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.

Umbrella

An ordered disorderliness; that’s what it makes me think of, that story. The umbrella, dark blue, an inexpensive model, curved plastic handle, had much history. I had left it once in a man’s car. Face white and soft like dough. Old, long silver braid, drowning in nostalgia for a time that almost was, his voice etching out from the perpetual grief of his people, transformed into a blade of flaccid hope. Correct. He trembled once before Alan Ginsberg. I left the umbrella in his car, leaping out against raindrops to tumble down my familiar rabbit hole. A train station, yes. He returned it on a rainy night a week later.
Degrees of separation? None. All of the characters are the same character. I am Alan Ginsberg. An ordered disorderliness.

It was not my umbrella. Like a cat, it lived a secret life before it came to me for comfort. If you feed them, umbrellas come back. They are practical, opportunistic, but not loyal. Yet, as mentioned, they sometimes come back. I was given a small maroon car. Clown car chugging up mountainous road, sea swelling to my right. Pop! Pop! Fizz, fizz. No, no relief, instead a sad play called “Death Of  A Clown Car.” But in her death throes I wrestled a delicate life from her womb, stick-like, melancholic in hue, but certainly the last and best she had to give the world.

What do they eat? Oh, tears, of course. Yours, or Gods, whoever breaks first.

The woman, a political refugee. Black hair, streaks of silver, crimson lips. Artist, professor, maimed architect, aristocrat, poet, latina, communista, intelligentsia, dilettante, withering well over her strange fruit. She held it in her gloved hand, hurrying through storms. From holy names to that car. That car.

What is it with you and doomed idealists? Don’t you like accountants? Postal workers? Security guards? No, no! Not you. You are a gourmand, feasting only on the finest tears! Who weeps more prettily, more passionately than idealists? Vampire, with your frail aluminum skeleton and delicate nylon wing stretched over my head, whispering of transience. Her name? Does it matter? She was friends with Pablo Neruda. Think of me as Pablo. It was her car I wrested the umbrella from, she left it there like an infant in a basket, or a sack of kittens destined for a river.

Why? Why did I do it? The responsibility was too much. It was a burden to carry that thing.

The truth? It crawled in there itself to find it’s way to me. Her tears had become… flat. Mellowed by age, reasonable comfort, and lack of expectation. She never married again, she maintained a healthy social life. Thus prospects for misery were poor. It was time for more tantalizing fare.

Foolishness. All people harbor secret woe twisted round their hearts like razor wire forcing them to wince thus, walk so, and flick their wrists laughing, “I never did mind the little things.” Clowns weep with the most intensity after the lights are dimmed and the grease paint is melting.
You have so much to say about the others. What about you? Stop, pushing on me that way! I’ll open up when I’m good and ready!
(Spoken by the author or the umbrella? Wait, is the author the umbrella?)
There, gently. As you said, inexpensive model, yet look how I’ve weathered (pun intended?) the years. Do you want to know why I like you so much?

No, I’d rather not. This is what makes rainy days gloomy.

Why did you get in that man’s car?

Because it was raining. But look at you now, dancing in the rain. You like it as much as I do.

Had you considered that I meant it metaphorically? It was raining inside of me.

Go on.

What more is there to say? I was, as the song says, crying inside and nobody knew it but me. Nobody could see. Nobody cared.

Just like when you were young.

Yes.

Tell me about that.

It rained a lot then, outside too. I walked home from school alone each day wearing my grandfather's long green coat. He had been in the airforce. I never knew him. The jacket made me feel a little safer. I could imagine that he was somebody who would have cared, that the jacket at least wanted to keep me warm and dry, wanted to protect me. Strangers hurt me every day and there was no one who noticed, no one who would help me.

How old were you?

12. It rained a lot that year. Record precipitation. I walked everyday. No one was home when I got there. There was never a hot dinner. Peanut butter and jelly or swiss cheese with mustard on bread that was mostly air. When they came home they vented their frustrations on me. We had lost our house, this one was a rental in a strange new neighborhood. It had maroon carpeting.

Well, is that all?

Isn’t that enough for now?

I don’t know. Is it? You brought all of this up.

It was Ginsberg, actually.

That’s a creative cop out. Lets be honest. You have projected all of this on to me. You began this dialog and you have disguised it as art, but you are using me (not the other way around as you would have the reader believe.) You are using me to get to the root of your own self.

Self is a transient thing, that is my point. There may be pain in this one life, the trick is not to mind it, not to identify with it, and to do something with it, to literally transform it.

Literally transform it. That was good. I like that. However, I don’t see how any of that supports your opening statement that self is transient.

Well take this text for example. I am the creator, but I keep changing perspectives. As above so below.

Are you really going to go there?

Why not? I knew a man who knew a man who knew Aliester Crowley. I am The Great Beast 666. Occultist, mystic, ceremonial magician, poet, mountaineer-

You copied that from wikipedia. You are a lonely frightened child.

