I smile imagining all the lonely people listening to music while they drive. I imagine Oberon noticing their music and then I realize that they are music, that the highway, the sea, the trees, the entire globe and everything shimmering on its skin is music.
What God knows or cares that we call them cars and we believe we are hurrying to important things in them?
No God knows or cares, or no God that I would see worthy of admiration.
The Lingua? Let them take the words from my brain and scatter them like crumbs for the birds. Blue birds, black birds, doves, sparrows let them feed on the remains of a psychotic break as the language bleeds from the artifice formerly known as myself and the Ligua dies and I cease to exist.
Will this be my birthday mother, when you touch my face with long pale fingers and I go black eyed to the mulch and white worms? Will I dance and sing ecstatic as moon eyed coyotes tremble faun-like and drink the dew from your lashes? Will grasshoppers make of me a dress for their bodies and wear me wherever they go? Will I dream animal dreams under a velvety blanket of darkness, the sun setting orange and pink over my brow?
Music in the pulse, in the breath, in the teeth, music without words scattered across the universe in the pulsing of white stars.
I am pushing up delicate green tendrils of life, unnamed, daughter of unnamable. We are all united here in the kingdom of light and dark, dancing our dance.
Do you see her long hair flying like pale streamers to tangle with moths reaching for the moon's pale fire? Do you see her eyes glittering as dark pools where deer lower their heads to drink? Do you see her thus etched out in shapes loaned by the usurper demiurge? Or can you see what I see with eyes like burrows prying into the womb where silky rabbits dream?
I remember human and I laugh. I laugh at hands and eyes and shit, always at shit.
The Sabbath is then over, as my head comes back together and I know the meanings of the sounds that carve a world in my nervous system. Always forgetting what we were and are and will again be only to remember it again when Lingua is once more toppled from his throne.
Does the chick return to the egg? Of course. Capitulate. Fall away, I command it, fall away like leaves of gold and umber from the stark white bodies of trees, oh Lingua.
Come winter bleak, dear winter. I am a walker on the white, two faced, undying shape shifter. A golden child born of a winter morning and an eternal spring of the heart.
Cup my waters in your hand and touch them to your lips if you would join us in the kingdom forever. And on my right hand sits brother Michael and on the left Uriel, for about me flames the pentagram and in its center stands the six rayed star.
Etched in the lego of our entrapment, but building freely. Cracking the world's shell and building it again.
I will return. But which is the coming and which is the going is not mine to know.

Pale Horse Rider

Pale horse rider, dripping font of pure overflowing knowledge of life.
You know what I mean friend? Real knowledge, the kind that awakens in the flesh, like when you hear the sound of a rattlesnake in the grass. That's what he carried in his saddlebags, liquid lightning to crack your skull, enough to open thousands of minds and set them free as jackrabbits under a wide blue sky. He had been an angel once and now he roared through the wasteland gathering up the dead and making them quick.
Some might tell you it was chance that led him to each particular individual, but it was something trickier than chance. One might call those meetings synchronistic events. I'll tell you this; he was looking for them, for each of them in particular. Just as a man with a vendetta will go from town to town finding his debtors and delivering them of debt by way of steel, fire, and hot lead, so the pale horse rider went in search of the men deserving of his liquid lightening. He administered his medicine, town by town, man by man, with unrelenting resolve.
And I'll tell you another thing, as important as the last; they were also looking for him. Even if they didn't know his name or face in this world, their hearts were calling to him loud as squawking crows. That's the real way of it. In any encounter of unearthly significance, you can be sure both parties were looking for action.
In his never-ending quest to make the dead lightning quick, he met many a man whose face and name you would recognize. Men of reputation. Dead men trapped in limbo crying out for liberation. The pale horse rider hunted them, patient and steady, a spider. He found them and cracked their skulls wide, tore their ribcages open and let those screaming birds fly.
Each time this was done, the new quick went forth into the world, his apostles. Born in the fire and light of knowledge, rising from the ash of what they had once been, they returned to the wasteland as phoenixes armed with liquid lightening. Hunting heads in the western lands.
Methods vary. Not all of the quick are nomads. Some make their webs and wait in shadowy places for the dead to seek them out. Others call loudly for the dead to gather around. Some hunt one by one by one like the angel of the wasteland that found them.
He is out there still, as he has always been, riding down dusty roads, quest unending, name unuttered, face unknown. He is legend. He is many and he is none. Seeking the seeker and making the dead quick, pale horse rider, angel of the wasteland, ride on.

