Object Petite A

These are the things I don’t want to know anymore, don’t want to say anymore, don’t want to write.  By then it was called the city of Lake Elsinore, but when I arrived in 1986 at the age of five, it was only a town. I’ve been trying to run away from the pain so that I’ll behave like a good citizen. Anything I can do now to pretend it wasn’t me, a little Holly Golightly, phantom without a past. Or, I could let the wound bleed the stories that I don’t want to belong to, like one of the cards that paints the roses red. Summer faded but we remained. We attempted to perform magic rituals using packets of salt and a plastic knife in the back room by the time clock. Even then I wished to be undone, to unravel like the fibers of a rope and become straw.

I recognize that those sweetest of dreams are not of people or events that truly were, but of those that never quite were and never will be. Along with some of my clothes and shoes the package contained an envelope filled with letters and mini cassettes. Recognizing this makes it no easier to say farewell to ghosts. They linger. The mini cassettes were of him talking as he wandered around the town alone. The hotel room was dark, the curtains were drawn and it must have been night outside. It was perhaps a place of perpetual night just as we were those who are ever young.Vampiric dreams to savage the frail reality of the waking world.

It was a weekday. Maybe a Friday. He was strumming his guitar while I poured over the loose pages of the manuscript, looking for gaps, figuring where to take up the telling. It felt good to be sitting next to Alan in the sun with naked legs, trees and ravines and dirt turnouts rushing by. A town with just four stop signs located at the intersection of Central and Lakeshore. Trying to run away from the pain so that I’ll behave. I wondered if he’d ever gotten my letter, but I didn’t ask. It was written on notebook paper with a blue pen and I was continuing it. I saw him then, but I didn‘t know him. I was careful not to touch him so as not to disturb him in any way lest he should vanish once more. He was here now, that was good enough.

Even then I wished to be undone, to unravel like the fibers of a rope and  become straw. I was taking up the text I had left behind, writing my manifesto. After reading one of these I sent him a note from the concession stand that read, “Michael John Sarver, you are so damned good I think I want to have your children.” We attempted to perform magic rituals using packets of salt and a plastic knife in the back room by the time clock. A wild empty place filled with mystery, mountains, and sun baked hills beyond which lakes lie hidden among spruce and yarrow. That was all that I wanted, everything I was reaching for. To be clean of the Born Again Christians and the anonymous alcoholics and the dusty shoeless prostitutes of Grand Ave.

He said,
“This is so surreal, it’s like an alternate reality, and this is my dog and we’re together.”
I laughed appreciatively,
“Yeah.”
The desert with its wide-open vistas, spider-like Manzanita, and unperturbed sky in faded blue.  Some things cannot last, very simply because they are not real. Mirages. Hallucinations. Some fevered madness. Harsh lights, bad smells, and I was injured on entry; the doctor gave me two black eyes when he reached in and twisted me around. I was almost there with the primordial man that is my companion in the dream world.

I was strong and eager and curious despite the circumstances. I couldn’t tell which answer it was, whether he wanted me to be like a sister, or a lover, but it didn’t matter. After all the other kids my age returned to school I was still there popping corn and sweeping floors, and tearing tickets because I had graduated early. Fluid got into my lungs. People handled me through rubber gloves and I was surrounded by Plexiglas or some such material. Furnishings were simple and sparse. The room had an art deco feel. There was a yellow orange quality to the light, and maroon carpet or drapes or bed covers. Some lands lay barren forever waiting for their fisher king.

You know snow globes? How there’s a little figure or a little town trapped inside and you can never touch it and it can never touch you? By then it was called the city of Lake Elsinore. Look there, see the widow sneaking out by the river, smuggling babies and guns and tobacco out of the wasteland? He was one of the cards. I worked in concessions. One night I had a terrifying experience of sleep paralysis. Like all bullies he was scared. Mostly he was scared for me. The carpet was warm and soft, the acoustics were likewise muted, it was dim, and my parents' garments hung around me like curtains or banners, a pleasant array of patterns and colors. High up on the shelves there were strange objects for me to examine in that moment of evacuation and quite contemplation.

