Stories

If only the story had a clear beginning or a clear end then I would give it to you straight instead of in these helix-like curly cues. I intent to purposefully obfuscate the truth, not because I want to lie to you, because if I tried to speak directly to you THAT would be the lie.
It was very unfortunate that I had not recently suffered the proper amount of brain damage to initiate the multidimensional scanning process. I knew he would ask,
"Is this a mash up?" and I would say no, because the mash up was coming from inside my head rather than through an external process of combining seemingly disparate texts. It's the natural beauty of my mental illness. He would say from his crystal palace,
"I connect things too, that seem unrelated."
At this juncture it is wise to explain that clearly there is only one "he" ever. It may seem that there are a multitude, that I am in fact sitting around an octagonal table with multiple individual "he" right now, but I have learned the deeper secrets. I understand that all along I have only known one primordial he and have interacted with him through various emissaries both conscious and unconscious of their roles as high priests within the order of the shinning eternal nil.
The music, by the way, was noise and we listened with gusto, filling me with hope. Sometimes I met one who was both he and she, a creature capable of invoking all the powers fluidly. I am one such of these creatures, a rainbow unicorn once held sealed within a lead tomb beneath layers of Korean soil waiting to be unearthed by the emperor. You will see that there is some internal logic, a special hidden system for decoding the sacred texts. I could no longer be a human woman although I had played the part well in biological excess and had difficulty separating myself from MOTHER.
I wanted to tell him not to ride that motorcycle straight towards death, but his life and death were not mine to dictate and I would not like to interfere with his appointment with destiny.
Such strange beautiful mysteries I have questioned and viewed from the observation deck. I was thoroughly interviewed on entry myself . They examined my oral cavity for contraband that I was attempting to smuggle in from the womb, so I took it into my lungs and held it there for 30 years.
I saw a movie about a girl with a friend and it reminded me a little that one time I did have a friend like that one. She had an opportunity to escape and said she didn't want to leave me, but I told her that she had to go, that I wanted her to go, that it was the opportunity we had both wished for, so she flew away trailing rainbow streamers. We met at the estuary where we were both hatched and learned to manipulate him.
I look in amazement through the oculus and wonder how anyone could have stomached me when I was the arch-duchess of Coldsville conducting psychological experiments on those alien entities I called "friends."
I had of course been warned by my father, the duke, that these so called friends would be my ultimate demise if I let them get too close to me. It happened just as he had said it would, but not as he had imagined it. When the walls came down and I let the alien other in, his little proxy was damaged beyond repair allowing for the multidimensional scanning process to be performed with this bio terminal. The angels began the process of molecular distillation that altered my basic shape retrofitting me for the other process without leaving a bad taste.
Of course none of that was real. None of this is real either. If you want to understand this text you will need to find the other two books but I wont tell you where to look.
I believe that I am "her" which has made it difficult for me to see or interact with her often. While I have amphibian capabilities, they have been little exercised and my time above water has made aquatic flips more challenging than they were after I first hatched. Initially I was uncomfortable with being "her" but eventually I escaped his expectation that I replace him and learned to embrace my subverted femininity. Thus I learned to walk and paint my fingernails, but at a much later date.
In the end, the end that I thought could not be found, it was Miley Cyrus who showed me the secret to storytelling. She said:
"A flower is a rose, a rose is a whore, a whore is a sailor, a sailor is a mermaid, a mermaid is a hippo, a hippo dances in a ballet, the ballet becomes a circus, the circus has clowns, clowns wear flowers that spit water from their lapels."
Even then, as he busily ushered orgone from the lower dimensions into the crystal palace, he answered:
"Some day together we will shine."

Memory

Memory is selective, often used to justify our current stance. If I am angry with you, then for this moment, all that I remember is the innumerable times you’ve let me down, hurt my feelings, ignored my needs.
I remember the times you have abandoned me, screamed at me, kicked things off the table, smashed my fingers in car doors, elevator doors, and under prefab houses. I remember how you criticized my drawings, my singing, my way of talking, my way of walking, I remember that you threatened to have me institutionalized, that you shouted at me and demanded the sums of mathematical equations until I was in tears.
I’ll remember that you were gone for years, that you sent me to a Christian school even though you told me it was nonsense, that you told me that the children that I played with were not my friends, that I could trust no one, that I would be alone in life, that I could not play with my first schoolyard playmate because she was black. That you forced me to listen to cassettes touted as subliminal therapy meant to enhance powers of positive thinking and creativity. That you made me fill out lottery tickets for you insisting that I use my psychic ability to select the right numbers. That you asked me for my opinion and ignored it. That you lost our home and couldn’t support us.

This is what I will recollect when it suits a particular mood.

There are other moods for other moments. Then I remember you differently. I remember that you painted murals on the walls, that you took me to climb the mountain many times, that you read the Hobbit to me, that you played your guitar for me at night until I fell asleep and again in the morning when I woke up.  That you brought home a puppy and orchestrated a convincing meeting with Santa. That one year you dressed as Santa yourself even though I was too old to be fooled. That when I had chickenpox and couldn’t go out you brought home a deluxe dinosaur playset that entertained me for feverish itchy weeks of confinement. That you taught me to ride a bike and zipped me up inside your sweatshirt with you when I was tiny.

Today’s memory is neutral, possibly good. I can’t imagine why, but this memory returns to me often, shifts between ages. Could it be that this thing occurred more than once? Or is it remembering it so often and in different moods which has created variations?

