Colony

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

Moon Eater

The Moon looks so contemplative, so quiet and concentrated. The woman in the photograph beams outward rather than inward as the moon does. The woman in the photo is a sun painted white, a sun disguised as a moon. Big Cheshire cat grin. Didn’t the Cheshire cat disguise himself as the moon? His grin was the horned moon, or the horned moon was his grin, and he materialized around it humming a little “huma de hum de hum”. The woman with the white face is like that, a sun with the moon caught in her teeth. An eater of moons, moon shaped cookies downed with milk and honey, falling, cascading in sugar cookie crumbles down the dark well of a throat, chased by cool white milk, down down down to places our eye should not see. There is no light in there, down in the woman’s gut, in her moon belly. A tiny crumb being pulverized down in there would look about itself and swear that it was now in the abyss, in the terrible place outside of the world. But it is not the outside of the moon eater. It is the inside of the moon eater that is the strange and dark annihilation of a cookie. The cookie is the inside of the moon eater and within the moon eater there are many divisions, tissues and linings and cell walls. Everywhere of the moon eater is an inside of something and an outside of something else. But a crumb down there in the acid bath of the stomach’s delight would never know it. It would have no idea. It would think, most definitely, that it had gone outside. The interior of the moon eater is so dark, but from its dense surface, light is reflected and we are presented with an image. Ah! Just like the moon itself. A dense body whose surface reflects the light of the sun. The moon give off no illumination of its own. It baths in the sun’s radiance to be seen. Only a dress of light worn so that the children of the sun will know it is there. The children of the sun with their eyes for perceiving light could not recognize the moon without her disguise. The moon, like the moon eater, wears a disguise. Trixie things, moons and the eaters of moons. Scary white things whose insides are black. It would be better to be eaten by a black thing whose insides were light. But how likely would you be to make that choice? If you stood before two doors, one painted black and one painted white, which would you choose? And what if the doors were not the doors of houses but the mouths of lions opened wide, bottom teeth pointed up and top teeth pointed down? Would you prefer to be eaten by the black lion or the white lion? I will tell you a secret; the black lion is made of glass painted on the inside with all the colors of an infinite universe so that when you look upon it, it appears to be black. The white lion is made of plaster so that you do not see its dark insides when you glance at its clean bright surface. I am not going to tell you which lion you should choose. I think I will not even tell you which lion I would choose. I will say, that the white lion is the moon eater and that you are what you eat. Are you an eater of moons, an eater of lions, an eater of cookies, or garbage, or hash? What do you eat and what’s eating you, bite by delectable bite? I’m not saying I know. I’m not saying I don’t. It’s worth contemplation though, worth the quiet concentration of a lunar entity, hung as white horns in a black sky, singing, “huma de hum de hum”.

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.)

