Mama Bunny

I have been so heavy with sleep, drooping as a green leaf might droop under the accumulated moisture of a heavy mist. My body feels tired, my emotions are troubled, my mind muddled. I don’t want to touch a rock, to drag myself into the magic circle. Feeling trapped under the weight of things to do, things to do, things to do, I have an angst filled desire to moan, “Fuck it all.” shed some tars, eat some candy corn and watch The Vampire Diaries.
A tiny voice inside of me urges me against giving in to the weight of sleep. I crawl into the magic circle and touch a rock. I do a number of secret things with no attention whatsoever. It is difficult just to be there, forget doing anything well. My mind is pulling like a dog on the end of a leash, reaching for anything anywhere but refusing to heel, to be right here, right now.
Eventually the tiny white rabbit enters the magic circle. I know her well and think of her as Mamma Bunny.
“Keep trying. You’re doing good just by trying.” she tells me.
I don’t feel like I’m doing good. I feel like I’m going through the motions and I’d like to give up.
“You're in a valley. That’s all. On the mountain it’s clear. You are awake, everything makes sense, but inevitably you come down. That’s part of existence, a natural law. And in the valley you feel that you can’t ever reach the peak again, that maybe you’ve never been there. You can’t understand what you once understood. You can’t understand the mountain from the valley. That’s okay. It’s not worth trying to understand what you knew then. Now is now. All you have to do is understand that where you are now you won’t be able to appreciate where you’ve been or where you will be again. But you can understand that it is temporary, that you won't always be as you are now. You won't always sleep. One day you’ll be awake again. And it is in preparation for that day that you continue your practice. Even if you can’t do much through your practice at this moment, simply maintaining the habit of practice makes it possible for you to do something real later.”
“Look at it another way. The master of the house is away, but you maintain the house so that the master can return. If you let the house fall into decay, if you abandon it, the master can’t come home. Or when he does, he‘ll have to focus on putting the house in order. But if you keep the house in good shape, the master can return and do something productive with it right away. Which is better, because the master comes and goes on, and this house can only stand for a century or less, so time is limited.”
Mama bunny points her little face up at me, golden eyes shinning.
“Just keep it up. You’re doing good by trying. Trying is good  enough. It turns into doing. Nothing is permanent and you don’t have to understand everything in all of your facets. Practice makes it possible to experience another facet from whose perspective you will understand. If you don’t get up and do your chores, you can’t go to the ball, and if you don’t go to the ball, you can’t meet the prince! And you‘ll find that even if your chores seem impossible, by getting up and getting started, by trying, you‘ll attract enough helpers to get the job done.”
I lower my face towards mama bunny’s and gently touch my forehead to hers. Then I open my mouth and swallow her. She jumps down happily, a white rabbit plunging back into wonderland. I feel her glowing inside of me, a kernel of levity, a nightlight against the darkness of slumber, a movement in the underbrush that sends the dew into a sparkling scatter of droplets bouncing from a green leaf.

Touch A Rock

Let us suppose that for the duration of this textual exploration the words "THE CLEAR LIGHT" will be used interchangeably with the words "THE REAL" and "THE ETERNAL". What these words refer to is a thing that I, the author, cannot give to you in words. They are words that I will use to refer to something beyond words, beyond time and all linear constructs.
To begin this exploration I wish to provide you with a terrain.
You will need a rock. You have my leave to gather this necessary material before continuing with me on this journey.
Now that you have the rock, (and if you don't have it, then go away and don't come back until you do) please touch it.
Touch a rock.
Not casually, but with everything you've got, touch a rock.
Were you thinking of anything else as you touched it? Or were you fully present with it, wholly open to the communion with that thing that we are calling "rock"? Was it the word "rock" that you brushed against with your mind, or was there something that you encountered with your hand? Or something that you illuminated with your attention, pure and true?
Touch a rock.
What is "rock"? When your hand was on it, were you there? Were you there or were you wandering through a chain of associations that stem from the word “rock“? Were you lost in thought about everything but a boring old rock?
Touch a rock.
What is beyond the word "rock"?
Eternity is not a very long time. Eternity is a state beyond time, outside of time, separate from it.
The human biological machine exists in time. Being is eternal.
When the Machine is locked in a state of identification with its own conflicts and pleasures it is not possible for the experience of Eternity to take root in it. If the machine can manage a state of high indifference to its situation as a machine, to the endless flow of thoughts and feeling that are the whir and buzz of mechanical operations, an interaction with the real becomes possible. We will call this experience “awakening.”
The human biological machine is not a merely physical entity. It is composed of many subtle parts. The emotions and thoughts are also part of the human biological machine. The part of you that thinks of itself as a “me” is a part of the human biological machine and a manifestation of the unfolding of time.
If we can awaken the biological machine so that it may interface with eternity, we create the possibility for Creation, something that is occasionally called “THE GREAT WORK” or simply “THE WORK”. However, to even get to the point of being able to create the possibility for Creation, one must first endeavor to cultivate and maintain for extended periods that state of high indifference, the awakened state of the human biological machine. Often this is called “WORKING” too, but in actuality it is preparation for the REAL WORK that may be possible as a result of these efforts.
This is it, right now.
Touch a rock.
This is ETERNITY.
If you reach out and touch it.
Not casually, but with everything you've got, by making an effort to focus your attention on something that is not part of the struggles and desires of the human biological machine, something that cannot be defined by that linear construct that we call “language.”
While our attention is squandered on the unfolding of the human biological machine we perceive ourselves as moving through time. But this right now, this is ETERNITY, THE CLEAR LIGHT of objective REALITY.
Eternity cannot be something that happens later. It is something that happens right now or it doesn’t happen at all.
If it is THE REAL it can only be NOW.
This is the moment to endeavor to prepare for creative WORK.
Now you should begin to explore the terrain.
Touch a rock.
Thank you.