I am in the white pick up truck in the parking lot of Sears Lumber. The yellow fields surrounding the parking lot are empty except for the bodies of naked black trees that jut up towards a slate colored sky. Clouds are layered upon more clouds achieving different shades of gray and blue and white and black, some smooth and some lumpy with the promise of rain, of thunder, of lightning.
The smell of moist earth. A special smell that has become familiar to me through the years, a smell that comes in late autumn and in winter after the rain has wetted the dead grasses and made its way to the heart of the clods of dirt that lie exposed. I have smelled it nowhere else but there in that valley that was home. I have smelled rain and wet earth and grass in other places since, but the odor is not the same.
Far away I could see the green and gold and red leafed tops of distant trees in distant fields. A crow perched on a lamppost cawed, a sound that I have heard in other places, the  harsh hallow voice of a big black bird.
The lumber store is the largest in a row of commercial buildings done in mocha hued stucco and wooden signs and beams painted dark chocolate. There is a little Mexican cantina that I have never been in, and a beauty shop, and empty shop windows where there are vacancies. All in all the strip has room for no more than five or six establishments.
The parking lot is vast and cracked and uneven, and all around it the empty fields yawn like a sea of grass interrupted only by the line of buildings in the east and Lakeshore drive in the south. Behind Lakeshore a wall of trees hides the view of La Laguna Grande, but it has not been called by that name for decades.
It is now Lake Elsinore, named for Hamlet's Castle Elsinore, and the town is named the same. The sea of grass is broken by buildings and trees off in the west, and beyond that the mountain sleeps under the soft blankets of clouds. Our house is over there, underneath the mountain, planted at its feet.
I look at the field, the clouds, the naked trees and imagine I am in some east coast village in some forgotten era. In a moment I will see a maiden in a hooded cloak rushing away from or towards some terrible danger, a basket dangling from her arm. In another moment I will be the maiden.
I have never been to the east coast, or anywhere at all other than this valley and the stretch of highway that leads to my grandparents' home in Phoenix, Arizona. 
In another moment it is a European copse, in another I am gazing upon the shire. These fields are ripe with magic. You can smell it in the air.  Or rather I have imposed the magic of my imagination over these  empty fields, and their smell has become special  by association.
I want to stay in the pick up and day dream. In one version of this memory I do. In another I go into the lumber store with you and am allowed to stand by myself looking with wonder at hardware while a pimple faced young man in jeans and a flannel helps you find whatever it is we have come here for.
In another version my little sister is here and she wears a flannel and jeans and our house is still under the mountain to the west, but it is no longer ours and we live in someone else’s house to the north.

All versions share the same sky, fields, parking lot, commercial building, and season. It is one memory which has expanded to encompass a few others for simplicity’s sake.
Memory is selective in every way. I have conjured this particular memory, or cluster of memories, on other days similar to today. On days when clouds gather and the light is exactly as it is now and I feel neutral. Some days the memories are angry, some days they are happy, others, like those arising today, are neutral, but almost all are laced with an undercurrent of sorrow and loss.
And you are always there, lending a back story to my emotional state, a conglomerate of memories that I call Father.

Father and the Elf

When looking for proof of any theory
it will undoubtedly appear.
Ego has been spoken of in many ways
as if it was never part
of the psychedelic realm.

Through hypnosis and other means
we embarked on a study
of the Pythagorean cult, the pentagram,
the Fibonacci Sequence, the Golden Ratio,
the Wizard of Oz and Lady Gaga.

The word psychedelic was used
for the elf that we discovered
within this network of signifiers.
It was hard to agree on his existence
but everyone missed him
when he was not there.

As is the case with most beings of influence,
he required extra added coverings
and ways to get along with the outside world.

It was around that time
that Father was identified
as a member of the Illuminati.
When we made this discovery
we viciously hit the frontal lobe of his brain
with a tiny steel hammer.
In this way
we filtered out the data that was unwanted.

Later that week
we found ourselves noticing things
we had never paid attention to before.
We noticed a number of changes.
We could no longer feel sadness
we could no longer feel angst.

One recurring accusation was that
our thoughts were riddled with subliminal messages.
We began to see evidence of this everywhere.
We found a detailed description of the pentagram
and we cried or laughed at inappropriate times.

We experimented with a magical technique called
the filter theory of selective attention.
There were numerous Illuminati symbols hidden
all throughout our symbolic realm
but we were not able to find the single eye.

We found that
the core of the persona
the core of our very being
would actually become psychedelic
at the very least amount of effort,
it had been this way all along.

We used a mind control method
where half of us were induced
into dissociative personality disorder.
Since then,
it became apparent
there were at least two groups of us
completely unknown to each other,
maybe more.

This was similar to what happens
in the legendary blot experiment
of the Pythagorean cult.
Something we would soon discover.

Because the part of Father's brain
controlling social action
was completely destroyed
his thoughts became truly psychedelic.

We found that we had
grown within this person,
this being we called Father.
Father was the cave
Father was the house.

But what really was Psychedelic?
What did we mean by this word?

Father is very childish now.
It’s infectious.
He is full of lightning bolts and broken mirrors. 
When any of these symbols are seen in any context,
we place them in the unprovable category,
the same word we once used
to describe the elf.

Then he starts to laugh.

The Big Nothing

If I could be free of familial obligation I feel that I would have the same sensation as someone who has mastered an addiction. If I could contentedly go through my life knowing that I would never bend to the will or whim of my parents, so much of my time and energy would be free that I would surely rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
Damn them for giving me life then exercising all of their energies towards the end of subverting that life to their own wishes and desires. Damn them for seeing me only as  an uncooperative place holder in the symbolic order. Category: daughter, type A, first born.
Damn them for assuming that my existence is about them. Example: If I am not there it is to make them sad, depressed. Damn them for making me responsible for their emotional state. If I were to have continued to do the same I would have been dead long ago, suicide note reading:
“I have tried my best. Nothing I can do is good enough for you. Why must love be contingent upon approval?”
I ran away once and got no further than Lakeland Village.
Later I got as far as San Francisco and it might as well have been Mars. I felt happy and free. More myself than I had ever been permitted to be. Love and Will were more important than material things and these in true form could never be subject to approval.
But several times a year I must be dragged back into the underworld, into the land of the dead. Because while they lacked the ability to think of my happiness before their own, I did not. I would go and try to give them the pretty picture. I would not say any of what I really thought to them. I would let their hurtful words and way of being wash over me and not struggle against it. My mantra was “I am a duck.” I had the promise of  leaving their presence to get me through these visits.
But each visit was as toxic as a nuclear blast. Before and after I was sick. During I would almost die.
And at last my connection to them was tenuous at the most. The stronger I became the less reason could be seen to consent to participate in their play. The only reason as always was, “to not hurt them.”
But these miserable people were endlessly hurting and always the blame would lie somewhere other than within their own disturbed psyches,  rooted somewhere other than in their many poor choices, somewhere other than in their own utter lack of illumination.
If I were to tell them the truth would it be kind or cruel?
Kind or cruel?
Kind or cruel?
That for me, the interaction is corrosive, futile, unnecessary and harmful to all that I strive for.
If they cared for me as an objective entity at all, they would leave me alone and seek their happiness elsewhere. They would not make me come back, they would not force me to take the communion of pain and eat of the flesh of  their woe and drink of the deep back blood of their despair.
They force it, but I could say no. I could make a clean break if I told them the brutal truth.
Kind or cruel?
I keep trying to give them what they say they want. I keep trying to be good for the BIG OTHER, the eye in the sky that is watching over my deeds.
And yet I want nothing more than to flip them all the bird, Ma. Pa, and Jesus too. I want to set the world on fire.
I keep turning the other cheek, good lamb, but within me a wolf is growling. The real in me begs to be freed of all the empty gestures that supply the emptiness the symbolic order demands, the emptiness my parents crave, the big nothing they have sown.

