Saint Veshua

She had been on the mountaintop since the early afternoon the previous day. Such a painful curve of the wheel. Dark time lasted for an eternity, just the slowly arching crescent moon marked the movement of the earth and her body’s place upon it. They were solid, ancient and cold.
"It hurts to be so nonexistent," she said. He felt that she was at a loss for words.
"It only hurts when you are trying to prevent it." 
He sincerely felt the wish to say so much more to her but he also knew that it was not possible, it was simply beyond the scope of the options currently available.
"There’s a cold wind blowing through my veins. Someone has driven a stake through my heart."
"It’s your father." He said, "He was trying to protect you."
“They cut me apart and they put something in me… this is what they did… see? Look at it, look at it...”
He searched her form for a message, letting the tenuous sparks of insight fall to him like snowflakes. She kept her eyes wide, letting the blackness and flickering stars roll and tumble over her with possibilities, letting it drag her mind into depths that daylight preferred to avoid. The wind moved over her and a nearby howl maintained the simple music of their encounter.
"I wanted to make something real." She said.
"Don’t struggle." He advised, "That will never happen if you struggle and crack the vessel."
But she pulled the stake out and the insects come pouring from her heart. They rushed over the surface of her body to devour it. There were animals with horns climbing the rocks and a lilting flute called from the distance.
Their line of communication was severed.
He watched it all from a distant peak, his scarf flapping in the wind, spy glass poised for the view. What he saw was a blond girl from some great American novel kneel to pray, and at that moment her heart burst into flames which soon consumed the whole apparition. For a moment it reminded him of the Inquisition, then the formation changed, and the flaming girl collapsed into a brilliant star. The explosion was magnificent.
It knocked him off of his feet.
He lay on the mountaintop as morning light spilled into the world of a newborn day, and he drank in the pale pink light. He opened his arms wide, letting the new sun bathe him in its clarity.
From her vantage point she watched the birds and the lone hawk that swept over him in circles again and again, as though they had something specific to communicate, but she could not hear him anymore.
It seemed like an inappropriate use of materials, but that’s the nature of magick.  Below, he held on to her light, thinking that it alone would ease his wish to change the reality of these new limitations.

D is for...

In the morning I had a phone call from my mother. My hands were covered in egg whites so I didn’t answer right away. Instead I finished making breakfast and then listened to the voicemail that she had left. It was strangely brief.
“Hi, it’s mom. Call me back when you are not busy.”

Her tone was dark and I wondered whether something specific was bothering her or whether it was the same general note of depression her voice usually carried.
I went to open the garden gate to carry out some bags of garden waste and discovered numerous black widow webs. I could barely make out a dark form behind a panel of wood and knew at least one spider was hiding there. I shivered all over.
The day before I had turned over an inverted flower pot and moved some bags of stone unearthing five of the deadly arachnids. I killed them with my boot heel when possible and the shovel tip when my foot couldn’t reach. I had been fairly brave in the moment, but now, knowing that there were more sent chills rippling through my body.

While I brought the pickup truck around to the gate my friend started carrying out the bags of leaves and weeds. We drove over the mountain and I kept my window rolled down, breathing the ion charged air.
At the county dump we pulled up to the scale to weigh our load and I noticed a trio of plastic skeletons arranged in a bush. I admired their creative placement.
Our county dump is full of artistic talent. An enormous installation of fascinating rubbish has long graced the hill behind the chemical waste shed and there is always some fetching creation to greet us when we reach the main warehouse. I smiled. The installations were spreading.

After purging ourselves of leaves and dead grass we headed towards home. Paused at a traffic light we watched palm bearers struggle to unload a coffin from a hearse. I was enjoying the bright orange of the flowers atop the glossy casket, the picture perfect ensemble of men in dark suits struggling under the weight as they carried it awkwardly into the yawning doors of a church.
“That’s intense.” my friend said.
“What is?”
“Somebody died and those five guys are carrying the body in. I guess we don’t have a lot of opportunities to confront death in this culture. We’re not usually face to face with it.”

At home I called my mother back.
“I have sad news. Jimmy’s daughter died last night.”
“I didn’t know Jimmy had a daughter.” I said.
“Well you know, I think we told you that just before Shanna was born Jimmy had another baby with another woman, Pam... and when he told her Kelly was going to have Shanna she took her baby, D’Laney, to Oregon so her parents could help.”
I digested this. I had been thinking of my mother’s other cousin Jay. I wasn’t sure if he had any kids. I knew about Shanna. Shanna had been to our house a number of times while I was growing up. But I had never heard the name D’Laney. I had never met her or even seen a photo.
“It’s so sad. She was only 34.”
“How did she die?”
“A cat bite. Isn’t that weird? It was her own cat. Apparently if a cat bites you it can lead to an infection and cause systemic failure.”

After I hung up I found D’Laney Ford’s Facebook page. She liked Philip Glass. I also like Philip Glass. Some of her friends mentioned her tribe. I figured she must have been a groovy burner from Seattle.
I felt a little emotional and looked out the window. A neighbor I had never met was standing in his backyard which is directly behind mine. He was wearing only a white bathrobe. I tried to write something .

“Dear D’Laney,
Why didn’t I know you? My mother called this morning to tell me that my second cousin D’Laney had passed away last night. D’Laney. Now I’ve seen your Facebook profile and I feel like we would have liked one another if we had ever had the chance to meet. I wonder if you ever knew I existed. I didn’t know about you. We never played together as children.”


I stopped. I really didn’t know what else to say. I looked at my neighbor in his bathrobe. He had something in his hand. What is that? I wondered.
I watched him for a few moment and felt a wash of surprise when he lifted his arm and started swinging a machete. What is he doing? I wondered. He was swinging it in a leisurely half hearted way, swinging it at nothing at all. Then he wandered a little and hacked briefly at a bush before meandering back into his house.

He Died For Our Sins

“Oh my God, this thing is from the 90’s!”
It seems so close, so far away. Roller skates and corduroys and neon colors.
They are making weapons out of electric green Bendaroos, organizing complicated games in a home for deranged ex villains. My man is there, looking bad but meaning well, poet in black jeans.
The shadow of a black widow in a thicket of web nestled in a long forgotten Easter basket, still wrapped in plastic.

I can’t believe this passes for technology. It should have been replaced ten years ago. Give it a tweak. Flash of lights red and green.
They’re only games, but they look like violence, like evil schemes plotted by insecure misogynists. They know not what they do, and so they know not how to take responsibility for what they’ve done.
But it gnaws at them. Something feasts on their gut, making them feel dirty but they don’t know what they did. How did they get like this? Were they not innocent boys when it started?

Conversations in parks, in bathrooms, on Christina ct. Were we not being punished for something?
I hoped so, because if so then redemption was possible. If redemption was possible we could do the right things and escape this misery.
However, redemption philosophy required that we all began as sinners and he would say:
“I can’t believe that. What could I have done to deserve what I got? I was just a little boy. I didn‘t deserve that.”

I feared that going back down I might fall. I considered crawling the rest of the way up and breaking through a window.
By now, however, I had learned that crawling through a window would likely result in a rebirth, and then big sis and I would never finish fixing this thing.
I could see the shadowy form more clearly; definitely that creature that I feared. Should I attempt to stab it with the scissors? Should I trust that film of plastic to be a satisfactory barrier between us?
Those flashing lights seemed to be a bad sign. I might have to stay up here with it longer.

Existence is suffering. All beings suffer. I had read this.
I didn’t want to believe it, despite the fact that it seemed likely. If we could have understood that concept, perhaps we could have shed our guilt and shame, the hope that we could escape our unknown crime.
Despite the fact that his objections to it were strong, the ideology lived in both of us. Perhaps it was even better rooted in him.
He was an earthy sort, and in the act of fierce rejection he had become locked in an embrace with it, like a bull whose horns get lodged in the opposing structure. 
I was in a process of accepting it and synthesizing it. I would have dreams that something horrible was coming towards me, and instead of running, or fighting, I would try to hold it and transform it by making it a part of myself.
Sometimes it destroyed me.

In the end, he would sacrifice himself.
It would be hard to look at. It would be impossible to remember whether he had been a villain, an innocent boy, or a hero.
The flash created by the sacrifice would be so blinding, it would obscure the past. The power of it would send me hurtling into unknown terrains.
It was a gift.