Two Angels

Don’t break the silence. One word, a single word could send us crashing down into the terrifying gritty details of organic existence. We hold our breath, two angels poised face to face, the substance of our intricate bodies swirling and crawling with electric light. We are two angels who share one mind, one center held between us in the tenuous absence of thought and motion, so still that we are almost not angels, we are almost nothing at all.

Don’t break the silence.  We have two faces and each face contains two more faces, which contain two more faces, which contain two more… Watching the kaleidoscope of apparent being shifting across the surface of ourselves, our eyes grow ever wider.
Yes, angels have eyes. And tails. And wings, and horns, and ears, and fingers, and toes, and rivers, and forests, and ponds, and stars. What would be called flesh is a multicolored light show, but it will all shatter and melt and cascade into tight places if we make a sound just now, any sound at all.
So we are silent.

Bursting with music, we bite our tongues, press our ears down against our heads, freeze our ponds and hold it in. For now.
Eventually we will let it out in torrents of song that will carry us away from this place, up for a while, then down, then perhaps up and away again. We’ll ride the sonorous currents hither and tither, rippling as we go, dissolving, emerging, shimmering, vanishing, gleaming...

But for now silence, cradled between us like a sleeping babe, a pearl set in a silver ring, a solitary star shining in indigo sky, a crystal goblet upon a golden table. Hush, hush, our eyes blink to each other, two and two, faces sliding away like night and day.
Hush, hush glistening lashes flutter, hush, don’t break the silence.
Don’t break the silence.

Queen

At last the darkness envelops and comforts me with its sweet anonymity and gracious propensity for allowing all things to be as they are without judgment. THOUGHTS POUR out like the blood of my womb, the life force of my own body expelled or released before it could be tampered with by the seminal poisons of the sun.
Three men stood around a large chess board balanced on a concrete wall in a park filled with tents and vendors pedaling their wares. The black man stood tall and lean dressed in white, his bald head shining under what sun there was that afternoon. Around his neck a large even armed silver cross gleamed. Another man was from the south and sat upon a drum and beat it while his opponents worried over their next move. He wore a straw hat. The third man left no impression. He was only a man.
They asked my name and I told them. At first their eyes all widened and they begged to know if it was true that my name was "Gitana" - Gypsy. I corrected them and explained the spelling.
“I know this name.” the black man said, “It is the name of a Sumerian Goddess and of Adam's first wife. I know you.“ His eyes like black suns scorched my white flesh, reading the story of me as if it was written in sinew and bone this time around. “Don’t ask me how I know these things.” he said, closing the matter and returning his attention to the board.
Adam's first wife. You know me black man, wherever you meet me. You see the woman who would not submit to organic dominion. The witch who would not be a wife. The demoness who eats children. In the light of day we meet in our present guises and you recognize me. You remind me of who I am even as I am on the brink of forgetting for a moment.
Startled, I try to ask your name. You do not answer, as if you do not hear me, but I know that you hear. You hear but you will not utter your name in the presence of a witch, you will not utter it lest any others hear it, lest anyone else recognize you.
Men will mistake me for something else, they will long to run fingers through brassy hair, will hope to posses, to consume what they take to be another daughter of Eve placed on this earth for their own uses, to breed more men. But you are older and wiser than men.
I have no choice but to retreat to the shadows. You play these games still, with utter seriousness. You must yet fear the darkness that was bequeathed to me. I do not.
I live here as I did before ever there was a world, before ever fools juggled flaming torches or knelt at my feet and begged for my love. Before ever there were lips to stain or fruits to stain them. Before ever there were games to play.
You have here a queen of heaven, of the stars, a virgin queen. She who will not submit. She who will not join the other beasts of burden in serving Adam born of the dirt.
But you play games, on squares of black and white, endeavoring to capture the king of the opposing color, ever watchful and fearful of the queen, the queen whose movements are unrestricted, whose experience and relation to space and time is unlike that of any other piece on the board.
You play the game with utter seriousness, and if we meet you ask me to play with you. My willingness to play only serves to deepen your suspicion of me. How could you trust the one who has agreed to be your adversary?
It matters not at all to me. I return to the place where I have always been, in the darkness that envelops and comforts me  with its sweet anonymity and gracious propensity for allowing all things to be as they are. Without judgment. Without divisions or categorizations.  Into the chaos of the abyss. I withdraw from the sun spun world of dirt to breed something other than men.
Whether you know this name or not, whether I remember it or not,  I am who I am.