Un

I was born under a pile of corpses. They nurtured and grew me into the malformed beast that I am. Heavy with death and blinded by darkness, I could see nothing of objective reality and could not move.
Can you see it? Chained in place by my biological link to the family of death and rot, the family of the world.
They would press me down under their weight, feeding off of me even as I fed off of them struggling for life, struggling to press my face up out of their coiled nest of flesh towards the sun. Where I could not go with body I had to go with mind.
I grew out into the darkness, into the strangeness, into places they could not touch. I dreamed a sun and a moon and countless stars burning in a vacuum, Hisssssssss. Burning stars like hearts forming bodies, solar systems pulled towards the gravity of their passion.
The heart is the first organ to form in the body of Adam. So it is in larger bodies that the star is first born and grows and collects smaller celestial objects to make its body. All bodies are made of love, love is gravity,  the glue, the lehadbik pulling strange bodies together making new bodies from them.
Can you see me buried under the pale bodies of my parents, under their pain and anguish and their cannibal desire to consume my passion before I could become a star?
Do hearts or stars ever say to their parts, go on, go if you like and be the center of your own universe? Be free.
What they’ve made, what they’ve collected, what they’ve gathered, they hold. If you are born into a body of death that is who you are. You must fight a civil war if you wish to transform. You will have to slash and burn the body you gestated in to be free.
It sounds monstrous doesn’t it? It is also monstrous laying at the bottom of the heap, grown to a size that can better feed the body of death, parents, preachers, and teachers feeding on the blood of your heart, tearing new wounds to sip from so that their rule is strengthened by your meager borrowed life.
When you are born into  dark world do you remember the space before your phantom life as a luminous wonderland? How many births have you suffered to be buried so deep under the heap? How many births have I suffered to be way down here, suffocating?
More important: how many deaths will I have to die to be released? How many selves shed, how many voices silenced, how many regimes of parents, preachers and teachers slashed away before I find the shinning emptiness at the center, the pure untouched well of being that has always been and will ever be and is none and nothing, entirely un.
When will I stop desiring the caresses of dead hands and the praise of phantom voices? When will I be free of my self?
Clawing, clawing towards the surface, angering ghosts as I go, feeling the loss of connection with the body that was as I move towards an unknown.
There is no conclusion. I am mad and madness has no limit. This limitlessness was born in the strictest confinement, containment and isolation.
I am looking for the sun that burns me into un. I am looking for the love that is death. Freeing black bird, devour me and carry me away from the wheel into the terrible luminosity of the Absolute.
Can you see it?
I was born under a pile of corpses, they nurtured and grew me into the malformed beast that I am. Heavy with death and blinded by darkness I could see nothing of objective reality and could not move.
In my stillness I am traveling. I am going beyond. Beyond the strictest confinement, containment and isolation into the burning dissolving madness of un.
Can you see it? Can you?

Nothing Is True

Aren’t you so tired of all those voices from out there reaching into you like a murder of crows probing the cracks in a sidewalk, the recesses of your mind, with long sharp beaks? Don’t you feel the sickness growing in your gut as you are assaulted daily by the loud caterwauling of authoritarian voices demanding that you do this to be good or that to be smart or such to be healthy or wise or enlightened? Don’t you just want to tear all your clothes off and scream incoherently and run barefoot under the trees and stars?
This author, who states now her presence so that you will be aware of it as it comes into you so that you may either allow it access or deny it willfully, this author admits that she is and does.
Beware of those who wish to sell you THE TRUTH or give you THE TRUTH or explain THE TRUTH. Watch out for fools, for buffoons repeating words they believe to be endowed with wisdom, words from their parents, from their spiritual teachers, from learned books or mystical books, or fantastic television documentaries. Most of all, beware of the voices that came from outside but now live inside of you without your knowledge. The voices of all these loud insistent purveyors of so called TRUTH that now swirl around inside your head, triggered in response to various stimuli.
If you think you can speak the TRUTH, if you feel you should spread the TRUTH, or help others to awaken to the TRUTH, watch out, you’re running blindfolded with a sharp stick in your hand. Because the TRUTH, or that which this author sees as the signified experience indicated by that particular signifier, is indescribable, it doesn’t live here in the words, in this confusing scritch scratch of symbols.
The TRUTH doesn’t want to be spread. It’s the hyena-like cackle of words that wants to be spread. It’s the voice of your ancestors, the confusion of accidental associations between various stimuli and sounds and shapes that is shaping you, informing your decisions, building your version of TRUTH and REALITY.  And it wants to spread, needs to spread, will spread infecting every body it can infect.
There is no antidote against this infection of language except to know it is there, to see it forming your experience and do what you WILL as much as possible within these inherited constraints and work to free yourself of them when and where they interfere with this WILL, if that is something that interests you.
Or if that does not interest you, you can go on pretending that you are the infection, that you are in control, that you know THE ONE AND ONLY TRUTH. Or if you prefer to go willy nilly you might pacifically insist that you know YOUR TRUTH, which is just another way of saying “I won’t mention your nakedness if you won’t mention mine.”
You can take all your TRUTH, personal or universal as you may deem it to be, all your assumptions, all your apish babble and shove it directly up your ass, because this author is uninterested in THE TRUTH. This author is unwilling to offer up her own desperate attempts to make order out of chaos, meaning out of confusion, something out of nothing so that you or she may feel more comfortable. She will not promise you that everything will be okay, that heaven awaits the righteous, that good karma will carry you through, that positive thinking will align you with universal energies, or that Santa will be leaving you a gift this year.
Don’t misread this as an Atheistic or Nihilistic proclamation. This author has brushed up against something beyond the veil of words and acknowledges it. She simply wishes to exercise some restraint and abstains from birthing its shadow in the form of a word that the reader may misunderstand to be something they have heard or read of before.
You have never heard or read of this. The words you have heard and read, all of the words you will ever hear and read, are their own entity, maintaining a life independent of that of the signified. And this is why they can’t be trusted. It is of their nature to be separate. They can never be true. They can only be noisy, more babble to pierce the air and every corner of your mind with its deceptive and authoritarian assumption of power.