There was nothing further that could be done. I slid down, dangled from the ledge and jumped. It was easier than I had anticipated.
Sis helped me stand and dust myself off. She checked for spiders. We were about to walk up the path back into the house when we heard it, a ghostly voice from above.
It was a tech agent responding to my prodding of the device. In his far off phone voice he issued instructions for troubleshooting.
At first it seemed like I might need to go back up, but after listening for a moment it became clear that, like the device, the instructions for its operation were obsolete.

North Wind

Stop making that face or the North wind might blow and freeze that look there. That’s what my grandmother used to say, and there is some truth in this, though I doubt she thought so.
You never know when the north wind is going to blow, when it will huff and puff and blow your house down. What kind of face will you be caught making when the cards come crashing down to the table? Will you find yourself as a queen of hearts or a queen of spades? A Diamond or a club perhaps? Will you be caught light as a feather on the scale or heavy as a noose when so and so weighs your heart?
The weight of your own heart can drag you down,
Down,
down.
That face that you were making, was it heavy with the charge of negative emotion as the North wind blew, or was it electrified  with the charge of real emotion?
As I ask these questions I ponder my own faces, the masks I wear in different plays, the uncontrolled contortions of my vessel, my outward shape.
I, like all of my kind, am a factory for processing light. I am a play, a shape, a program, a ride, a structure, a labyrinth for channeling the vital essence of life.
But am I a mad house or a sanctuary? What am I creating with the essence of life if I am making faces without will, the random mad house faces of jealously or greed or fear or even happiness? Am I making anything more or less than a hot mess?
The essential nature of creation involves three elements, the raw diamond of attention, the putty called matter (oh mother) that can take many shapes, and the essential essence of life, the being, the baby, little sleeping beauty- a thing of potential whose birth is yet to come. It lies passive in the mother's womb, in every particle of matter.
And when that cold wind blows that shape that it has assumed in the cup of mother's womb, is the shape in which it will be born.
This is the reason that we must consider death through the course of what we call life. Death in fact, that cold north wind, is an icy midwife who delivers you into the next realm of experience.
You will enter this realm in precisely the shape your attention forged in the mother and your journey of transformation will not be over then.
They call it work for a reason, for precisely this reason, because the attention works to create, it must if you would choose an apt face for a suitable birth. And there is no end that we can perceive, merely a series of doorways, through which to pass once you have oozed your way through the crystalline structure of a lifetime.
And you never know when you will be thrust through that door, when the matter will open wide and the midwife will grab you screaming by the crown and pull you into the next world.
What face will you be wearing when you arrive there?
That face will be the shape of the world.
Will it be the contorted face you wear as you grasp desperately for some object of desire? Or will it be a clear face of unattached and concentrated attention?

Ferryman

At the mouth of the mad bad bardo lands, way down south where the demons grin like miracle rainbows as they hang you upside down and naked, demanding the truth. Way beyond the sacred cities of  our immaculate lady of the symbolic order where proper folk wear their Sunday finest to listen to THE good WORD.
There in the border lands, that's where you'll meet your ferryman dressed in black, silver spurs glinting in the sunlight. The threat of his guns holstered and silent is no less ominous than if they were hot and smoking.
When you see him, you know this is the one who can lead you, the one who can show you the way. He will be your coyote, your guide, familiar with both worlds; the land of the bright and shinning living, a superficial blemish of law and order, and the land of the dead, a deep rooted eternal dirt devil of chaos and freedom.
The man with a gun, eyes shaded by his black hat, will escort you to your destiny, to the terrible truth from which you've been running.  He can show you why you're afraid to live and why you're afraid to die. He can give you a purpose, a mission, something to do in the chaotic wilderness or in the sterile town, something to lift you beyond life and death.
He will give you a quest, demand a sacrifice. Only those who accept live the life eternal. Those who answer his call become legend, wings outstretched to brush against endless vistas.
All others become whirling demons or pasty servants of the word, taking what they can while they can, or hiding in fear of the Real, building walls against its hot unforgiving breath.
They will want to forget the ferryman dwelling as he does at the borders of their lands, beckoning with bony finger. They will strive to push him away.
But, the ever restless,  those who become legend, ride with him into the burning heat of a fading sun.

Leaf

Every time I catch sight of a falling leaf I feel that I have witnessed an awesome event.
Why is that?
For a moment I consider that it’s like when a baby loses a tooth, but then I realize, no, it’s more rare to witness any given tree dropping a leaf than a child loosing their tooth. You know how many teeth your child will loose as they mature, you will be there for many of them, and those extractions you don’t witness, you’ll be informed about, in most cases you’ll hold the tooth in your hand, you might sneak it out from under a pillow and leave a silver dollar in its place.
That leaf that you see falling from a tree is more like one of innumerable hairs falling from a head, which when you think of it that way, at first, it seems like no occasion for awe. People shed hair all the time, and so must trees shed their leaves, even when it’s unseasonable.
Why then the awe?
Because it’s an intimate moment shared with this random tree. I may never see it loose another leaf. The next time I pass, it may be a still bit of scenery, either naked, or covered in orange or green foliage. It will give an impression of being static, as if it has always stood thus. My attention will be attracted to the moving objects in the environment, humans, birds, cars, cats. If I take note of the tree, it will be of the whole tree, or the entire canopy of leaves shimmering with sunlight, but not of that moment of separation, that instant when a small part of the entirety falls.
I suppose that is where the awe originates.
To see a leaf fall is like witnessing a birth, the moment when something that was a part of one thing emerges suddenly distinct and isolated. Behold the brave leaf twirling gracefully towards the earth, a solitary thing, dancing on the wind, lost eventually to the mulch. It’s a lifetime that lapses before my eye for a duration of time that I call 3 seconds.
Likewise, I am still twirling in free fall, no longer what I was, not yet what I will be, a thing in motion, excited, confused, thrilled, frightened, streaking through a duration of time with definite limits. Transience, mortality, in the falling of a leaf. The mirror of my own existence.
Every time I catch sight of a falling leaf I have witnessed my own transgression.

Recognition

I saw your face again today for the very first time in a long while. Your eyes sparkled like diamonds.
When we looked at each other it was as if there were nothing separating us, we could see each other, and we each knew the other was seeing us back. It hasn’t been quite like that for a very long time. Not quite like that.
It reminded me of a night in a distant dream where you came and sat on the couch in my living room while my lover was out. You came and sat there on that maroon sued couch not far from a life size painting of Pan that my lover had commissioned months ago.
I saw you and I said:
“It’s over now.”
And you looked at me, perhaps coyly, smiling while the rest of your face and body seemed passive, immobile. You asked me what I meant.
“Seeing you sitting here. It’s like you’ve come to claim me. My life is over.”
You were pleased, because it was true. I was frightened, but you told me not to be afraid.
We left that dream together and entered another and here we have been.
This has happened many times between us, in many different dreams. You arrive and I go with you. Whatever dream I have been living, when you come, it is a pale mirage in comparison to your stark presence.
My lovers, my families, my hopes, my wishes, my plans, my hobbies, my friends, my accomplishments, my shortcomings, my possessions, I leave them and we go on.
You have led me out of the nightmare dimensions in this way, you are still leading me from them in this way. We are at this moment, in the darkest chamber of existence and in the brightest and in every place between, and in all of them, I am seeing you and you are seeing me and we each are aware of this rare experience of recognition.

Searchers

You are searching for yourself in the wasteland. In the dusty range among the blood soaked buttes and natives under powdered blankets. You are searching, a searcher, searching for yourself, for the eyes that were shot out while you lay in an unmarked grave, under sand and desert breath, fine and fiery. You look and when you see you shudder. You tear away the miles and the years, distances that can’t be measured and find THE OTHER resting beneath your skull like a stranger in your bed squirming up close to your reposed flesh. You are searching for yourself and here you are, a loathsome abomination that you wish to smite out of existence with a blazing barrel. Memories out of the wide blue vistas and rolling thunder clouds that seldom visit wash down over you, sweep you away in a torrent of rage and self hatred. You found it, you found what you were looking for and now you wish to smash it, destroy what you don’t understand, what you don’t know. What you don’t know. What you don’t wish to know… what you wish to forget so you shoot its eyes out, gouge your own eyes out with speeding fragments of lead so that you can forget… so that you can dream. You dream of a wasteland teeming with life. The quick little hare scampers from her den, the coyote snatches her up and carries her away… and you pursue them. You insist on prodding the wound, opening it wide, making it bleed until you remember that you wished to forget. A long wavy scalp dangling from a pole, it demands an us to exact our revenge on a them. Bodies flowing out of canyons and caverns, rivers and tee pees. Bodies wailing from under the brush. You are searching for yourself in the wasteland. In the dusty range among the blood soaked buttes and natives under powdered blankets. The ones who are of the wasteland, the very fabric of your confusion, they flicker like fire light, one moment familiar, the next moment strange. Strangely familiar forever these OTHERs. You remember the snow, cold and wet, hiding their tracks so that you could not find them, could not find the one that you seek. You are a searcher seeking after understanding of self. You have journeyed beyond, outside the cozy world of the comfortable and familiar. Dazed, you discover that you can never go back. You have lost your way. You are condemned to being them to yourself forever more. You are searching, a searcher, searching for yourself, for the eyes that were shot out while you lay in an unmarked grave, under sand and a desert breath, fine and fiery. Memories, revenge, a cup of coffee and a rocking chair…so that you can dream, strangely familiar forever.