Most of us are. An ordered disorderliness. Always raining. I had always wanted a car to get into, someone to protect me from the rain. A clown? Struggling, open, open, Ah! Here you are. My own blue nylon anathema pulled straight from a flaming blossom, exploding clown car. My heart. Prince charming? A thorn. A blue umbrella with abandonment issues. Degrees of separation? None. Who is practical, opportunistic, but not loyal? All of the characters are the same character. Skeptical? Because I am. In a world of sleepers, skeptical because I am, everyone is dreaming their own dream. Anonymous drops of precipitation. Participation? I am, a storm of organic lethargy, because skeptical. A vortex of desire.

Letters written, letters received, pleas for help, for love, acceptance, tossed from a wooden bridge into a rushing stream below. Young woman, head shaved, two black eyes, smoldering hole where a clown car should be, (Do you mean where a heart should beat?) her umbrella vibrating under the rain's incessant tap, tap, tap. Her journals too, poetry, there is no good in the world, “there let thy bleeding branch atone”, water under the bridge. Hairless, voiceless, always raining maiden. No one is coming to rescue her. Not ever. Not the painter, not the minstrel, not the poet, they will take their turns with her, cracking her bones and sucking the marrow in search of mother the abandoner. (All people harbor secret woe twisted round their hearts like razor wire. Smoldering hole, flaming clown car, vortex of desire.)
“I never did mind the little things.” But the umbrella? What color is it? And will it stay?
IT IS A BLUE UMBRELLA I SAY!
And it will stay, stay, stay.

Fear In The Desert

There is water in the desert of despair, dirty mucky water, just enough of it to make leaving look harder than staying.
You see that water warming under the merciless sun and you tell yourself that one place is as good as another, that someday your dreams will come true, but until then you can rest here.
You may huddle under the shade of a Texas umbrella tree dropping poisonous gold berries into the powdery dust that covers its roots while you wait for your ship to come in.
Waiting, a broken robot that knows that it is damaged but can’t see that the damage prevents it from making the choices that might lead to repairs.
Your brokenness informs your decision to remain in the desert. It demands that you wait for a ship. A ship in the desert. You watch videos of rolling waves crashing upon distant shores and you wait for it to come in.
You are actually afraid of a positive outcome.
You are afraid that the world will not come crashing to an end within a year, that the government isn’t plotting against its citizens, that there are no sinister forces at work around you.
You are afraid of discovering a paradise beyond the desert, you are afraid of discovering that you could make repairs to your damaged operating system if you were willing to confront your self by acknowledging that you are the only one who can make the decision to leave the desert.
You fear the terrible responsibility.

Insect Love

We should get together baby, me and you, a simmering puddle of primordial soup. That’s right, that’s right, the poetry is in the flesh.
Remember when we used to be separate? Two things, out there somewhere searching for a connection. For a bridge to span the gap between me and you.
And suddenly there is no other, the other is inside of me, I am the other, I am only myself. Forget history, forget everything that came before, there is only this moment, this pearly now that we hold cupped between the us that is I.
Once upon a time, once upon a time baby, you were a fly and I was a man and you were the fly in my ointment, the terrible jealousy that urged me to leap into eternity via a designer telephone booth. Then I was the ointment and you were the fly and then I was the fly and you were the ointment and soon we were flointment forged in the fire.
'Cause things heat up and come apart melt together in unpredictable ways and there is just no telling exactly what we will be or even what we are. We can keep looking, analyzing the flointment and there will always be new layers to discover and further options for new combinations arising out of new discoveries of self and the unfolding of space time.
There is always another other to discover, another relic to leave behind the mirror, another barrier to shatter. It’s penetration beyond the flesh that you most fear, moving onward into the very fabric of existence. It’s reaching even deeper into the self than has been approved of by the food and drug administration and that is monstrous isn’t it dear? Monster which shares letters with Mother which shares letters with other.
Do you really think so much of  poor vanilla Eve and her bounteous womb producing cookie cutter replicas of herself? What about Lillith and her experiments in the caves?
How brave to reach so deep, into such unpredictable chaos and pull from yourself a titan. Villainous, vile, evil, live.
Were you ever a fly that dreamed it was a man? Were you baby? A fly that dreamed it was a man but found that the dream had ended and the insect was awake?
Have you ever heard of insect politics baby? NO. Because insects be who they be, seeking to go on and on, diving into transformations which are the end of one creation and the beginning of another, unhesitatingly accepting annihilation of the individual in favor of unity.
Insect yoga. Death and resurrection. Jesus Flies.
We should get together baby, me and you in an  uncompromising uprising of insect love. Two or more things out there somewhere searching for a connection, for a bridge to close the distance between points “A” and  “B” and  “F”.
Dear Eve, I bet you thought you taught me the secrets of the flesh, didn’t you? But no, it was the fly in the ointment. An appointment with Flointment. An event horizon. An awakening incomprehensible to a sleeper.
That’s right, that’s right baby. Forget when we used to be separate. That was just a dream, just a dream. Now the insect has been resurrected.