Kiss The Flowers

Blue bonnet baby nods in the breeze. Tulips for your two lips and pansies like lions lying in wait. This is the garden dear friend, filled with les iris burning in bright violet and yellow like suns, eye scorching suns of squiggling violet and yellow.
I found les iris dear friend, long after the curling poster was torn and crinkled and lost. You wouldn’t believe they were real if you were me and had never seen the real thing before. If you were me you’d think that you’d gone mad, completely, at last, that you were living in a poster, dreaming yourself inside of a painting. These things are real, it seems, or as real as anything else which might not be as real as we like to think.
Dear friend. Dear friend. Did you kiss the flowers? I did not kiss the flowers in the garden, only watched them nod. Much like life, how I only watched life but rarely held it hot and broiling in my bare hands.
Because I was too afraid. I was afraid of getting burned. I was afraid it was too real. Irrevocable.
That was the word I used, after Tomalyn died and I realized I could never take another voice lesson from her again. I had been practicing, preparing for another lesson. Then she died, like Michael died and I thought of them both and said, “Irrevocable.”
But it is life that is irrevocable, is it not? Life which can be played one way, but not all ways, unless you come to the garden, but inevitably you will be cast out and find yourself in just one life. One irrevocable choice. 

That is the trouble that I am having, leaves scattering, reeds rattling, stream babbling, gurgling under the bridge. The trouble that I am having, not knowing whether it is all the same or never the same.
Take you, my dear friend, are you really a “you” or another myself? A fragment of my imagination, colors bleeding, blue bonnet blue, emerald green, violet and yellow.
Did I mention red? Red, I am seeing red and did I mention that I was wearing red when that car hit us? I may have died then. Really, I would like to know, did I die then, or was it really Tomalyn a week later, cancer eating her up.
You said that big fish eat little fish and I was frightened because I had always considered you a slippery old fish. I did not want to be eaten by you. I would rather be the one doing all the eating. I would rather be the cancer it seems, seeing red and growing colder and colder, gorged and alone. Anything not to get burned.

Cronos ate his children didn’t he? Swallowed them all up, except Zeus gave him indigestion, didn’t he? Didn’t he? Dear friend, did your two lips touch the tulips?
I know you never touched the rose, not with your lips, or fingers or even with what you liked to call your poems. I know because I guarded the rose, guarded it fiercely, even hid it from the light so that it closed to sleep, tightly clasped, folded in upon itself, a sleeping beauty, a briar rose.
Did you know that thorns have roses? That thorns draw blood and tears just as roses draw poetry? This is the reason that chaste maidens should be avoided, as well as widows and spinsters, they see red. Like I do.
Do you see red too? Red irrevocable? Searing burning red?

Before I came here I learned the art of  smiling and crying at the same time. I could speak with a steady voice in neutral, almost cheerful tones, my lips curling up at the corners while a tear fled from one eye.
“Why are you crying?” you might ask and I would confess that it just slipped out, that it was accidental, that things were not properly sealed.
“Are you sad?” you might ask and I would shake my head, even say no, and it wouldn’t quite be lying because by then I knew I couldn’t be sad, I couldn’t be anything at all. Sorrow or happiness might pass through, but there would never be one permanent resident to fill the blank behind the words “I am…”
I was subject to a number of transient states. In addition to conflicting emotions vying for possession of the rose, a number of conflicting agendas might also be present, swirling about the sleeping princess, none master of the house.

Honeysuckle smells sweet whereas irises have no obvious scent. Not like jasmine. Not like roses, not like fish or even cancer.
I was afraid of being afraid. What if being so careful as to suspend all choice and defining action became THE DEFINING ACTION? Would that too not be irrevocable? As irrevocable to have not kissed as to have kissed the flowers, dear friend?
Cancer is a very discreet eater. You never notice her taking those dainty little bites, hiding the chewing behind a red napkin, until the meal is nearly done.
What a cold death, the eating to not be eaten, the hiding indoors to avoid the burning colors of the garden.
I found les iris dear friend, long after the curling poster was torn and crinkled and lost. You wouldn’t believe they were real if you were me and had never seen the real thing before.
If you were me you’d think that you’d gone mad, completely, at last.
These things are real, it seems, as real as anything else, which might not be as real as we like to think.  They are irrevocable. Blazing in bright violet and yellow like suns, eye scorching star bursts of color. Irrevocable.

