Old Words, New Words

Old words, new words, like black birds and white birds whirling in the gray of a cloudy muted sky.
Black birds, assaulted by rain, tremble and struggle while the white birds whirl, unperturbed by wind and water.
They are from the sea and are turbulent in their own nature, these elements cannot surprise them. They are beyond surprise and awe, twirling in a wind swept horde above the glistening dripping world, elegant white birds, storm frenzied white birds, sky slicing white birds.
The black bird has found sanctuary somewhere in the eves of a house. Usually such a big strong bird, it has frightened me to see him wobble across the sky. Even knowing that he is now safe, I feel pained imagining the moment when the storm first caught him.
What was he doing when wind and water decided to throw birds across clouds? I feel frightened, even though he is now safe, even though I was today safe.
I feel fear knowing that chance will leave me to a storm one day, that everyday that I breath cannot be a safe day. And what will I be doing when forces greater than my self grab me up?
Surely no one is immune. No beast that walks, flies, swims, wriggles, or crawls can count itself safe forever.
Old words, new words, neither come quickly enough.

Barbarians Are Coming

The end of the world came and went and nothing perceptible changed. We stood around rubbing our eyes and blinking on a bright winter morning a week later asking each other how our end of the world was.
Josh, the honey guy as I thought of him, was wearing a pair of blue gloves with detachable mitten tips. These little caps were peeled back so he could work his digits and in each fist he held a jar of honey, a silent offer of trade. I told him how Lydia, who worked for the Bavarian Bakery, and I made music and danced with a church of ravers in a building like an old castle in Oakland. He nodded and told me that he attended three different solstice ceremonies in San Francisco, the last occurring at a beach in the Sunset district. My turn to nod.

We had all been here a week ago, a day after the twenty first, while a rainstorm raged all around us. As far as we could tell, that was the sum of the apocalypse, a cold heavy rain and a wind that threw canopies over backwards and tore their aluminum legs in half like a starving yeti mangling some black eyed Bhutanese doe.
We all huddled in our individual camps, by cars or trucks, and waved to each other through the tempest but couldn’t speak. Inside the back of a big white Cargo truck I was standing huddled with Sing and Backtaur by the portable tandori. We had hooked this and the steam table up to a propane tank  right inside the truck's cargo hold. Whenever some brave soul skittered across the parking lot under an umbrella I shouted:
“Samosas! One dollar!”
Often my shout drew them to us like a lighthouse beacon and they shivered below us, faces peering up over the mammoth truck's tail gate awaiting a cup of hot chai and some steaming curry.
In the moments when the storm was most violent we felt it battering the truck and fairly cringed looking at each other with wide eyes of amazement. Then Sing would laugh his pure, rich laughter and I would murmur:
“What a wind!”

Now and then the storm would tire itself out and be still. Then the birds came out and somehow found Sing, who always remembers to share the bounty of India Gourmet with the littlest market patrons. He threw his customary handfuls of basmati rice seasoned with cardamom pods to them. More birds than I had ever seen at the market came to the feast,  multicolored varieties; black with red wings, black with beady yellow eyes, tiny brown and black sparrows, larger brown speckled specimens with long yellow beaks,  lumbering midnight hued crows, side by side in a temporary truce, all gobbling up the offer with urgency.

“They are hungry.” Sing boomed with his deep musical voice, “They can’t get their breakfast in the storm.” He threw them more and more rice, a tall man with a jolly belly, a white beard, red turban, and big glittering brown eyes, a Sikh Santa of the birds.

So it rained, but the world was still there a few days later when the clouds blew away and we could come out and check.  We were disappointed, let's not dance around this point, we Americans born in America. We clearly wanted something to happen, probably different things depending upon each person's particular background. Flying saucers full of Mayans, or Jesus with laser eyes, or a spontaneous psychedelic awakening to free us from our petty and deeply artificial consumer culture.
We wanted to stare the grim reaper in the eyes in a way that was never possible in a society where children are told to close their eyes and step over the bodies of their massacred peers, where we are only permitted to see death once it has been washed and painted and put in a box lined with satin, where we are assured that our nation is the mightiest and will never fall so that what we really fear is an unbroken and monotonous horizon whereupon we will never see the outlines of approaching barbarians.

