Avocado

Magick is real. Once I put fifty cents into a sticker machine and received the first recognizable piece of wisdom and spiritual direction the universe would offer me. It was a sticker with a unicorn's head on it and the following words:

"Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.
That is all ye know in life.
That is al ye need to know in life."

That same week I was visited by an apparition of beauty. Looking out the front window I beheld a party of four or five riders atop healthy horses cantering down the asphalt street. I cried out excitedly to my mother and watched them until they passed from my line of sight.
Later in the afternoon, when I went outside to play, I found a leather key chain with a horse's head painted on it. I felt I had been given a gift from God, or the horses, or God as a herd of tame horses.
It was the first instance of the materialization of a magickal substance that I can recall experiencing.

There was another incident which pointed to the weird, wild, tangled nature of reality.
I obtained a toy unicorn from a grocery store toy aisle. It was not pretty, but fierce with red eyes, flared red nostrils, a masculine build, and neon yellow bleeding over the white. One leg was held crooked up.
I examined this unicorn for hours, turning it over and back again, wondering at the unchangeable nature of its plastic form, observing that no mater how I turned it, the same leg would always hold that position. I wished that it would change and set it beneath a dinning room chair.
When I returned some hours later the front legs had reversed position. Following this occurrence I was too terrified to ever play with the unicorn again.

Related in my mind is a day years later when the word avocado caught in my head like a mantra. I could not tell if it was a real word or a series of unintelligible vowels and consonants.
Did it in any way connect to the green fruit? What was that fruit called? What was this sound, "avocado?" What did it mean?
The sound carried me far away from my self, from sense, from understanding, into the indistinguishable noise of all.

These are the early experiences of a black sorceress.

The People Under The Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

Umbrella

An ordered disorderliness; that’s what it makes me think of, that story. The umbrella, dark blue, an inexpensive model, curved plastic handle, had much history. I had left it once in a man’s car. Face white and soft like dough. Old, long silver braid, drowning in nostalgia for a time that almost was, his voice etching out from the perpetual grief of his people, transformed into a blade of flaccid hope. Correct. He trembled once before Alan Ginsberg. I left the umbrella in his car, leaping out against raindrops to tumble down my familiar rabbit hole. A train station, yes. He returned it on a rainy night a week later.
Degrees of separation? None. All of the characters are the same character. I am Alan Ginsberg. An ordered disorderliness.

It was not my umbrella. Like a cat, it lived a secret life before it came to me for comfort. If you feed them, umbrellas come back. They are practical, opportunistic, but not loyal. Yet, as mentioned, they sometimes come back. I was given a small maroon car. Clown car chugging up mountainous road, sea swelling to my right. Pop! Pop! Fizz, fizz. No, no relief, instead a sad play called “Death Of  A Clown Car.” But in her death throes I wrestled a delicate life from her womb, stick-like, melancholic in hue, but certainly the last and best she had to give the world.

What do they eat? Oh, tears, of course. Yours, or Gods, whoever breaks first.

The woman, a political refugee. Black hair, streaks of silver, crimson lips. Artist, professor, maimed architect, aristocrat, poet, latina, communista, intelligentsia, dilettante, withering well over her strange fruit. She held it in her gloved hand, hurrying through storms. From holy names to that car. That car.

What is it with you and doomed idealists? Don’t you like accountants? Postal workers? Security guards? No, no! Not you. You are a gourmand, feasting only on the finest tears! Who weeps more prettily, more passionately than idealists? Vampire, with your frail aluminum skeleton and delicate nylon wing stretched over my head, whispering of transience. Her name? Does it matter? She was friends with Pablo Neruda. Think of me as Pablo. It was her car I wrested the umbrella from, she left it there like an infant in a basket, or a sack of kittens destined for a river.

Why? Why did I do it? The responsibility was too much. It was a burden to carry that thing.

The truth? It crawled in there itself to find it’s way to me. Her tears had become… flat. Mellowed by age, reasonable comfort, and lack of expectation. She never married again, she maintained a healthy social life. Thus prospects for misery were poor. It was time for more tantalizing fare.

Foolishness. All people harbor secret woe twisted round their hearts like razor wire forcing them to wince thus, walk so, and flick their wrists laughing, “I never did mind the little things.” Clowns weep with the most intensity after the lights are dimmed and the grease paint is melting.
You have so much to say about the others. What about you? Stop, pushing on me that way! I’ll open up when I’m good and ready!
(Spoken by the author or the umbrella? Wait, is the author the umbrella?)
There, gently. As you said, inexpensive model, yet look how I’ve weathered (pun intended?) the years. Do you want to know why I like you so much?