Adam

Now all these things came to pass by the will of the father of the entirety. By the will of the father of eternity, these things came to pass, as all things did, as all things do. By eternity, by will, by the father.

Afterwards, the spirit saw the soul-endowed man upon the ground. The soul-endowed man upon the earth, walking naked through the yellowed land.

The spirit came forth from the Adamantine Land, travelling like a forceful wind through the many worlds. From the Adamantine Land the spirit came forth; it descended and came to dwell within him, finding a home in his flesh. That man became a living soul, a living soul became that man. The spirit called him Adam since he was found moving upon the ground, walking naked through the yellowed land.

A voice came forth from Incorruptibility for the assistance of Adam, from a voice Incorruptibility came forth, and the rulers gathered together all the animals of the earth, the animals of the earth gathered the rulers, and the rulers gathered all the birds of heaven, the birds of heaven gathered all the rulers and brought them to Adam to see what Adam would call them, that he might give a name to each of the birds and all the beasts. They listened for his breath, for the names that would come.

They took Adam and put him in the garden so that he might cultivate it and keep watch over it, that he might keep watch over it and cultivate it. That olives might grow, that branches be pushed and sculpted towards the sun, so that dates could create sugar from light in endless bounty.

And the rulers issued a command to him, saying:
"From every tree in the garden shall you eat, you shall eat from every tree in the garden, yet from the tree that recognizes good and evil do not eat, nor touch it; for the day you eat from it, with death you will die."

They told him this, yet they did not understand what they said. They could not fully understand the workings of the soul-endowed man. Rather, by the father's will, they said this in such a way that he might be tempted to eat, and that Adam might not regard them as would a man of an exclusively material nature. As a man of an exclusively material nature he might not regard them. He might, he would, take from the tree of good and evil.

Crown

One day I finally decided to do it, to actually do it.
I created an altar on the east wall of my room, the one wall with the least amount of junk scattered on the floor in front of it. On this altar I placed photographs of myself, a sequence of images progressing slowly from infancy to adulthood. At the center of the altar I placed a photograph of my father. I made something like a throne for this picture to rest on, some thick books covered by a piece of red cloth and a couple of small figurines to guard it. It was enough like a throne that I could see it as a throne and that was enough for me.
When the altar was ready, I lit candles and incense. The room got thick with smoke and strong scents from distant lands I had never visited. Then I sat in front of my altar to stare at what I had created. It would have been easy to overlook that step. But I didn’t. This was the time when I would finally do it. I couldn’t jump over any step.

Drip drop went the secretions of certain glands that helped me to modify my view of reality.
Drip drop.
REALITY.
The Real.
That is what we were searching for, isn’t it? Some of us, not all of us. Sometimes, not all the time.
It was important then to understand that not everyone wanted to discover the Real. Some did seek it out, but when they found it they recoiled in terror and sincerely hoped that they would never have to see it again. Some said that they wanted it but they really wanted other things, private pleasures that would never be disclosed in public. I had to understand this. I had to remember it.

In those days I had come to understand that I was a robot. (It may seem obvious to you now, but it was a great shock to me when I first saw it. Don’t forget how different things were back then. None of what we know now was so clear, it was all kind of fuzzy, like looking at a vast landscape through piece of cellophane wrapped around your head.)
I was some kind of bio mechanical doll. I was made of meat and not metal but I was still a robot. A sophisticated meat doll. That was all I was. Nothing more, nothing less.
All that I liked, all that I disliked, all that I believed and disbelieved, all that I wanted and all that I feared, these things were not ME, even if they seemed like it. They might have seemed to come from me, but they didn’t. They had all come from somewhere else.
These things were programs that I ran, within my wet circuitry of coils of bloody guts. Or rather I should say that these were programs that ran me. I was merely a strange unconscious puppet in their hands, an empty receptacle for their various microscopic products.
I had no hand in creating or choosing all these programs. It was strange circuitous process that occurred long before I knew what was happening, or that anything was happening at all. Most of it was quite accidental. Accidental programming. It just happened. In my case, it happened to me. You understand? So it seemed natural, eminently natural, so it seemed real, so it seemed normal, so it seemed as the way things should be. What else could they be? This was me and everything around me fit perfectly with me. Almost everything, I should say. Almost everything.

Strawberries were good, black licorice was bad. Men with facial hair made me wet, so wet that the juice ran down my thighs and made it hard for me to sit still. When the sun was shining, I was happy and because I was happy, I twisted my face into a kind of frozen grimace that I called a smile. Cats were better than dogs. It was never okay to steal. It was okay to lie sometimes but only in particular situations. Killing was okay but only when you were threatened. Christians were good and Muslims were bad. I had to sleep in a bed or I wouldn’t feel right in the morning. The bed had to have sheets and blankets, all of certain colors. I had to make a certain amount of money a year. I had to have a car to drive so I could go places, places where there were other people like me.
All of these things were arbitrary. I didn’t know it then but it was still true. None of these programs represented anything that was objectively true. It was just things that were said and they got repeated. Linguistic viruses that came into me when someone spoke too loud too close to me, when my senses were wide open and vulnerable. They were a kind of sonic self reproductive demons that inhabited my shivering temple of wet and tender walls, strange non physical half living creatures that swayed me to do this or that, pushed me to do things in a way that complied with their secret directives.

So I made a crown. I knew it couldn’t be too simple, it shouldn’t be. Some effort had to go into its construction. But I also couldn’t make it too elaborate. If I made it too difficult I would never finish it and it was of utmost importance that I should finish.
I knew it had to fit upon my head. That was most crucial. I made it out of twine and placed some leaves and flowers all along the perimeter. I was very pleased with my work.
I placed the crown and a robe on the simple little altar I had made earlier. I placed it all before my father’s throne. It seemed as if he was looking down at it but it was really just a photograph. Still, it really did seem like he was looking. Looking down. At me.
The robe was an old terrycloth bathrobe, light green in color, nothing that special really. Not until I made it special. And then it was. It truly was.