We hoped for a reprieve from the unending sameness and safety and guilt inducing comfort and might. We longed for something real.

I  think that secretly many of us held on to hope until New Year's Day. We let ourselves get excited again on the eve of December 30, fingers crossed for the twins, death and rebirth. Then we woke up and the sun was still shining. Is still shining.
But Americans will never give up. Even our elders were running like lemmings towards our artificially imposed fiscal cliff, seeking to plunge ourselves and the world into an economic down spiral, only turning back at the last possible moment.
Many others will no doubt arrive in public buildings with semiautomatic rifles in the coming months. We are a suicidal nation. It would be too difficult to admit that we are sick  and make changes. Much easier to set the world on fire so that we will never have to admit our shortcomings.

Or maybe change is here, fast and invisible, in the embracing of the artificial. Maybe we are saying goodbye to our earthy roots and our old social and moral codes as we somersault blindly into the heart of our techno creations without regret.
Our children will be the future, not our flesh and blood offspring, but our spawn  of micro chips and liquid crystal. The change may be here and we are simply blind to it as a mother is blind to the inch by inch growth of a tot she sees every day. Each morning it appears to be the same child and yet it is transforming right under mother's nose. In 20 years mother will be obsolete, all that the child needs of her it carries already within itself, in the software and hardware she provided. The child will spread its wings and fly and mother will be both a cast off shell and a voice within.

A death and a rebirth. All that we hoped for but dared not admit to ourselves. The other from within, the ultimate barbarian on the horizon.

Direct Experience

Terrible questions looming just beneath a thin layer of bone and flesh. Tiny capillaries doing their best, a silent symphony of flowing red life pulsing beneath the surface. Terrible questions looming.
If I am not what I think I am, then what am I?
Antero Alli mentions that the awakened human brain is the alien and that those whose brains have awakened are the aliens among us and can be recognized by the light in their eyes.
He says Timothy Leary said this, and his host becomes stricken, turns ashy and stammers: "I've never heard that."
Ali laughs, "This was in a private conversation."
Ha ha. The man who has read all the books quivers when he meets a man with a direct experience of a third man whom the first man with all the books has only read about, but feels he knows.
Can't follow that? Am I being confusing or are you being dull?
Trick question. The answer is both.
Terrible questions looming, questions worse than these. An uncomfortable feeling that can almost be drowned by television and social networks and booze and parties and romance and cinema and literature.
Will it make a good comic book? Will it be a three part television miniseries?  Can we sell it? Does the second man have any idea what the first man is talking about when he says direct experience?
Ashy complexion. Uncomfortable voice.
Now things have gone too far if we are talking about aliens and the light in their eyes. LSD, ok, secret oral traditions, ok, aliens with light in their eyes, no! No! No! He's gone too far. How dare he?
We are only interested in reality here, which we have a clear understanding of thanks to the books written by others claiming something called direct experience.
Fuck it man, are you really still reading this?
What I am trying to tell you is that you should eat something from outer space that just might help you access a little inner space.
I tell her that mushroom spores could have been carried to this planet on comets.
"Are mushrooms really from outer space?"
Everything on this planet is from outer space baby.
"Yeah some scientists think that water was first introduced to this planet by comets. Bacteria too."
That's right baby, we are all stardust.
"The alien doesn't necessarily come from outer space, contact is made in inner space, and why not? We ARE the alien."
No! No! No! We've gone too far.
Terrible questions looming. Shaking the foundation of what we know. But brother there is a serious difference between gnosis and what you think you know now that you've read all those damned books and posted those comments about the video online.
God, if you're still reading this it must be because you don't know where to find the mushrooms.
Listen, listen, you should try printing this out and eating it. Right now.
At this moment you're just reading some shit somebody else wanted to say about what some other people said.
You should eat this. Go ahead. Take a bite. Chew. Swallow.
That's a direct experience.

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.

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.