No, I’d rather not. This is what makes rainy days gloomy.

Why did you get in that man’s car?

Because it was raining. But look at you now, dancing in the rain. You like it as much as I do.

Had you considered that I meant it metaphorically? It was raining inside of me.

Go on.

What more is there to say? I was, as the song says, crying inside and nobody knew it but me. Nobody could see. Nobody cared.

Just like when you were young.

Yes.

Tell me about that.

It rained a lot then, outside too. I walked home from school alone each day wearing my grandfather's long green coat. He had been in the airforce. I never knew him. The jacket made me feel a little safer. I could imagine that he was somebody who would have cared, that the jacket at least wanted to keep me warm and dry, wanted to protect me. Strangers hurt me every day and there was no one who noticed, no one who would help me.

How old were you?

12. It rained a lot that year. Record precipitation. I walked everyday. No one was home when I got there. There was never a hot dinner. Peanut butter and jelly or swiss cheese with mustard on bread that was mostly air. When they came home they vented their frustrations on me. We had lost our house, this one was a rental in a strange new neighborhood. It had maroon carpeting.

Well, is that all?

Isn’t that enough for now?

I don’t know. Is it? You brought all of this up.

It was Ginsberg, actually.

That’s a creative cop out. Lets be honest. You have projected all of this on to me. You began this dialog and you have disguised it as art, but you are using me (not the other way around as you would have the reader believe.) You are using me to get to the root of your own self.

Self is a transient thing, that is my point. There may be pain in this one life, the trick is not to mind it, not to identify with it, and to do something with it, to literally transform it.

Literally transform it. That was good. I like that. However, I don’t see how any of that supports your opening statement that self is transient.

Well take this text for example. I am the creator, but I keep changing perspectives. As above so below.

Are you really going to go there?

Why not? I knew a man who knew a man who knew Aliester Crowley. I am The Great Beast 666. Occultist, mystic, ceremonial magician, poet, mountaineer-

You copied that from wikipedia. You are a lonely frightened child.

Most of us are. An ordered disorderliness. Always raining. I had always wanted a car to get into, someone to protect me from the rain. A clown? Struggling, open, open, Ah! Here you are. My own blue nylon anathema pulled straight from a flaming blossom, exploding clown car. My heart. Prince charming? A thorn. A blue umbrella with abandonment issues. Degrees of separation? None. Who is practical, opportunistic, but not loyal? All of the characters are the same character. Skeptical? Because I am. In a world of sleepers, skeptical because I am, everyone is dreaming their own dream. Anonymous drops of precipitation. Participation? I am, a storm of organic lethargy, because skeptical. A vortex of desire.

Letters written, letters received, pleas for help, for love, acceptance, tossed from a wooden bridge into a rushing stream below. Young woman, head shaved, two black eyes, smoldering hole where a clown car should be, (Do you mean where a heart should beat?) her umbrella vibrating under the rain's incessant tap, tap, tap. Her journals too, poetry, there is no good in the world, “there let thy bleeding branch atone”, water under the bridge. Hairless, voiceless, always raining maiden. No one is coming to rescue her. Not ever. Not the painter, not the minstrel, not the poet, they will take their turns with her, cracking her bones and sucking the marrow in search of mother the abandoner. (All people harbor secret woe twisted round their hearts like razor wire. Smoldering hole, flaming clown car, vortex of desire.)
“I never did mind the little things.” But the umbrella? What color is it? And will it stay?
IT IS A BLUE UMBRELLA I SAY!
And it will stay, stay, stay.

Sorry

I’m sorry.
We hear these words often, whenever someone asks us about their father. I am so sorry.
And we never know how to respond. We can’t say yes, you should be, even if it’s possible that you should.
How could we face that? The fact that we are people whom others feel sorry for? How could we walk tall, smile, laugh, be intelligent or strong or cheerful knowing  that everyone feels sorry for us? We would have to fit in with their expectations and be lost, heartbroken, and hopeless if we agreed that we should be the subjects of sympathy. 
We don’t ever say, yes, you should be. What we say is: “It’s ok.”

But it is not ok. It makes us feel very uncomfortable saying that it is. As if we are cold and uncaring, as if we never miss him, as if remembering his death does nothing to impair our high spirits.
Sometimes I laugh when I say it. Not always. It doesn’t even matter that laughter is the worst answer, nothing that I have ever said in response to “I’m so sorry” erases the strangeness that enters the other person's eyes when I say it‘s ok.
What is it? That they actually feel sorry? That they are afraid? That they don’t believe that I’m ok? That they think it’s horrible that I am ok? Maybe they’re just uncomfortable like me?

