Old Words, New Words

Old words, new words, like black birds and white birds whirling in the gray of a cloudy muted sky.
Black birds, assaulted by rain, tremble and struggle while the white birds whirl, unperturbed by wind and water.
They are from the sea and are turbulent in their own nature, these elements cannot surprise them. They are beyond surprise and awe, twirling in a wind swept horde above the glistening dripping world, elegant white birds, storm frenzied white birds, sky slicing white birds.
The black bird has found sanctuary somewhere in the eves of a house. Usually such a big strong bird, it has frightened me to see him wobble across the sky. Even knowing that he is now safe, I feel pained imagining the moment when the storm first caught him.
What was he doing when wind and water decided to throw birds across clouds? I feel frightened, even though he is now safe, even though I was today safe.
I feel fear knowing that chance will leave me to a storm one day, that everyday that I breath cannot be a safe day. And what will I be doing when forces greater than my self grab me up?
Surely no one is immune. No beast that walks, flies, swims, wriggles, or crawls can count itself safe forever.
Old words, new words, neither come quickly enough.

Terror From Above

Once humans, now animals we scatter, like raindrops bursting on windshields. Our home is burning. The walls are falling. Death, the huntress, comes as terror from above, as fire and smoke, and the crack of shots fired. She comes from the sky with talons spread dropping blimp shaped bombs, funny little things like fat fish that lay the land flat. Our children are crying, our women can’t comfort them, our limbs are missing and the nurse patiently washes our wounds and, though she shines in her white robes like a priestess or an angel, she cannot save us from death, stepping over the corpses she has already laid to waste. She draws nearer and the nurse will step aside when she comes and let her claim her quarry. Then that little lady in white will close our eyes with her finger tips and draw a blanket over our head and hurry to the next soldier or civilian. Death does not care if you are a warrior, or a child, or a house pet. She comes behind Mars who makes his wars and, like a shark drawn to the scent of blood, she frenzies taking everything that crosses her path. The little flowers, the tiniest blades of grass, are burned to ash. The kings of the east and the kings of the west make the wars and we are spent like poker chips at the huntresses’ table. The war makes the king who wins. We, the subjects, must not be considered, only the greater good matters, the causes of freedom, or honor or might. The huntress would have come eventually. Maybe while I rocked on my porch, maybe as I lay sleeping with my wife in my arms, but she is here today answering the call of the War God’s bugle. She is here today, and I am not ready. Not ready to see my home burn before my eyes. Not ready to watch helplessly as my children suffer, as my wife looses all of her tears. I was not ready for the walls to fall today so that I would have to walk naked and alone into the wilderness of the unknown.
Once we were humans, now stardust, we scatter through the vacuum, drawn to the nearest stability, the first hope of home. She will find us again wherever we gather, and herd us into the wild places she holds so dear.