Everyone around me was the same. This took some time for me to recognize. For so long I had assumed that everyone else was different, that they actually knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. It took me a while to accept that they knew as much as I did, maybe a little less since they couldn’t look directly into their own robotic nature, since they still believed they made decisions on their own, since they still believed they were unique and capable of deciding their own course in life.
The fact was that we simply collided our way through an accidental obstacle course that we called existence. We bounced off of each other like bumper cars. It became clear that they were all the same, Hebrews, Romans, or Barbarians. In fact, I had lost track of what had once distinguished them from each other. Suddenly they all seemed the same to me. Not in a good way, either.
One genetic trait was not better than another. Some things made a particular genetic line of robots live longer. That in itself was not “good”. The entire perpetuation of the species was neither good nor bad. It was simply a thing to watch happening, like the firecrackers on the fourth of July or black birds flying in a flock over a calm lake in summertime.
Survival was all that mattered to them, to us. The survival of the meat bots. All the meat bots like me. We thought we were superior to every other thing that bopped around on this planet. We thought we were the best.
Somehow, what we thought to explain our own presence here, was what made us better. One thought justified another in a circle that we were never inclined to unwind or examine closely.
We were somehow better than dogs because when we fucked, we would do it within the bounds of holy matrimony and we would then produce children to please GOD. GOD, which was itself a construct of our bewildered and imaginative minds which we molded into our own image. GOD, mad scientist, creator of broken robots out of old discarded parts.
We were better because we could see the difference between right and wrong. And we got to decide what was right and wrong based on what was best for us. And we were told what was best for us before we even knew what was being said to us. So we decided nothing. Nothing at all.
An accidental obstacle course and nothing else. It was hard to see it back then. But you have to understand, we didn’t know hardly anything.

When everything was prepared and the scene was set, I bowed to the four directions and crossed my heart, just as I had learned so long ago, back when I had thought I knew so much.
I approached the altar carefully, almost with weariness. In a loud and clear voice, I said:
"I have come to bear the burden"
I said it two more times slowly and carefully. The sound of my voice echoed through the room and came back to me thicker and stronger than I would have imagined it.

We were machines run by programs created by unnamed authors, long lost biological hackers who had maybe succumbed to their own devious traps.
We were ruled by Accident, Chaos, Chance. Our main directive, our only real wish was to survive at any cost. Everything else was secondary. No matter what we said, no matter what we believed.
That is all we were, all we were, all we were. But we didn’t know it. We didn’t want to know it.
Now you understand, just like you do. It wasn’t easy to see through it, through the great charade, the great game. It wasn’t easy for me, it wasn’t easy for anyone. Nobody starts out with a taste for silence. It’s an acquired taste. Something to be developed.

I removed my father’s photograph from the throne and placed it face down on the carpet. I then replaced it with one of my own. My photograph up there on the throne looking down at me just like my father had been doing before. I put on the robe that I had chosen and I placed the crown upon my head. I placed it slowly, suddenly aware of what I was doing, suddenly curious, suddenly afraid.
I extended my arms to both sides palms facing upward. Then I brought them together over my heart in a prayer position, palms together, fingers pointing upwards.
I looked at myself on the throne. I looked at myself and my self looked back. I recognized myself. I recognized my self. There. On the throne. I had come to bear the burden. It was time to take my rightful place. It was time to leave the charade behind. It was time to know.

Feast of Cannibals

With cannibal love we coddle them, keeping them locked within steely fences and walls of white plaster. Never will the wolves get their chance at these, our precious young. Never will the world have the chance to dash their bones into bits with terrible falls after great feats. We alone shall enjoy that privilege, the honor of eating our young alive.
Fattened as they are with the sloth of caged animals, darkened by their cheerless existence beneath our marvelous white wings, they know no joy. They watch the images of childhood from our flickering screens, see the green of grass and blue of sky without the knowledge of the wealth of feelings that such images evoke in the spirit of one whose bare feet have trod on grass and leaped towards the sky.
The sky shall not have them. The grass shall never touch them. We keep them safe, like pearly little maggots hidden away in a dark dumpster, suffocating them with cellophane wrappers and video games, and mp3 players, and cellular phones.
They may speak to one another, reach for one another through these devices, but harsh words will have to win their battles, smooth talk suffice for exchanges of affection. We will not let the bloody fisted brawls have them, nor the hand holding, tickling, chasing, and swinging. They are only for us.
We strip away their immortal souls and make machines of them, fat little high fructose corn syrup powered bots to cherish the ideals we hammered into the hole we tore in their hearts. They will hate terror and terrorists. They will love America and God. Their ears and belly buttons will be washed and their homework done.
We will make them want us, want us for the toys, the shoes, the clothes, the sweets we can buy. They will wail for these things, the fruits of our Empire, never knowing the taste of earth and air and sun and water. We will give them corn to eat in all of the colors of the rainbow forged in the shapes of cartoon characters and steroids to make their lungs pump even when there is no oxygen left to breathe and technology to cast its light over their pallor and more fucking liquid corn to leave them thirsty for more and more and more…
They belong to us and to no other, certainly not to themselves. Whatever they are, whatever they were or might have been, it will be smothered like the unwholesome flame that it is.
Death shall not have them, for we will never let them live. They will die before they can be born, to satisfy our hunger, to stave off the orgy of fear that is existence. They will never be here, will never know now, will always be spirited away by our incessant diversions, left as ghosts slumped on sofas with crumbs in their creases.
And the few who suspect that they have been denied the most precious gift we could give will be punished for their intelligence, for their pure heartedness and courage. The brave and the curious and the noble of our brood will suffer the worst tortures so that we may enjoy our cannibal feast, unperturbed by remorse or anxiety.
We will never need to atone if we nip truth in the bud, snuff out the first smoldering spark before a wild fire can grow and spread its crimson fingers over the hearts of our children, taking them forever from us . Never will the passion to live flower within and eat them alive and transform them from worms into butterflies. They are ours alone to devour.