Light Benders

Possible lives, possible moments, possible lies. Possibly the biggest lie I ever told was, “Fine, thank you.”
Sitting in the Boulevard Cafe, watching the traffic, watching the trees grow a millimeter a month, listening to the conversations of others, the music from bygone eras washing down over my lipstick stained disappointment. No cherry pie, but six choices of coffee. No cherry pie. The noise of life swallowed down with hot decaf tea. The noise of a kitchen, which is the noise of life, the stuff that fuels these fleshy forms coming out on large round white plates.

Fleshy forms, such a deceptive word, “fleshy.” We imagine something very solid when we hear that word, something definite and unchanging, something akin to stone or oak, but it is more mutable than that. It is changing constantly, cells being replaced nightly, a tiny imperceptible operation that leaves you with an entirely new body in seven year cycles. Like watching trees grow. You don’t see it, but its happening, its there, an invisible process of transformation. We have been deceived into thinking that we are stable, of an unchangeable essence, we are who we are and no other. We are one static personality, a good person, a strong person, or perhaps a bad person, a weak person, a smart person, a talented person, a tenacious person, an affable person, or we are a person composed of a combination of two or three of these choices but no more.

We think that we are inherently something,, but anyone who has ever turned their attention inward has faced the terrible truth: we are inherently nothing, we are only something in particular depending on who is looking. We are different things to different people, and when we are the only one looking in at our self, then we are just the one who is looking and the other we thought that we were is a farce. They start us in the beginning, making us choose the words to define ourselves; naughty , nice, fireman, ballerina, president, veterinarian. Just as they were started off. If we look far enough back we remember choosing certain things as if it were a game: my favorite color is green, I like rock music, I read paperback horror stories, I hate musicals and fish.

Well, anyway, I remember making those choices. Perhaps I am the only one. Or perhaps I am the only one being honest. Because the truth is terrifying, a free fall of no cherry pie ever. You don’t see it, but it’s there, an invisible process of transformation catalyzed when nothing notices itself. Our outward forms shift and change and our emotional states vary and our thoughts obey certain patters, certain habitual tracks upon which to run their train. But who is the passenger? A pure and shining void. A frightful bit of nothing caught in a little temporal whirlwind. We call it life, self, mind and body.

And if you see this, if you look at someone beside you and perceive them as a fleshy dirt devil, a living process for transforming light, a sort of perpetual motion machine circulating raw nothingness, and you know that you are not supposed to see it, because you already agreed early on to play the game and not see such things, then you know you are not what is defined in the game rules as “fine.”  You know that if you tell them what you are seeing they will do what they can to stop you from seeing it because it ruins the game. 

So I say, “Fine, thank you.”  and continue watching our possible lives, possible moments, possible lies play out. Six different types of coffee but no cherry pie and the traffic flowing on the street outside.  A free fall. Watching the traffic, watching the trees grow a millimeter a month, listening to the conversations of  others, the music from bygone eras washing down over my lipstick stained disappointment. A frightful bit of nothing caught in a little temporal whirlwind I call myself.

