Saint Veshua

She had been on the mountaintop since the early afternoon the previous day. Such a painful curve of the wheel. Dark time lasted for an eternity, just the slowly arching crescent moon marked the movement of the earth and her body’s place upon it. They were solid, ancient and cold.
"It hurts to be so nonexistent," she said. He felt that she was at a loss for words.
"It only hurts when you are trying to prevent it." 
He sincerely felt the wish to say so much more to her but he also knew that it was not possible, it was simply beyond the scope of the options currently available.
"There’s a cold wind blowing through my veins. Someone has driven a stake through my heart."
"It’s your father." He said, "He was trying to protect you."
“They cut me apart and they put something in me… this is what they did… see? Look at it, look at it...”
He searched her form for a message, letting the tenuous sparks of insight fall to him like snowflakes. She kept her eyes wide, letting the blackness and flickering stars roll and tumble over her with possibilities, letting it drag her mind into depths that daylight preferred to avoid. The wind moved over her and a nearby howl maintained the simple music of their encounter.
"I wanted to make something real." She said.
"Don’t struggle." He advised, "That will never happen if you struggle and crack the vessel."
But she pulled the stake out and the insects come pouring from her heart. They rushed over the surface of her body to devour it. There were animals with horns climbing the rocks and a lilting flute called from the distance.
Their line of communication was severed.
He watched it all from a distant peak, his scarf flapping in the wind, spy glass poised for the view. What he saw was a blond girl from some great American novel kneel to pray, and at that moment her heart burst into flames which soon consumed the whole apparition. For a moment it reminded him of the Inquisition, then the formation changed, and the flaming girl collapsed into a brilliant star. The explosion was magnificent.
It knocked him off of his feet.
He lay on the mountaintop as morning light spilled into the world of a newborn day, and he drank in the pale pink light. He opened his arms wide, letting the new sun bathe him in its clarity.
From her vantage point she watched the birds and the lone hawk that swept over him in circles again and again, as though they had something specific to communicate, but she could not hear him anymore.
It seemed like an inappropriate use of materials, but that’s the nature of magick.  Below, he held on to her light, thinking that it alone would ease his wish to change the reality of these new limitations.

Don't Know

I don’t know yet and I probably never will.
Everything is better that way. Not knowing anything for certain, so certain so certain so certain. Let it be a mystery.
Whatever it is let it touch you, kiss your mind open your face with mouth yawning wide in response to a curious sensation. Want to chop it up, box it label it, display it? Such a pathetic response to the real deal.

The real deal, ha! No real way, no way. Something comes out and we say, “don’t let it stop!” Just one moment after the next, never knowing, like a snow bird, robin was it?
Cardinal poised on the branch, little red riding hood. Nobody knows, nobody knows. The trouble I’ve seen? It didn’t trouble me at all when I went all jiggly like jelly melting over hot cake.
What the hell. No mind. Don’t nobody mind what’s going down here.
Didn’t I sing to the walls last night? Waking them up to the starlight and moonbeams and the little exploding lights in the sky.

I am so far from home, a weary traveler.
There is no such thing as home after all. We’ll always be moving if we want to remain alive, some part must always be in motion. If it isn’t the outside that lacks the charms of home then it’s the inside rearranging, that sensation of loosing my mind.
Loosing it is so different from letting it go. Loosing implies the grasping, the desperate urge to contain, while letting is a form of adoration.

What is more important than love?
Such a stupid word for a thing that stands outside of the kingdom of syllabic moaning and groaning. In human bodies, out of human bodies.
What is it, this thing we call life, now, love?
I don’t know and why strive to know through entrapment and dissection. Let it flow freely through whatever I am, wherever I am, whenever I can. Ride this pale horse this strange fleshy creature, a mighty big dog,
Oh death the eternal dark place from which we emerge and to which we return like a bright and shining eye eclipsed by a lid, in with a blink.
Flash one life, flash two life, flash three…The blink of an I . I am this, I am that, I am that I am, say on sayer. Whatever you wish is my command.