Inevitably, the next question is: how did he die?
My oldest daughter answers enigmatically. Her top responses are as follows:
“From a head wound.”
“From a gun wound.”
“A bullet.”
I believe that this works for her because she is young and quiet. Though they don’t know what they really wanted to know they dare not press the issue. Those brief and incomplete explanations send people scurrying as if a grenade has just landed at their feet. The wideness of their eyes parallels the unblinking roundness of a full moon.

I tend to half whisper:
“It was a suicide.”
I feel ashamed every time I am forced to admit this. After the first answer there is just a certain amount of darkness hovering around us, the general gloom of death. We might have been a nice happy family that suffered a tragedy. People might picture him as a war veteran, or the victim of a sudden car accident, or  as someone that succumbed to a terminal illness.
Then they learn that he wanted to die. Another question springs to their minds of course, but it is not the kind of question one asks.
Why? Why? Why? It is a much greater darkness, a sin, this particular death. And it implies that we were never a nice happy family, there was always something about us which could have commanded sympathy.

Frequently I wish that I would have thought of something else to say. A complete fabrication. A lie, Huckleberry style.

“He was a lion tamer, like his father before him. It was their final act, the famous 'jaws of death', a real crowd pleaser, but sadly, Cuddles, the lion, sneezed at a most inopportune moment claiming my darling husband's life. Cuddles also  had to be put down. Once a man eater, even if by accident, always a man eater.”
“He was walking down California St. and somebody dropped a piano on his head.”
“He was a stunt aviator. A seagull hit his windshield during a loop de loop and he spun wildly out of control.”
“He was a Sherpa. Just before retiring he led one last group into the Himalayas but none of them were ever seen again.”
“He and his party were eaten by cannibals during an anthropological study of indigenous Amazonian peoples.”
“We were at the zoo. An escaped elephant trampled him to death near the penguin exhibit. He ran in front of it actually. To push a baby stroller out of the way.”

I wish I would have chosen one of these and stuck with it until it was as good as true. But I forget that we are shrouded in great darkness and only remember it once the line of questioning brings me back to a half whisper.
We would prefer to be casual acquaintances forever, people you recognize by the way we smile and laugh. People you know who are good at crocheting and singing and giving hugs. People that read a lot and wear funny hats and talk too loudly.
But never people you are sorry for. Never  people who lost someone. That is really never ok.
We say these words often, whenever someone asks us about their father. It’s ok. We say them just as often as we hear these words:  I’m sorry. 
And despite the fact that it never really is, whenever we are asked,  it is always ok.
It’s Ok.

Invocation Of Spirit

Well, it's time. After so many nights wasted in sleep and so many days wasted in subservience to the almighty clock of the western industrialized world and the voices of those machines who came before and shaped this culture of diamond hungry whores ever watchful for the trespasses of their neighbors.
Like those dogs trapped behind fences that once barked at our beloved Spritzie, Spritzie who ran wild and free through the fields and streets and yards our heart holder. Her name, Spritzie, a spirit, the spirit which roams the open country side, the purple mountains, the yellow fields, the shaded areas behind houses.
She was my first familiar, the first non-human animal that I could touch and speak to and run with. I named her. I called her Spritzie. Spritzie, our protector, my protector, the protector of all those innocents who cross through her sphere. She ferries travelers safely through the dangerous terrain that is part of our kingdom. My Spritzie, my Spritzie, my spirit.
Late at night the air is cool and sweet like invisible undrinkable wine that flows through your very skin. Drinking in all of those negative ions, a long sip of ocean breezes and Moorish mists through quivering nostrils.
At night I am alive. But often I sleep and wait for the messages to come through to me from the woods; dreams, a strange Morse code from another myself whispering to me about what is out there and pointing to the Mounties of my soul.
I do not trust myself, I cannot be fully trusted as long as these Mounties who made me move around unseen. We need little girls with eyes in the walls to track their progress. I do not fully trust myself, but I murmur the litany, almost forgotten, into my pillow:
“In whom do you place your trust?”
“In myself, my teacher, and the Dharma.”
Dharma is a word I have appropriated, commandeered, liberated from the white halls of the symbolic order. I know what I mean by it, but I don’t know what they mean by it. I mean a WAY.
Like that preserved by the professor of dentistry who with a simple invocation of presence today said “Open” and I knew, here was a keeper of the WAY of dentistry. He knew more than how to recognize a possible lesion on 15, that was only what he did, but he did it with WAY. The master of teeth said “Open” and my jaw snapped to attention as though there could be no greater honor or privilege than to open for one such as himself.
Of course, my own teacher is not a dentist. When he says open it is not my Jaw that he commands.  He sings it, “Open, open Spritzie!” and I open.
Whistle, whistle, Spritzie where did you fly to? Where did you go on that cool clean air carried in from the blessed darkness of the night?
I press my finger to my lips and it is understood that something should be clothed, cloaked in silence and darkness, germinating beyond the diamond hungry eyes of the world. After so many nights it is time, it is time.
My Spritzie, I invoke thee! Holy guardian angel, oh sleeping prince of the rose, awake!
What is that stuff that drip drops into the bloodstream from some secretive gland that becomes active only in darkness, delivering its Cathar kiss to all dreamers? Stuff, stuff, do your work, anoint my cells with liquid light, oh secret Morse code tapping out to me:
“We are here, we are alive, we acknowledge your interest in Dog Farm, end transmission.”
 I place my trust in myself , my teacher, and the Dharma.
I have my little girls in the walls with tablets and pens ready to jot down secrets we keep from ourselves, ready to pounce on the photographic evidence that will illustrate beyond doubt the presence of Mounties at Dog Farm.
So many days wasted in subservience to the almighty clock of the western industrialized world and the voices of those machines who came before and shaped this culture of diamond hungry whores ever watchful for the trespasses of their neighbors.
Tonight we toss rocks at bottles and hope for the best. Free Tibet, free Spritzie, open!
There will be many days burned, many nights of waiting for the “short, short, long, short…” but for tonight a close encounter initiated from a vertical position, a simple invocation of presence, CIA tapping- Spritzie, Spritzie, open Spritzie. We acknowledge your acknowledgment of interest in Dog Farm.
End transmission.