Conflict

The machine will always be in conflict with something. It worries. It agonizes. It schemes and plans. The machine may have a problem with the way a colleague looks at them, with the color of a neighbor's dress, with sideburns and taxes and that sibling that borrows money and never pays it back.
These problems are the problems of the machine, not problems of the being. Most importantly, they are not a conflict between the being and the machine. The being simply doesn’t put up a fight. The machine on the other hand is a bloodthirsty pit bull that will bite and its jaw will lock and it will shake and shake and shake the life out of anything. When confronted with conflict with the being, the machine latches on to a machine conflict and goes berserk.
For example your machine might want an ice cream cone when you are trying to do your daily meditation. But your machine wants an ice cream cone, but your teacher has recommended this daily meditation, but your machine wants an ice cream cone and how are you going to reach enlightenment or whatever if you have no freedom to make any choices and everything is all about routine?
Things are getting dogmatic and that asshole prefers his female students and gives them all of his attention and all he is doing is taking advantage of them and you really should tell him that you’re on to him and look for another teacher and there is a new yoga studio on main street, maybe you should stop there and see what kind of workshops they are offering and find out how they view free will and (by the way, while we’re down there we will get an ice cream cone from the place next door, but just because it’s on the way and we really need to show this asshole that we don’t need him, we can find enlightenment with a just teacher who will distribute their attentions evenly over their students regardless of gender, and then, or maybe just before then, get an ice cream cone.)
The moment it feels as if awakening is imminent, the machine lunges for something, anything to hold onto. A moment of awakening cannot occur simultaneously with a moment of identification, so if your machine can get a hold of something and start shaking it to death it can prevent awakening.
You might be painting a picture using careful attention, your mind remarkably still. Something unusual is starting to happen, you feel tingly and then you remember that your roommate will be home soon and she will take a shower and get water all over the floor and leave it there where you will step in the puddles of water, spoiling your socks the next time you want to blow your nose or urinate. Then you’ll be sitting there with no toilet paper, because she never puts a new roll on and her greasy hair sticks to the shower walls and your boyfriend was looking at her tits the other day because she was wearing that smutty shirt and she has to sleep with every man in the universe, and what you should do is stop painting and turn on the shower and let all the hot water run out so that when she gets in there will be none left for her, see how she likes a big fat dose of inconsideration. And you might run the water or you might crawl into bed and cry realizing that your relationship with boyfriend is doomed if he can be tantalized by the tasteless flaunting of bosoms. In fact, if he can like her at all, what does that say about you? Are you also a tawdry slut? Boo, hoo, boo, hoo. The painting lies unfinished, the being is completely silenced, the machine is thrashing.
Identification with the machine is the act of allowing one's attention to flow into the opinions, positions, and problems of the machine. Inversely, awakening is the act of allowing the attention to flow elsewhere, into the being, the most essential self. Any form of identification is counterproductive to work towards awakening. It doesn’t have to feel miserable to qualify as identification. Often times it feels ooooh too good.
If while you are conducting your morning meditation you suddenly realize fully and completely that you have the power to manipulate reality and can fly so you go soaring around the town feeling gleeful and transforming parking tickets into lollipops with the wave of a hand, and with a wink of the eye you get beautiful women to nurse you and you feel so wonderful laying in her lap on the park bench drinking Cristal from her swollen breast, then you are still identified. You’re just an identified psychic super mutant. If, on the other hand, while you are conducting your morning meditation you suddenly realize fully and completely that you have the power to manipulate reality and you remain seated and direct your attention inward upon your being, remembering your eternal self, that would be a moment of awakening.
The machine wants to solve things, it wants to do things, have things, to be things. The being is agenda-less. The machine is an inversion of this agenda-less-ness. It is a reaction to agenda-less-ness. Your existence in this world is a reflex against being. A reflex. An unintentional response.
You as a machine are just doing what you do, which is avoid Being. If you wish to work towards awakening you will have to learn to control this reflexive manifestation. To gain control of it you will have to distance yourself from it, find ways around it.
The best way to stop gagging is not to grab hold of your throat and squeeze or think loudly, “STOP GAGGING!” or wish obsessively that the horrible taste or smell or object lodged in your throat that catalyzed the gagging will cease to be.
The best way to stop gagging is to relax.
RELAX.
Don’t try to create relaxing conditions. Relax where you are, with what you are. Stop rejecting and allow. Don’t spit, swallow.

Work On Self

In the ordinary course of life as human animals our attention flows untrained from one thing to another. Whatever is loudest, brightest, closest, or most thrilling captivates this precious resource, this little understood commodity. Reflexively, our mood changes constantly as well, contorted in one way or another in response to external stimuli, blindly following our unguided attention.
When you are constantly wrapped up in this shifting, this loss of attention, you can’t really be free, you can’t make any choices, you can’t do anything seriously. You will merely move from one attention grabbing person, place or thing to the next, responding emotionally to each new source of stimulation with astoundingly mechanical reliability.
We react. Clowns cause fear, praise arouses pleasure, a traffic jam equals anger. If being ordered around by your boss made you irritable today, there is no reason to suspect that you might enjoy the experience tomorrow.
Being happy, being sad, angry, or fearful, these are not things that we do, these are things that do us. We react automatically to whatever stimulus we encounter.
We assume that these reactions are somehow more than arbitrary, that if something pleases or displeases us there is a fundamental justification for the response.
If my spouse cheats on me I feel that I should be sad and angry, I have every right to it. I will feel that it is my spouse's fault that I am angry.
I have never considered that my response to the situations and individuals around me comes from within me. It is particular to me. It is a reaction I learned early in life from my parents, my teachers, the television and my peers and I have repeated it mechanically so often that it feels “right.”
We feel that these reflexive states of being are dictated by who we are, when really we are being dictated by them.
Who are you anyway? What are you? What is the nature of this existence?
Most of us have not considered what it means to be a person. We have not asked ourselves, “what am I? What function do I serve?”
Nobody else asked us either. In fact we have been informed of who we are by others who have never wondered what they were. To delve into such a question would mean directing our attention inward, placing it on our own self rather than allowing it to drift over whatever new thing calls to it.

When I was a child I was very concerned with the question: “what am I?”
It seems as if immediately after being informed of who I was, and consequently forgetting what I am or might be, I began to try to find my way back to it. At least as many years as was spent forgetting myself came to be invested in trying to remember it again.
By the time I was in the fifth grade I became very convinced, walking home from school one day, that I did understand something about myself and reality and it was summed up best by these lines from a popular nursery song; life is but a dream.
I am a dream. One dream of many. There are dreams within dreams to consider.
If I am a dream, then there is a dreamer, there’s something else, an eternal something, an other of some kind.
It took more time for me to build on this theory, to move beyond “what am I?” to “why might I be?“
To me it seems that one function of the human being is to establish contact with that dreamer, that eternal being. Just doing that is a lot harder than it sounds.

Doing that in as many different ways and different spaces as possible is the function of a human being in a system that involves this organic existence but is not only this organic existence.
We do this with our attention, by turning it in on ourselves, in on the dreamer.
This is an non-ordinary application of attention. This is going beyond the course of life as human animals. This is applying attention intentionally rather than accidentally. This is trading the subjectivity involved in riding the roller coaster of human emotion for the objectivity of a waking state; a moment of lucidity in which I remember myself as the eternal dreamer.
This is what I call “work on self.”