 I can change my mode, mode, mode, mode. Cause I’m a billion different people from one day to the next. A slippery sliding whatever it is.
I already told you I don’t know. I don’t know and you don’t know because it can’t be held without dying, like butterflies or opals or those dripping stalagmites beneath the earth.
You can’t hold life, liberty, love in your hand or even in the intestinal coils of the brain. God, it’s stuffed with packing peanuts.

The main point is not what I think with words, the main thing is conductivity. We just need to let it flow right through, and knowing most definitely obstructs the flow because when we know we no longer seek, we hold the crumpled dead thing in our hand and say this is a butterfly.
But this is not a butterfly. This is a crushed dead thing. Butterflies fly and extend long black tongues into flowers to extract nectar from bright blooms, all things that cannot happen when they are held in your hand.
In that moment that you reach out and grab it, it ceases to be what it was, because we are motion.
That is all. We are not what we think. We are what we do. You only exist when in motion.

You are nothing when you are speculating, thinking, waiting. Of course I can’t be certain about this or any of the things that can be said.
They will wiggle away, change into something new, and leave me holding their jackets, looking shocked. I can only let it roll out, rush through a thing in motion, something that I call love or life or liberty.
What I call it and what it is. Two separate animals. An arbitrarily designated connection.
Everything is better this way, not knowing anything for certain, letting whatever it is unfold unimpeded.
Go go little butterfly, dragonfly shape shifter. Questions are so much more useful than answers.

Dog And Cat Days

Oh the sea foam green dreams of young kitten girls with soft clouds of hair and stooped shoulders. They break on the rocks and spray the faces of bull dog boys waiting on the beach with their guitars and bon fires and all hearts have wings that beat against the cages of rib bone that house them. So often we feel them trying to fly up out of our throats and they get stuck there as a lump, or sometimes they flutter around in our stomachs especially when our eyes meet or some bit of flesh brushes up against another. We’ll be drug or gun runners and we’ll sit by turquoise pools in forgotten desert motels and sip drinks garnished with hot pink paper umbrellas until we get our stomachs shot out and we bleed out red blood into some old avocado green shag and hold hands and feel shocked watching the light go out of our eyes.
We’ll be rock stars with coke habits and old mink coats and big sunglasses and then we’ll look more than ever like the kitten girls and bull dog boys we are. We carve our initials into the sandy cliffs that overlook the surf and kitten girls know that the wind will blow the names away and there will be no more KG “heart” BDB some day, but still her eyes are full of stars and Harley Davidsons rumble through her cranium. They could just live in an apartment that smells like antiques and old ladies down by the sea, soaking the asbestos up while being nobodies together. She can write a novel that no one will publish and he can work in construction and play in a band that sounds like animals fighting in the guts of land mowers and each can maintain with pride their respective My Space profiles.
It was meant to be glorious and shining, our youth unending, the mysteries of the universe always sparkling over us, hearts always trying to escape these excited bodies, these chemical factories for building space ships for the Gods. We would die young and live in the kingdom of heaven forever. Maybe recklessly manufacture smurf speed in a bathtub in a sagging house off of Machado St. and wait for the fantastic explosion that would set our hearts free. Kitten girl would do anything, anything at all to feel alive, break her hymen over Tom Waits songs, bite and scratch, forget the condoms, take a greyhound bus to another state, watch strangers play video games and drink wine coolers in living rooms that smell like nothingness. She’d even shave away the soft clouds of hair and invoke demons in circles and stars made of masking tape and spend the night in cars parked at run down drive ins.
Somewhere along the way the dreams were trapped in black bottles and distilled into nightmares brewed in basements.
What happened to recording our newest song in the bathroom on an old cassette player and ditching school to play it on the old boss stereo for grandma? What happened to dancing half naked in the surf and bulldog boys in pink dresses and kitten girls singing songs on the fences of hot alleys?
In some tear drop of time we are there, like insects trapped in amber, our spirits were left behind in the golden sun filled afternoons of our dog and cat days. Now we march, life less old wrinkled things with guts too heavy to swing to the music and hearts too swollen with betrayals of self to flutter or even flop. Poor hearts, the wings have so hopelessly atrophied. This slow death is not the glory we imagined, is not the song to the immortal that we dreamed we’d learn to sing. When did we become tame old pets with small dreams? Little petty fantasies so devoid of life they can no longer crash onto shores but only slosh about like old beer in plastic cups?
Oh the sea foam green dreams of young kitten girls with soft clouds of hair and stooped shoulders. They used to break on the rocks and spray the faces of bull dog boys waiting on the beach with their guitars and bon fires and everyone’s hearts had wings that beat against the cages of rib bone that housed them.
We can live again in the bright and shinning moment, dancing and singing the sparkle of the stars. The night sky will once again drip with mystery, our hearts might again shudder with ecstasy and its promise. Anything is yet possible while we still breathe, even if there is a tear drop in which we are sour little pusses and sleeping old dogs, there is always another moment waiting to be born. A sea foam green bead of liquid life in which we rise from our ashes and live, live, live, live, wild and magick things from other times and other places, from fantasy books and independent films, soft kitten girls and brave hearted bull dog boys, the stewards of live hearts.
And now that innocence has become experience we’ll know how to let them fly. We’ll let them soar like birds of prey, graceful and far seeing carrying us to all new vistas of sound and color, to worlds knit of avocado green shag and soft pale clouds of hair and guitars and bonfires and pink flesh stitched together with boom boxes and reels of old film. Oh the sea foam green dreams with their Harley Davidson rumble and the red blood that sloshes like beer in old cups shuddering with ecstasy distilled into nightmares. The glory we imagined is the song to the immortal that we dreamed we’d sing with our tear drops of time wrapped in stooped shoulders. We break on the rocks and the wind blows the names away along with the cages of rib bone that housed them.