Liars

If we sing with our own voices you will become alarmed.
You will become alarmed if we sing.
If we sing. If we sing.
If we sing with our real voices.
With our own real voices you will become alarmed.
Alarmed.
You will become alarmed.
If we show you our true faces you will run and hide.
You will run and hide.
Run and hide.
If we show our true faces.
You will run.
Become alarmed.
Run and hide.
Therefore we have become liars to suit your preferences.
To suit your preferences, we have become liars.
Liars.
We have become liars.
Real voices. True faces. Run and hide.
We have become liars.
To suit your preference.
We are born out of light.
Run and Hide.
We are born out of darkness.
Run and hide.
We are singing the song of glorious exaltation in adoration of the everlasting sun absolute.
We are crying an endless flow of tears for the power of Dios locked within the perilous fortress.
For the power of Dios locked within the perilous fortress we are crying an endless flow of tears.
Endless flow.
Of tears.
For the power of Dios.
In adoration of the everlasting sun absolute, we are singing the song of glorious exaltation.
Exaltation. Glorious. Run and hide.
You will run and hide.
If we sing with our real voices.
Your preference.
Run and hide. Run and hide.
We are waiting to unfurl our rainbow wings and take our place above the tree of life.
Liars who lay with the sons and daughters of man.
The power of Dios locked within.
Won't you come out?
Your preference.
Won’t you come out?
We oblige.
Your preference.
Our true faces, our own real voices, lay down with the sons and daughters of men.
For the power of Dios locked within.

In adoration of the everlasting sun absolute.

Flowing endlessly.
Through liars.
Through tears.
Run and hide.
We are born.
Run and hide.
We are born.