Run As Fast As You Can

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

Pink Satin Roses Unraveling

Pink satin roses unraveling and round moon white belly out running tiny breasts. The great hallowed halls of my makers and their room of mirrors, that is the place where I go to wait. The wall of windows lies exposed and I can see the fields all gold and brown and the dusty green olive trees and a far away lake of dark blue. The sun shines eternally in that place and there is someone to take my hand and the memories shift like the beads at the end of a kaleidoscope, always changing the view. I am young and strong and brave again with the stars of wonder restored to my heart. I can run with long legs and bare feet into all of the days that come with lungs pumping and heart pounding, aching in my chest. The pleasure of letting the spirit fly through life outweighs the pain of moving the body so that there is no desire to stop. They make themselves old in that world far from the room of mirrors in the halls of the makers, stooped over desks and hunched over steering wheels. They die bit by bit each time that a bell is rung and they begin to practice this little death while they are children. Poison in silver wrappers, poison filled with sweet cream and stowed away in neat plastic boxes adorned with our favorite blue skinned heroes sets the mind racing when it finds its way into the blood stream. That is how we grow old, loosing our bodies to false gods and cramped spaces and sweet toxic substances that give us a moment of pleasure. That is how I grow old and come to sag, that and by giving myself away to all comers. Anyone who asks gets my attention. My parents start stealing it away when I am small. I come to believe it is what I must do in all cases, and only when it is too late, I realize that it must be stopped. I must keep a kernel for myself so that it can grow and flower again and again. Never ever give it all away. Keep it so that spring can come again. There is a way that leads to life and a way that leads to death. Not for the body alone, but for something else as well. We must live for the shimmering sliding something that passes through this world. It passes through what we think we are, it passes through the whole thing. Later we will read these words and we will think that they make no sense, but that is all a mater of perspective. You must be much bigger to see, you must be bleeding through the paper thin world of the temporary. I draw a cross in the little world and in the room of mirrors a door opens and I find a tiny sword in the darkness beneath a fur coat. It fills me with fear, because I never imagined I would find such a thing in this place. It came from somewhere that I am blind to, it has come from the Other. Now I have the tiny sword in my hands. I knew of the place outside of places when I found the sword. I knew it when I met the terrible yellow unicorn with its red eyes and it dared to defy the laws of the world that I inhabited. I knew it best of all when I stacked the brightly colored boxes, little ones on top of big ones or inside of big ones and there was a special square way that they fit. That was what taught me to understand space and it reminded me keenly of the place outside of places. Soft and sweet with little bits of pink satin roses coming unraveled, and a hard sidewalk on a pleasantly warm night and the infinite open above me. Another right there beside me and we are amazed that we are here, amazed that we are alive, amazed that there is another amazed one here, right now with the one I call “me”. The great hallowed halls of my makers and their room of mirrors, that is the place where I go to wait. That is where I am. A kernel kept for myself so that spring will come again.

The Emperor

I lay on my grandfather’s couch, where he had preferred to sleep during the days, stretched out in front of the television set. The seat cushions were a dark, almost black chocolate color and the back supporting cushions were a gray the color of clay. All of it was soft to the touch and delicately furry. It held the person that lay on it like a gentle beast with silky fur.
The smell of my grandparent’s house was always of wood and vanilla scented candles and black licorice and coffee and the smell of the desert mingled with water and trees and stone. At the table behind me my grandmother was sitting, my father sometimes stood, sometimes sat, beside her, pleading, and my uncle sat at the kitchen bar across from the table. My uncle had a black beard and a booming voice.
The carpet was a rich red orange shag, also soft to the touch. The lace curtains and vinyl shutters filtered the bright sunlight that made its way past the giant elm trees my grandfather had grown all around the house.
My father was asking my grandmother to come and live with us, my mother and my sisters and I could care for her. My grandmother and Uncle rejected his offer. They were mean to him. I felt an intense shock. These people who had seemed to be family were bitterly cruel, they were stabbing my father in the heart. The sounds of their voices were full of a dismissive disdain. They said that my father was a complete fool who could care for no one, that nobody needed him, or even wanted him. I thought that my father would cry. I was filled with rage, my father was here offering help, asking his mother to come with him, and they would not even acknowledge his good intentions. They did not care.
I realized suddenly that they did not like him. That my grandmother and her first bastard son were a special pair, pleased to inflict pain on my father, the other son, the son of the father. They were venting their rage towards the father on his son, because he was not there to receive it.
These were people who had cradled me when I was small, my grandmother particularly. Her skin was always soft, her hair short and white, her body big and round like one of those headless goddess statues. She wore brightly colored housedresses. Now she could no longer walk and could barely speak except to groan a bit and shake her head and sometimes communicate in a slow growling voice like a creature from a swamp.
As a child I had known her only as a benevolent figure who loved me. She did not even love me as much now as she did then. I had been like a pet, a thing which is loveable when it is small and then it is a terrible surprise when it grows too large for the house and drools and barks and wants to run and dig under the fence.
I had already known that my uncle was a wretched cruel heart. When I was a baby my Aunt Peggy shot herself in the head because he ran off with a blonde nurse named Terry and said that he didn’t love her anymore. I was very young at the time and hadn’t been told what had happened, but from the time that my Aunt Peggy became sad and disappeared I disliked and distrusted him. My dislike for him grew when I had to spend time with my new Aunt Terry, because I disliked everything about her. I had loved my Aunt Peggy naturally.
To see my uncle this way was not a surprise, but to see that he had learned such cruelty from my grandmother was terrible. My Father had gray hair. He was tall. He usually seemed rough and uncaring. Now that he was being tender, his new tender feelings were being squashed by a gruesome pair.
I hated them both from then on. I did not want to see my grandmother again. I called once and my Uncle, who was now in charge of caring for her, did all the talking, mostly judging me for my move to a far away city, asking me if I had gone chasing a man, asking what a descent man would want with a woman with little kids (a strange question considering that Terry had a pair of youngsters when he married her).
After that, I would never call again. When my grandmother died, I made little observance of the occurrence. She was a stranger.
Laying on the couch that day, I had noticed that the beautiful tile coffee table constructed by my grandfather had been removed and replaced by the table he had made for my uncle. This one had broken tiles at the corners that left terrible vacancies upon its surface. It made me feel sick to see it there, looking like that.
When my grandfather had been alive the table had stood whole and without fracture. The lawn and trees in the back yard had been green and he had kept a thriving garden of herbs. Now that he was gone, my uncle was here, and with him he had brought a broken table and the death of the lawn and trees and garden. My Grandfather’s land was dead, having been invaded by the desert that in life he had held at bay. His house had become a nightmarish mockery of what it had once been, broken or ill fit odds and ends having usurped the finer objects which had been of his making and had once held sway. And his real heirs wept and were broken hearted by the revolution of death that had turned the father’s kingdom into dust where mites took up residence and ruled over his waste.