Or let the wound bleed. I had the feeling that if they knew what I knew they’d agree, that eventually they’d come around and see that there was no use in doing things their way. If I ran across the stars, skipping from one to another like sparkling stones jutting from a black river, would you run with me? Would you view with wide-eyed wonderment the secret chambers beneath the current of life while I sing my body electric? I know you would. I have become a ghost, the silent center of the vortex. The stories whirl around me. I dart a hand out and grab them, plucking multicolored carp from the whirl pool, making their stories mine.

He also demanded that I read two books: "Dianetics" so that I could learn to control myself and Einstein’s "Theory of the Universe" so that I would see reality’s shabby skeleton. A cover up. A blind spot. I am the secret thing I can not even say to myself, that which motivates all of my existence. I am the unutterable thing externalized. Is this what it means to be a woman? To always sense your worth in the attention granted you by men? All that he was communicating to me was fear. I try to think of what the opposite of that would have been. The real story. At the center. The thing that never quite gets said. The door that can’t be opened. To simulate the force of a shot fired, he’d shove me backwards so I could practice bracing myself.

He was always saying that he wanted me to be free, but I had hardly ever been free. Unperturbed sky in faded blue.  Some things cannot last very simply because they are not real. Even then I wished to be undone, to unravel like the fibers of a rope and become straw.  He walked to his mother’s home on Case St. where he was living and shot himself in the head. And in the moments when I was, I came hurtling
towards other bodies, a brilliant flaming star that they quickly caught and held, determined to keep the heat for themselves. He had a way of laughing after mentioning things that hurt. Phrases like, “That dog was my best friend.’ or ‘It broke my heart, you know?’ would be punctuated with soft laughter that seemed to come rocking out of his body.

“He was a cocker spaniel too, he looked just like this one.”
The window was rolled down blowing my hair a little so that the dog could sniff the mountain air. It was an imaginary place in an imaginary time. Wild, empty, filled with mystery. Mountains, sun baked hills, lakes hidden among spruce and yarrow. That was all that I wanted, everything I was reaching for. When I arrived in 1986 at the age of five it was only a town. I recognize that those sweetest of dreams are not of people or events that truly were, but of those that never quite were and never will be. I am only a sound caught in the throat. I am no one. No longer a character in any story that can be told. Inexpressible. A mirage. Some fevered madness. It was written on notebook paper with a blue pen and I was continuing it. The real story, at the center. That thing that never quite gets said.

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.