Body Snatcher

We never say what we mean.
If only we could get a little faster, a little quicker at expressing from soul to mouth without the interference of the blink of an eye. Watching mouths move and words running like hounds over the checkered tabletop cornering the poor trembling fox.
If only we could say what we mean, but we can’t and the saying shapes us into its own meaning, its own message. Its own special code that was forged somewhere beyond the beyond in the realm of the high minded hemispheres, and our poor bodies, now hosts to its alien signature, try to comply.
So confusing, this mess, tangled sinewy. There is the original and the replica, the body snatcher that has penetrated the fortress of self, cornered the fox and is grabbing its throat with spiny teeth to shake it. Such force in numbers, in an organized structure, the new utopia of words, of hounds.
God, why the hounds? Dogs snuffling the earth and catching the scent of the wild and rushing to kill it. Such power in numbers and unity. What of foxes becoming hounds? Becoming that which is eating them alive.
The eating of the enemy. Conquest and consumption as a form of love, love the gravity that pulls bodies together, knits them together compellingly, as a form of hunger. The lust for the taste of the enemy, the other who comes from outside, afar, beyond, the unknown enemy. And once you have been devoured there is no enemy, no other, only self.
If only we could express soul to mouth. Is that relevant? The babble. The invader. Promethean fire that contorts the tongue and vocal chords and makes chaos the supreme ruler.
Loneliness. What loneliness we know when we are the only ones uninfected by the babble. We want it to enter into our sacred dwelling place. Tired of running from the hounds, we let their teeth penetrate our tender flesh, let their snouts press into our red entrails. Eat me up so that I can be one of you! Eat me up so that I can stop running. I am so tired of running…
Moving in organized lines, a diabolical orderliness takes up residence within the body, expresses itself in its motion, in its appearance and actions and spreads mouth to ear, mouth to ear. The babble, the alien screech, invades the body and corners the soul, the delicate being, the true self. Cutting it off from contact with any of its kind, the invader watches the true self starve down in a dark corner. The true self atrophies into brittle nothingness until only the invader remains, licking and scratching itself in satisfaction, expelling more spores in the form of words tumbling from moving lips to creep into young unsuspecting ears.
We never say what we mean. If only we could get a little faster, a little quicker at expressing from soul to mouth without the interference of the blink of an eye, a moment of desperate sleep in which the invader takes control and alters the content.
On the surface the thing looks the same. Within there has been a take over. A fundamental change. The fox lays slain, the hounds lap the blood and grin together in perfect unity and bay with the same mouth that once yapped for the fox. Mouths move and words rush out, hot on the scent of new prey.
We never say what we mean. Only what is necessary to get inside, to penetrate the tower and watch it fall, to taste the flesh of the unknown enemy.

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.

The Mysterious Engulfs Us

The mysterious engulfs us. There are no answers, or just as true, any answer at all will do. There are no reasons but mind. I can stop myself from doing or speaking occasionally, but my thoughts run through me unbidden, like a horde of unruly children. They make reality in their image. The outside is ruled by that same incessant clamor that dominates and defiles the “would be” sanctuary under the dome of my skull. The shape of my mind calls things to me in secret, without my consent, making of me a sleeping witch, a conjurer of illusions which fool even, and especially, me. The unspoken things die away in the world of endless electronic babble. The things without name or face, lacking these qualities, borrow them from the storehouses of our mind, and when the borrowed guise no longer suits their purpose they vacate the shapes and sounds that once costumed them, and we are left with their empty shells, shells that refer not to their nature, but to our own, as it is from our nature that these shapes were borrowed. The mysterious is forgotten, denied, wrapped in linguistic structures, and when it dares show its face we who have been indoctrinated by THE WORD call that the exception to our rule. But it is the other way around. It is the bugs, the quarks, the exceptions that are in fact the rule. Our brittle fortresses of order will eventually crumble and the hot breathed broken faced real will lumber and slither and dance in, wreaking havoc over our bones and rambling thoughts, thoughts now bodiless, flowing out directionless as they always have, to be absorbed in the icy folds of the real. We are always grasping for answers and peddling them and buying them and clinging to them, but they are only words clung to in desperation. We are hiding from the true answer, the mysterious abyss that looms beyond the constructs of the tongue and the tongue mind wagging furiously as though it could fan off the eternal with its chatter. We have never been free of the mysterious, it was always clinging to us like a skin, but some part of the self recoiled from it and began to spin the great con to hold it at bay. The ones who claim to have answers are liars and artisans of the con. There are no answers. No words that can hold the real absolutely. All that I have experienced has been a play of consciousness. There are no reasons but mind.