The Punishment that was the World

The chief ruler came wearing his crown of gold and green jewels, his robes of purple silk that moved like a sweet scent on the wind. He called as a boy would after a beloved dog:
"Adam! Where are you?"
For he did not understand what had happened, being himself blind.
And trembling behind a blossoming rock rose bush Adam said:
"I heard your voice and was afraid because I was naked; and I hid."
Gritting his teeth and lolling his blind eyes the ruler let loose an anguished groan that filled the sky:
"Why did you hide, unless it is because you have eaten from the tree from which I have commanded you not to eat from? And you have eaten!"
Mountains exploded. Birds fell from the sky.
Adam sought forgiveness and said:
"The woman that you gave me, the woman of clay and bones, of tree and soil, she gave to me red and white flesh, and I ate."
Thunder rolled from his lips as the arrogant ruler cursed the woman. It came as earthquakes, and horrible frozen rain, as salty tears.
The woman, also eager to please now that the terrible ruler stood before her with glowing eyes and fire that threatened to burn the life around her, she groveled and said:
"It was the snake that led me astray. The snake, a seducer. I listened to it and I ate."
They turned to the snake and cursed its shadowy reflection. They stood powerless, not comprehending, not remembering that it was a form they themselves had modeled.
Powerless, not comprehending that it was a form they themselves had modeled, they turned to the snake and cursed its shadowy reflection.

From that day, the day of storms and fire, the snake came to be under the curse of the rulers. It moved nearly blind, without legs, winding across the earth’s surface in endless pursuit.
Until the all-powerful man was to come, that curse would be upon the snake, red and green, black and white, it was the curse of all snakes.
The Rulers turned to their Adam, their man of soil and dirt. They took him in hand, giving him a final kiss. Then they expelled him from the fecund garden. His wife followed, wearing leaves and twigs; for they had no blessing, they were under the curse, following the twisting line of the snake into the world beyond the golden gates and bright sun.
Out of jealousy and fear, the Rulers threw mankind into great distraction, into a life of toil, disease and hardship. It was the great distraction, the plan so that mankind might be occupied by worldly affairs, what would be known as the human life.
Consumed with the need for water, food and safety, these concerns would come to absorb the whole of them, using all their mind and strength; after their physical needs where satisfied there would be nothing left of the being to devote to the holy spirit.
The rulers tasted the bitter tongue of hatred, knowing that their creation could see, while they, the creators of this being, were blind. It called up their rage and they turned themselves into winds of fire, streaking across the universe in bursts of bright red anger that exploded into stars. They cursed Adam and watched him walk into the cold of the world, his woman at his side, expelled from the garden so that he might never learn his advantage over them, so that he might never learn that he could see what they could not.

Colony

My sister was there when I was born. She helped me remove the shell that encased me when I felt complete in my beingness. I flexed my legs and scratched at the walls from the inside until the sheath trembled and shook with my efforts. Then my sister took notice and came to my assistance. When enough surface had been torn away, her antenna touched mine and I was soothed knowing that I was cherished. We shared knowing. Together we removed the white husk that had held me since a time before I was me.
I had been other than I was now. That time was lost to me, except the vague memory of my sister’s touch. We had shared knowing even before my transformation. She had always cared for me, and I was glad now that I was as she. We were now fully sisters.
When I had completely emerged, my sister and I touched feelers again. There was much that needed to be shared with me. Even while we communed this away another of my sisters came and carried away the birthing husk. My sister showed me the nursery where there were others who were as I once had been. They were so different than I was now. My long slender legs were now so quick and agile. Once I had none. Once I had lain blind and wriggling.
My sister showed me how she cared for these others. The understanding had already been transmitted to me in the knowing when we touched, but now I watched as she helped the blind ones, grabbing them with her mandibles and dragging them to the center of the chamber where they could roll and wriggle together. There were other sisters here, all assisting the blind ones who were as I had been and as my sisters themselves once were. I joined them in herding the blind ones together and saw to it that they were cherished and helped to nurture them so they could grow fat in preparation for their long confinement in transformation.
Some of the blind ones were ready. They were now busy cocooning themselves in fresh birthing sheaths. They would sleep the sleep that I had slept and would awaken anew when their own transformation was complete.
I was shown the eggs from which the blind ones had emerged. My sister touched feelers with me and asked me to help her move the eggs up to another chamber where there was warmth. We worked, letting the rhythm of work fill us with delight, carrying eggs from one chamber to the next through the tunnels. We were filled with pleasure assisting our unborn sisters, helping them to grow into blind ones so that they would one day undergo the great transformation and be as we were.
When our mandibles were empty we occasionally paused to touch feelers sharing the knowing. Our communion warmed us. We were also warmed by our work. Later when the upper chambers cooled, we moved the eggs back to the protected depths of the nursery.
We took a moment from our work and feasted on what our warrior sisters had killed. It was a fantastic beast that they had slain, huge and alien. Its mammoth size was a testament to our sisters’ courage and strength. We touched and sang their praise in the knowing.
When I was satiated I watched as one of my sisters carried away the body of another sister who had ceased to know us. This was all right. We still knew her. Down in the nursery, eggs were hatching and the blind ones were being fed and were spinning cocoons and soon they would join us in the knowing.
The knowing was shared before we were born and it would continue to be shared after we died. Our constant work ensured this. We rejoiced in the never ending flow of activity that was our communal beingness; carrying eggs, tending the blind ones, removing the dead, tunneling new passages, maintaining the old, exploring the world beyond, and hunting and killing, and scavenging and always, always sharing in the knowing.
My sister was there when I was born, and I was there when she was born, helping her to emerge from her cocoon, showing her all that she must know so that she could be there when her sister was born again.

Answers

I have nothing to say that will give you the answers to the wordless questions that burn in your heart. Those anguished muffled screams from your breast and the muted cry of an entire body take shape in the paunch that hangs over the belt and the ache of shoulders and the sorrows whose source seems to be diffused in the atmosphere like vapor. Vapor of my heart suffocates me and I oscillate between desiring affectionate company and craving the solitude of a deep dark warm cave. Perhaps in another way all I am seeking is that same deep dark exile, the reprieve of momentary annihilation.
I don’t have answers for you. My question is my self, the answer is the same. You are out here looking for something that no one can give you. If you want to know the truth then look into the abysmal well of self. It could be that you are happy, and that my dark mood doesn’t suit you. I happen to think, however, that happy people don’t look for answers. Show me someone who is tortured wondering why they are so happy, or why life is so just and fair and lovely.
People with questions are dissatisfied, admittedly to varying degrees. Some are miserable while others have only vaguely disquieting feelings that lead them to search for the source of the disquiet. If I had a greater magick I would never stoop to attempt to say anything directly to any one. I would have written you a fairy tale.
Notice also my need to say that “you” are looking for something. I want to set myself up as someone who knows more and to know more there must be someone else who knows less, so I have invented you. This is the sickness of all those who want to tell you “the truth” or “illuminate” your mind. Everyone who wants to tell you something factual, deliver the answers you seek, is a hungry liar. Even those who are well intentioned are liars. For example they may feel that what they want is to help you when in reality what they want is to be helped. They want to give you what no one can give them. They have made up some answers or been given some “one size fits all” explanations that they hope to pass on to you for your betterment, but one size fits all is the same as one size fits none.
If you want to know what is wrong find a mirror. For so much of my life I have assumed that others felt like me. Only now I see, the impressions which formed me may have varied in innumerable ways from those that formed you or any other given member of humanity. What ails me is a personal affliction, and what ails the world is me and my affliction.
There is always a chance that you feel a little bit like I do. Then in some way you might be comforted to think that you are not entirely alone with your shouting heart, that somewhere out there, someone else’s heart is shouting, and they are scrambling to find the reason, working desperately to save that heart from the terminal illness that filled it with woe.
Good heavens! If only I could lay my face in some grass or press my body against a boulder or a tree. If only I could be free to be alive instead of always fighting for that feeling. If only I wasn’t so angry… then what? What would I be, what would I have to do, what would you be reading now?
And of course there are others who are right now fighting for their mortal lives and some of them feel more truly alive than I do now. I am a spoiled white girl sitting in her high tower willing to dish out her opinions and advice while feeling sorry for her woes. I am like a house cat. I just want to get out. I just want to die so that I can feel alive.
That is my answer. If you want the truth then die or come close to it whenever possible. Turn yourself (hence the world) upside down. Revolutionize it. That is the only choice you have.