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.

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.

The Path of the Heart

Oh, those sad lost creations of Neverwhere, wandering aimlessly from one cast off husk of a dream to another, from one pretend family and one imagined life to another. In world of the sleepwalkers, there is no real home, there is no real heart. We are born into the black abyss like the rats of NIMH into a dark air shaft. Only those strong enough to build their own heart and hearth will survive, only they will become anything at all. The weak will be sucked away into the cold darkness. Those who do pull themselves together and become the center of a tiny universe will suffer all of the growing pains that we expect infants to endure, as they struggle from crawling to walking upright. What is a magnificent triumph in the beginning is small potatoes as the work unfolds and you race against time like a slinky dripping silver down an unending flight of stairs. Its movement is fluid and harmonious with the laws of nature.
Your own motion will ever be subject to the very same laws, but there is a hope that something within you will supply you with a supernatural reserve of power, enough so that you may operate both as time does and as time does not. That secret something, your ace in the hole, would be the ace of hearts, that same heart you started growing when you crawled out of the chaos one morning so long ago and defiantly declared:
"I am the center. I am the point upon which all lines of force converge!"
At first it would be small and tender, a meek little thing fluttering like red rose petals twirling on a breeze. You must do more to nourish it or it will fade away and you will face oblivion. You must grow the heart, keep the heart, and tend it unerringly, for there are great gales ahead, storms which outmatch the tempest from which you emerged, and if your heart is a small fragile thing, it will splinter and bust and you will be no more than dust, the sort that trickles through the narrow waist of an hour glass.
Like a garden left untended, a heart will cease to function if it is not cared for. If neglected, the bloom you could have watched swell with care, will wither and be choked out by other hands, coarse things from the primordial chaos. The effort must never cease. In every moment, you race against sleek silver time, striving to widen your sphere of influence, striving to grow as a star grows, drawing on the mysterious force at the core of your cosmic body and, in so doing, burning brighter and hotter, ever more painfully.
It hurts to come to life.
It hurts to be alive.
There is only rest in sleep.
This is the unfolding of your heart. In the wasteland, you will be your own sanctuary. In the desert of Maya, you will be like the hermit crab which carries its home upon its own back, always searching for the next opportunity to expand into a larger sanctuary, a vaster greater heart.
Know yourself well, love yourself well, and perhaps you will find another you to travel with, the Other that is the moon’s reflection upon the water. This is will happen as the heart grows greater. But do not become distracted by the dead rocks that orbit the sun.
The heart must be maintained, the attention trained within, or you will be lost in the carnival of chaos, lost in a hall of fun house mirrors. You may look at mirrors up and down, but you may not come to know mirrors, you will only come to know illusions and distractions. The only thing that you may know is an invisible thing, a line to tether yourself to in the darkness, a small kernel of self which must be watered with constant attention until it grows and grows and blossoms out of the dirt of the dream.
Through the madness of the dream it is born, but it is not of the dream.
You are not of the dream, traveler.
You are a strange bloom in a cold black desert. An improbable but beautiful thing. A heart. A hearth. A home. A point from which the infinite can be navigated.
Explorers need stars to chart a course. If you want to become an explorer one day and rise from your knees to chart the cold valleys of the wasteland, you must first become the very star that you will follow. Once the star has grown within you, never falter, never deviate, never let your attention stray, never become fascinated with the many obstacles of the labyrinth. Follow the star that is you unerringly, until the very path that you walk becomes your home, and the void around you becomes the real heart that beats within you.
Do not be discouraged. The path is lit by the light of those who came before you.

