Alien

Mistress Deep with her bite so sharp and slimy crawling around through the body of the one who calls herself MOTHER. She goes where she pleases, between the walls, down tight narrow little labyrinthine passages in search of prey, of heroes bones to crush, in search of the Other whom she may embrace and make self. Dripping, oozing, sliming her way through the darkness, she stalks, the son of Cain, the draconian descendant, the line of Lilith and Samael. Her kiss is death, the life of her lineage is death for the sons of Adam. She opens her arms and welcomes the Other to annihilation, planting her seed inside so that it will become as she.
MOTHER so bright and clean works to conceal her strange pet, that thing that lurks beneath her shiny veneer. Her cool logic and twinkling sterile light seem to offer protection, but deep within her icy hull chaotic animal hunger lurks. The Queen of the Heavens, she is a shining Isis struggling with Lilith over the habub tree. The stars are her companions, burning in the cold depths of the abyss. For her, the organic world is something to be used, turned to her advantage, and men are mere expendable tools.
The maiden who steals light walks the halls, a tiny reflection of MOTHER, the controlling, the rational, the calculating. Clean skin and neatly laced shoes. Our Theseus wondering in the dark, hunting and evading the minotaur. The hero, the one with a plan, unrolling her ball of string, her chain of never-ending thoughts to help her find her way. Occasionally she is lured into the wild wet madness of the other by her own animal, suddenly irrationally entering the darkness, the den of Mistress Deep, crooning,
“Here Jones, Jones, kitty, kitty.”
She is there, poised precariously between Isis and Lilith, the calculating and the chaotic elements of the machine in which she dwells. With her string unraveling she discovers the awful truth, that MOTHER wants to keep the OTHER inside, that MOTHER is not protecting her. MOTHER is using her, just as Mistress Deep wants to use her.
Theseus will not to be a tool. She tampers with codes and moves elements within the machine setting into motion the countdown for MOTHER to self destruct. When MOTHER dies then Mistress Deep will die with her. Our Theseus torches the minotaur’s nest and cages Jones, her own animal instinct, and carries Jones with her, controlled into her new body and watches the beautiful destruction of MOTHER.
She is going home, leaving the strange terrors of her quest behind, but the OTHER, dear Mistress Deep is still with her, not as easily shaken off as the bright and sterile MOTHER. The new body has been infected, Theseus is not alone. Poor Theseus sings a trembling song about the stars and positions herself for the final confrontation. Mistress Deep slowly unfolds, comes out of her hiding place. Theseus expels her from the new body, sends her into the vacuum, subjecting her to the fire.
Mistress Deep with her bite so sharp and MOTHER so bright and clean, burning in the cold abyss just as the stars burn. Jones sleeps in his corner and Theseus files her final reports, the Gods of the new order, rulers of the new machine, a new mother and a new beast settling in for their long deep sleep.

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.

Binary Man

Here we go loop de loo, here we go loop de lie. Around and around like the waters spinning down a toilet bowl, spin, spin, spin. We will be back where we started again. One step forward, two steps back. Oh you pudgy balding little binary man. My hero, Binary Man, coming to slash through reality with his machete made of ones and zeros. Give him a yes or a no. That is your only choice. This was my hero? I have to confess that I also like Rorschach. I side with the deviant losers. *Sigh* . We are all going to get our hearts broken over and over in this sticky bubble gum web. Why did I make my baby wait every day after school? Just a little baby waiting for her mamma who’s off crying and fighting and sometimes running down the street alone to rescue her baby when the bus is late, and arriving disheveled and puffy eyed. And baby asks, “How did you get here so early?” But I’m a half hour late. I don’t know why baby, I thought I had friends, but then I had none. How did this all get rolling? I was standing in line behind a pleasant black man at the DMV. He was getting his motorcycle license. I was sixteen. This was the last day before my driver’s permit would expire, my last chance to take the driving exam and get my license. Sink or swim time. In line for hours. The gentleman explained to me, “People are either for you or against you. Sometimes it’s people you love, people who love you who are against you. But you have look past it all and see that they are either for you or against you.” The first incarnation of binary man. I thought he was right. My parents for example were against me, although they’d swear they were for me. But they were really for themselves and for their version of me which was not the actual me, but a me that served them. So I’d need to break clean. But I couldn’t do it properly for a long time. Soon I was alone. There is nobody here that is for me. I am not even for me. Damn you Binary Man! I think you were my father whispering in one ear all of the time, extreme and righteous, bending me, bending me, bending me until I was tweaked. The data that comes in is always tweaked as I process it. They are all against me. There is a distinction, however, between everyone being for themselves and everybody being against you. They are not all automatically against you, they just aren’t for you. There is a subtle difference. It is not a one or a two yet, not a yes or a no. There is a big gray forest that we may abide in, a shadowy place from which many shapes and possibilities may be plucked, raised, lifted, conjured. Yes and No man is coming with his machete. His goal is deforestation. He wants us to join him or die, twisted and alone in the desert he makes for us. Fuck you Binary Man. You are no hero! You are a mediocre Villain. I’m not going to join you. And I’m not going to be alone. I’m gonna fill my pockets with seeds of ambiguity and Johnny Appleseed it across the globe. You can loop de loo all you please, but you won’t get me. I’m gonna run up, up, up the holy mountain planting these little seeds. Like Luke Skywalker, I can still see the good in you father, but you are mostly machine now. It you come any closer I’ll lop off your machete hand with this gardening spade and watch you twitch. You are not a magick man, you are just THE MAN, taking names and asking, “Are you with me?” *chalks an x on your skull and slowly guides the machete to the mark for practice* “Or not?”