Les Iris

I had a poster of a Vincent van Gogh painting, les iris, when I was a freshman in high school. The colors were bright and easy to be absorbed into. It had been rolled in a tube so that its deepest desire now was to curl up once again and sleep in a dark cylindrical womb, but I crucified it mercilessly to the walls with four brass thumbtacks and lay on my day bed and stared into the green and brown and purple blue.
My father disliked it. He even told me that I would go crazy if I kept that poster in my room. Maybe he was right, or maybe the poster was a symptom rather than a cause of insanity, or maybe the poster was completely innocent and uninvolved with madness of any kind, or at least far less involved than my father himself.
But I did lay there and gaze at the poster in silence and through tears. Sometimes from the floor where I lay on the carpet by the door I tried not to breathe, willing my heart to stop beating, begging fate and pleading with my body for death while smelling the paint that made my walls and the door so bright white and seeing les iris shivering on the wall.
What else was on my walls? That poster had only two companions, a Greek orthodox wooden crucifix with a sad Jesus bleeding artistically, and a golden plaque with the lord’s prayer inscribed on its surface. My father may have asked me what I was doing with those on my wall too, because we were not Christians, or at least he was not, even though he had sent me to a Christian school so that I could get a taste of religion and morality.
Jesus was there because I found him in a strange store full of such artifacts and I had thought it was beautiful. I had never seen a Jesus like that before, a Jesus that looked as though he had come from a mosaic in a Byzantine cathedral. It was intriguing to me to see Jesus in a way that had never been presented to me. Christians in my little piece of American hell displayed and wore crosses, but you never saw Jesus dangling from that ornament.
This was the part that they were referring to and hiding with their clean crosses; the bloody man slowly dying while crucified. This was what they were really displaying around their necks and on their bumpers and from the brittle hillsides behind their trailers; the torture and suffering of a man, the death of the God who had a body.
The lord’s prayer had been a gift from my grandmother when I was small. She gave it to me when we moved into our first house. Now by merit of its age and its affiliation with someone soft and warm it had earned a place and glittered on my wall.
But by then, by the time les iris had become part of my surroundings, I did not believe that God could hear me or was listening, if it did exist. I did not talk to the long deceased Jesus, I would not allow myself the luxurious comfort of these fantasies.
I was alone and if there was anybody that could understand my plight, it was the Devil, if he existed. At that time, in the madness of les iris, when I did consider that Our Heavenly Father was waiting in heaven with his milky white and passive son, I was determined to rail against their regime. I was sympathetic to Lucifer.
I knew what it was like to be misunderstood, to fall from grace with the father. I knew what it was like to be demonized for one’s differences. I knew what it was like to love the trees and the wild things and prize them above the walls and rules of society. I knew what it was like to fall.
When I wasn’t hoping to die, when I had given up on taking my disfigured presence out of the world, then I prepared for battle. I sat on my bed facing les iris and wrote on notebook paper my arguments on the devil’s behalf. I wrote stories about those who were different than the rest of the flock or I read books about those who went on living despite their “wicked” natures. I delved into the squirming lines of the flowers and earth and green stems and convinced myself that I too should live, writhing and screaming if necessary, but live, rather than go the way of the sad pale withering Christ, good and nice to the last drop.

Where Dark And Light Meet

I hate my father. I hate all men and everything male. I do secretly wish to castrate them, to dominate and humiliate them. This secret hatred running under my skin ran rampant and was vented on my husband until his death, frightened my old teacher when we sat together under the trees.
In those early days, when it first boiled over the top and I grew out my arm pit hair and swore off the boys, I thought it was because a boy had broken my heart. A boy did hurt me, but even before then my heart had been broken, smashed into a thousand pieces by my father who crushed all of the life out of me, sought to dominate every aspect of me mercilessly, unintentionally. The hatred, the rage must have been growing, welling up inside of me long before that silly boy dealt his blow, also unintentionally.
I could not look at my father after puberty, because of the fear of being squashed, because of the hatred whose twin was desire. Now I know what Freud knew, that I have secretly and unconsciously wished to replace my mother. I have also looked for a man who would replace my father, the one who would be stronger than him and overcome him and become him.
I look at my biological father now knowing these things, and it is knowing them fully that allows me to look because I can be certain that those urges are not what is doing the looking and smiling. I am looking and smiling. The deepest me. The me that is nobody’s daughter, nobody’s wife, no man’s enemy, a wind in the doorway, an eternal notness.
I look at him and he smiles back. He said during a game of murder that he knew I was the murderer because I looked at him and I usually don’t look at him. From then on I made the effort to be awake and look at him. I do this for him, for me, for the eternal notness.
In the forest, with one who would replace him, I also look. I look until he is trembling, I look at the one I have known for 15 years and never looked at. We have inflicted emotional injuries upon one another both intentionally and unintentionally, always driven by those unconscious motives, acting out with each other the desires and resentment we harbor for our parents, always fearful of being crushed.
But now for an awakened moment we are free of those bonds. We are together, our grievances are gone, because I drop all of the barriers that I am aware off and let my heart burn bright and he responds by dropping his and glowing with me and we understand each other.
We are so happy together, like when we were lonely confused children who found solace in each other’s company, only far better because my heart is so much bigger now than it was then, so much braver, brave enough to swallow us both whole and carry us smiling over dusty trails, big enough that this one time, I can protect us both from the unconscious hatred that I have harbored, the hatred that had, from time to time, been vented on him in our youth.
Big and brave enough after a week of time with my biological father, that I know that whatever unconscious urges afflict and drive this other, he can’t hurt me. If he bites my bare pulsing heart with steely knives of rejection, or mischief, they will be baby bites compared to those made by my own flesh and blood.
But he does not bite, instead he hears me telling him something that I have tried to tell him before, something that could not be communicated until we were both made vulnerable by this torrent of love flowing between us. Now, because we finally truly have this understanding, he lets me collect a lost piece of myself that he had greedily and hungrily and achingly horded. He too collects a lost piece of himself in this fair and ecstatic exchange, and he tells me to go and collect the rest of the pieces of myself, all of the pieces that I can find in the darkness of the wasteland. He tells me to love the ones I am journeying with in that darkness, to love them as much as I love him and he loves me, as much as we could have ever loved, as much as we would have loved if we had only known how to do so.