Fear In The Desert

There is water in the desert of despair, dirty mucky water, just enough of it to make leaving look harder than staying.
You see that water warming under the merciless sun and you tell yourself that one place is as good as another, that someday your dreams will come true, but until then you can rest here.
You may huddle under the shade of a Texas umbrella tree dropping poisonous gold berries into the powdery dust that covers its roots while you wait for your ship to come in.
Waiting, a broken robot that knows that it is damaged but can’t see that the damage prevents it from making the choices that might lead to repairs.
Your brokenness informs your decision to remain in the desert. It demands that you wait for a ship. A ship in the desert. You watch videos of rolling waves crashing upon distant shores and you wait for it to come in.
You are actually afraid of a positive outcome.
You are afraid that the world will not come crashing to an end within a year, that the government isn’t plotting against its citizens, that there are no sinister forces at work around you.
You are afraid of discovering a paradise beyond the desert, you are afraid of discovering that you could make repairs to your damaged operating system if you were willing to confront your self by acknowledging that you are the only one who can make the decision to leave the desert.
You fear the terrible responsibility.

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.

Insect Love

We should get together baby, me and you, a simmering puddle of primordial soup. That’s right, that’s right, the poetry is in the flesh.
Remember when we used to be separate? Two things, out there somewhere searching for a connection. For a bridge to span the gap between me and you.
And suddenly there is no other, the other is inside of me, I am the other, I am only myself. Forget history, forget everything that came before, there is only this moment, this pearly now that we hold cupped between the us that is I.
Once upon a time, once upon a time baby, you were a fly and I was a man and you were the fly in my ointment, the terrible jealousy that urged me to leap into eternity via a designer telephone booth. Then I was the ointment and you were the fly and then I was the fly and you were the ointment and soon we were flointment forged in the fire.
'Cause things heat up and come apart melt together in unpredictable ways and there is just no telling exactly what we will be or even what we are. We can keep looking, analyzing the flointment and there will always be new layers to discover and further options for new combinations arising out of new discoveries of self and the unfolding of space time.
There is always another other to discover, another relic to leave behind the mirror, another barrier to shatter. It’s penetration beyond the flesh that you most fear, moving onward into the very fabric of existence. It’s reaching even deeper into the self than has been approved of by the food and drug administration and that is monstrous isn’t it dear? Monster which shares letters with Mother which shares letters with other.
Do you really think so much of  poor vanilla Eve and her bounteous womb producing cookie cutter replicas of herself? What about Lillith and her experiments in the caves?
How brave to reach so deep, into such unpredictable chaos and pull from yourself a titan. Villainous, vile, evil, live.
Were you ever a fly that dreamed it was a man? Were you baby? A fly that dreamed it was a man but found that the dream had ended and the insect was awake?
Have you ever heard of insect politics baby? NO. Because insects be who they be, seeking to go on and on, diving into transformations which are the end of one creation and the beginning of another, unhesitatingly accepting annihilation of the individual in favor of unity.
Insect yoga. Death and resurrection. Jesus Flies.
We should get together baby, me and you in an  uncompromising uprising of insect love. Two or more things out there somewhere searching for a connection, for a bridge to close the distance between points “A” and  “B” and  “F”.
Dear Eve, I bet you thought you taught me the secrets of the flesh, didn’t you? But no, it was the fly in the ointment. An appointment with Flointment. An event horizon. An awakening incomprehensible to a sleeper.
That’s right, that’s right baby. Forget when we used to be separate. That was just a dream, just a dream. Now the insect has been resurrected.

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.