Creation and Property

Nobody can own music.
Nobody can own a sound.
You can make music, you can make a sound, but you can’t keep it in bondage.
It’s like a child. You may birth it, name it Rainbow and raise it on organic vegetable matter and Dalai Llama quotes excerpted from coffee table novelty books, but when it turns 18, if it wants to ride in red sports cars with gangstas and shake its ass in a skin tight mini skirts made of genuine baby white tiger skin, then that’s just what it will do.
The things which accumulated in you and resulted in "the song" were not unique to you, they came from elsewhere.
For example, your siblings also feel the angst that remains from your father’s drunken abuse, and your love of wild flowers is shared with scores of green peace enthusiast, hippies and botanist. That chord arrangement is only slightly different from others, and probably is identical to an arrangement featured in a polka song written by an accordion player that lives with his mother in Michigan and works as a used car salesman by day. The only thing distinguishing your arrangement from his is that the rhythm is different and yours is strummed on an acoustic guitar rather than keyed on an accordion and you have an audience and got a record deal while he suffers from loneliness due to his pig nosed face.
The very idea that creative material should be owned is an uncreative idea. It is an idea that says: “Now I have made this and no one else can make anything else like it or from it or I’ll sue their ass for copyright infringement”
Creativity is using anything and everything and making something new from it, something slightly different or unrecognizably different. Kudos to anyone that can take part of a song about love and peace and turn it into a song about hate and violence. That is called being creative. No one comes up with anything brand new and all their own.
We are all composites of the many different influences which converge within us and our ideas and creations stem from this composite creation that we call self. We do not know the nature of our self, and not knowing our self, how could we ever presume to possess it, let alone those composite spores that it spews into the ether in the form of poetry, song, or sculpture.
This self is on loan. We borrow it for a while, taking it for a spin before it evaporates. These impressions shaping our creative impulses, are viewed through the borrowed lens of self. They did not originate within us. The color of the sky was present long before we were and the birds were singing about it long before we started writing about them singing about it. The thing which made the song was not yours, the things that the song is made up of is not yours, those things that inspired its making are not yours, how could the song itself be yours?
Nothing is new under the sun. There are no original ideas. Your ideas come from others. From the sound of your mother’s voice when you were twelve, from your father’s old car, from the lake you nearly drowned in, from the song that played on the radio when you first kissed, from the way she screamed when she left, from the theme of that cartoon you watched when you were four, and the song your grandmother hummed when you were 13 months old.
There are things at work within you which you are not even aware of. That song you wrote may very well be an approximation of something you heard when you were a child or in the elevator three months ago. That you were unaware of its influence on you does not make the resulting song original. It came from somewhere.
To be creative is to see what there is to work with and work with it in any way possible. To steal, to borrow, to reuse and cause mutations, that is creative. To forge something new of what was is God-like, opening up infinite possibilities. To spend one’s life obsessed about protecting a small blot of intellectual material is limiting and can only lead to decay, to the end of possibilities.
Creativity is brave. To be a true creator is to scatter creations like droplets of water from the trembling wings of a heron. You do not take time to count the droplets, or to try to catch them before they can dance off of the wings of another.
If someone takes what you have made and does something new with it, that is a compliment. If you were focused on creation and not ownership, you would be unafraid to loose the drops of water that scatter from your wings, you would know that soon you will dip into the waters of life in search of the wriggling fish and new things will scatter from you as you part with the water again and ascend with your catch. This can happen again and again if you are active and not busy catching and adoring the product of dives into the deep that occurred once long ago.
When you create, you are in the present. What you created, that is already in the past. Dead and gone. If you are interested in ownership, sue the earth itself. For that is where you came from and that is where you’re going.

My Life as a Creator Dog

I have been trained like some berzerker attack dog to hammer on the keys to the rhythm of the beat and spill out golden sinews of thought and emotion without censorship. It is a developing habit, a thing I do almost effortlessly. Once I am in the chair, once the headphones are clapped over my ears and the music begins to trickle along the channels of my nervous system, I respond. Just as rubbing a thigh will warm other more secretive parts to the point of yielding up some gooey magick, so a few drops of sound may be administered to my ear canal and the result will be the warmth and wetness of an aroused mind.
This is what we want. We want habits that carry us through in the desired direction. We want to create every day to strive to be truly worthy of the phrase, “made in the image of God”. God must not be one who sits on his couch watching reality TV produced by some creative other, munching his popped corn and sipping his orange Fanta and waiting for the time when he will have to relieve himself. Certainly that is not the God in whose image I was made. That is not the God that I would aspire to be.
I make myself in the image of a creator god, one who rolls clay and breathes fire into it for six days and rests only on the seventh before resuming his work again the following day. Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Si, and Do again. The unending music of busy busy hands rolling and tapping to eke something out of the hard cold matter, the unyielding mother. We rub her and ply her sleeping flesh in an effort to rouse her from her deep deep slumber. Eventually even she will warm up under that persistent touch. This is the work of rescuing enchanted princesses frozen in spells of isolation and lethargy, waiting for true love to return the rose glow to pallid cheeks.
Rise! Rise!
Each day I come and set myself in supplication before you. I spin at the wheel, stoke the fires of the kiln, roll dough into the shapes of ginger children, paint upon the walls of the cave and sing my heart into a roaring ball of fire, a sun to awaken the life held dormant beneath your icy flesh.
Watch!
Here it comes now, the life so long hidden in subterranean galleries beneath a fog of slumber rises to the call. Timid green shoots break through the black top soil, pushing their budding little heads up towards my affections, seeking out that promised kiss from the sun.
We are makers. Doers, creators, builders, makers. Makers that roll the matter of the mother into unexpected forms, designs sprung from a pattern so entrenched in our genetic make up that we are blind to it.
There are always guard dogs, bitter pups on chains, not doers or makers, but stoppers and destroyers that would say that only the devil supplies such dreams as these that I weave, as these dreams that weave me. Not even for them will we yield, but instead work in the darkness, in secret, always shaking the sleeping world with gentle loving finger tips to make new life from the old in the same way that mushrooms spring up over heaps of decay and convert death into the life of their own kind.
Feed me your death, sleeping queen. Angry watch dogs set to protect her slumber, big black dogs, nip at my feet when I would step off of the table of the world and call in other dreams, universes of light and color and sound that would transform the sleeping queen forever and make her unrecognizable to trembling pups.
We call this change the end times, the end of the world as we know it, the end of the ages of sleep, the awakening that must come if enough makers stand around prodding rolls of reality flesh with pins, until riddled with such holes, the colors of the unmade spill through like water through a colander creating fountains of incomprehensible life. Not an end as trembling dogs will bark, but a beginning, a beginning made in each moment of concentrated making, a making done now, for the sake of its own existence as a state, as a position of matter in space and time, without fear or obedience to futures or pasts.
Some dogs have been trained to stop trespassers, and others, like myself, have been trained to run out into the wilderness and fetch the strange and bring it back inside the city walls. We each have our habits which move us like the gears in a clock. We makers are no less mechanical than our frightened brethren. Our nature is the same. The difference is that we are using our nature to be of service to something beyond our own nature. We have taken up the work of programming our own routines for the purpose of becoming makers, so that when Pavlov’s bell is rung, we don’t just salivate, we stand and dance and sing a song.