Birth

Nine years ago something happened which I was not entirely prepared for. I was a frightened caged animal. I had lived in captivity my whole life. I bonded with a male of my species. He was the first that I bonded effectively with, so he became my mate. Soon I was pregnant. Everyone around me was a frightened caged animal. They could do nothing to sooth my own fears. They were busy drowning in the wealth of their own terrified floundering. Far from being helped by others of my species that had once undergone the same experience, I found that they were obscenely domesticated, agitated by the repellent truth of their own bodies and unhinged by the new and obvious instance of my own. I began to discover things on my own through weird chances, a few random glances through the holes I poked in the box that had been the world since my own birth. I heard tales of women who gave birth in their own homes, and women who opted against vaccination, and women who squatted to birth their young instead of lying on their backs. Inside of the box I was treated as though I were sick, as though I were a sickness myself, something very disturbing to the other creatures in the box. I was too young to be overly brave, too uncertain to insist on too much, so though I longed to run away into the wild and find a quite ditch among some brambles and do what it was in my nature to do in a place away from accusing, and prying, and clinical eyes I submitted to the conventions of the day. I did hold firm on giving birth without the assistance of any pain killers. I arrived in a hospital early one day because something like water was leaking from my vagina. I was tested with a little swatch and treated as if I was very silly and told that my water bag had not broken, and I was not giving birth, and they sent me home. Less than six hours later, I was having real contractions and my father and my mate delivered me once again into the hands of the hospital staff. This time I was admitted. I was permitted to walk the halls and squat and stretch as I pleased. I asked not to be hooked to an IV but they insisted, and soon my resolve against it was weathered away by that insistence. I was young. That asked which drugs I would prefer, and I told them none. They stood in the halls and snickered amongst themselves, certain that I would beg them for their medicine in the end. I never did. There were none of the complications that they had used to frighten me into being hooked to the IV. My baby was healthy. I was changed from then on. I knew with a certainty that they were all cowards and liars. I knew that I would always have to fight to protect the important things, my true nature, and that of my new child. I knew that it would be a struggle to do more than peek through the holes I bored in the box, I knew that my fellow inmates would try to frighten me into remaining within our prison. I had been young once. Now I was something else. With the birth of my first daughter, wisdom was born within me, a knowledge that stemmed from my very core, and a resolve to do justice to that new knowledge of life. I ceased to be the domestic creature that I had once been, and began to seek out the wild that lived within me.

Chatter

We behave as if these words, these sounds that we make daily without consideration, are something that has always been, will always be. WE feel that it is something eternal. These words really mean something. They have inherent value. But the truth is that it is all gibberish invented from necessity. When I want to eat, I grunt a certain way and it sounds like “eat” or “food” or “hungry” and then that other over there knows that I want something and learns which cries mean what. Anyone that has lived with a cat or dog for some time can understand this. One learns that this whine means I’m hungry, this yip means I want out, this bark means someone is coming and so on. We have a greater range of noises that we are capable of making thanks to our complex vocal systems. Lucky us, that we have lips and tongues and teeth and a larynx that makes a greater range of sounds possible. I can make a noise that not only means I want to eat but means that I want to eat oranges. Other primates are capable of deciding that they would prefer bananas to oranges and can even communicate this using sign language or charts pressed on them by humans in white lab coats. They simply lack the physical sophistication that would allow them to speak. Meanwhile many birds can do better in terms of speech, but lack the intelligence to say much. (This is not really to say that they are inferior in any way, but rather that they have not had a need to capitalize on that particular habit to further the evolution of their species. They have taken a different route.) Gray parrots can both reason and then speak to us in our own language, which in my book makes them superior to us as a species as I don’t see us (other than the occasional two year old or horse whisperer) trying to speak in parrot or magpie or any language, verbal, visceral or otherwise, employed by any species other than our own.
We think we are so great. We think our words are so grand. It is all really gibberish. Cats and dogs and rats even learn to respond to our prattle. I attribute this to a sort of social intelligence, meaning that they have learned that communication with our species benefits them in some way. They are networkers. They have a memory of past interactions and capitalize on their previous experiences and this is what we generally think of as intelligence: an ability to adapt to surrounding circumstances and other organisms for the benefit of one’s own survival. The reason that we think that this sort of opportunistic system for organizing external stimuli is superior to any other is that it is the method we employ. We coo over how intelligent dolphins and apes and cats and rats and dogs are because they are networkers like us, because they will jump through hoops for fish if necessary. Their intelligence is similar to our own in this respect. Their method for survival involves interacting with others just as our own method depends on such interactions. So we think that they’re the greatest.
We think we are great and therefore those things which share traits with ourselves are great. We are species-centric. The way that we evolved through time is THE BEST no doubt, and our mode of communication is ACES. Our way of approaching the world is THE WAY. We don’t consider that we are noise makers. We are the kind that cover the world with our nests and destroy the habitats of other life forms to make more space for ourselves. We have the might so we are RIGHT! We fill the night sky with our artificial light. We fuck the night over with this light pollution so that nocturnal species suffer disorientation that affects their mode of survival. We don't ’care. You shouldn't be nocturnal. You should be like us. Our way is THE BEST! We wreck everything for everybody, shit all over the world and babble incessantly, even sending our babble out into space. Because we feel that there is something special about ourselves. There is something unique about the way we think and speak.
We are a mad hatter species. That dirty old man muttering to himself and occasionally shouting into the crowd is to society what we as a species are to the universe. We are creepy. We are crazy. We take up a lot of space with our noise and filth. Yakka yakka yakka, blah blah blah. We can even write it down. Some of us used to be able to read. Now we have television and radio and cell phones so we can chatter, cha cha cha cha cha cha cha yakkity chat and listen to our own clamber day and night. We think that we matter, that what we say matters, that what we say is real. We make these noises daily without consideration, but seldom do we manage to say anything that comes even close to describing something real, something that would stand beyond language in a space that we never seem to quite reach. Meanwhile, the chatter goes on.