Love Letter

So I sit on the train, glaringly aware of their ignorance. How can they know what is happening under my skull? In my veins and along the branching network of my nervous system, demons are howling and stomping out a rhythm to accompany the dark rite that is happening in plain view, this orgy of fingers on slick paper and eyes opened wide. I see the skulls and insects and organic eruptions of form in stark black and white, and I am home.
The dragon fly. I would find one dying on my porch later, and after going inside to uncover the details of its life cycle I would determine that there was nothing I could do to help restore it to the so called land of the living. Having ruled out any other option, I would sit with it, gazing into its bulbous eyes, experiencing through empathy the alien beauty of its consciousness and I would sing a whining high pitched song in its honor. I would sit with it until it died, and then I’d put its remains on a shelf in the garage. That shelf would already have a far out collage made from National Geographic clippings and a white candle waiting for this final element to come and rest with them, encircled by purple daisies picked from a shrub in the backyard. In short I would enshrine the remains of this voyager that laid himself down on my front stair. I would piggy back on its continued cycle of occult transformation.
I had learned that large dragon flies begin their lives as something called a nymph, living hidden from our eyes in the bottoms of ponds and lakes for as long as five years before becoming those things called dragon flies. The part of their existence with which we humans are most familiar with is the briefest segment of their lives. It transpires in a flash. They are only dragon flies for a matter of a few months before they lay down and wait for some mysterious part of themselves to move once again into a world of which we humans are ignorant. I would learn all of this for myself when I would find the dragonfly on my porch, but that is a month away from now, a moment existing in a future whose shape is eclipsed by the present.
I am now only looking at a black and white image of a dragon fly printed on the pages of this thing I hold in my hands. I feel the blood in my veins dancing like witches at a Sabbath and I look at the stupefied faces of my fellow passengers frozen in attitudes of boredom, fatigue, and apathy. I look at the silly putty color of their skin and their crisp gray suits or bright red lipsticks and am amazed that they are so distant from this space that I occupy; a universe born of the lusty unification of my twisted mind and this thing in my hands. We are so physically close, breathing the same stale air of this rocking train car, smelling each others’ chemical front, the colognes, perfumes, and body sprays we doused ourselves in to disguise our animal odors, yet the distance between us is impossible to bridge because it has not been noticed. They must see another putty colored mannequin sitting here turning the pages of a magazine. They cannot see the elysian ritual transpiring within this fleshy temple, cannot wittiness with their glassy eyes the terrible magick being worked in neurons and sinews, all catalyzed by my contact with this thing. A transformation initiated by this unholy relic whose radiation is causing a mutation, augmenting elements of my self that needed only the tiniest push to come into full bloom.
Advertisements streak by the tinted rectangles of glass and a steady clack, clack, imposes itself upon my ears. The realization that something will come of this is as bright as transparent wings catching sunlight reflected off water, but what that will be is unknown. That is the terrible risk inherent in change. What I am cannot dream of what I will become, it is too deeply other. All that I can do is sit here, feeling my heart thump, feeling my spirit swell out beyond the confines of this body, this train car, beyond anything recognizable. I feel something invisible growing, like antenna reaching out from me to dip into darkest waters. I feel this and I watch the man in the seat ahead of me maintain his perfectly subdued expression as if he were afraid to alter it in any way. Clutching this thing in my hands, looking around at the other passengers, aware of the growing chasm between us, I ride the train, and flip through the pages and wait for the shapes of things to emerge.