Poisonous Blue Sky

Ha ha. Poisonous blue sky, so bright so clear. Old white men gather around the table and talk about the kids, the rotten no good kids, busting lights and keying cars. Do they ask why? Why are the kids doing this? No. They pronounce the verdict, “crazy” the kids are crazy, “there’s something wrong with her.” A thirteen year old girl that takes scissors and rakes them across BMWs. Do I hear them say three or four times that she is Chinese, as if that may be part of the problem? How easy to sit around this table together and make our pronouncements. Not like us. Crazy.
Not like you. If you were any older, your spirits any more decrepit, you’d have your coffins parked outside not your BMWs. Four old white corpses gathered around a table. They aren’t even drinking coffee or tea or eating cake. They have come into this café to meet for this conversation, this weary pep rally to assure them of their supremacy. They will wait until later to feed. After the grim reaper comes to collect them they will feast on the worms that crawl from their cavernous heads before laying back down in their expensive stone mausoleum together, taking turns scratching each others’ backs before taking their respite. The flaking old flesh is raked off beneath their talons, for the white hair and finger and toenails continue to grow, even after they accepted death’s putrid favors.
These undead gangsters of the All American, with their cell phones laying out on the table or clipped to their leather belts. Crisp white work shirts whether they still have jobs or not. Sweater vests to complete the look. Now the bitter grapes are made into bitter wine. They discuss, with raspy voices like the sound of dry leaves rattling down empty streets, the beggars who make $400 dollars a day waiting in busy intersections with cardboard signs. Mashing the sour fruits of their hearts with their brittle fists, they hold their mouths open at the edge of the table to catch the elixir as it overflows. This is all they need. One little sip of envy, and disgust. “Not like us. Lazy. There’s something wrong with her.”
Their own children, because they have pulses, are alien to these old patrons of the crypt who lie down to die before they could come alive, like good Americans.
Is it America? Is it the world? Where is the factory that churns out these creatures of the crypt, these rotting vestiges of capitalist idealism. They will take dollar bills with their worms latter, spreading the wrigglies over the greenbacks like caviar over a cracker. That was all it took to lure them into premature death. The reaper stood in the mausoleum doorway with a plate of crackers bearing the faces of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin , other old dead white men, and these four came crawling, drooling from the corners of their mouths. The dream that wrapped her ephemeral fingers round their throats like a collar with a leash and pulled them towards her master. It was a dream of supremacy, of comfort, of power and prestige.
Are you comfortable in your velvet lined coffins, talking about your pension funds and how much Ed Davis brought home last year? Blurting out precise figures like a litany, holding your dark mass under poisonous blue skies in the center of a brightly lit café. Making grim pronouncements of “Not like us. Crazy. There’s something wrong with…” and hiding under the gray robes of your precious dream while she grips you each tightly by the throat. Then, suddenly in accordance with the laws of the eternal day born in the age of industry, she gives them a jerk and they fly up from the table like a murder of crows. It’s back to the graveyard she leads them, back to her master in the black cloak with the scythe, holding out his plate of green crackers.
In they’ll go still rumbling their litany, safe within their four walls of stone, safe with their keepers, while out there somewhere the kids are running wild, propelled by the life that surges through their rebellious spirits. Out there in the rainbow jungle the kids are smashing lights and scratching Mercedes and BMWs with sharp scissors and pan handling and fucking and getting high while their fathers are finishing their bedtime snacks and reclining inside of boxes within boxes. Poisonous blue sky, so bright, so clear, illuminates the day, spreads over the empty table where four old white men lapped the bitter wine of their hearts, over the graveyards where they continue to murmur their unhallowed prayers, over the thirteen year old Chinese girls smiling with their scissors at the ready, over grisly faced pan handlers and over me. Ha ha. Poisonous blue sky.

Thoughtfully, Beautifully

The problem is the music putting ideas into their heads, words not their own running in lines like trains along tracks, tracks all forged in the simple melodies of these songs. All of my thoughts have been cooked out of my head, my senses dulled by the sun blazing on and on. The people made in the music and baked in the sun lay around wondering vaguely how they came to be at the bottom of the valley. Dressing their dogs up and wearing the least possible amount of clothing themselves, these Southern Californians run on iced coffee and sex. These are the two lures that get them to race through the course like lanky long faced gray hounds after the rabbit. Is there a story in there somewhere? Or is it only a poem? A verse in the song that makes us, an incoherent stream of experience, one line of code, pure data in the form of color and sound. The sweet bitter taste of coffee and cinnamon, the scent of vanilla body wash rising from heated skin bronzing under the solar disc rolling overhead, Apollo driving his chariot over water and earth without compromise.
Why don’t we all sit together and make our own song? After all, we’ll all soon be bones or ash and it won’t matter where the broom was or who opened the window while the air conditioner was running. Such resentment because life hasn’t been made thoughtfully, beautifully, but has rather happened to us when we should have happened to it. A sword slicing through a piece of blue sky like a knife through lemon meringue pie, purposeful, unrelenting like the tap, tap, of a wood peckers bill into the trunk of a tree. Bit by bit, measure by measure, taken in careful steps laden with the intent to savor and cherish. That was the way to do it, but we schlepped through it, clinging to vague ideas, promises regarding tomorrow and other distant futures that could never arrive because the first steps would never be taken and someone else would be blamed for the inaction.
What is missing is not a something that can be held in sweaty hands. All we will ever need, the most glorious thing we could ever obtain is already here and we are closed to it, blind to the wealth that is real and irrevocable; this liberty that is mind, this river that is love and never ceases to flow.
The problem is the music putting ideas into their heads, words not their own, words that tell us what should be, what could be, but never what is. Where is the rejoicing? The explosion of self that is being all that I am in this moment with lungs and heart and brain pouring pure poetry and hands that can do. It is our hands that give us some unusual potential as makers. But what good are makers that take no action, that never make?
Creators that do not create are something else, listening to the lyric that someone else wrote as if it were absolute, this reality the only reality. These are consumers, the walking dead, with tiny dogs in purses and the urge to create subverted so that all they really need to get by is a jar of Vaseline and a stack of pornographic magazines, and ideally some one to stick it into or to take it from, words not their own running in lines like trains along tracks, senses dulled by the sun blazing on and on.
Whatever happened to the darkness, the womb where things are allowed to gestate and come to fruition? There is no room for creation in the endless prying light. All things skim by on the surface, racing towards the future on the tracks forged in the simple melodies of this popular song. When will we all meet in the darkness, within the depths below? Shall we really wait until there is nothing left of us but bone or ash? Is it then not too late to last and love? To persist and adore? Is it then not too late to sing our own song, to use our hands for something more challenging than instant gratification?
That song, the resentment in that voice, the sad helplessness of flesh trapped within the life unlived, sagging with age, the bitter threat to run away once again. Time runs out. All songs happen through time, all songs begin and end. It is the little flourishes in between that count the most.
Did we make it ours? Live up to our deepest nature as makers? Or did we let it rush by on those rails that were supplied by the manufacturer, let it rush by only to make bone and ash, bitter sweet taste of coffee and cinnamon, blue sky un-sliced?
It should have been made thoughtfully, beautifully, and without compromise. It should have been made in the dark. It should have been our own.