Come In!

It all points back to the early years when it seemed I would be a model citizen once I reached a ripe age. In my youth I was cheerful, kind , and, above all, an obedient little girl. The very sweetest and kindest are most susceptible to conviction, so when they suggested that I ask Jesus into my heart I did just that, rather than pretending, like everybody else did. Everyone in America knows that it’s good to talk about Jesus and justify everything you do by insisting that you love Jesus, but of course that’s all just play acting, a little show on the surface of things, a lie we tell ourselves and each other while deep down beneath the shiny veneer, within the confused tangles of the deep psyche, we maneuver towards our greatest desires and veer away from our worst fears, and plot ways to hide all of this subterranean activity under layers and layers of words and social etiquette.
But I did not know that as a child. I was too slow to catch on to the ways of the world. When they bade me to accept Jesus I opened my arms and flung wide the doors to my little heart and cried:
"Come in, come in!"
And that was how my career as an invocant was begun, very innocently, obediently and with the best intentions. My crime, of course, was, is and ever shall be an indulgence in conviction. While immersed in a culture of fakers there can be no greater sin than sincerity. Jesus was for me a gateway deity. The way some kids smoke pot and then move on to try something harsher, I started with what was friendliest and worked my way outward towards the most forbidden. With time I grew sympathetic to stranger wilder forces, forces without forms, or names, or mythologies to dress them in. To those forces beyond calculation I likewise opened the temple of my mammalian countenance and threw back my head to howl an invitation:
"Come in, come in!"
There was never a more generous or hospitable offer to make, nor shall there ever be. I hear from others that this is a very frightening and naughty thing to have done. I hear from human animals that this is a bad thing. I hear this from fakers, from liars, from cowards. I am not ashamed to have looked into my own innermost quarters, into the depths of my heart, and the secret crevices of my mind and discovered that there was darkness there. I am not ashamed to have discovered that I am but a mere mortal, an animal alike in my fears and desires to all other animals. I am not ashamed that I would make a sacrifice of that animal on the altar that we call a lifetime. What is one lamb more or less to the flock? Maybe there are a few that have missed me down at the trough while I was away acting upon my convictions, living not just for the sake of being alive, but rather questioning the possibilities entrenched within that experience, exploring it, testing its measure, prodding its heights and depths with every sense available to me, beyond hope, shame, or fear. You may keep all of the rewards in store for the good animals, I will take all of the punishments reserved for the strays. For freedom I will pay with responsibility, accepting the consequence of my actions and inactions. I will be faithful to my purest impulses, to my open hearted wonderment and willingness. I will accept my worst nature, my cowardly yearnings, as they are mine too, and I will be the one to master them with open eyes and a gentle hand. I am resolved to be a bad girl until the bitter end, incurable of honesty and true charity, ever biting at the tether and bucking at the reign of the masters of the world. My kingdom is in the invisible heavens and hells, embedded in every shadow and every reflection, in every grain of sand and every tear drop. May it live in small gestures that grow grander, may it breath through subtle shapes, hues, and murmurs, may it flourish under this veil of mortality. I invite it with open heart:
"Come in! Come in!"