Inch By Inch

Like a thousand beetles crawling out of the decimated corpse of the Pharaoh, my ideas spill from my cracked head to rejoin the blackness outside. What was in is now out, rejoining the abyss, the cave-like halls of nowhere, my mother’s ancient cold womb. When the stars tumbled out dancing like sparks hissing off the arch of a welding torch, that was my beginning too.
Just as a dragonfly was once a nymph that spent five rotations of the earth around the sun hunting in the deep aquamarine waters of the lagoon before becoming a winged predator that would live less than a month, my larval stage too was much longer than this phase of existence will be.
In my infancy, I was a star burning and swirling, drawing everything to myself, a different sort of predator of the deep, waiting to gain the strength and size necessary for my transformation, my moment to super nova and spread star seed through the curving darkness of the womb space, waiting for that seed to impregnate the terrestrial egg where, warmed by a foster solar entity, it would grow into the newest me, the me that here sits breathing oxygen and expelling carbon monoxide.
I have not yet reached completion, if such a thing exists, as I am still housed safely within the world’s shell, incubating, waiting for the next moment of acceleration to crack the cocoon with wings unfurled. If the egg does not crack then the chick will die before it is born… so I let it bleed out into the abyss…all my animal hopes for preservation.
I was not always as I am now, I will not always be as I was a moment ago, that moment which lapsed, folding in on itself in quiet surrender to the ever flowing passage of time, of thought, a victim of an organizational system that is void of life, a mere mechanical apparatus for processing eternity, a factory for turning darkness into light, a star making machine that I have sometimes thought was myself, but is in reality only one function of self.
Deep self is nestled at the hub of the voyager called eternity, extending its tentacles in every direction, a living pulsing organism moving the blood of being through its veins. This lifetime, a fragment of the life cycle of a star is only a small side effect of the functioning of this vast entity. A little thing like white blood cells gathering around some infected tissue, a thing which happens within the body of a man without the man ever noticing unless the white blood cells fail in their mission and he grows ill and dies.
So this great play unfolds within the body of a titan that has considered us occasionally, but has never called us the crown of creation. This being in turn does what it can with the probabilities that dictate its nature.
I am dreaming. This was all a dream, this black blood spilling from my head into the darkness outside. A dream, the whole warm safe sphere before the ship’s hull was breached, that too was a dream. A dream that I danced like a prince among my whirling peers, glowing hungry for life and death.
Life and death. Motion. The crawling of a worm, inching its way through an unknowable matrix. Inch, Life, Inch, death, inch by life by death by inch, making its way, never knowing where or why, always going.
Would I un-dream any dream I ever dreamed knowing the fount would never grow dry? Knowing each one was an inch by inch by inch motion. No, I wouldn’t erase my nightmares nor my dreams seeing that they were just a motion like a dancer’s arm sweeping gracefully over her head, or her spasmodic jumping.
I let the beetles go their way, go wherever they can find a crack, a crevice, a hole to exploit. I let everything go to sway like the flora clinging to the inner wall of the small intestines.
I cannot know you, great titan, if I hold on, hide within my shell like a crustacean. I will know you as the river knows the sea, one body flowing into the other, waters exchanged.
Like a thousand beetles crawling out of the decimated corpse of a Pharaoh, my ideas spill from my cracked head to rejoin the blackness outside. What was in, now rushes out, what was out now rushes in. A new phase of existence. A train wreck., most beautiful, sublime, bodies spilled along the rails to ooze nutrients into the soil where the newest me will grow.
I was not always as I am now, I will not always be as I was a moment ago. Like a dragonfly, like a star, living through dying, the pure motion of existence. Inch by inch by inch I am made new, again and again.

In Between

Something stuck in between worlds is lurking in the halls of dream. Something shapeless that takes shape, whatever shape is handy. Something that has been waiting through the abysmal lurching of time, growing colder and lonelier, now reaches out a twisted hand to grasp at something other than itself. Something warm to cling to. Something warm to crawl through, to devour slowly from the inside. A new shape to take with the force of Princes and warriors and beasts of the wild, those things beyond morality, those
things which take what they need without asking, without hesitation or remorse. Something that glides between the waking and the dreaming moment, a silent thief, a beggar, a suitor, a seducer. It offers you the cold run of eternity in exchange for the hot fleeting passion of a moment. “Let me have your moment.”, it begs, “And I will give you forever.” The stillness, the quiet, the darkness of eternity, for a glaring flash of heat and movement, a wild cacophonous dance through the temporary. If you take that twisted hand, if you take your place as one of death’s concubines, one of those many shapes it penetrates for a moment and is then left as cold and wanting of heat as ever, you join in that torpid waiting, the waiting of the spider for the next wriggling thing that may pass your way. You, now the something in between. You, now the emptiness. You, now the loneliness, the cold. You waiting through the abysmal lurching of time, waiting for some hot live other to submit to your ravenous kiss. Longing to inhabit that ephemeral world of the dream which melts under your caress like vapors of steam blown away by a wind. When you touch it, it becomes as you are, real, emptiness, vast and cold. Still you cannot be without it, you, neither wholly of one state or another, are doomed to lurk in the mist, taking whatever shape is available at the time. Seeking heat, seeking movement, seeking that which you lack, wriggling your way slowly, one conquest after another, through the world of shape, color and form like a worm through an apple. You cannot touch the mists without changing them, you cannot be without that touching, that taking. An eater of dreams, an eater of life, a shape shifting something making its way desperately through the myriad of forms as the infant wriggles through the birth canal, or the soldier over the charred and blood soaked battlefield. You will take what you need. That is the only law. You will be whatever you have become. You will struggle to exist and you will change shapes as necessary. You will be forever longing, forever reaching, forever struggling.