Spelunking With Papa Bear

"You’ve got to hi de hi, you’ve got to ho de ho, you’ve got to he de he de he, to get along with me!" The old man in the mountain, he wants one thing and the little lady she wants another, but the old man always gets his way because he’s bigger and his beard is longer. He just slaps his big feet around on the cave floor and asks: ”Whatcha gonna do now?" And in a lilting voice she wiggles her hips and says: "I’m gonna do the best I can."
So he chases her round and around through the twinning tunnels that twist through the mountains guts. They run over little bridges that hang over dark abysses, and down paths that grow narrower and narrower and sometimes disappear under pools where pale frogs croak and swim after glow-in-the-dark minnows. They run through hallways were fungi grow on the walls and turn their caps in their direction as they fly past. Just rubbing up against this fungal federation is enough to send the body into shock, it has so much to say in the language of light and so few people come down into the dark to rub it and lick it and listen to its incredible story.
The old man and the little woman squeeze their arms close to their bodies and rush by so that they won’t be drawn into a conversation that could take an eternity and change the course of evolution forever. Whoosh, they whiz through tunnels like hamsters scurrying through plastic tubes. She is always just a step or two ahead, barely defending her lead, and his big hand reaches out, groping the space between them, waiting for the moment to come when she will fall back into his hands.
On they go, deeper and deeper, down staircases that spiral into the earth’s core like a corkscrew. They swing over pits of molten lava and disappear down ramps of bright red adobe. Lucifer is pitching a shovel full of coal into the fire, his tail a-twitching. As they pass, he waves courteously, and grinning, he puts his back into it, heave ho, in goes coal and the flames dance up higher than ever, wiggling their indistinct hips and bosoms.
The heat is intense, and the old man is slowed down just a little bit more than the young woman, so she manages to put a few extra feet between them, but the sweat is running into her eyes and making her hair and dress cling to her body. Squish, with every step the perspiration that has pooled down in their socks is squeezed out under the pressure of a foot to leave little wet prints.
The heat slowly diminishes as they journey through a corridor that slopes steeply uphill. Neither can run at this point, both parties walk huffing and puffing, grabbing onto little roots that protrude from the dirt walls to prevent themselves from loosing their footing and tumbling backwards into the broiling flames behind them. Wheezing and hanging their heads between their legs, they catch their breath when the ground levels out and a colony of little brown rabbits hops by on its way to the surface, brushing up against their ankles as they go, strong bucks, plump does and downy soft little youngster all wrinkling their noses and twitching their ears.
The little woman doesn’t know it, but these rabbits work for the old man, so when she coos, "Oh how cute!”, and reaches down to pet them, they hold perfectly still and act as if they enjoy it, staring up with dewy little eyes that glisten in the darkness. Then, whoosh, the old man leaps forward and catches her by the hair. Still holding on tight, he uses his other hand to pull bunches of baby carrots from his bearskin smock and rewards the bunnies for a job well done. They giggle gleefully and hip hop away.
"Ooooh!" the little lady exclaims in an endearingly angry little voice, sweet on the surface, smoldering at the core. The old man drags her the rest of the way home, singing, "You’ve got to hi de hi, you’ve got to ho de ho, you’ve got to he de he de he, to get along with me!"

Eaters of Death

Today is Easter, time to celebrate our undead god and eat his flesh and drink his blood. We run through open green fields or across well manicured little plots of grass in gaily colored frocks in search of the unborn offspring of birds, reverting for this one day to one of our earliest scavenger instincts. This is how our pretty little walnut shaped brains got so meaty. We ate all those omega threes and got super wise, wise enough to figure that if we could eat the eggs they left behind, we could also murder the foul that laid them, causing that pulsing twitching organ under our skull cap to burst with profound insight and new wisdom about the fine art of killing and eating. This gave us time to grow philosophical, mystical. We imposed sexual metaphor over everything around us, father sky coming down to make life with mother earth. Soon we grew even wiser and learned that if death is what makes us so strong and makes our brains so big we would need to forget about mother earth and build the cult of father sky. Angry, jealous, vengeful. His son a radical mischief maker. Ah, ah, ah, but I skip way ahead, can you see the whole progression in your mind? We kill, we learn to stand upright, we advance just a little from early Cro-Magnon to present day Christian cannibal. We eat life, sucking it up wherever we go. Today we make our own eggs out of hard plastic and fill them with chocolate made with cocoa harvested by 8 year olds in underdeveloped countries. Some little brown kid is sipping down his morning cup of Java, the big meal of the day before he goes to work so that pure white people can feed the fruits of his brown labor wrapped in multicolored foil wrappers to their own pasty larvae. Shall we talk about fertility on this day, the way rabbits do it and do it until they overrun the hillside? Imagine rabbits with no natural enemies left to hunt them, cannibal rabbits that eat death and have cunning bulging brains, tearing the country hillsides to shreds to build their little warrens. That’s us. Or more austere, imagine one more ape, the son of jealous Jehovah bleeding on a cross and getting dried out by the sun like that ugly bug covered fish I saw in my neighbor’s kitchen yesterday. He finally dies and we lay him in a cave, but then he rises, up, up back to father sky. Did I mention that he took a last meal before he was convicted for his crimes, whatever they were. Gulp, gulp, chew, chew, and he communicated to his followers what they should do. Be good cannibals, eat life, be eaters of the living flesh of god, father sky. Yum yum. So we whirl around in our sun drenched warrens playing games and then we sit down to eat the remains of a big pig adorned with little yellow ringlets of pineapple. If we are extra good, we stop off at the temple first to take the last sacrament, to reenact the last meal with our cannibal prophet, the son of father sky. Take this body my body, this blood my blood, and go look for eggs in the grass. The omega trees that I mentioned earlier come from the grass. Hens eat grass and worms and other crawlies and that’s what makes their eggs so good for us. We can’t digest grass ourselves, we need the chicken to do that for us. We feed on her life process. The holy trinity, the grass, the chicken, and the egg. This gives life. Today is a good day for the eaters of death. Today it is time to celebrate our undead god and eat his flesh and drink his blood.