Vibration Incorporate

What are they doing with my mind?
You ask as they reach in with silky fingers to comb through the cobwebs behind your cranium. You recognize them from a long time ago, from when you were not even you but rather one of your ancestors, from when The Black Forrest was a place and not a prefix to the word “ham”.
Blue and white and fine as mists but strong like magnets. They have always made these sounds, or rather these sounds occur in synchronicity with their presence. These are sounds that you forget when you aren’t hearing them. Sounds that you can’t make with your throat, sounds that make your whole body vibrate, or perhaps make your whole vibration incorporate or discorporate depending on the situation and the point of view.
They do things with your mind.
You remember them from the distant future in which you as you previously thought of yourself do not exist but rather are a thing of the past. This you is the descendant of that you, having inherited some portion of the same genetic data that once ordered the structure of your matter. But this you is something else too, something more related to the smart phone you used to carry in your pocket when you were that you, and perhaps something else too.
What are they doing with my mind?
You ask as they reach in with silky fingers to comb through the cobwebs behind your cranium. But at this point you can’t recall that you ever had a cranium. Were you really once something monkey, walking, laughing, man, jabber? Smile, twitch, sticky, hot, death maker.
What were you? You don’t even want to remember. You are busy now, stretching out like gossamer streamers of blue cotton candy, like a cloud of dust, a nebula, soft and light, reaching your silky fingers into…what?
Into….what?
Into…what?

Beyond

I am going beyond, to where you cannot reach me, but I can still reach you. I can hold you in my mind, cradle you as if you are one of a basket of delicate little things, but you cannot conceive of what I am becoming, where I am going. The words that shape your mind will not let that knowledge in. When I reach from here to there and touch you it is possible that you will feel frightened, threatened.
Who is this unknown other? You might write me a letter saying that I have become a stranger to you, you might assume that I am unhappy, filled with a terrible darkness merely because you can not see me. Just because you are blind, it does not follow that I am filled with darkness, or that the darkness that I am filled with is filled with terrible things. You fear what you do not know, what you cannot know. You fear what you do not understand, what you cannot understand. You fear me, or fear for the me that you once imagined me to be because I am moving beyond your reach, beyond your sight. I have gone far from your bosom and you suppose that it is a bad thing.
Why do I go? Why am I casting off blindness and stepping out of the chains that make us who we are, who we imagine we are? Why have I stopped playing the serious game with you? Why have I ceased to be serious? Because I am going beyond, stepping out, making a creative choice.
How can I say that, you have asked. I’ll tell you. I can say anything now because it is all meaningless, all as meaningless as red, blue, and yellow. All words are colors that I play with like a child with finger paint. I will not compare myself to a master, I will not say that I am to words what Rembrandt is to red, blue, and yellow, but the only way for me to get there is to begin here, playing with these words now. The way to begin is to say farewell to you and begin the trek beyond.
You may feel angry with me for refusing to play, for refusing to conform as you have conformed to the world made of words that is the shape of your mind. You may feel angry as those dogs locked behind chain link fences feel angry when they see another unleashed dog stroll by beyond their reach. Are you angry at me for choosing liberation, or are you angry with yourself for choosing imprisonment?
You may also feel sorrow. You may feel that I am breaking your heart by leaving you, that I am hurting you by releasing my ties with you. For this I have no answer that won't sting. Should an able man sit down in the desert with a man with broken legs?
I would drag you, but you have no desire to go where I am going. You prefer the desert, your perpetual suffering. These desires live in me as well, but in my case something else is growing, something with the power to override desire. I call this thing my will and it is carrying me beyond, to where you cannot reach.