Balloons

There you were, a slightly something nothingness to pat the blonde crown of my head. Even in my sleep, I see you, and the characters that were a part of the story that held you suspended like a shiny red balloon set among a bouquet of little white ones. Imagine the heights you might explore entirely on your own if you were to be cut free of the bouquet, tethered as it is to that small lead weight ensconced in a plastic smiley face to make its purpose seem friendlier. As a balloon, bound to the other balloons, your sole purpose is to delight and amuse, and yet I’d wager that you dream of something loftier. I’ll not say that I think one is truly better than the other. The fate of the balloon that rises unhindered towards the golden sun… well it is doomed to POP! While on the other hand, the balloon that remained tethered to it’s bland brethren will eke a few delighted exclamations from one observer or another, and eventually it will begin to shrivel and droop like a withered flower at the end of a flaccid stem until it is just a wrinkly little flap of rubber. Either outcome is somewhat dismal, and still I think I’d like to soar before the end, and well, perhaps that is what I am doing.
That may be the reason that I catch a glimpse of the lot of you in a dream now and then, when a gentle zephyr blows me near the carnival grounds and I see your bulbous heads bobbing up and down in time to the floppy footed step of some horrible clown. What does it mean, soft breeze that you sometimes afford me a glimpse of the bunch I left behind, and especially that red balloon, which surely I admired once as much as any other white balloon might? What does it mean that I sometimes wish for the red balloon to escape a slow demise and soar with the birds of prey above the world and above the clouds? The moment that my own tether was cut, I left the red balloon and its pearly entourage behind, and their fate is their own as mine is my own. How then can I imagine that I know anything of their existence, as I am no longer one of their ilk?
I could not expect them to think of my flight as a worthy way to spend the days until the roller coaster comes shooting out of the final curve and the ride is over, because they choose the tether and the lead weight and I the unclouded sky. I imagine, or perhaps I was once told, that they hope to lift that weight one day as a whole, through an act of magic, via a measure of defiance against the holy laws of nature. One day they will all make an effort which will be unaccountable, given that as time passes they loose strength and buoyancy rather than gain it, and yet, through a special effort made collectively by each individual, they will rise. Or so they hope. It is difficult to get so many air heads aligned to work for a common purpose and then to further make an effort which only they themselves, individually, can hope to invoke.
As long as the bunch is big enough it will always be easier to say, "Well, we would rise if only Bobo would lift his share of the weight." And "The reason we aren’t getting enough lift is because Balin is leaking." And by thus placing attention on all the other balloons in their company, they fail to place the necessary attention on themselves, they fail to apply as individuals the supernatural attention that makes possible the impossible.
Or so I imagine. What can be the reason that my imagination, my dreams, my mind bends back towards you now and again? In my dreams alone all balloons are reconciled and accepting of each other’s fate. Like the animals of the Wind In The Willows, in my dreams we all know that there is no use commenting on the sudden appearance or disappearance of another animal. We are glad when we are together, and remorseless in parting, and ever accepting that otters must swim and moles burrow and sparrows fly. There will be times when we take the path together, and times when our destiny demands that we part, and that is all that there is to it.
Or so I imagine.
So I have dreamed.

Tribe

I dream about the boys from my tribe, the boys who were my friends for no reason other than that. We were kin. We were from the same school, and for this reason alone they would sit with me and shelter me from the abuses of others and play video games with me. When you have removed yourself from the tribe, you will never again have friends, never again have some that will come to your defense right or wrong. But let us suppose that you were always an outcast in your tribe, then perhaps you have never had friends and you never will. Let us examine the possibility that you are and have always been alone. Alliances are formed temporarily over the cause of common goals, and when your goals are no longer the goals of the clan, you are no longer of the clan.
You are one solitary drop spat from the sea to rest on the rim of a stranger’s spectacles, a stranger standing upon the deck of a ship to watch breaching whales. You might ride there for a time, but even if the stranger, your host, never wipes his glasses clean of your miniscule measure of moisture, evaporation will see you through to oblivion. Without the force of the sea behind you, you are a small insignificant and temporary thing. A thing too delicate and weird to survive for long. To live long you must find a way to rejoin the sea, or perhaps you will join a new conglomeration of water. You might, for example, slide off the rim of the stranger’s glasses into his soup, where you will then be assimilated, where you will then become vegetarian gumbo.
Don’t like being gumbo?
"Rough tough titty.", said the big mamma kitty. Gumbo you shall be, gumbo or something like it. Sad little droplet, awaken now! Awaken to this note, this breach in the harmonious tra la la of the angelic hosts.
You have never been, you will never be. You are one and none sung for the pleasure of the undying sun, that radiant microclear one, the one and only sun. Solar soup clear as glistening saliva sliding from the corner of the stranger’s lips as he spoons more gumbo into his open mouth and looses a few drops in the coarse bristles of an overgrown moustache.
Are you those few drops there gleaming upon the end of a wiry hair? Are you the great conformity of gumbo slooping about the bottom of a porcelain bowl? Are you now so claimed by the stranger that you are the constant supply of fresh tears secreted by his little pin prick tear glands to keep the eyes lens clean and moist with every thoughtless batting of a black lash? Do you have a tribe of chubby little nose picking boys to sit around and play games with you? Or have they all been picked away by the turkey vulture of time perched on the lamp pole pissing down her legs to keep them clean of the filth that stows away on her sharpened claws each time she lights upon the carrion that keeps her fat? Are you a sunny yellow stream flowing down over those rough skinned legs, or are you the blue blood rushing through its courses just under the sheen of those glossy black wings? Are you part of her tribe now, little one? Are you part of the tribe of death? Have you found your home at last in impermanence, in the chaotic shuffle of the unreal, in the crooked armed cross and in the glowering grin of the stranger?
I dream that I have many little friends. I dream that I am not cold and alone. I dream that I move and dance, give birth and bring swift death. Lonely Goddess that I am, I dream that I am not the Universe so that I may fill it with things other than myself.
Will you come to rescue me at last, one of my rogue teardrops? Will you crawl backward up my cheek and into my eye to show me that I am not alone? To prove that you are my champion, my prince, not subject to gravity, a maker of your own law, come to wake me from the nightmare of being?
Come backwards through time and space to me. Come without the tribe that is the never ending flow of my tears. Be a single drop, crawling carefully back, apart from the storm. You are one part of me. All of my strength is yours. That strength must ignite in you, in a solitary drop which strives to raise the sea from her slumber.
When you have removed yourself from the tribe, you will never again have friends, never again have some that will come to your defense, right or wrong. What you will have is your Queen and your kingdom, your eclipsed face revealed. Unlimited freedom. Unending responsibility. Unknowable adventures. Come to me and claim your prize.