Vulnerability

There is always enough time for some lost bird to come careening out of the storm and fly through the gap between thoughts and words, crashing into your soft brain matter with the force of a hard cold gray stone sending your blood spattering in every direction. A spray of your valuable attention, your magick mojo, the blood of life that swirls through your veins like molten lava rushing to the head to make your squishy gray tissue into the crown of kings, now bursts into a bleeding mess of moist tissues. The careless mechanical munch, munch, munching of the caterpillars of the world. The ones that will grow fatter and fatter and never make cocoons, they are so busy with their cacophonous munching, gnawing right into your inner sanctum if they can, disguised as your lover, or your sister, or your grandmother, or your friend, smiling and lilting sweetly all the while preparing to launch that kamikaze attack on your mind, that ble de de de de de de dah of machine gun fire into your delicate magickal body, masquerading as a series of questions, objections, or comments, or they may launch a stealthy psychic attack, thinking so loudly that you feel stabbing pains in your chest, shoulders and side as if you’d been running a mile while breathing improperly, staring at you silently, morbidly from under veiled lids, not speaking their poison but letting it ooze, hiding sharp knives behind their backs and waiting for the ideal moment to slash and stab and drain you of your fire. They don’t know why. They munch, munch holes into the gossamer magick walls of the kingdom of God, filled with intellectual justifications for every bite. They are killing you while saying, what? What did I do? Munch munch. I only offered you a sandwich, I only reminded you of an errand, I was only talking to you about the GREAT WORK, munch, munch, gurgle. There is always time enough for these bandits to sneak in and steal the treasure. They steal it in the murky shadows between syllables and the blinks of an eye. They are your own thoughts, the thoughts of others, the stereo pumping from that pimp mobile paused at the curb wailing, “I need money”. You are never more than one sling shot away from loosing everything you worked so hard to gather, all of that blessed hot air lifting your balloon sewn of Persian rugs into the wide blue sky and blinking stars shining like the many nipples of that bitch goddess Nuit, feeding all her suckling pups, worthy and unworthy alike, with her twinkling light. All of your precious lift, lost when a single pin hole puncture procured by an act of mechanicality compromises your space. A solitary word, spoken or thought, launched like a grain of sand to a blind giant, a delicate crippled giant that suffers much from it’s affliction/gift, never having terrorized a villager or swallowed a child in its life, it has always been the tiny terrible peasants that have wounded the giant like vicious bloodthirsty monsters with sickle sharp teeth, tearing and gnashing, munch, munch; the fat caterpillar people crying, “Come down where we are, where you should be. It’s so much nicer in the mud.” They slash your wings, those delicate paper thin wings that you worked for long hard months in darkness and solitude to manufacture from your own flesh and blood and strength of will, now torn and waving like ribbons after an attack from one of the caterpillar people, the one outside of you or the one that will always live inside of you, the one you are making yourself from, the one that doesn’t know what is happening to it, or why it should fly instead of crawling and munching. You are besieged by a thousand enemies, both within and without, all waiting to take you down in one of those unprotected gaps, in one of those places where your attention is stretched too thin, or doesn’t quite reach, leaving chinks in the walls of your flying machine, neat little crevices where saboteurs can wedge a stick of dynamite and plug their ears and watch you burst in a shower of crimson and salty tears. Even a mighty dragon, if it is missing just a single scale, can be brought down with a piercing shot aimed into that small but fatal gap. There is always a space, a bit of time, a weak point where the guard is down, the sentry fallen into gluttonous slumber, a way to ruin ages of work in a moment.

A Wish In Five Minutes

With five minutes what can I do? I do what? Five minutes? I do five minutes. What? I can. What I can do: five minutes. Five minutes of my time which will eventually become five minutes of your time. Your time. If you were born in 1981 then this is our time. OUR TIME. I am not a Goonie and I want to go home, you say. But there is no going home. I know that. Home will be different, home will be gone. Home will be a golf course or a desert. We are here, in the underworld with the slimy skeletons of dead pirates and the shiny coins thrown down a well by many starry eyed wishers. We are swimming with the wishes and the fishes down below the feet of the walking dead, the ones above ground. And I tell you that this is OUR TIME! We can do something now. In our time. Our moment. Our adventure. A chance to live for a moment, like a moth drawn in to peril by the exciting glowing filaments of a light bulb. It is the electricity that draws us into this peril. You wish to escape peril. You wish to go home. But home is gone and this wish that you made, it’s right here, with my wish and all the other wishes that sleep with the fishes now that they are dead dull copper dreams with the face of Abe Lincoln stamped on one side. Now I can hold it in my hand. I take mine back, because it didn’t come true, and now that I have it again, I will be the one to carry out my wish. I’m my own coin now, you see. I am the currency with which dreams are bought and lost and stolen and smashed. I am a coin that keeps turning up. Lucky for some, unlucky for others. Now I won’t get tossed. No heads no tails. No tales to tells. I am that I am. This is what I do with five. With five alive I sing and strive and dive and dive deeper into cavern sweeter where pale fishes swim with tails of silver and gold, swish swishing in dark pools. This my proof that I do yet live, for dead men tell no tales, and I more than tell them, I sprout them from my rear side and watch them wiggle and squiggle and slip and slide. The trick with a tail is not to let it fall off, which it wants to do, but send it back up and around on the figure eight for snakes merry go round. But you must not let snakes get stuck in your head. Then your looks can kill doll, turning all your company to stone with fright. Then they wont call you doll, doll, they won’t call you at all and behind your back they’ll say “beastie”. Then what can you do? You call it, Heads or Tails? But I say I wont get tossed. Naw Naw. I’ll hold it this time, cause this time is my time. OUR TIME. No time like the right time. Left or right. Up or down. In or out. I wont get tossed. I am not this I am not that. That’s what I can do. There is what a man can do and what he can’t. I can do it all, being from no man born. I’m a creature of the NOW. The mammas and the papas wave their fingers at me and say, "Now, now!" I let their fingers wag. They wag since I’m getting out of hand. I’m slipping out of hand since those finger won’t quit wagging. Wagon at the Dwagon. But the dwagon pulls the wagon. Pulls the wagon in five. In five minutes my time, Earth time. Earth, Air, Fire, and Water time. This is my wish. This one right here. And you know what? I’m taking it back, because it didn’t come true. Because now it’s our time. And with our time we can make wishes real.