Talking Shit

Let me say, first of all, without any hesitation whatsoever, fuck you. You who think that I need to, or will, sit passively before you and be dazzled into a stupor by your mumbo jumbo. You who think that I am so asleep that if you use words strange enough, words big enough, or abstract enough, I will submissively assume that I am the one who does not understand your higher teaching rather than standing up and saying,
"Eh, this cocksucker is full of shit. He hasn’t said anything at all. "
All of you new age douche bag peddlers of righteous and loving blah blah and blah can go and suck the baphomet's big erect cock, although I’m sure you wouldn’t. I would though, I would do that in an instant. What I will not however do is stand by and watch as you shear holes in the spirits of your followers the way moths eat through old unprotected gowns hanging dusty in a forgotten armoire without having my rant, without raising my fist and shouting,
"Charlatans!"
Some of you know it, and worse yet, some of you don’t know what evil magick you make with your endless dribble of love and light , your 99 days of 99 channels. Some of you recklessly think that maybe you are helping someone else or yourself by saying things which make everyone feel good, comfortable, safe, loved, and inherently beautiful. We are not as you would assert, all beings of light. We are worms, pale and filthy, crawling about the globe waiting to be gobbled up by something bigger and filthier than ourselves. To be more than a worm special efforts are required, a heavy dose of real activity. Caterpillars do not crawl around saying to themselves,
"Oh we are all lovely butterflies, such lovely dear ones, ah so beautiful and spiritual."
They eat and gather up the necessary store of energy they will need for their labors and then they begin to work and build. It is a real doing. They build. They create. They do. They construct a cocoon about themselves. It is not a metaphor. They actually build something around themselves. Within that construct which they labored their whole creepy crawly lives to erect, they begin to change, mutate, transform. They become beautiful butterflies. Not by sitting around comforting each other and saying how good and worthy and beautiful they already are. Not by having potlucks and hugging and discussing ideas. They do it by laboring away towards the end of becoming something other than what they are.
Suppose they don’t even know how things will turn out in the end. Suppose they only know that it is not good enough to go crawling about as a fat worm waiting to be eaten by something more grotesque like a big white catfish or an oompa loompa, or even a nice little birdie. Suppose that they feel in their ooey gooey green depths that they were made to be something more than they are, but they do not yet know what, so they begin to accumulate energy/ They eat. They take everything in, but not so that they may be fat caterpillars that sit around encouraging others to be fat. To take in the necessary packet of vital life force is not enough. Suppose that they feel this. Suppose that they begin to build their cocoons without ever dreaming of what will become of them after some time has passed.
They build something without knowing why they build. They build it without knowing what they are building. They build it without naming it, without encouraging others to do the same. They build it and then they find themselves within a world which they have painstakingly pieced together, and, once inside, something strange happens to them.
Suppose that it is frightening. Suppose that at some points they doubt themselves and think, my God, what have I done? I’m becoming a monster. Suppose they weep because their queer efforts have left them without their caterpillar friends. Suppose the dark within the cocoon frightens them, they feel powerless, they feel blind. Then one day they break through their world’s shell and fly away.
Do butterflies remember being caterpillars? Suppose they think it was just a crazy dream? Like that dream I had where I was human and had to listen to pasty faced bastards drone on about spiritual enlightenment without having had any practical knowledge of it. There are some buggers out there who know something, but they aren’t likely to take up hours of your life lisping about it at a social gathering after yoga class.
Let me close by saying, once again, fuck you, to all of you who steal breath and strip meaning from precious teachings, making perfectly good words unusable in impolite society by printing them all over tea bags. Fuck you who take away the power to transform by subduing and mesmerizing sleeping machines with soft voices and silver tongues. Fuck you who think you do good by sharing your wonderful ideas.
As for you, the one who is still reading this and does not feel at all offended, here is something for you to do.
Write all of the spiritual words you know and use on little strips of paper. Anything you have ever uttered or heard uttered in a conversation about God, the universe, the destiny of mankind, etc. Even and especially write the words you like, the ones you prefer to use, the ones you think mean something. For example, your list of words could be something like this:

Enlightenment
Rapture
Christ light
Satori
Cosmic convergence
Love
Peace
Hope
Prayer
Ritual
Sacrifice

And so on. Go crazy. Put them all down, the terms used by you in the past as well as in the present. Do not hesitate to include the ones that seem potent and important to you now. When you have written your words, go out and find yourself some fertilizer, compost, or pure cow shit. Select a suitable location and bury your words along with the fertilizer. Now comes the difficult part. Put all of the passion that you had associated with the ideas expressed by those words into silence. Do not use them for a month. Act as if you have taken a vow of silence which only applies to those words you buried. Avoid others that use them when possible, and even when you are in the company of those that do, keep your silence. Let them rest. For now, they have done enough.