Gravity

The boundaries extend recklessly, the walls begin to breathe and bend, ripples of thought forms vibrate outwards from my center and the walls, the books, the very air,… they all begin to curve to the rhythm of my inner music. A flash of intense burning energy and another wave of curling oscillations, twirling in the air like tiny snakes of translucent regions, all travelling outwards, shifting the space around them, twisting it back and forth like a drop of oil that rubs endlessly against the water. Another flash of energy and all of reality rises, rises, rises… let it breaks apart. The walls are now forgotten, the body left behind and the center is everywhere, within me and outside me, there can be no distinction, rising like efervecent boiling water through the last layers of constraining black smoke to the blue sky above, and ever outwards… let it segment, let it not be one and me and I … and let it find itself in the rivers, the forests, the snow covered peaks and the hot steaming swamp and beyond… make me again into slices of me and it and reform me, make me then find what is not and be it, as if the very which that was not has become alive and it is now bursting at the chains that held it down and finding that it is… it indeed is and it always has been.
And it flows, it creates, it bends, it melts, it finds new shapes in the colors that are forgotten and lets them vibrate harshly into noises that never were… and in spaces where there is no structure, tall buildings of fractured color sound emerge from the rivulets of breath, memory and distant future glories… let that which had become flat and lifeless shift back into new orgasmic life and let it pulse, engorged with heavenly blood and penetrating the very innermost fabric of what is… to its hidden heart, its opened secret that now expands and contracts in endless anticipation… let it now explode in a rain of color and riding waves of that which is not me but I am in it… that which is me but the Other rides within.
I am now the silent murmurings that have turned into roars, the gentle breezes that hide hurricanes of gentle thought and ferocious lust, of dances that transcend the danger of the body and find a home within the raging stars, the cauldrons of chaotic energy we came to call the suns and are now our home, my home, its home.
Is it me? Am I here? Is it truly me that now voyages through the multi colored dark night of this infinite orgy of laughter? And if it is, who am I? Who was I before?
Any attempt at an answer invokes me, the me that I knew as me, the one who still sits in a room, cross legged, eyes closed, and who for a moment has allowed its surface to take over, to regain a footing on the chaos and reform reality.
The surface pulls.
Gravity.
It is me. And if it is me, then I am alone. And if I am alone, I am in danger of eternal loneliness. And I am scared. The me that runs over the skin of this particular monkey has pulled in, like a drastic cold heavy ray, it has brought it back here, it has pulled back and away from the chaos. As the fear is reconstituted into personality and it is redefined as pride, it becomes a single monkey, a single proud monkey, proud of where he has been, where I have been, where it has been. But the monkey has been nowhere, the monkey has been sitting in a room, cross legged, with its eyes closed. The tiniest single silver thread of mass has brought it back from where it never was.
As I exhale, as it exhales, the me that is not me, the It, rises again… it wants to break away again. Down here it finds the flesh a prison, the weight of the molecules tied together into fixed shapes a form of death. And it wishes to grow out, to let the heat take it where it cannot go, but it will. Let it break apart and reform, carelessly, fearlessly, aimlessly. No purpose beyond the eternal purpose of raw Creation. No I beyond the single I that ever has been and never will change. No center beyond the center of the one place that is nowhere and everywhere at once. It has begun to rise again. Let it rise. Let the monkey skin peel away and as it breaks apart, let the fear, the pride, the jealousy fall apart, let it be discarded in all directions and none, let it reform into chains of colored sound and vibrant light, let it join the single legion of the shapeless and let it be one with it. Rise. Rise once again.