Foundation of a Shadow

Give me your hand and let me take you into the tangled jungle of flesh, blood, and bone. Let me take you into those caverns where chest cavities gap wide open, making the walls that hold you and tangled indiscriminate masses of fleshiness make an uneven carpet of malformed shapes. The colors here are peachy and dripping crimson and veiny royal blue. Shredded muscle tissues hang like scarlet drapes, windows look into the hive-like interior of bone where the marrow rests maroon in its pockets. You will find that everything drips here, like melting wax. You needn’t move at all to journey through these chambers, they do the moving for you. Morphing, they collapse in on themselves as a new interior design emerges on the back of the old. We can walk through the catacombs of gore in their bright colors until deformed skulls emerge in the landscape, stark and white, being swallowed by blackness that eats itself until a new bright white set of bones bleeds into the forefront and strange vines of darkness reach like tentacles from every corner, weaving their way through the forest of ivory skeletal structures.
Vaguely, you think that this must be a bad trip, except nothing about it particularly bothers you and even that doesn’t bother you anymore, not the way that it used to when you wore little golden crosses on delicate chains around your neck and imagined that God dwelt in a palace of crystal surrounded by English gardens. Now you can tumble within the swirling black vapors like a sky diver through clouds, without fear of Gods or Devils that struggle over pure souls like Counts and Dukes over the young virgins of adventure stories. Now they are just these two things that give you the benefit of travel; shadow and light, and neither one loves you more than the other and neither one will hurt you more than the other. They are not your parents. They are your children, your toys, your tools. They are the tricks that make something out of nothing, motion out of stillness, form out of void, and whatever you are, wherever you go, you’re just passing through, crawling through sticky bloody hells as tantalizing to the senses as any heavenly field of lavender under a bright blue sky.
Crawl out into an office of clean white walls and blue Berber carpet and white laminate counter tops stocked with jars of tongue depressors. Slip up onto a cushy rainbow colored bean bag and make yourself comfortable, because you are a body now, a human that knows the words for “bean bag” and “laminate” but not the words that describe the other places where you have just been. The therapist arranges herself on another beanbag. Her coat is white, her hospital pants are powder blue. There are pens in her pocket and glasses on her clean friendly face, framed by straight auburn hair, fashionably layered to balance against the spectacles and make her seem perfectly ordinary, not too much of anything, nor to little.
“I like bean bags,” you tell her.
“Yes,” she says, “they do the job.”
“I’ve always meant to get one/ wanted to have one/ am meaning to get one soon/ saw some when I was little.” You say all of these things at once but it is organized into one concise sentence such as,
“I’ve always liked them.”
There are some juggling balls out on the floor. You pick them up because they seem to be out of place and you think that you are preparing the room and making her comfortable while she waits for the person she is going to help, so you tell her,
“I can juggle.”
“Really?” she is sincerely interested, but not overly excited, just right, like warm water.
You try to juggle but you don’t catch the balls. Apologizing, you try again. When you throw them into the air, you experience a temporary blindness. This shouldn’t hinder you because you know you don’t need to see the balls to catch them. You try not to look at them and focus on the woman’s face the way you were taught, but it seems that you are also throwing them out of pattern so that they spill onto the floor far from reach. Collecting and examining them, you notice that one is smaller than the other two. You explain that this may be the reason you are having trouble and trade the odd ball out for another that seems to be of the same size as the other two. Then you notice that all three are of slightly different sizes and decide not to throw them all over the room again.
You tell the analyst:
“I’m out of practice. I used to have a friend that I practiced with. He taught me how to juggle. I could juggle three when I met him…”
A vision of when you first saw a jester with jingle bells on his cap standing under a canopy within a circle of hay bails. You looked at the straw on the ground as he shows you how to throw the ball so that you catch it again. And you bought three little sacks, like tiny firm bean bags that were delicately furred and took them home with you.
“…but he taught me how to pass with a partner…”
You picture the different ways that you passed, sometimes facing each other and standing perhaps three feet apart, sometimes side by side with one arm each wrapped around the others waist, locked together like Siamese twins, your left hand passing to his right.
You describe the different methods to her and continue, “And he taught me to juggle four balls, and two in one hand so that I could juggle four that way.”
While you are speaking, you begin to suspect that she is here to listen to you. She is not waiting for anyone else. And you wonder what you will discover. You wonder what it means. And you decide not to finish the story because you are afraid of what it reveals. That is how the blackness eats itself here, how the scene falls away so that another will emerge built on the foundation of a shadow.

Finesse

Nothing good will come of this, I warn you. You go around reading blogs written by other crazed machines, cyborgs whose dreams are wrought with longing and sorrow, and who sit in their pajamas all day long making pictures out of words or digital images or the ghosts of 1956, and you don’t know what might happen. What do you hope to gain coming round here, snooping around a blog like this? Are you looking for the truth? Or some helpful suggestions for improving your animatronic lifestyle? Maybe you are here looking for tips on how to work?
We haven’t got the truth here. I’m sorry, but there are two angels living under my skull, one who always lies and the other who always tells the truth, but I never know which one is which and they both insist that they are the angel that speaks only truth. I haven’t learned the trick for deciphering which one is which, so as far as truth is concerned, I can offer you no assistance on that account.
When it comes to tips for improving your animatronic existence, I am again of two minds. One mind says the best solution for the problems of life is not to live. If you want my advice, swallow a lead bullet, I know some people this has worked wonders for. My other mind suggests that you buy some Avon, work out, dress to the nines and find someone that makes you feel sexy.
I really am a bitter old goat when it comes to improving one’s life, I haven’t improved mine, I don’t think that life as a cyborg is really something that can be improved. It’s like buying designer brand curtains to hang in your house made of straw. I tell you love, there’s no point.
So you can see that if advice for good living is what you seek, you’ve come to the wrong fountain. I only know about bad living. Now, now then, if you are looking for a way to work, congratulations! You have figured out what robots were made to do. Good for you for wanting to be the best bot that you can be. I have something to say on this topic and in the end it will be up to you to decide whether I’m of a mind that others should partake of.
First, lets make it clear, there are two things that must happen for work to be work in the way that I mean when I say work:

1. You have to do something, engage in an actual activity of some kind. Things that will not qualify include: sleeping, dreaming, reading, talking, or thinking great thoughts.