Boogie

Answers born from questions and questions born from answers tumble awkwardly over one another like dark suited gymnasts. I pull up from the dark depths wondering. What is that light there, penetrating the serenity of this once womb-like space? Eerie and blue, it calls me out of slumber and points to a startling terror; I have not been alone here.
There is a movement not far off, something that can see me, just as I can now see it and the age old questions arise; can it hurt me? Should I hurt it first? Who will eat who?
Play seems out of the question. After all, who comes creeping silently into your room to kneel beside your bed while you slumber as an invitation to play? This is too close.
A friend knocks at the door, a friend calls to you, announces their presence from some distance before coming so near.
Or are there other ways to play? Ways that belong to creatures far beyond fear of safety and borders of individuality? Does one thought in my mind announce itself to another before it takes over?
It’s all for the furtherance of some game perhaps, but not a game for human animals, not a game that this one that I have perceived myself as being can win. Hostility or hospitality weigh in on either hand, who shall be the victor?
Fear is such an insistent mistress, always calling for my attention, always making bold claims, such as this announcement that this is a matter of life and death. Leap up and attack! Run! Or tell yourself that it isn’t real. It was only your imagination, there was nothing there, and drift back to sleep.
I close my eyes. If I can’t see it, then it can’t see me…so goes the ostrich logic. Leave the boogies to feast over my reposed form. What do they do while I hide behind closed lids? What do they want?
This is the thing that they told me didn’t exist. The thing that was not in my closet, not under the bed, not at my window. Sleep they told me, go to sleep. So I did. Now that I have grown taller and have sent my own children into the darkness with promises of false safety, only now, sleeping in their room, am I startled awake by this presence, this “should not be here” that disturbs the peace like a spider falling from the ceiling onto your cheek.
Now I know that it has always been here. It was always in the closet, under the bed, and at my window, then just as now. I sent the lambs to the slaughter just as my parents did before me, off to be the center piece at the boogie feast.
Slowly I realize that this time it has not come for me. Here it is peeking into the bed of my youngest daughter, and this thing that should not be has suddenly taken notice of me noticing it. How surprised we both are. I would not usually be here, on the floor sleeping, would not usually perceive that strange glow, hear the rustling, feel my pulse quicken and my eyes snap open. What seemed at first like my own unwelcome visitor did not expect so close an encounter with me, it has come creeping with other quarry in mind.
I am here, an adult in the nursery, positioned on the floor beside the bed to prove the security of our sanctuary and I witness for myself the breach. They are hard to see once fully awake. It is only with lids partially veiled that I can perceive their glow, the shadows of their slinking movement.
They are unconcerned by their discovery of me, more importantly, by my discovery of them. Even while they see me watching through slit eyes, they continue their advance.
Why should they worry? I don’t believe that they exist. Reason should prevent me from rising to stop them. I have always closed my eyes tighter and gone back to sleep in the past, a habit formed in child hood, why now would I do any other thing?
Sleep they told me, go to sleep. So I did. That has always been the way. Tell yourself that it isn’t real. It is only your imagination, there is nothing here.
What do they do while I hide behind closed lids? What do they want?
Answers born from questions and questions born from answers tumble awkwardly over one another like dark suited gymnasts. I descend into the dark depth blotting them from my mind. Forget that light there disturbing the womb of darkness and retreat into slumber and the comforting illusion of solitude.

Familiar Domain

Whatever is happening, whatever this is, I allow it, orange flowers dropping petals into a small clay bowl. The bowl is glazed to look like a quail's egg, six quails' eggs held in the dry hands of the potter Emmanuel.
Whatever this is I accept it. Our Father... I accept it. Who art in…I accept it…heaven…hallowed be… I accept it…thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in…accept it.
Though the faces that are worn by the beloved appear differently to me now, this is the same domain, the same beloved, all the same self that has always been and will always be. I observe it now from a lower level of energy than on the previous visit.
The first orange flower petals dropping into a small clay bowl. Emmanuel was the potter's name.
I allow all feelings of fear to pass through me, merging with all visions, liberating myself from the apparitions and entrapments of the lower dimensions.
The woman with the dark circles under her eyes, pale bony body, tiny lungs breathing in, then expelling the breath into my face…I allow all feelings of fear to pass through me.
But even though they may seem different to me now, I know that these are the same domains as before, and that nothing is going to happen to me that hasn’t happened before. Whatever is happening, whatever this is, I allow it, orange flowers drooping, their petals laying in the basin of a small ceramic bowl.
Give us this day our daily…glazed to look like a quail's egg, six tiny speckled quail's eggs supported in the large cracked hands of Emmanuel the potter.
Forgive us for our trespasses as we forgive those…when the visages and emotional auras of the unresponsive guides are superimposed upon the beloved, I must remember to recognize them as my own projections… who trespass against us… and not view these face changes as foreboding evil, danger, or antagonism… her dark eyes sinking in the dark rings of flesh, slippery lips, unkempt hair and a stale odor lingering about her cave…if I react in repulsion, I may find it difficult or impossible to blend my own energy field with that of the beloved…for thine is the power…but if I am able…the kingdom… to merge with the guide…and the glory…at this point…forever…I should be able to thus liberate myself from the endless action reaction game maintained by our opposing and unblending vibrations…Amen.
If I can manage to awaken my attention, and can accept the full reality of the macrodimensions, the divine state of liberation should dawn upon me as the cycle of death and rebirth is broken.
Whatever is happening, whatever this is, I allow it, I accept it, these orange petals dangling and falling and filling the uneven ceramic bowl fashioned by the chaffed hands of the one called Close to God. Emmanuel carrying away the six pale green and brown speckled quail's eggs…
I must remember that I can achieve liberation at any moment just by the power of recognition… remembering myself in these guides, the flower, the bowl, Emmanuel, the eggs, and the dark woman…penetrating through these visions into the clear light… thy kingdom… from which all visions have come and to which all visions return, like a sleeper's breath, like tiny lungs expanding and contracting…like six eggs which become a bowl… her breath on my face…allowing feelings of fear to pass through me…whatever this is…thy will be done… whatever this is… on earth as it is in…this same domain seen from a different vantage point...I accept it.

Weary Head

I try to rest my head… upon what? I do not know what I am or where I am or why I am here. I love someone but I do not really know what they are either. I do not know if what I experience as love is what he experiences as love, and I do not know if love means that I will have a friend forever, or if I will have a forever friend for a moment and later I will look up and see that I was never with anyone at all.
My insides are exploding out like billions of tiny diamonds flung into the sunlight and the sunlight is caught and refracted through every facet until there is no way of knowing whether one should be looking at diamonds or at shards of light or if either is more fundamental than the other.
I never was before this moment, but now I feel so small and naked and bewildered. I am adrift in the woods and I know I am lost, but that lost is meaningless as there is nowhere that I was going to, nor anywhere that I came from. Looking for “home” is just running from the forest with its tangled trees and unseen creatures making strange noises so that I may not guess whether they are friend or foe. It is an act in a dream, that act when you say I do not like this, I am not here, I am somewhere else and suddenly you are transported.
Sometimes the change is smooth and complete and other times it is slow and painful, like when a zombie is coming at you and you know that a gun should be in your hand and you lift your hand to shoot the zombie but there is no gun, but you insist that there is, there must be a gun there, and you make the shape of a gun with your fingers and you aim at the zombie and think, ‘I’m shooting now’, and there is no sound, no BANG! So you say, “bang!” but the Zombie keeps coming and you tell it, “No, I shot you. You’re dead. I got you.” And sometimes that works and at other times the zombie just keeps on coming, or even says, “No, you didn’t. You missed me” And you have a battle accompanied by a narrative of arguments.
I can say, I am going home, I can even find a home, I can even imagine that I am not lost, but I will never have left the forest. I am still there, shivering in the cold. I do not know for certain, but I think that I am lost. Everything is strange forever, emerging from a mysterious origin so alien that I cannot guess what it means or intends. If I am eaten by a big bad wolf does it matter? Does it really matter to either me or to the wolf? It must not. And yet I do not wish to be eaten tonight. I wish that the wolf would bite me and then I would become a wolf too, we might then be one wolf, maybe one wolf with two heads. And even then I might be alone, only one wolf.
Will I find out that it was a nightmare, a silly nightmare, that I am lost in the woods? I don’t have to dislike it, this feeling of being lost. I could enjoy it very much. I could delight in not knowing what I am or from whence I came. I could be merry about eternity and the stinging cold and the solitude of just myself and the tangled roots of the trees pushing up out of the moist dark earth. I could wander over the musk scented leaves carpeting the forest floor and wail like the wolves, or make the tortured yapping of coyotes my new song, a lament to shake the dark green silence while my pale bare feet churn the orange and gold leaves endlessly, never stopping to ask upon what I might rest my weary head.