The Three Directives

There are three directives which move a human being into action. These are “need”, “desire”, and “will”.
Need is the most basic and primordial mover. The human machine needs food, needs water, needs warmth, needs affection, needs to excrete waste. Once a need has been met there is a sense of concrete satisfaction that sets in until the need arises again according to the physical cycles of the human machine. Needs can be met.
Desires are a trickier monster. They arise when needs have been transformed through the symbolic structure. For example, thirst is a real need for the human machine so an advertisement for a clothing line might depict a well dressed man and a woman drinking from glasses. A human machine that sees the ad will unwittingly transform the need to drink into a desire for a dress or pair of slacks. The trouble is, that while drinking a glass of water will quench thirst, buying a pair of slacks will not. Satisfaction will be denied.
Desires can never lead to satisfaction because they are born of the symbolic realm and not of the real. This is true of any desire, it is what distinguishes desire from need. It is an endless circle, a wheel fit for a hamster. The pursuit of desires can never yield fulfillment. This is not because there is something fundamentally evil about desire. It is because desire is a need that has been disfigured by language and made abstract. You cannot eat, drink, or hug an abstract.
A young gorilla needs something to love in order for its life to continue. This need can be met by a kitten or a doll or a fury blanket tied to a post, as long as the gorilla can touch it, the need is met. The same is true of human animals. You don’t need a porn star to hug. You could give a squeeze to a warty old hag to meet the need. You desire a porn star, a picture from a magazine, but even if you meet a live porn model, she will never be exactly the same as the picture from the magazine. She may meet some of your needs, but she can never quench your desires, those will go ungratified into eternity.
Will stands in a category all of its own. It does not arise from the machinations of the human, physical or linguistic. It is neither a need nor a desire. It comes from elsewhere. It is infinitely more difficult to act on will than it is to respond to a need or a desire. Will often conflicts with the needs and desires of the human biological machine.
With both needs and desires occupying the attention and energy of the machine, it can be almost impossible to heed the strange call of the will. Desires are particularly an obstacle. While the human machine has a limited number of needs which have to be met repeatedly, the ghostly world of desire is as unlimited as it is insatiable. The desires will breed more desires and will come to occupy all the space of the mind, demanding that one thing or another be pursued until the will is nearly buried in an avalanche of desires.
Desires will propagate on their own without any effort being made on the part of the human machine, but the true will, if it is denied attention and left unused, will wither like an atrophied limb. Efforts must be made to invoke and support the will, efforts which may seem most unpleasant to the machine because those efforts will be of no direct benefit to it.