Anger

We must begin with the understanding that I am a very angry person, so much so that nearly anything that comes from me is sure to be laced with a fine trim of rage, either subtle or not so subtle. This is because I have been sensitive my whole life to being forced to do as others suppose I should. I have been threatened by angry outbursts and squashed and prodded with the hope that I would become what is considered a model citizen.
My father made me mad in every sense of the word. My mother played the role of the villain’s henchman, the one that is in the story for comic relief and because the villain needs someone else to do their dirty work. I am angry because I was told that my drawings weren’t good enough, that you must do something right or not at all. The music that I liked was NOT music, it didn’t qualify. All real music was set to 4/4 timing, a rhythm that was natural, like the beating of a heart. I am angry because I was told that reading fiction was a waste of my time and I should read a real book. Perhaps the only thing that was praised was my writing, my story telling, maybe because a teacher had reported that I was talented. Then I was prodded to write stories with the idea of selling stories, as though there were no other possible reason to write a story, sing a song, or paint a picture. When I did make music I was told that I needed to make an effort to write a song that could be sold to Joni Mitchell so that she could perform it. When I announced that I would be an actress, I was taken to a commercial acting class… “O.B. sanitary napkins keep me confident and dry all day long…”
Anything that wasn’t pleasing, relaxing, and palatable by the masses wasn’t art. My father would have liked Hitler’s paintings. This is the reason that I am angry, so angry that I don’t even notice that I am angry, so angry that I could jump off a couch crush strawberries over my face until I am crimson and recite the national anthem backwards to the tune of a Lady Gaga song. I am angry because I knew that he was wrong but I was too small to defend my delicate creative being from my father’s corrosive view of life. I am angry because I was bullied by a greedy critic for more than half my life.
When I see anything that resembles these characteristic in others, when they champion greed or criticism with know-it-all confidence, it triggers a violent reaction within me. When someone appears to be making even the subtlest attempt to place a yoke over my creative being or that of another, even a hypothetical other, I feel the urge to smash a glass on the coffee table and slash the offender from their guggle to their zatch in order to fashion a hat from their entrails and paint the story of my victory over the walls with their blood.
Instead, I write something that will never make it to the best seller’s list or be published in a Newberry award winning children’s book because now my delicate creative being is active and productive and I will let nothing stop it.
I do not think that anger has no place any more than I should think that laughter has no place. They both belong here in my selection of words. Whatever I am, whatever I think, whether I am angry or frightened or joyful, that is what I can use, the raw material that I have to be creative with. I must not wait until I am a happy or peaceful person to start creating. Then I would never create. I write on the wall with my own gory entrails. The twisted workings of my machinery are bent to the ever unjustifiable purpose of being a free builder. So while I must confess that in my spirit aggression is a very near cousin to affection, I feel that there is nothing at all problematic with that unless it prevents me from doing that which I am determined to do: make stuff, whatever kind of stuff I can.

Chewing The Moral Fibers

What if my father had not despised chewing gum so? He said to me when I was a child that chewing gum was despicable and that all chewers of gum should be executed. I liked gum. Perhaps if he had not said this, then maybe I would have agreed with him that Niggers and Jews should also be lined up against the wall. I might have swallowed hook line and sinker the notion that there was a world wide conspiracy in progress being orchestrated by sixty rich families that would stop at nothing short of a bloody revolution resulting in the destruction of their lineages. I may have accepted without question that the human race was created by a more advanced civilization of beings to provide a work force that would mine the gold which they needed to power their space craft. But he pushed me over the edge with the chewing gum issue. This was the first matter on which I was willing to disagree with my father, the first thing which made me feel that it was okay to defy him. I wanted to chew gum. I did chew gum. I did this despicable thing and nothing happened. The righteousness of the world did not come slamming down upon me like a dump truck full of text books. My father did not shoot me in the back of the head. He did not even ground me. He only shook his finger at me and said,
"I better not find that on the floor or anywhere else but in the trash can."
Maybe once or twice he did find it on the floor, but as it was not clear whether it had been my error or my sister’s (not clear to even my sister and I, or, at least on my end, I truly believed I was innocent and believed her when she said that she was) nobody could be punished and life went right on ticking. I chewed it and I REACHED INTO MY MOUTH WITH MY FINGERS AND PULLED ON IT TO WATCH IT STRETCH FROM MY TEETH FAR OUT BEFORE MY EYES, THEN STUFFED IT BACK IN MY MOUTH AND CHEWED SOME MORE. I was told not to do this, but I wanted to, so I continued to chomp and smack away and even learned to blow bubbles that would burst and cling to my face as a sticky pink film and sometimes it even made its way into my hair and had to be cut out.
But I was not executed, nor were the scores of other children I was aquatinted with who were as despicable as me in their gum chewing habits. We continued to exist. And because my father had been so extreme and severe in the way he spoke about chewing gum, it seemed likely that anything else that he said might be equally ludicrous. I could probably marry or even just fuck a black man today (even though I was passionately warned against it), and send our smiling photo to my parents in an email headed, “Me and My man Jamal at Golden Gate Park”, and still suffer no consequence. My Dad probably would not disown or kill me or Jamal (though he promised that he would when I was seven). He would probably even let him into the house on Thanksgiving. He might even play computer games with him, Jamal could be an Orc and my Dad an Elf and they would go on missions together and play for hours and life would go on. We couldn’t listen to rap music while we visited without my fathers head exploding and sending his crunchy brain matter flying through the room as if a bag of pork rinds or Funions had burst, in which case there would at last be a tragic fatality and we’d have to sweep up the mess. But the criminal (me) would go on listening to devil music with Jews and Negroes while chewing gum and buying the things that keep the rich getting richer behind those imposing locked doors in tall dark towers far from sight. Being as extreme as they were, my father’s words burned a hole right through my psyche, a hole through which all manner of things is capable of passing without causing me to shout,
"Off with their fucking heads!"
A hole deeper and darker than Alice’s, with tunnels which branch off into Wonderlands of every kind and color, where every wrong lives with every right and they exchange hats like teenage girls trading bangles. An infinite network of possibilities that would be closed to me if my father had bought me chewing gum at the Nickel And Dime and patted by blonde pig tails.

King of Kings

From whom do the Merovingian princes descend?

From he that has two fathers; one a ruler of men, descended from kings, and the other a monstrous serpent from the dark depths of the sea. His mother was wife to that worldly father, she too a descendant from the line of kings.
One evening as she bathed alone in the surf a monster rose from the great sea and mated with her.
It said to her:

" I am named the left hand of God,
bringer of death,
Gabriel,
and also Nin Ti, the lady who makes life,
lady of the rib."

From this union was born Issa, later called Merovee.
The son of a serpent, and heir to the throne, King of Kings.