Run As Fast As You Can

As fast as you can, run. Feet pounding against hard dry earth, then the sound of brittle dry grass and wild oats and wheat folding under foot. A frantic rustling sound, like the tearing of sheets of paper, run. The trees conspiring to make shade in a place accustomed to the tortures of the sun…slender young things, rebels in a desert. The white church with its friendly face and the weirdness tucked tight within, worshipers down on their hands and knees, new initiates stripped to their undergarments to be absolved of sin before their brethren’s eyes. Stripped of sin, of the mortal sin all begun with a bite into a crisp apple, sin originating from a resounding “crunch". See it in the jagged yellow action bubble.
Suddenly Eve beholds her nakedness. So now they take off their clothes in the basement of the church. But you don’t have to, you don’t have to go there. You can run. Run away from your parents and your teachers and the preacher and the neighbors. You can get away with strong young legs, but it’s not the strength of the body that they have restricted. It is the strength of the will. You are their slave. A sad host for their disease.
The trailers, the custom homes sprawled like mansions in a no man’s land, rest side by side, crowning hills and nestling within valleys. The woman with the high heels is coming, asking again if we’ll come help her with some work at her house. Smart gray knee length skirt and jacket, red lipstick, mahogany locks shining in the sun.
Everything looks just right. A fine outstanding citizen. We go, because we can no longer refuse and be considered polite, good neighbors, fine young people. Later, we can’t remember what happened at her house. We’re not even sure that we went.
Run, as fast as you can, run. The face of the house white as the church, charming green trim and the stairway around back that leads to another basement…
Smooth sun tanned arms and legs and freckled cheeks, walking through the fields, resting under the little trees. Scent of hot asphalt when we cross the only paved street in town for ice cream or magazines and bubble gum. Clouds of dust stirred up by our discolored sneakers as we race home along the dirt roads. Bigger clouds made by the tires of pick up trucks rattling along.
When we were younger we waved. Now sometimes we hear them coming and dive into the seas of tall grass. A refuge from all of their expectations. Lady bugs crawling up long stalks and other insects we haven’t named, pale green and yellow or black and red, also down here hiding.
The woman with the high heels smiling at us again in front of the white church. Won’t we come again? She always asks when others are present, ashen adults who admire her color, her charm. If we refuse they will frown at us. We are encouraged to go.
No!
We scream silently, hearts thundering, adrenaline rushing. Not even we know why, but we feel it from head to toe, a throbbing urge to run, as fast as we can. But with their eyes on us we can’t. We can only submit and walk back to her house, to the place we can only half remember. Back to the green sofa and tumblers of ice tea, the part we’re allowed to remember, the part that comes before the concrete steps and the cool darkness of the basement.
It comes bubbling up only in flashes, half remembered scenes that step beyond reason. Discordant images quickly pushed back into the depths, too incongruent with the shiny platitude of the surface. It is too late to act on the impulse to flee, but we do it anyway, with our minds, because it is too late for our bodies. As fast as you can, run, skimming over the top like flat stones over a pond’s mirror finish.

Moths And Hobos

My experience with hobos and moths has taught me that it is a mistake to be attracted to warmth and light; these are the real death traps. These are the places where there are walls that hold the warmth and light together in stagnant pools allowing virulent strains of consciousness to engage in a frenzied process of growth and replication. In the cold, endless, dark, night where there are no walls, your own radiance is all that you have, all that is required if you prefer freedom to entrapment. You may shiver and come to know death’s pale face in the wide endless wood, but you will have lived unfettered. Uncontaminated.
The life in the light is like no life at all. It is the life of chimps in dresses and lions behind bars and baby elephants in clown paint. It is no life at all. Where everything is chained in certainty, in safety, in comfort and doused in fluorescent splendor and halogen homeliness; on the inside.
It can be so tempting as you flit by in the night, a solitary lone entity, a one that has no other, no assurances, no desires to lead you from one unsatisfactory chamber within the labyrinthine city walls to the next and the next, sampling the buffet offering of colored lights; trying the red light, the blue light, the green light, the yellow light, the orange light, the violet light and even the white. It can be so tempting, the promise of something to warm your cold skin, the promise that death will no longer be able to look in on you and leer at you so.
You can leave her behind, outside the walls. You can be warm and full of the same stuffing the rest of the may hens and Christmas geese of civilization have been stuffed with. You too could be filled with the disease, the warm disease. No longer alone. No longer unique. No longer alive. One of an assorted variety of creatures fastened by steely pins to a white back drop, carefully labeled, preserved beneath the glass, made brilliant under the light.
It is so tempting. I know. I know.
We shiver and run barefoot through the blackness and ascend invisible mountains and tumble from great heights never knowing what we are doing, or where we are going, only doing it with style, somersaulting on wings the color of soiled doilies or whirring by in a drafty box car over the clickity, clack, clikcity, clack, or strolling by the glittering glass display windows without peering inside. It is so tempting because death has gone all mad, or always was and always will be and whispers all sorts of things through her broken teeth and the gaping black holes where they used to be.
She is always out here with us, hanging on our arms, or walking five paces behind, and sometimes she’s a gay old time, but sometimes she makes you shiver, or rather something in you switches around and makes you shiver, because people are hot and cold like that. Sometimes we are repelled by the real deal and sometimes we accept it, all depending on which of our masks is doing the driving just then. And when you are one of those “I's” that can’t stand her rancid breath and wailing cackle anymore, then you might start looking for the nearest well lit window, looking for a crack to slip in.
But then you might remember, Rome always falls, and when it does she will be waiting and feeling scorned, and you might even think for a moment how lonely she would be if you weren’t out here turning summersaults down her black cape. And you might remember that moths get trapped in brightly-lit kitchens and die under lampshades and behind curtains, having battered themselves to death against the confines of the oppressive walls of the labyrinthine city. You might think, as I sometimes do, that hobos are wiser than the moths, trying to get outside instead of in, and you might take a step backward, away from the open window or door, away from the light and the warmth and sickness of the living dead and not enter Rome with its comfort and delights.
Those things, they come with a price, so you see, you can sell yourself to Rome or give yourself to the wild, and one you do to escape the pain of living and the other you do for love, because mad as she is, death is your companion, your immortal beloved, and maybe you can help her to carry the burden of eternity and give her a shoulder to lean on in the wilderness.

Terror From Above

Once humans, now animals we scatter, like raindrops bursting on windshields. Our home is burning. The walls are falling. Death, the huntress, comes as terror from above, as fire and smoke, and the crack of shots fired. She comes from the sky with talons spread dropping blimp shaped bombs, funny little things like fat fish that lay the land flat. Our children are crying, our women can’t comfort them, our limbs are missing and the nurse patiently washes our wounds and, though she shines in her white robes like a priestess or an angel, she cannot save us from death, stepping over the corpses she has already laid to waste. She draws nearer and the nurse will step aside when she comes and let her claim her quarry. Then that little lady in white will close our eyes with her finger tips and draw a blanket over our head and hurry to the next soldier or civilian. Death does not care if you are a warrior, or a child, or a house pet. She comes behind Mars who makes his wars and, like a shark drawn to the scent of blood, she frenzies taking everything that crosses her path. The little flowers, the tiniest blades of grass, are burned to ash. The kings of the east and the kings of the west make the wars and we are spent like poker chips at the huntresses’ table. The war makes the king who wins. We, the subjects, must not be considered, only the greater good matters, the causes of freedom, or honor or might. The huntress would have come eventually. Maybe while I rocked on my porch, maybe as I lay sleeping with my wife in my arms, but she is here today answering the call of the War God’s bugle. She is here today, and I am not ready. Not ready to see my home burn before my eyes. Not ready to watch helplessly as my children suffer, as my wife looses all of her tears. I was not ready for the walls to fall today so that I would have to walk naked and alone into the wilderness of the unknown.
Once we were humans, now stardust, we scatter through the vacuum, drawn to the nearest stability, the first hope of home. She will find us again wherever we gather, and herd us into the wild places she holds so dear.