Union

Tell me, little electric pulses that take the shape of white letters on a liquid crystal screen, tell me what I do not know about myself, about you, about us. I have gone around turning up stones since I was a little girl, turning up stones not just to see what lies and lives beneath them, but to reach down with lightening quick fingers to catch what has been unearthed and press it to my lip, lick it with my tongue, and drop it into that cavern that is my mouth so that I can eat it up, letting it wriggle down my throat with all its crawly legs. This is how I have forged a relationship with that which is beyond the surface of my skin; I welcome it in. Answers bear no weight with me. Questions are only useful if they draw me into a real encounter with something that I am not. Something that I am not until it has found its way inside of me, then I am. I am without sorrow or regret my own worst nightmares, those things that I found brooding in the darkest depths of my psyche. I opened me up and looked in on what was there, then beckoned with a welcoming finger,
"Come here you strange obscene things. Come here and let me eat you. You will like it, I promise, it feels so good to be digested rather than shoved off the plate. Let me try you, you will see, it feels so good when you are me."
One night death came in and sat on my roommates couch in a black denim jacket. I sat cross legged on the floor, criss cross apple sauce Indian style with a nervous smile. Looking upon its pale grinning visage I said:
"It’s all over now that you are here. I understand that." And I spread my legs wide and said,
"Come in. Your welcome."
Because, you see, with me the unknown is always welcome, the fierce, the frightening, the unknowable, it’s all quite edible once you’ve acquired a taste for it. Like black licorice, its flavor is distinct and stains your tongue so that others will suspect what you’ve been up to. Yes, yes, it’s an acquired taste, like eating worms or drinking urine and others will be able to smell something on you that isn’t quite right, but most will be willing to ignore the signs which point to your unwholesome appetite. Most will be happy to ignore you completely, in fact, because they wouldn’t care to share or spare a bit of attention, seeing as they have so precious little to begin with and they plan to blow it all on shopping or watching sports.
So you can smell like dog shit and have worms crawling out of your head, and then they will not want to be friends with you, but bless them, they won’t interfere with you. No, they will gladly perfect the art of neglect and let you wander from garbage can to dank dark garbage can where you can extend your hand into the darkness and let your fingers close around something without quite knowing what it is, and then you can pull it up into the light and find that it’s a paper box from a nearby fast food chain, and opening the lid you will discover a half eaten crispy chicken sandwich which you will not hesitate to bite into yourself, right there, on the spot, achieving union with deep fried foul, minus feathers, plus secret sauce and limp yellow lettuce.
You can count on such measures of freedom it you live in a city big enough, if you live in a hot bed of civilization and if you are willing to sleep alone on a cold hard sidewalk beneath a sheet of newspapers. You can find what you don’t know and embrace it if you aren’t afraid of being infected by it, if you have no reserves about becoming something other than what you were just before such a fateful encounter. Those who have such hesitations do not turn up rocks or open mysterious boxes or admit to themselves that they have had dreams about fucking dogs.
Those who want to remain as they imagine they are, with a nickel’s worth of attention left to burn on their favorite diversion, so that they may easily forget those queer dreams and ignore those unusual packages, and dismiss the strange apparitions sitting on their roommate’s sofa, will be just fine. They are free not to explore. I am allowed, even encouraged not to notice the creepy crawly things that live in my head, the heads of others or under stones.
However, I choose to embrace self knowledge without conditions, which means that I will change shapes. Oh yes I will. And you may look at these little symbols blazing on a liquid crystal screen, and eat the forbidden knowledge I have pressed to your lips without ever suspecting that you are in fact eating me. (Unless of course I mention it…) If what I have just said about myself, about you, and about us, manages to wriggle down your throat like a slimy green alligator’s tongue, you may find that it will change you too. That is the magick of union, my love. That is what I offer you now.