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.

Ruler Of The Kingdom

When first they gave me the poison I was told that I must be careful and do certain things so that it would take hold. I call it a poison for I can presently think of no better description, although it is more like semen than poison. But semen is after all a type of poison, a thing which comes in and causes change, causes the death of the young woman and the birth of the new babe and mother. This that they gave me was like semen, filled with new hidden life, a type of life which I, as I then was, could not even fully comprehend. Like a person asked to take a mysterious package to an unknown house, I cannot know whether the package delivered means life or death. Certainly it delivers both, but whether it is for the benefit or detriment of your cause all depends on which side you’re rooting for, mobsters or coppers, guerillas or soldiers. Some, like myself, agree to carry the package not because we are partial to one side or another, but rather because the dangerous opportunity has at last been either ferreted out or stumbled upon, and the chance that it could mean death for the courier is promising. I did not care to be what I had been anymore. I did not care if I lived or died. No, that is not true, I preferred to die if possible. Suicide would be the choice of a more reasonable person, but I have never been reasonable. I had decided that suicide was for the weak and I wanted to be strong, strong or dead, and there is only one way to meet one or the other of these two fates. One must jump into the fray. So that is what I did.
It was described to me in a variety of ways with the usage of a variety of terms. They called it a lineage, they called it a way. There was talk about the transfer and transformation of substances. At times I thought it was like being sprinkled with pixie dust, it was a mystical something which might effect a change upon me. Most other times I simply understood that IT, rather than I, was the most important part of the equation. Yes, there were times that I understood that, in theory, I was a host for something. A host just as the mother is host for the human embryo as it grows within her, for it is a fact that throughout a pregnancy the developing fetus functions as a parasite within the mother’s body and it is by a clever and necessary internal trick that our body is swayed into harboring this guest. I understood this theoretically, philosophically. I was comfortable with this "idea".
And then I changed handlers, went away to another master. At that time, the talking stopped. The idea was forgotten. I was given things to do and I did them. I stopped thinking about the transference of substances. I was kept busy doing things which would seem to an outside observer to be perfectly ordinary things to do. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, I walk. I write silly nonsense stories. I make love to my handler. I cook and clean for my handler. I make love to my handler. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, and I walk. Perfectly ordinary things to do. I did them, and I did them as instructed. Time passed. I felt differences in my appetite; in my appetite for company and music and movies and books and yes, even foods. I noticed these changes, and I even imagined that these were signs of success, but silly me, I didn’t think to make any predictions with regards to what such signs might foretell. Perhaps it is not so strange that I did not wonder or guess at what might lie ahead. Very few animals do truly posses the ability to foresee what effect they may be causing in the present moment. For example, many dogs will run into the street to bite a tire without expecting to die or cause an accident, and teenage girls fuck as they please and are shocked to find themselves impregnated.
I did as I was instructed to the best of my ability and shifted little by little into being something other than that which I had been. I did not understand that this difference in me was just the beginning, a preparatory phase.
One day I felt uncommonly sleepy. I lay down to nap and began to dream of mating with the Bistea Neptunis, which looked to me a bit like one imagines Poseidon, bearded and muscular with a beastly fin. It was not how it looked so much as how it felt that seemed monstrous. Its presence was alien. I was suspended in the water above this creature and my heart was wide open and golden love seeped from my heart into its own heart and with its tail, it fanned that same love back to me, it spewed from its genitals into the water which carried it into my tingling vagina. It all felt so good. Then I was abruptly awakened by some heated quarreling taking place in the room adjacent to mine. My head began to hurt very badly. It hurt for three days, and, by the third day, my stomach also hurt immensely.
In the afternoon of that third day, the pain was unbearable and I laid down upon my handlers bed with my hands folded upon my chest. I was alone in the room. I felt myself shifting and moving out of my body, reaching with many waving tentacles from my center. The pain in my body seemed to be a disturbance caused by the discord inherent in having this subtle many tentacled thing within me rubbing and moving about within a body that is the wrong shape. We were both very uncomfortable, myself and my alien occupant. I decided that it was a sort of growing pain shared between us. Something would eventually give, my invisible body would stretch to accommodate it or it might slowly devour that body and take its place. I could not, of course, be certain.
My handler was unconcerned by these developments. His only instruction to me was this: "Stay calm."
That was when I knew that the time had come for me to be careful and do what was necessary to ensure that this delicate bloom of the netherworld would take hold within me. This is what I had agreed to do, whether I had understood that in the beginning or not.
Somewhere along the way I became the whore of Babylon. Somewhere along the way I had picked up a package and now I walk with it, unsure of whether I will survive this little voyage, not knowing what impact its delivery might have. I look to the outside observer as if I am running an ordinary errand. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, and I walk some more. Ripe with poison and rocked with shock, I do the little things I have learned to do in order to nurture the life hidden inside of me. They have become habit, so that as this new thing eats away at the old and eventually replaces it, it will already be accustomed to walking upright, to snapping its fingers, and scratching it’s head, to making love and writing silly stories, and no one will even know when it was that I died and it took my place as ruler of the kingdom.