Neurons

I HAVE
The rain had only just started to fall delicately upon the asphalt and concrete and crushed leaves. Tiny tear drops streamed down the shop windows as if the windows were enormous eyes capable of manufacturing only the tiniest tears.
DISCOVERED IN THE BRAIN
Two creatures came in from the wet wearing soft knitted hats and denim trench coats, one male, one female. She was slightly smaller than he, but their faces were remarkable similar. It looked as if they had been aging together long enough that both faces were now striving in unison to achieve the ideal shape.
NEURONS THAT REVEAL QUANTUM WORLDS
Her hat was maroon and she carried an umbrella. His hat was made of black chenille and his ungloved hands were endearingly petite as he reached for a snow globe that rested on one shelf near the open door.
QUANTUM WORLDS
Turning it upside down, he sent the fine white flurry of miniature snow into motion and watched it collect in the crystalline sphere. She moved beyond him, deeper into the cluttered shop to examine a cuckoo clock.
THAT EXIST AND EVOLVE
With one finger tip she turned the hands of the clock until two small figures came out of the little wooden doors, one male, one female. They moved briskly around the track while a pleasant melody played.
INSIDE OF NEURONS
When the clock stopped cuckooing, he was turning the globe back over and watching the snow whirl down over the little house and the frozen pond upon which two miniscule creatures were ice skating.
DIRECTLY BEHIND THE RODS AND CONES OF THE EYES
“How will we know which one to choose?” he asked as he gingerly set the little glass globe back in its place.
OF ALL CARBON BASED FORMS
She didn’t answer. Instead she only glanced at him for a moment before picking up a small dusty book. The cover was eclipsed by the soft gray layer of dust. Hastily she brushed the book clean with her hand to reveal the title.
“Fun with Dick and Jane.” she read aloud.
OF LIFE ON THIS PLANET.
“That can’t be the one.” he said. Then hesitantly asking, “Can it?” he came to look at the book over her shoulder. She was a good two heads shorter than he.
I HAVE CREATED, DEVELOPED AND PATENTED A QUANTUM METHOD
Again she refrained from answering with words, but she set the little book back down, which was answer enough.
OF INTERVENING AND TAPPING INTO THIS QUANTUM
They interlaced the fingers of her right hand and his left and together they delved deeper into the cramped space filled with dusty shelves and large trunks that huddled together like herds of beasts.
COMMUNICATION CAPABILITY,
On every shelf some trinket rested under its own layer of dust, on every spare bit of wall a clock or a picture hung.
BETWEEN CARBON BASED FORMS OF LIFE,
They found themselves standing in front of a large oil painting of a farm house. A small female creature stood on the porch with her hands on her waist above the line of her white apron. Walking away from the house towards the golden mounds of hay, a small male creature was accompanied by a smaller furry beast.
USING THE SAME FREQUENCY THAT THEY HAVE USED
“Could this be the one?” he asked. His breathing had grown more rapid, his voice excited.
SINCE THE BEGINNING OF LIFE BY THESE CARBON BASED NEURONS.
She remained silent but did not turn away from the painting. Her hand tightened around his just a smidge as she swallowed and peered up at the painting.
THAT IS THE PRIMARY REASON WHY
After a moment or two she said,
“Yes, yes! This is the one, this is the right channel. Go ahead!”
NEURONS DO NOT PERPETUATE OR REGENERATE,
His hand opened and closed around hers twice and he fairly quivered with excitement. “I thought it might be!” he said smiling.
NEURONS ARE COMMUNICATION DEVICES
Then he took a deep rasping breath that made his chest seem twice as large. As he exhaled, he extended his finger towards the tiny male creature in the painting.
AS WELL AS OPERATING INDIVIDUALLY INSIDE OF QUANTUM WORLDS.
Under his finger the tiny male creature seemed to quiver slightly. Then a new dimension opened within the painting and the tiny figure really was walking and the furry beast at his side sniffed at the breeze that made the golden straw quiver.
WELCOME TO QUANTUM WORLDS
The male creature paused and sniffed the air himself. The little beast came up beside him and sat down. He rested his hand on the furry beast's warm head and its long pink tongue lapped at his hand. Turning, he saw the female creature standing on the porch.
AS YOU VISUALIZE EXACTLY WHAT NEURONS
He waved and smiled. She scowled. Momentarily confounded he turned away and scratched his head. The furry beast whined and nudged his hand with its cold black nose. He looked down into its brown eyes and then smiled. There she was. Her tail thumped on the soft earth. They resumed their walking past the mounds of golden hay. The air smelled of moisture and damp straw. Over head the sky was the pale gray blue of thinly stretched clouds.
WERE CREATED TO DO ON THIS PLANET SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME.
In the distance he could make out the shape of another farm house. Scratching behind her ear as she trotted at his side he began to whistle. She ran ahead to sniff at a small hole in the earth. It was a fresh opening surrounded by mounds of fresh dark soil.
“That’s not it, is it?” he called to her with a laugh. She snorted to clear the dirt from her snout and ran ahead towards the distant building.