Belief

Belief was a golden haired child born in the state of desire within the realm of the word. He had never been in the realm of the real, could never be, in fact, because nothing born of the word can walk in the realm of the real. In the realm of the real there would be no need for such a child as belief. Belief, as I have said, was born in the state of desire, a place where the urge to fulfil needs is transferred into abstract longings whose ends can never be met. In such a place, a place where yearning goes on and on because there can be no end to yearning, Belief is a necessary entity. Belief is a natural product of desire. Whereas a need can be met, a desire knows no fulfillment and so it naturally blossoms into belief, the notion that that which one longs for does exist, will happen, is coming eventually. But all of this occurs only within the realm of the symbolic order. All of this occurs because a symbol is not the thing itself. The signifier is not the signified. It is like a shadow, it refers to the real, it takes a shape that cannot be grasped, a shape that may take on a life of its own and birth new shapes with no correspondences to the real. These shapes, these shadows with no correspondences, are the makers of desire, the grandparents of Belief. Belief is a prince in the house of desire. He runs to and fro calling for some action or other in his name. People gladly indulge this spoiled child because it gives them Hope, his lovely sister. Hope and Belief offer justification to the house of desire. They are like the children that a couple that has become disenchanted with one another conceives in order to have a reason to stay together. They are the fantasies that make all of our fantasies okay. If we have Belief we will join God in Heaven and bring Tinkerbell back to life. With Belief’s hand in your own, it is okay to kill and take another’s land. His presence will make you feel better about actions which primarily serve some personal desire, his company will help to justify your actions. With Belief at your side, you will do any number of absurd things; set out cookies for an immortal in a red suit, or eat cookies and wine and call it the flesh and blood of your God, or burn a person at the stake, or drive your neighbors from their homes and push them into the sea, or destroy all of the natural resources available to you. There is nothing that can’t or shouldn’t be done when you can say that Belief is with you. No door can be closed to you when you come from the house of desire, frothing at the mouth with want of a satisfaction that can’t be had, Golden Belief and fair Hope marching at your side demanding that you take, take, take. Take what you want and say it was for Belief. Run amok under the shadowy banners of the house of Desire within the Realm of the symbolic. In the realm of the Real, Belief and Hope vanish like the ill spirits that they are, and you stand alone with blood on your hands, and it is not a Jihad, or a Crusade, or a Sacrifice, it is raw animal death and it is under your fingernails, spattered on your face, and shivering through your bones.

In Between

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

Sheep Roll In Soul

They show me that we are good sheep, sheep who walk in neat lines to be counted lustily, sheep who roll by in cars. They show this to me. They say, “You are a sheep. Sheep need to have this.” And that is the advertisement; sheep in lines, sheep in cars. They call it the soul. They want to sell me, a sheep, a soul. So ludicrous that my mind is dropped from its usual turbulent fury to a complete silence. I needn’t dig deep. They put it right out in the open. We have become so hopeless, so used to the manipulation of life and words that we don’t need the message to be too discreet. You can simply tell us, you are sheep, you want to fit in with the herd, you want this car, we will give you soul. Soul, the thing that flies or the thing that makes you rock and gyrate to the music. Soul. Yes. I told you. I can say nothing more than what they said, it was so plainly put in pictures and animation and words. I am left silent. Why fight it? Why suggest to a sheep, “Hey yew, they’re just trying to eat yew? They’re getting fat on yew. And yew are getting fleeced.”?
They want to be sheep. They want to be herded. They want the bearded man with the bo-peep cane to stand over them and smile with a heart pinned to his dress. They want him to tell them where they should go, when they should go, they don’t even need a why. Glad to accept that father knows best, they’ll do what they are told, because after all they are sheep, and the shepherd is much smarter, far better suited to make the best choices. He leads them to the greenest grass, the sweetest pastures, why object? We get what we want. Listen to it. You don’t’ even have to worry about your soul. You can buy that too. All you need to do is consume. Feed in the green pasture and the shepherd will give you a soul. He is looking out for both your material and spiritual well fare. He is loading you up onto the conveyor belt and watching you disappear into the dark depths of the light crushing machinery. You will be dust. You will be ash. Immortality is for Gods, not for sheep. You are a quick snack for the Cannibal God and his brood. Yum yum, they taste so good doused in Christian Doir and wrapped in lycra, served on platters of satin and oak. Down in the earth six feet deep your soul will roll along the black asphalt above with a new sheep at the wheel ready to go and earn a paycheck and hit the online stores and shopping malls. Ready to sign its life away, holding a pen clenched in its bovine maw, yes on the dotted line, thank you, and here, here, and here by the X , yes, thank you. Pockets full of plastic and we all fall down. Ring around, around, around. I know it’s true, I’ve said it before, I’ve sung it in nursery rhymes and set it in words and pointed and hopped up and down. And this time I mention it with less passion, with less concern. You are right after all, we are only sheep. If you’re only wish is to feed in greener pastures, then bon appetite. Enjoy it while you can. Because that soul you bought, it won’t roll where you’re going to go. The asphalt reaches only so far.
(A note to the reader- if you find this more than mostly confusing you may need to run a Google search on SOUL. The very first listing will help find a Kia dealer where you can buy your very own.)