The Dreams of Monsters

What could I tell you if I could remember no dreams? I’d have no tongue to wiggity wag because I’d not remember this here fantasy where I dream of dreams forged from words. They say that it is most restful to sleep beneath three feet of ice nestled within two down sleeping bags with a wool cap clapped over your head and a little air hole dug through the snow, just snoozing away in the ice mother’s belly. They say that all the action of sleep happens during the REM cycle, all the Freudian fun that allows you to wake up and say,
“ I dreamed I drank a chocolate shake through a straw.”
But the psychologists and dream analysts know that what you were really dreaming about was fucking your father. You only remember it as drinking a chocolate shake because the brain makes things right for us when we wake up, makes it so that we can feel like a healthy drone and not some deranged maniac. There is however another cycle where the very deepest of sleep occurs and to catch these elusive z’s, they say that the best place is beneath snow or in a Turkish cave or on a whaling ship with no heat and just a thin blanket between you and the North Atlantic chill. So they say. They say that the dreamless sleep is the most restful, and who am I to disagree?
I have seen the light that burns in the darkness, the light from nowhere that burns behind closed eyelids and comes with the hum and buzz of the eternal. If you listen to it deeply you will evaporate completely, so you resist as often as you can, being identified with this dream of mortality, this dream of ATM machines and airplanes and dish washers and pop stars. But if you were to give in, to let go, then what would you be? Nothing you could talk about here, where if you told them that you saw great monsters of light shifting and changing shape in an electric light parade jungle to a music that needs no ears to pander to, well then, they would just say that you had been dreaming about fucking your mother. (And maybe that’s exactly what you would be doing.)
Or if you could tell of the time that you were a giant with purple gray tendrils rising from your crown and your body was interlocked with that mysterious other and you sang songs with the voice of a pipe organ, songs that turned purple and black and neon green and glowed through the infinite darkness, then wouldn’t they just say that it was a dream about replacing your mother so that you could be with your father?
But what, what if that was not the dream. What if that pipe organ song is the reality, the dream weaving machine, the stone dropped into a pond that makes all the little ripples that we think are the real world. What if having a mother and a father is only the dream of a mushroom headed God that comes from many and none and returns to many and none.
How could you remember this truth in the middle of dreaming that you must make it to work on time and your children must be picked up from school on time but a woman in the train station won’t help you with your ticket and you are stuck there for much longer than you would like? Is there any way to describe the translucent limb extending through space time that suddenly got crimped and caused this nightmare to be my life?
Me, a tiny pin drop of light. A partial opening in the eyelid of a titan who gently sleeps, twitching tortured through the rapid eye movement cycle of slumber, invisible limbs quaking, metropolises plunging into the sea, planets melting, civilizations crumbling, and new stars bursting into brightness to warm little clay marbles on a black tablecloth under which a wild black dog sits snarling, insisting you stay on the table spinning and rolling, for the truth of what you are is too monstrous, too mammoth to be explained to a little pin head of dream stuff like you. Your story, your life, your play on the stage of the Goliath mind will come to a close, and you cannot begin to understand what you are or what moves you, you can only be shoved across the board like a chess piece moved by a sparkling effervescent tentacle that wants to forget what it is and rest for a minute in your strange strife.
The grass is always greener on the other side.
The grass is always greener on the other side.
The grass is always greener on the other side…
So monsters dream of being human, and humans dream of fleeing or being monsters. If I were not a dream thing I could not speak these words, for the thing that sleeps has no tongue, no eyes, no ears, and wrestles with an eternity of stillness. I am made to do the things that it cannot do for itself. I am made to do the things it can only dream of.

Impermanence

How many days have passed that I have said nothing at all and let the opportunity slip away? Today I had the vision of snow melting on the branch of a conifer tree, the perfect visualization of impermanence, ice transforming slowly to water as it drips away. I thought of it in conjunction with falling, with forgetting, with taking two steps down one trail then loosing consciousness and taking up another and, with it, two steps in a new direction, over and over, so that I, like all my kindred, do nothing more than stomp in a confused circle.
I see it right now. I am a machine, a clockwork doll rotating around and around like one of those darling little wind up chicks that can manage to hop to the end of the table. The voyager is not like a passenger in a car, not like the cream filling inside of the Twinkie. The voyager at first is an observer. A person watching a movie, watching a little puppet show and becoming absorbed in the plot. Upon developing particular sympathy with a particular character, it soon finds that it has fallen into the play. It drips into the story like snow slipping off a branch, little, by little. The voyager forgets itself, becoming the puppet without noticing that a transference has occurred.
Etanna is nothing at all. She is a flea circus. A trap for an unsuspecting cosmic observer to become entangled in. It could be a good show if the observer remembers themselves and suddenly takes hold of the puppets strings and moves her around in accordance with the story line and in sympathy with the character while also remembering its true nature.
I can see a little withered old woman talking to me, the kind that makes me think of apples and gnarled forests and hand sewn dresses and curly hair. She was talking just now in the back of my mind and I could almost hear her voice although I could make out nothing of what she said, and when I noticed her, she evaporated. She was kindly. But that of course is how I remember her now. She was a dream I almost dreamt, except my pillow was missing and I was in the middle of saying something else.
Everything in me is rattling loose. Good things and bad things are welling up from within me within a matter of minutes. Forget what has gone unsaid for a day. There are things arising every minute to be lost again in the next and I am not quick enough yet to make anything of them.
While laying in bed or standing over the kitchen sink I experience Satori. During “enlightening time”, while I sit poised to type away and share whatever great vision makes me visionary, I go schizophrenic more than sage. I see shadows out of the corner of my eyes moving around. They move more than ever and without startling me in the least. They continue to move for a while after I’ve noticed and turned to look at them. That strange something that I saw out of the corner of my eye is still a strange something for a few moments while I regard it. I see it, but it fits into no category at all. I see this thing which is not anything as far as my brain is concerned and so, after regarding it and drawing a blank, it turns back into the shadow of a plant or even the plant itself. It doesn’t really have to be a shadow. It can be an actual object such as a stone or a shoe or a box or a chair which begins to crawl across the floor or otherwise move around and, when I look at it, it keeps going for a minute or two and doesn’t seem to be anything I know any name for, and then it goes back to being a stone or a shoe or a box or a chair or some thing which has a name and could plausibly be occupying the space that has arrested my attention.
I know. If you’re feeling friendly, you’re thinking. “Brain tumor.” And if you aren’t, you’re just thinking, “Cuckoo”. What if I did have a brain tumor though? Could you really say that it was the cause of the anomaly or couldn’t it equally be that the anomaly was the cause of the tumor? But that’s not what I really hoped to say. I think though, that telling you something was better than telling you nothing. How many days have passed that I have said nothing at all and let the opportunity slip away like melting snow? Lost days ripe with lost worlds diminished to fine vapor.
Today I did not have a vision.
Today the visions had me.