Desert

I am in a desert.

The wind rushes around carrying everything from me. Every grain of sand leaps into flight to leave me behind, so thirsty. Once I was a magician. I commanded the forms of things by manipulating their essence, the data riding in the invisible blood of the manifested. Like a child, hands immersed in paint, I moved what flowed, what already yearned to move, directing it, commanding it with the attention of a lucid dreamer:

Go forth from me now!

Like an electrode touching down upon a color spattered pane of glass, I commanded:

Go Forth!

Did I make the shapes that the minds of men desire to see? No! But they could see what they wanted in the shapes I wrought. They stole my worlds away from me. No matter… let them have them! More will come. Ah Zing! Zah. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…
I should have known better what fate awaits the magician. Have I not seen them? Sitting by garbage cans, coddling books of geometry, sketching unsatisfying graphite drawings, begging for change, sleeping in bushes, screaming at no one. I have seen myself, and still I bend the waters of life in devious directions, turning the holy cross on its head, rending the render. I will not stop, though I am warned.

I see myself in the desert, a ruptured vessel that can hold no more water. I am a desert. All that I had become, blown away when the vessel shattered. And yes, the desert is eternal. There is no end to my time of cracked heart and blown mind, a parched husk of life, of isolation, loss, and exile.
It is forever, like every moment.
It is forever and never.
I am there, a broken machine, a failed experiment, a tear spilled onto sun scorched earth, a soundless scream. Every desert was once an ocean from which life sprang, once wet and rich with the invisible blood, until something which boiled deep within the earth’s core, hot and volatile caused a rupture upon the surface. Each moment is the death of one thing and the birth of another. When the ocean died the desert was born.
The moment in which I am the magician touches the moment in which I am the mad. Beginning and end; distinct and yet knit one to the other like the heads of the Ouroboros. When the many were sacrificed, the one was born, the demon Azazel. Azazel, assassin of multiplicity, forever bearing the pain of the singular.
Beware these teeth of mine which bite at everything that seems other than me. Like any trapped animal, a demon is made fierce by its agony. A thing which does not want to be and yet cannot cease to be, even having devoured all those things which were its mirrors.
The only escape from the desert of singularity is death absolute. The one must be sacrificed so that the many will rise up again, a flood of possibility. A deluge in which a magician can spring into action once more. A deluge fed upon the blood spilled from a demon.

I am in a sea.

A tempest rages, carrying everything to me. Every drop of water finds another and another so that they congregate as ferocious waves which I may command:

"Go forth! Go forth from me now and change the face of creation!"