We Make Ourselves Every Day

We make ourselves everyday, we make ourselves in our own image. Some of us do it with care, artfully constructing a vehicle for the nameless, some do it sloppily, drowsily, with no attention to that which they are making, like a pimple faced, snot nosed teen in the kitchen of a drive through fast death chain assembling a Whacker burger from the ingredients available in a row of unwholesome white bins.
We make ourselves everyday. Some of us do it with flare. We make ourselves not just once in a day but as many times as we possibly can, in as many mediums as possible. We do it in service to my Lord, a silent black strange thing which cannot be defined as a thing itself. Only our relationship to it might be described, and I describe that relationship to you now with that pair of words, "My Lord", which implies that it is the governing noble force and I the capable hands which act out the will of the creeping chaos, the untamable shadow of the moon, the eternal resident of the underground labyrinth.
We make ourselves every day, in every moment. Some use only their default settings. They make themselves without love, they make themselves without care, they make themselves without attention. These docile little lambs go about chewing their cud and bleating their complaints to one another while the shepherdess, cloaked in black, wielding her curved cane, a cane made in the shape of a hook for snaring an unwitting fish, guides them gently towards the ashen abyss, to the well of lost souls, where they will spin like thin white sheets in the spin cycle as viewed through a little glass portal, twisted and tangled, churning in the dark, their whiteness revealing their great sin; the sin of having made no effort. They will have been, as we say, caught white handed, bleached out by the destroyer, the bone masher, smiling under her hood, edging them on with her boot tip, fastening gleaming brass bells about their necks. Why, I wonder, does she want them so white? So purged of color and variance? So depleted of any nutritious value that you will have to WONDER, is it still bread at all? See how she leads them to pastures which keep their fleeces soft and lovely?
We make ourselves every day, and if we do not do so with vigilance, there will always be another willing to make us for herself. She will prepare us to her taste, tender and undernourished, like calves shut away from sun and slaughtered before they can mature in order to yield a choice piece of veal.
Some have noticed the way that we make ourselves. Some have painted themselves black to escape the butchers block, to flee from Mary’s gently prodding toe, for everywhere that Mary bends the lamb is sure to go… Once painted black we are denied the safety of being bound to the flock. If you are not to her liking…away you go, to fend for yourself, if you will not be what she would make you, (something with salt, pepper, and a parsley garnish). If we make ourselves black, we are our own masters, beholden to none of this well tagged earth.
When you are your own maker then the world will close its doors to you and a cold wind will blow forever over your wretched frame. If you turn your back to Mary, she will make her world impossible for you to get by in. Don’t cross Mary unless you mean it. For those who painted the roses red, it’s off with your head, or into the wild wood, where the hungry wolves roam. Into "la aventura", into the unknown, from whence you will never emerge, because they don’t take our kind in the malt shops of the bountiful manifested world.
Out here in the tangled darkness, where our strange and varied colors mix and bleed together to make midnight soup. Out here where we wild things are, screeching and roaring, wailing and writhing, dreaming and stalking. Out here, where we make ourselves in our own image, in the form of the formless, governed by the boundless, taking shape for the pleasure of it, in service to none but the shadow, the unmade which aches for us to make it. We make ourselves for the hell of it, for the joy of it, to create because if you have not made yourself today, then tonight you will grace Mary’s plate.