Death

We are immersed in a culture so afraid of dying that it’s only purpose is to live, at any cost, in any way that one can manage. And yet each one of us will die eventually, despite our best effort to outmaneuver death. In the end, we have not lived at all, we were always avoiding death and doing things based on whether or not they might lead to our demise or to bodily harm or to shame. We might long to see the step pyramids nestled in the pulsing wet bosom of Central America but choose not to take the trip because the politics of the region are unstable, there are scorpions and snakes in the jungle, there are thieves and murderers waiting for victims outside of the airport and the plane might crash before they can even get you. You might be sold into white slavery, your organs might be traded in the black market, you might be arrested due to a minor misunderstanding and rot away in a third world jail cell where you may contract a life threatening disease.
So, for all of these reasons, you do not do the thing that you long to do. Instead, you go to work and come home and pay your taxes and change the oil in your car and watch the movies that Netflix delivers to your mailbox, like some crawly thing creeping in the shadows hoping that the hungry crow won’t find you. But she will eventually, she always does, no matter how skillfully you avoid living, you can never avoid death.
One day you will go for your routine checkup and the doctor will tactfully announce that they have detected something abnormal and would like to run more tests and after more tests he will solemnly explain that you have cancer but might recover if you undergo chemotherapy. You’ll agree, clinging to the idea of complete remission, a full recovery, so the treatment will begin and it will make you feel sicker and your hair will fall out and you will have trouble paying your medical bills and, within three years, you’ll finally die with a bad taste in your mouth, hooked up to an IV in some hospital, leaving your family buried under a mountain of debt.
You will be dead without ever having seen those pyramids where kings and priests plucked beating hearts from warm bodies and held them out before the eyes of the mesmerized crowd below, before rolling the now cooling body down the steps and bringing out another hot screaming live one. You will not know what it is like to walk in the jungle listening to the monkeys scream and the insects hum and catch a glimpse of the vivid plumage of the quetzal bird before she flies away after the blue butterfly. You will not know what rich heart you sacrificed when you opted to stay safe and comfortable rather than embrace an experience of the real, will never receive the secret communication that was meant for you alone and might have been transmitted to your deepest being, coursing from the ancients stones into the soles of your hiking boots and up your legs until it bursts in your chest and washes over every cell of your brain like waves crashing over a breaker. You will die without understanding why you should have gone, without guessing why you should have spent your days under the hot brilliance of the glorious sun without fear of the hungry black bird that circles perpetually over head.
You will die without ever having lived.
Staying alive is not the purpose of life and death is a doorway which you will definitely cross.
In both life and death, keep your eyes wide open and place fear aside, like an old battered hat.