Magick House

It is a place lost in the past, denied a present, buried in the midst of a buzzing metropolis and weighted down with hopes for a future. The walls have been battered again and again until they are only a fine powder of golden sand blown across the vast hostile desert. They have been built again and again until the people can think of nothing else but building them one more time, raising the walls so that blood can flow and appease that thing which would dwell within. That thing, that secret treasure, invisible to the eyes of men, capable of twisting their hearts into many strange shapes like animal balloons forged by the hands of a clown. Here is desire and jealously and rapture and grief and hatred, and joy, like a host of shadows dancing through the willing flesh of the people, so that they whirl and twirl and bow for that thing, though it cannot be touched, nor it’s name even pronounced. The people are always reaching for that place where they keep their covenant, where they can shuffle papers importantly like children imitating the misunderstood rituals of adults. They play games that are the shadows of the games they once played there in the house of the invisible, the magick house. Now some others play their games where the magick house once stood. Some others have come to play, but the people will not play with the others, they will not change their games on purpose, only by accident. Only when they are scattered like the golden sand hammered from the shattered walls of the magick house will they change the rules of their game to get by. They will refuse to share, refuse to play with others until the others push them out, out and away so that the others may have their turn, their time in the place that the people want so much. But however far they go, they find a way to remember. They find a way to covet the past, to reach back with hot little hands and try to pluck their special place out of the rubble. They try to play as they did once in the magick house. They wear their dress up clothes, they sing their clubhouse songs, and mull over the promise of a place all their own. Their heart, the center of the universe, is something outside, something that can be demolished, erected, taken and retaken. The people, as they have scattered regrouped and scattered again, have changed. Their games have changed. They no longer recognize one another but view each other as THE OTHER, but each other wants to have it back, have their magick house where secret things happen, where special things are kept. They want it even if they cannot remember the nature of the secret things. They long for it even if they are not the real people, for in fact none of those who want to be the people are the people. The people were cut down long ago, a final sacrifice in the original magick house, and their rituals, their mystic secrets died with them, bled out through slit throats to be sucked up by the thirsty sand, to become the invisible. There are no people who know the rites and the reason for the original magick house. There are only others, many envious others, who would be the people and claim that they and no OTHER are the only people. The chosen. The righteous. The worthy. They love not the invisible, but the letting of blood, the endless orgy of violence that may be called penance or promise. And the place, that elusive house where all that the imposter people desire can be called the will of God, remains remote and near at hand, non existent and very real, lost forever within a deluge of jealous dreams.

Experiment: Pennies in the Fountain

Go for a walk with six pennies in your pocket.
Find a fountain, indoors or outdoors, (or something that can stand in for a fountain: a lake, a river, the ocean, etc.) and sit beside it.
Take one penny. Place your attention on it, allow the deep yearnings of your machine to be embedded in the tiny penny, let them become one and the same.
As you toss it into the "fountain", allow your mental apparatus to repeat the words: "I wish, oh how I wish, for another penny".
Follow the same instructions for each of the pennies.
When you are finished, walk back and don’t look back.