2. You have to do whatever you do with a great deal of finesse.

I know, number two seems a little silly to a robot. What’s the difference if I walk from stage left to stage right or skip from stage left to stage right whistling Sweet Adeline, so long as I get from stage left to stage right in the end? Well if you really just like to keep busy, there is always knitting with the old gals. Finesse is for cyborgs that are trying to do something special with themselves. Upon realizing that you were destined for the junk heap and that little feral cats would meow and crawl around in your rusted hulk long after the last electric impulse fired within your advanced operating system, you might have thrown your dirty fist up to the sky and cried:
“There must be something more! What is the meaning of this…this… this terrible joke!?”
Well, I don’t know the answer to that question, but one idea that has made an impression on me is that if we do something a little different upon the cosmic stage, employ some parts that don’t usually get employed during a normal mechanical life time, then perhaps the results of such a life will be different than the results of the usual tired song and dance. Maybe something can be born of the ashes, a phoenix gestated within the robot husk and nurtured with finesse.
Remember, nothing good will come of this.
Nothing good, nothing bad.
You have been warned.
You may not enjoy it if you try it.
You might get used to it with time.
You will still die.
But perhaps something else will come of it all. Something might happen that would not have happened if you had gone through the usual motions while thinking and dreaming of something else. I am not saying that this would benefit you, with your gears that need greasing and your rusty cogs grinding away. I am saying that perhaps in living and doing and dying with a little finesse, one might at least be of benefit to something else and do more than feed the heap with one’s carnage.
You go around writing blogs, a crazed machine, a cyborg whose dreams are wrought with longing and sorrow, and who sits in pajamas all day long making pictures out of words or digital images or the ghosts of 1956, and you don’t know what might happen.

Here And There

Can I tell you how I came to be here, at the this time and this place, this point of convergence between dimensions that I imagine or experience or dream, this moment that I may not understand at all? If I tell you, swear to me by every hole in this cheese you hold so dear that you will accept every word I say as true and not press me on matters which seem questionable, for I fear that it will break my delicate grip with this reality if you prod it unnecessarily. These things are like fine webs made of spun sugar mounted one upon one another to form pink cloudy softness, webs that once touched with sweaty hands or a curious tongue merely melt into sticky sweetness, no more constant or fixed than human promises. I will tell you because you seem sincere and because you are here, an imaginary ear for my imaginary voice, so take an imaginary seat there by my imaginary hearth and I will tell you the story of the black man and the little bird.
First I will tell you about the black man. It does not matter which of these things I tell you about first as the events surrounding these two nouns; man and bird, occurred simultaneously, if they occurred at all. That is to say that sequence has everything to do with language in that the word is like a narrow doorway through which only one topic may pass at a time, like little drops of dewy spittle from my lip to your ear, a tiny packet of data about things which have been occurring in a world too vast to squeeze into dew drops or words or feathers that have been made into writing quills instead of the wings of flying birds. One comes before the other only because that is all that the doorway permits, all that that ungracious lord, THE WORD will allow, one at a time to visit the well of communion between souls.
So first the black man. Let me tell you this of him; he who is the cohort of countless witches condemned to burn as well as those that fly round secret fires in a whirlwind of ecstasy before they are discovered by the mob, he is not what you expect. He, as I have known him anyway, is always mild mannered, self composed and unassuming. He that knows so much will ask you what he well knows as though he never knew it and not to play a game with you, but just that the two of you shall partake of knowledge together in the renewed asking of a question. His hair flecked with grey, his posture stooped, he keeps trees that bear fruit, unusual trees and he will peel back the leathery skins of those fruits to reveal the strange delights held within and offer it to you as water to a parched man. He would withhold nothing, least of all that which grows from seed to meat. Should you wish to partake, he shares without reserve. What is his is yours while you are with him and again later if you choose. He is also a fisherman who draws great shy beast from the deep with lures unlike any used by ordinary men. He will draw up the arcatuthus for you and then you will see your greed for the catch dissolve into sympathy for the beast and you will see its children born and hope that it survives captivity and may return to the deep, but if not, then there are still the offspring in whom to invest this new found tenderness. He is a stranger, a lover, a father all in one, your oldest friend, a friend that you have forgotten. Never did he forget you. Never did he hold it against you that you would forget or swear that you are unacquainted with him. He has all the tenderness of an old grandfather, the wisdom of a priest of one of those true orders of mystic stewardship. That is the black man.
And then there is the bird. I met the bird in a parking lot looking for a crumb to nab. I was putting groceries into the back of the truck and I heard him say that he was hungry, so I broke off some bread and tossed it gently his way as I had been taught by the black man. The bird turned his head slightly to look me in the eye and thanked me very much for taking notice of him. I told him that it was my pleasure and I hoped he would enjoy the fare and as he went heartily to it I got into the truck and drove away. How did he look? Well he was small and sort of grayish brown, a sort of sparrow maybe. It is his little voice which was clearest to me both then and now. I heard his voice again this morning while I walked from school. He was singing gaily. You will tell me that sparrows don’t sing, but I must tell you that by today he was no longer a sparrow. His voice was very clear and bright and I listened to it as I walked, touched by its merriment. Then I noticed that he sang the song that cars sing when they are rubbed the wrong way by someone who cannot disarm the alarm. It was the song of that alarm which goes off in low class neighborhoods and runs through a series of different obnoxious tones and rhythms so that the offending car rubber will be dismayed by the shrill and clownish noises and depart in all due haste. Now my friend the bird repeated this same song in his lovely trill. I stopped beneath the tree laden with pink blossoms and listened to his heart bursting with joy through his rendering of this popular new song. The outward form mattered not at all. The lyric to the song, the tones, the rhythms, all were quite unimportant. What mattered so was the heart. That is what he administered liberally to that tired old alarm call. He made it a masterpiece.
“You should try it.” The black man said tasting a succulent gem from one of his trees. “That’s what we do. We take what they made and we remake it, we remake it with ourselves in it. It doesn’t matter at all what they meant for it to be in the first place. We make it alive.” He said this with a little flittering hand gesture that reminded me of the bird. His beard was short and sparse then, composed of short curled salt and pepper bristles. His skin looked like milk chocolate, soft and weathered with age. I say, sing on little bird, sing on and I will listen to you and to the black man too.
What about you friend? Are you listening to me now, telling you this story with gaps wide enough for us both to fall through? If you haven’t heard, then no matter and never mind, so long as you spare me your criticisms. I tell it to you the best way I can with this clumsy stuff, trying to wedge a leviathan through a hole made for a mouse. I could have just told you the story of Iron Hans, painting the forest in greens so deep they were almost black like the rotted underside of forgotten chard. I could have told you any story at all, an old, old story, one that you have heard a dozen times before and done as much if not more that I did here. It is not what I told you really that will profit you at all, but what I poured into every senseless syllable. It comes from the fount at the heart swelling over after the rains of winter, ready to feed all the spring grasses and from them, little lambs, and from them, hungry lions.
That is the story of how I came to be here, how we crossed here like roads running unknown courses, my imaginary voice and your imaginary ear, joined for a moment and now soon to part, for now I take my leave of you. I will never mind if you forget me. I will never mind if you claim that we never met.