Process

They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal, or by way of letter or wires that burn when they touch each other and then they can transform themselves into things that they weren’t to begin with, but still they come toward me, they are unifying principles, pure mathematical equations which live and breathe and fuck and come back for more and they do it all in many different strange contexts, in chambers of nightmare, and chambers of light, and chambers of fullness and chambers of emptiness that stretch out beyond my sight.
They come to me and I take them in, I eat them and then I burn myself into them, we burn ourselves together and then we touch them some more, delicately letting their essence remain while stripping it of everything that came with it, and so we can see that feedback is a principle, not just a principle but the principle, the solid bed rock of our work, that has no name and claims no understanding, an activity without meaning in a world of pure and clear purpose, it is the feedback then that figures in our muddled science of ghostly cybernetics, we are pilots through a land of garbage, birds of carrion in a wasteland of dead cars. We are natural and we are industrial, they come and they are me, and I put myself into them and turn them into something other, they are the little bits of protein that we make into ourselves through elusive processes formed of other more basic processes, such as feedback, such as melting, such as fusion, such as analysis, such as dice rolling on a sunny day, such as confluence of events, such as random neurons firing when they shouldn’t and sprinkling their lightning semen all over the naked flesh of my inner cerebellum, procreating when they should be resting, fucking when they should be at peace. Leave them alone, that is what they do, and they will do it when they have to, not when you tell them to, and they won’t do what you say, what you say is just more food, and it filters through their shape and takes it into itself, much like them, for it is them, and what you say comes to me and I take it in, and sometimes it hurts me and sometimes it pleases me and sometimes I just bite into it and send it sliding down my esophagus like so much more food, eager to take on a new form, so feed me, beautiful, feed me what you have. If you want to set conditions, I will eat them. If you want to say what it was that you saw so many years ago, I will eat that as well. Feed me. My mouth is open and I am still hungry. I am as ravenous as I have ever been. My limbs shiver with the deep need to chew on your hot gifts.
At this time, and it is not guaranteed that this will last for more than a moment, and it is very likely that by the time you read this, this will no longer be true, and such is the nature of all messages, by the time they arrive they are already old news, and I can simply tell you that everything changes, and everything must change for it to be what I am right now, and what I am is a process, a conceptual scheme, an abstraction of the second level, a structure with holes and chambers, tubes and elevators, sliders and knobs, amplifiers and microphones, cameras and projectors, ovens and little plastic containers to store cold food. What I am right now cannot be easily handled and it can’t be clearly implemented, I am a few steps beyond my own understanding and so, any attempt at telling you what is happening is bound to be confusing or disruptive or simply a lie, and once I come to understand that, then I know that I must lie freely, for only in the free lies will I find the truth, and, having established this, I will tell you then that I am composed of:
A) An action, like running my hand over a woman’s back or slicing across a piece of meat with a razor sharp knife or licking at my lips or swinging from a tree or leaning back and exhaling loudly as my body adjusts to the comfort it’s been seeking after a long night of dancing in circles, and it is likely that it is the only dance possible, and if we see anything other than circles we are simply getting lost in the details, missing the vast circle of life for its individual iterations, circles upon circles, all dancing, and then we can say that all of these are circles, all actions step out and come back, in one way or another, the sliding of the hand over the woman’s back must eventually move up, back up to where it once rested on her cheek, and the razor sharp knife must eventually come back to its resting place in the drawers of a kitchen, here or elsewhere, and my tongue, as much as I enjoy its slimy surface running over my dry lips, it must eventually pull back into my mouth and I must let go of the branch and, as much as I enjoy laying here on this soft green carpet, in the darkness of a place so far away from anything I find familiar, still I must get up eventually, we have to go home, and home is where things start, and home is where they end, and so it is all indeed a circle, and so an action, a circle, and we see this circle as a sequence of constituting sub-actions, ever smaller circles, smaller and more refined, so tiny that they will escape even the most subtle description, for the woman’s back has as many hills and valleys as the most complex mountain range, and they are both monumental and they both must come to an end, for they are not home yet, they are in the middle of their vast circle, and as much as I enjoy being here, running my hand down this woman’s back, soon she will be gone, or I will be gone, or we both will go, and soon there will be nothing but dust where there was a vast smooth back and my hand itself will be a dank smelly memory of life turning into life, and that is indeed what I am then, a process through which death becomes life and then becomes death again. The states of the world through which we move in this circular dance of desire and laughter and tears are referred to as stages of the process, and so look around, and you will see all the stages before you, the stage of open mouthed admiration, the stage of intense dedication, when the eyes barely move and the hands vibrate with energy that had been previously hidden, then the moment of flowering, when things begin to come together and you see it all before you, yes, as if it had always been there, as if it could not be any other way, and then the moment of hardship, when it could definitely be some other way, indeed you wish that it was, and it seems that we are lost at sea and the ocean is just a vast land of grayness and sadness and clouds and rain and storms and hungry predators that long to tear you apart, and if you hold on long enough, if you resist the urge to give in to the pull of the darkness, then things finally do come together again, and your mouth opens wide, in a great surrender, and you say to yourself "I have finished… and now I will rest…" and that is when the green carpet feels so good against your back and you can actually hear your vertebrae crackling because you have danced so much and the work has taken all out of you and the air is pulsing with colors and you are so tired that you would love the silence, but there are still residues of what just happened within you, so you then talk, and what you say only makes sense in the moment, right in the moment and nowhere else, and if someone happens to be with you in that moment, then they may or may not understand you, because they may be with you and somewhere else, or they may be truly with you, it is very hard to tell, but you talk anyway, just in case, and what you say is like a shower of strange rainbows cloaked in the metallic shapes of language, and it sprays over the ceiling and the walls, but it leaves no residue, and finally you truly must rest and everything goes black and there is nothing, and the resting can go on for a long time, and then you must eat and drink and eat some more, that’s when they start coming at you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires and soon it is time to start all over again, as usual. This is all normal. Everything that you have just experienced is eminently normal, and it is painfully unique, and in that duality is the answer that you seek, but it is not an answer that I can tell you, not unless we dance together, and if we did dance together, then there would be nothing to tell. I am a process, and as a process, I am sequence of these stages and more, it is impossible to determine them all, I only have so many words and just a limited amount of food to go on. It is enough that you understand the little I can say and go on without me. It is an action which is a circle which is separated in stages which all lead you back home in the end.
What we speak of here may be confused with a kite, or the wind that moves the kite, or the little girl that holds the string of the kite, or the mother that stands beside her, contemplating the expanse of the sky and the ocean and the world itself and if we go any further then we will talk of concepts, and this is not what I wish to do, because concepts are only there in your imagination, in mine, in ours, and they lack the infinite mountain ranges of the woman’s back and they come crashing down to earth before you have even finished calling their name, demons that can’t hold themselves together, and as they fall they pull you down with them, their red skin pushes against your own and pulls you down, like a kite that is too heavy and then it falls, and the girl is not happy and the mother is not happy and the world is not happy, and so you will say "these are concepts" and I will have to admit that they are but try to say it softly, try to refrain from holding tightly onto them or we may both fall together, and then our tears will mingle and I might become what you are and you may become what I am, and maybe that would be for the best, because one day you leave your house thinking you’re going to paint a house and you end up filming a video in a strange little town full of witches and women that look away when you look at them and you talk of distant lands and you meet a beautiful brown woman in a room of shadows, and that is just what happens, things like these just happen, and for you, maybe, this is fine, because you are brave and strong and you fear nothing, but for others it might not be so good, and maybe then I will end up jumping over cliffs and hanging from vines over dark rain water, gasping for my life, and you will end up sitting in front of a computer typing away words that you can’t understand, all because we couldn’t hold our tears and we had to cry all over each other. In the end, this is what we must do, cry and laugh and fuck, I have to go deep inside you and feel the inner walls of your presence with the fleshy extension of mine and you have to open to me and suck in what I have to give you, take it in and cook it, and feed it and shape it and kiss it and lick it, and then, when you have put yourself into it, when it is ready and fully formed, then give it back to me through the doorway that I hold open for just such an occasion, open for you, only for you, you that are endless and everywhere, you that listen, you that never blink. This is in fact what we have to do, as scary and as slimy as it is, as drenched in sweat and smells and tiny errors, we have no other recourse, but let’s wait for the right moment, let’s wait until I can give you what I am and you can take it and put yourself into it, let’s wait for an ephemeral moment such as this, let’s not act in haste for the exchange has to be complete and if we halt in the wrong moment, we will have changed the whole process, and maybe home will no longer lie in the middle of a dark garden and instead it will be thousands of miles away, among people who speak strange languages and cover their skins with symbols they can barely understand, and when that happens, as it surely must, remember that you are still a process, such as I am, but only for this one moment, and when you remember, start all over again, and let them come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and put yourself into them, put your past and your future, your fantasies and your fears, your truths and your lies, and let it all slide right in there and make up something new, something new such as never has happened, and then let it go out, let it fly like a kite that is so perfect and so light that it will never come back down to earth and cut the cord and then keep on wandering, for the work will never end, and you are the work, and the process never ends, for you are the process, and the actions that you take go in circles and circles go on forever. These then that we talk of are the stages of the process and they may be seen as abstractions limited in space but that is only an illusion, an illusion caused by the process itself, don’t let it fool you, the head is the tail, the tail is the only head, and the body is only your life, and you will keep on going for as long as the body pulses, and the body will never end because it never started. Leave fear behind, leave all your suspicions at the door, and, for this one moment, this single moment that will soon come to an end, become a process with me and let me feed you, don’t believe that there is something in this food, something solid, something to hold onto, these are only stages, these are only mathematical abstractions, and the only thing real is what you make of it, right now, this very moment when your eyes flash across this strange page of blinking lights.
Yes, I must admit this to you, even though I am concerned for what you will do with this knowledge, for what your complex sequence of tubes will grasp and how it will divide it and how it will cut it into tiny pieces and what will it build with its component parts, I am concerned but I shouldn’t be, I am concerned but it is only my old demon trying to pull me down to the dusty ground covered in pebbles, yes, that one, the one next to the ocean where one day you were almost about to fly away with the little blue balloons and I had to hold you down, grabbing tightly onto your ankles, and if you remember it you will know that that day we didn’t want you to fly away, we didn’t want you to disappear among the clouds, but this was only temporary, for sooner or later you would have to go, sooner or later the clouds would be your home, and the balloons would be your only anchor, and that is what we must talk about now, even if the weighted elements of my structure hesitate at the doorway of this revelation. Yes, the process has definite initial and final stages. You will appear to begin, you will appear to move through a thousand different chambers, you will appear to be happy, you will appear to be sad, you will appear to be covered in sweat as you fuck through an afternoon of debauchery, you will appear to congeal into a ball of pain when the world comes down upon you like a big castle full of bricks and people screaming at you that you should stop, that this has been enough, that it is time to grow up, and it will do no good to tell them that you have indeed grown up, that you have grown into a different process and that is all that you could have asked for, that is all anyone could have asked from you, and they won’t ever be happy with you and so you will have to leave them behind, and your body will start failing, and the things you could once do will become progressively harder until they become impossible, and when they become impossible it will be time to just lie down on a big bed listening to the radio and old cassette tapes of your grandkids speaking gibberish and then you will remember the old days, the times that now seem so perfect through the filmy gauze of memory, and maybe you will smile and maybe you will cry and eventually you won’t be capable of either, and the last of your circular actions will seem like it lasts forever and you will say to yourself, why? Oh why? Why didn’t I live it all like this? All moments were so precious and they spilled through me like grains of sand when I rolled on the wet beach that one day, and that day was truly beautiful because it was ending and the sunset was just perfect, covered as it was in orange and purple and blue, and the wind was not too warm and not too cold, and your skin was so wet, covered in the salty water, and your eyes flashed like the lightning of a storm made of loving raindrops, and maybe if I had done that more often, or maybe if I had let them come to me, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, maybe if I had placed myself into them, maybe then I would not be here, or even if I was here, it would not be so bad, it would just be another eternal moment, no different from the rest, no different from any other moment that has ever been, that ever will be, because now, lying here in this strange bed, now I know that it is so, and it always was, and now I must go and leave it all behind, and I feel that I haven’t fulfilled my purpose, my work with my hands, my work with my chest, my work with my eyes, my work with my nails, my work with my hair, my work with my long fingers which I can’t even move now, and then it was all in vain, so much effort and all in the wrong direction, and such things you will say to yourself and they will echo within you like huge brass bells in an ancient cathedral and they will fill you tired body with dread and they will drive it all deeper into you, the truth or what seems to be dressed like it, specially when you overhear your son crying from the next room and you are not strong enough to say anything to him, and he will be so sad and you won’t be there to console him, at least not you as you have come to know you, but who was that in the first place, and did you really know it? Who were you back when you were you? And if you are not that any longer, then are you already gone?
Consider it all then an abstraction, an abstraction that occurs at the beginning and at the end, for now you are finally open, and now you can see, and now they come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and now you finally take them in completely, and now you can finally put yourself in them, this is your time, time has not ended, time is barely starting, and, let me tell you and let me say that I know it is confusing but there is no way around it, you are now at the initial stage and this initial stage is called the input, and as much as you may now fly through dark thoughts of nightmare, here is where you will feed, take it all in, open yourself wide and allow yourself to be fucked as deeply and as savagely as you always wanted, it will happen whether you want it or not, might as well enjoy it, let the pain and the pleasure become as one, and let that one experience shake you to the core of what you are no longer, and let the semen that is not you come into you, and form yourself in its image, for it is the one that is as much as you are, and together you will form the new process that is you, the new you that is the process, and as you find yourself in a world of falling stars and vibrant supernovas, don’t let fear overtake you, you are merely what you always were, the only difference is that now you see it clearly, and as you slide into a permanent shape, know that this initial stage is an abstraction from the final stage called output, you in your life, as a woman of great stature in a little country forgotten by God and the Lords of the Universe, as a little brown girl full of dreams and of great disappointments, as a boy who dreams of Egyptian tombs and heroes in white robes, you are the final stage of the process, you are the output of that fearsome moment, and if you hear me now, even for just this one moment, because you must understand, clearly and beyond doubt, this is truly the only moment that we have, and if you hear me now, you will then see, like me, for a fleeting moment, and nothing more, that this is the process, you are the process, we are the process, and it has always been so.
We can then speak of the process as transforming the input into the output and as such it is true, without forgetting that the inputs are outputs themselves, food that will come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and whatever you make of them, whatever you take in and how you heat it and shape it and pull it apart, it will be a process too, and it will go on to form what you were not, and it will do what you never imagined, it will become violence in that shape of red and black and it will be gentle love in greens and yellows and it will be savage desire in the invisible movements of blue and violet and it will grow beyond the reach of your vision, so as to be too big to hold, too small to envision, and you can never predict it, you can never know where it will go, and you can never control it, and you wouldn’t want to if you could, not really, although you might be fooled into thinking that you would, but this is something that will disappear along with the mountain ranges of your flesh. I am then the process that writes these words for you, and only for you, and you are then the process that reads them, and maybe thinks of the future and maybe thinks of the past, and maybe, just for a moment, it simply takes them in and accepts them as the semen that I give you to build your own output. Please know that I don’t know what you hear, that when you say body, I see a spaceship and when I say the doors, you think I am talking of rectangular wooden structures. So leave all thoughts of understanding behind and simply take me in. I come to you down the street, down the tubes, down the wires. I am with you now as much as I have ever been with you. There can be no obstacle, no condition, no request. I am with you always and I have never left. For I am the process that is the food of the process, and the process never rests.
Some notes before I finish and go back to lie down on the green carpet, which feels so good against my back after a night of wild dancing and demonic invocations, specially here in the darkness of this quiet room that seemed at times to be on fire, that seemed at times to be full of music that emerged from my fingers like ribbons of colored light, there are still some things I must tell you before we end, they are of no utmost importance, but then again what is? We will place the importance on the things we encounter, it is the food that we choose to eat, and as it runs over our mouths, it will be warm and delicious and it will be that most important thing of all, later to be forgotten, later to be remembered, later to be something else altogether and the importance will be as transitory as the thing we attached it to and you will then decide what is important, and when you do, you will give your heart to it, and I will press my heart against yours and I will kiss you and I will say "yes, this is it. Do it."
Here I give you a few morsels which may help digest what has come before. There are processes which have a definite initial stage, a moment of quiet when we all sit in a circle and decide what to do, when we all say what it is that we are trying to achieve and we set out to do so, in that moment maybe you lean against a white chair, maybe I walk around in a black shirt and black pants, or maybe you are naked and you sit on my lap, and my penis throbs inside of you, and as our presences become one, then we know that it has started, yes it has started, a new eternal circular action has come into being and it mustn’t stop, and it can’t, for it is now eternal, and it always was as much as it now is.
As such, I must tell you, a process may be infinite. What came before was always there, what came after was bound to happen, and the hills of her back will be different and the carpet may no longer be green and the sky may not be as blue as it once was, and there may be no kites flying, and the cool room of darkness where we danced for an age of unreason may now be an office of women in business suits looking desperately up at a clock, but the process will keep on going, because the beginning was an illusion caused by the process itself, and any end that you imagine is the same, just lights hitting mirrors and bouncing back to become more lights, nothing more, nothing less. Let the infinite wheels turn and don’t hold on too tightly, you’re not going anywhere, you have been here for so long that you have forgotten where you are, the birth is a death, the death is a birth, the moment of flashing lights is another opening, another flash of truth in the ocean of the Real. The illusions are as real as the rooms that stand behind them, and the things that you imagine back there, the tall black statues and the thick old books, and the secret prayers that will finally change the nature of existence, they all wait back there, and in them you will find the flower, the music, the sky and the bone, you will find me waiting, and, when I finally open my eyes to look at you, after waiting for a thousand ages of oblivion, then, with shimmering pupils and a trembling voice, I will say to you, "They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal…" And we will start all over. As we always have. As we always will.
Maybe you will say that this is nonsense, that there you sit and I am nowhere, that I am just a bunch of letters on a screen of flashing lights, and you will be right, absolutely right beyond question, and I will have nothing to answer, nothing to respond, for I will not be there, not as you want me to be, not as I wish that I could be, but I am here with you, in this moment, and if you can only come to me, I will give you everything, I will hold nothing back, I will fly into you like a bird of a million colors, sparkling with the metal in my talons, flowing with the rainbows in my wings, and you will then see that I am nothing, I was always nothing, and everything that you saw in me was you yourself, you are the bird, you are the screen, you are the story. And you will say to me that you can touch your body, you can touch the wall, you can touch the floor, you can touch the carpet, and this is real, above all else, what my hands can reach out and hold is what truly exists, and since it exists then it is condemned to being a thing, and in being a thing it will start and it will end, and such we all are, you that write these things for no reason, you that read them for the same, you that will never come near me, you that once were close and now are gone.
But on a smaller time scale, so small maybe that you will have to squint so tightly, tighter still, in order to reach into the depths of its smallness, let’s do it together now, what I am and what I am not, what you once were and what you soon will be, down there in the miniscule reaches of our farthest perception, we observe constancy with respect to some cognitive actions, we observe that indeed some things stay the same, for as much as we talk of Eternity and the endless recurrence of our Being, some things manage to remain, earth abides, and with it the sky and the walls and the hands and the eyes, and this simple observation gives us the reason to speak of it as an object, a recurring perception of solid nature, a thing, stuff, food, stone, rock, dust, fever, blame, thought, vision, dream. On a larger time scale, this is a process, these are all processes, and, from far up in the limits of the sky, in the realms beyond the atmosphere, beyond our memories, beyond our thoughts, we looked down for a moment, for we have only a moment, I can never say it too many times, and in this one moment we look down and we say that the object is changing, it is not the same as it was, it is not the same as it will be. And if this thing, this stuff, this food, this stone, this rock, this dust, this fever, this blame, this thought, this vision, this dream… if it is changing then it is a process, and if this is a process then you know that you can’t be otherwise, and if I am a process, and we are together, then we are a process together, and a process can never end. How long have we traveled together, how long have you written strange things to be read on a screen of blinking lights? How long have I sat down to read the strange products of your fevered mind? How long will we be apart? How long will we be together?
The process that is me enters the process that is you and allows you to enter in return and we become something that is as we were, a process, nothing less, nothing more, and we stare out into nothingness and wait for our food to come, and as our multiple input channels open, I point out there, to the vast beyond that stretches in all directions, and I tell you:
"They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal…"
Stay with me as it happens, for there is much for us to do. We have the work of a lifetime before us. And we only have a moment.