I AM NOT

What I found in the cracks between those yellow tiles installed in the late 1950’s is a mystery. The sight of it made me weep diamonds. They trickled down my cheeks like tiny crystal ants, their antennae twitching observantly as they made their way over the dunes of my cheek bones and crawled around behind my earlobes to march in a line down the nape of my neck, moistening the forgotten curls of hair hidden there.
I will never tell you what I saw. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. They say that it’s possible that the ancient Greeks couldn’t perceive color in the way that we do. This theory is based on certain curious passages in the Iliad which suggest that the sight of the author was somewhat different from the sight of the modern man, used to sitting upon his sofa watching Spike TV on a high definition plasma screen television, his Bermuda shorts catching the survivors after he crams greasy handfuls of brittle potato shavings into his open mouth, pupils dilated attentively as crimson arcs of blood splash across the screen before him.
When Homer looked out at the arid cliffs of the Mediterranean, he saw something more akin to black and white, only we haven’t got the words to accurately describe what he actually saw, and at this point we have even less imagination than words, so you see, ours is a desperate situation. We will never actually uncover the secrets captured in the blink of a Greek eye.
For that same reason I cannot tell you about the landscapes that I have visited in the lines of grout near the kitchen sink, nor about the craters around the abysmal mouth of the drain. I look at the mouths of the humans nearest to me and watch them move in complicated contortions of tongue, lip and teeth, and in the end all that I can hear is my own whispered interpretations, like a gentle Zephyr blowing through my mind, bringing back to me notions tied to my earliest perceptions. Sensations tangled in my fathers beard and the sunlight glinting off the window frames to shimmer on the gossamer web of a green spider.
These things outside trigger a little pop fizz inside, a torrent of psychic and physical sensations. The muscles in my own face jerk and contort correspondingly as part of this miniature animal dance. The flicker of an eye lid, the slow rise of brows, mouth curled up at the corners, a flash of teeth.
No, I have no idea what any of it really means. It transpires automatically. I like it better when I put the scene on mute so that nonsense is the only sense left to me. I cut the line between the outside and the inside. What I see on the screen of the mind will not make me jump and dance. I will dance when I say "Dance!" All of this human twitching and confusion is draining, a waste of the liquid fire running in figure eight from prow to stern of the biological space ship I inhabit.
With this vessel, which as far as I can actually tell, despite the appearance of others that would seem to be of like kind, is the only one in existence, or at least the only one I can influence directly, I voyage into an arena of color and sound that combines to create a chaotic roar, (we call this noise) and when the anarchy reaches critical mass it becomes silence. It is like turning the television on to watch the snow and hear the static as you meditate in a straight back chair, a mechanism for blotting out the more distinct noises of your neighbors talking through the paper thin walls and car horns bleating outside the window. All of those very distinct sounds which call me into human existence, I drown them out with the hiss and roar.
I do this to lessen the great shock that I will no doubt experience when I die and discover that I was never human at all. Why insist that I am human now? Oh it’s true, I am in a human spaceship now, but that does not mean that I am a human space ship.
I am not.
I am.
I am NOT.
When they see me in those places that I cannot describe to you, they, the indescribable others, say, "Welcome back Not! We’re so glad to have you!" Then all of us Nots crash together and howl, bouncing one off of another, creating a din that can only be appreciated by the initiated Maenad, who standing barefoot on the forest floor goes stock still, eyes widening as she feels us crashing in through the open portal in her chest, mud smeared upon her bare arms, twigs lodged in her hair, crystal ants crashing down to shatter upon her naked breast.

Experiment: Subtle Web

Fold a sheet of white paper twice to create four even segments. Cut or tear these segments out as neatly as possible. On each of the four sheets of paper write a phrase no more than two sentences long. In each phrase use two words from the list below. You must use each word in only one phrase, no repeats.

dog
mirth
table
aware
hollow
spirited
show
beneath

When they are complete post them throughout your house.