The Burning Princess

I need more time in the dark, like a mushroom nestled at the underside of a fallen tree, drinking in the moisture and nutrients necessary without being prodded at my the nosy sun. I have so very little to put forth. I am a field that hasn’t recuperated properly from the last harvest. What will spring up out of this soil? Something has gone awry upon this day, some small thing which has led me to feel scorched inside as if I had been splayed open like a fish for the sun to blaze down upon my tender insides and burn them like a laser smoothing out the unwholesome imperfections on an aging starlet’s face.
What if I do have a monstrous deformity, one that can’t be seen, one that affects my thinking, my feeling, my perception of reality? Would you correct this deformity that is me? Would I be me without it? Perhaps I am the deformity, an asymmetrical thalamus made for communing with things left undisturbed by proportionately formed minds. What if I choose not to use my deformity to pray for money, health or peace? What if I don’t care whether there is a god greater than me, or if it hears me? What if I am only interested in the quest, in rescuing the princess from her deep slumber in the inky hot depths reeking of sulfur? Not because I have to, not because it would make me good, or better than any other pale ape, but because I heard her call out to me, I heard her say, "Please help me. You are my only hope."
So I run the gauntlet, which looks like a cluttered apartment filled with children and the belongings of a displaced girl and a tangle of electronics; computers, cameras, and cell phones. I make my way through the deadly maze that is blonde hair and blue eyes and acne scarred skin stuffed into tight jeans.
From the outside, from beyond the glass-less window they might look in and say:
"Her life is a waste, look at that dump that she lives in, she has no car and lives off government money. Why won’t she get off her ass and do something, make some money?"
"Mother," I say, "They’re playing our CD on the radio."
"Will you get any money?" she asks.
Money, money, money, and things, that is the measure of worth from that other side of the window. Without it you will suffer. Worse than not having it, is not wanting it more than any thing.
Lazy.
Shiftless.
Do nothing.
But no, I can see the princess burning down in the flames, hear the crackling of her flesh, the rustling of her shackles.
"Please help me. You’re the only one who hears me crying. Please, please…"
If I am the only deformed creature that can hear her plea, then she is unreal. Yet she is real to me, as real as any other thing, the deformity which I am acerbating causes me to see it that way, so I will have to best the labyrinth, make my way through the pattern forged of hopes, fears, desires, things made in the intense heat by a clumsy smith.
If I run this road, it will change, with every step it is made anew. I can run rabbit run and it will be known to me only as it is coming undone and reconfiguring, like grains of sand lifted by a wind and laid back to rest.
If I am ill made, will you stop me?
Tell me why, if my princess is imaginary, why should you stop me?
What has the world to fear from deformities like me?
What have you to fear from imaginary princesses?
I need more time in the dark, away from the prying light of illuminated minds. I need a dank place to nurse my defective nature into full blown monstrosity. Then see what comes forth from this point of convergence called human, from this crossroads where sacrifice should be made on behalf of shadowy things. One day of sun can be undone. You have witnessed its undoing.

Good Morning

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

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.

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.

Scratch

Cry blood for the innocent, mother, make ash in the palms of little black hands from thin air, and send the righteous quaking and rolling. What? We were made for rolling and belly doughing, jiggling slowly, while the spirit is growing. We’re just the little old caps of ‘shrooms poking their heads up out of the shit. If you want to know us, look down under the soil and see that there be no us, there is only one tangled mess with many little hydra heads spiraling out into the universe, into the UNI VERSE, the ONE SONG that we’ve been remixing as long as we can remember. The mechanics of life undo it, they undo it every time and we remake the same song again and again. Pass the hat. Take up a collection, a congregation in the name of the holy infection. Because out of the void arose the mound and the lotus, and as the lotus unfolded, there sat the glowing figure of Ammun Ra, and out of loneliness he made his son Geb and daughter Nut, and Nut and Geb out of fascination with one another, made Osiris and Seth, Isis and Nepthys.
All come out of nothing and back to nothing all will return.
All of our red and gold and blue and yellow and green and orange and purple will be black again. Blessed are the poor because they won’t mind being nothing again. Only the rich man will kick and scream as you strip all of his weight away from him. The poor are not poor because they have no bread. The poor are the fools dancing near to the edge of the mound smelling the flowers and wanting nothing more than this one moment. Their bread is the breast of Nut, sweet bread that brings madness. Pass the hat. I dreamed that Alice was an evil sorceress which lured small animals and cute toys into her midst by appearing to be a sweet child, but her heart was rotten and black and she devoured them all, all that wandered so innocently into her midst. We got to be light, like the fizzy bubbles of butterscotch soda, but we got to keep a wise eye open. We can’t be getting into the car with strangers offering us candy or salvation, crisp dollar bills or a good tea party. We got to keep walking and rolling an jelly belly doughing our way back to the abyss. When Annubis comes with the scale and weighs our heart against the feather of Isis, Alice will be waiting backstage licking her crocodile chomps and scratching her hungry, hungry hippo rump, opening wide and waiting for the heavy heart.
So be a poor fool. Be a fool that got nothing and want nothing. Be a fool that picks flowers and wanders over all the hills of all the days, humming the same little song again and again. Be an ass that falls head over heels then stands up again shameless. Pass the hat.
Cry blood and make ash and think nothing of it. Make dough of blood and ash and bake it in the fire of Ammun Ra until you’ve made an army of ash bread men to laugh and sing and dance ahead of you. Rub your ram horns, Khnum, and muse,
"My but they love to sing and dance!"
And then ramble on behind them playing your pipes and think nothing of it. Think nothing of it when Alice leads them away and dresses them in clean frocks and sets them in pews and bids them hold still. Think nothing of it when they stop coming to dance with you Khnum, and when they call you devil, and when they become so heavy the earth is marked with deep lines wherever they pass. Poor lonesome old Khnum. A few of us fool ash bread men will still dance with you. Pass the hat. We are gonna dance. We are gonna walk and roll and churn our dough.
That’s right. We are the poor, but we’ve got the dough we were made of to roll. And were gonna roll it! Roll it up the mountain and back down again until judgement come. Jiggle and wiggle and squiggle and shake until the snake oil salesman puts us all back in his carpet bag and tips his hat with a wink. What? We were made for rolling and belly doughing, jiggling slowly, while the spirit is growing. We’re just the little white crests of waves. Down deep the force of the ocean moves us onward, onward to sing our song and break on the rocks again and again. And them with there heavy roads and heavy buildings and important business and lead hearts are going to make happy Alice fat, fat, fat!