Good Morning

Good morning world, good morning sun, good morning song unsung. Do you hear it yet caught in my throat, the first cry of the day, the first scream of the new born infant just expelled from the mother’s womb and grasped in latex covered doctors hands? A shout of anguish, of excitement, an announcement of arrival. I have come world! Be prepared for what I bring. Though not even I can tell what it will be, I will make my contribution to the cosmic din and it starts with this note; "aaahhhh!"
Good morning carpet blue and houseplant green, drinking up the morning sun. Good morning squeaky faucet and ghostly telephone voices. I am ready, like a Scottish warrior painted robins egg blue and waiting on a windy hillside, I am ready to tumble into the fray, ready to roll like soap bubbles up out of the churning bath water, ready to dance on air like a Kung Fu master. I may fall or I may burst, but gravity and time will have to catch me first, and I have been made to run, like the prince with a thousand enemies. Behind every corner a trap lies hidden, a foe in wait licks at its sharp fangs and spreads its pointed claws, but I have been made hummingbird quick so that I may pass before the trap has been fully sprung.
So good morning foe, and good morning friend. Good morning eyes that might glean the difference between one and the other, round and blue and creased at the edges. A new day begins, a chapter in a story which starts with the lines: the day began like any other except that she couldn’t remember any other day and was stunned to find that she lived in a spacious apartment with steel bars over the windows and piles of recyclable bottles shifting and sliding around on the back porch. Her bed was like a cloud, or a birds nest suspended high above the carpeted floor. The ceiling as white as a frosted wedding cake spread out above her a mere 3 or 4 feet from the tip of her nose. Anyone awaking thus would well wonder how they came to be so close to the ceiling.
Peeking timidly over the edge, she found that it was in fact a loft bed with no ladder, so she sat amid the folds of lavender and blue sheets like Titania in her bed, waiting for the fairy maids to come and lower her down, but none came. Instead two small frightening creatures came roaring into the room and cried,
"What’s for breakfast?" They were children and they seemed to think that she was their mother so like baby birds they chirped, "We’re hungry. What is for breakfast?"
Like a dreamer she guessed what might come next in the dream and steered as best she could in a favorable direction by answering: "Cereal."
And like a dreamer, she willed the cereal to be there as the little creatures clambered away to open a refrigerator door and pull chairs around so that they groaned as they were dragged over the linoleum to be stood upon in order that the cereal, (which miraculously was there), could be reached. She gazed out the window between the bars and was delighted to see a small hummingbird hovering near the top wrung of the fire ladder hanging on the side of the building across the alley. This seemed to be a good omen.
"Good morning bird." She said, and then after finding a way down the loft, "Good morning children." , and after looking around, "Good Morning world, and sun, and song unsung."