Conflict

The machine will always be in conflict with something. It worries. It agonizes. It schemes and plans. The machine may have a problem with the way a colleague looks at them, with the color of a neighbor's dress, with sideburns and taxes and that sibling that borrows money and never pays it back.
These problems are the problems of the machine, not problems of the being. Most importantly, they are not a conflict between the being and the machine. The being simply doesn’t put up a fight. The machine on the other hand is a bloodthirsty pit bull that will bite and its jaw will lock and it will shake and shake and shake the life out of anything. When confronted with conflict with the being, the machine latches on to a machine conflict and goes berserk.
For example your machine might want an ice cream cone when you are trying to do your daily meditation. But your machine wants an ice cream cone, but your teacher has recommended this daily meditation, but your machine wants an ice cream cone and how are you going to reach enlightenment or whatever if you have no freedom to make any choices and everything is all about routine?
Things are getting dogmatic and that asshole prefers his female students and gives them all of his attention and all he is doing is taking advantage of them and you really should tell him that you’re on to him and look for another teacher and there is a new yoga studio on main street, maybe you should stop there and see what kind of workshops they are offering and find out how they view free will and (by the way, while we’re down there we will get an ice cream cone from the place next door, but just because it’s on the way and we really need to show this asshole that we don’t need him, we can find enlightenment with a just teacher who will distribute their attentions evenly over their students regardless of gender, and then, or maybe just before then, get an ice cream cone.)
The moment it feels as if awakening is imminent, the machine lunges for something, anything to hold onto. A moment of awakening cannot occur simultaneously with a moment of identification, so if your machine can get a hold of something and start shaking it to death it can prevent awakening.
You might be painting a picture using careful attention, your mind remarkably still. Something unusual is starting to happen, you feel tingly and then you remember that your roommate will be home soon and she will take a shower and get water all over the floor and leave it there where you will step in the puddles of water, spoiling your socks the next time you want to blow your nose or urinate. Then you’ll be sitting there with no toilet paper, because she never puts a new roll on and her greasy hair sticks to the shower walls and your boyfriend was looking at her tits the other day because she was wearing that smutty shirt and she has to sleep with every man in the universe, and what you should do is stop painting and turn on the shower and let all the hot water run out so that when she gets in there will be none left for her, see how she likes a big fat dose of inconsideration. And you might run the water or you might crawl into bed and cry realizing that your relationship with boyfriend is doomed if he can be tantalized by the tasteless flaunting of bosoms. In fact, if he can like her at all, what does that say about you? Are you also a tawdry slut? Boo, hoo, boo, hoo. The painting lies unfinished, the being is completely silenced, the machine is thrashing.
Identification with the machine is the act of allowing one's attention to flow into the opinions, positions, and problems of the machine. Inversely, awakening is the act of allowing the attention to flow elsewhere, into the being, the most essential self. Any form of identification is counterproductive to work towards awakening. It doesn’t have to feel miserable to qualify as identification. Often times it feels ooooh too good.
If while you are conducting your morning meditation you suddenly realize fully and completely that you have the power to manipulate reality and can fly so you go soaring around the town feeling gleeful and transforming parking tickets into lollipops with the wave of a hand, and with a wink of the eye you get beautiful women to nurse you and you feel so wonderful laying in her lap on the park bench drinking Cristal from her swollen breast, then you are still identified. You’re just an identified psychic super mutant. If, on the other hand, while you are conducting your morning meditation you suddenly realize fully and completely that you have the power to manipulate reality and you remain seated and direct your attention inward upon your being, remembering your eternal self, that would be a moment of awakening.
The machine wants to solve things, it wants to do things, have things, to be things. The being is agenda-less. The machine is an inversion of this agenda-less-ness. It is a reaction to agenda-less-ness. Your existence in this world is a reflex against being. A reflex. An unintentional response.
You as a machine are just doing what you do, which is avoid Being. If you wish to work towards awakening you will have to learn to control this reflexive manifestation. To gain control of it you will have to distance yourself from it, find ways around it.
The best way to stop gagging is not to grab hold of your throat and squeeze or think loudly, “STOP GAGGING!” or wish obsessively that the horrible taste or smell or object lodged in your throat that catalyzed the gagging will cease to be.
The best way to stop gagging is to relax.
RELAX.
Don’t try to create relaxing conditions. Relax where you are, with what you are. Stop rejecting and allow. Don’t spit, swallow.

Invaders

They are coming, spreading their otherness throughout our very personal space. Here behind the wall where we were once so safe, they are thriving, squirming, multiplying.
It seems, at first, like a dance. They are floating and drifting. Exotic visitors. Maybe they bring peanut butter. Maybe these are our lost brothers.
Their numbers increase. What was an interesting bit of choreography has become a swarming mass of bodies. There are so many more of them than there are of us. They are inside.
Maybe they bring liberation. Maybe what they bring is death.
This hostile presence, this thing that does not obey the laws we obey, this thing whose code is its very own secret way, it is an invader. It is the Other.
It is intent on making what was ours its own. It has come for our vital resources. It is feeding on the vein of our land, our body, the kingdom where we dwell. It is feeding on us, wearing us down, overwhelming us in numbers.
There are so many more of them than we can deal with. They breed so quickly. Clouding our skies with their awkward birth. There was a time when ours was the only culture. Now theirs is here, growing, expanding, reaching in beyond the boundaries.
Something is coming, closing in, frenzied by the heat of conquest, eager to breach our walls. It reaches into our space. This alien thing. Its shape, so unlike our own, so similar in startling ways, inspires our awe.
What? What does it want? Maybe it is playing. Maybe it is giving us a gift. This alien thing. Its shape, so unlike our own, so similar in startling ways, inspires our fear.
It is inside of us now. Its way is not our way. It does what it wants with us, this occupying force. We are infected by its presence. We are becoming they.
We resist. Our insurgence matches their hostility with violence. Their numbers are greater. They tumble out of the sky, out of space, from the abyss, they tumble, are hurling towards us to explode in our warmth.
They come to dig in. To make our body their own. Their culture will be grown in our soiled ruin. Whether we accept it. Or reject it. Something is coming.
There are so many more of them than there are of us. They are inside now. This is their kingdom, their land, their home. They are the “Us”. We are now the “They”, creeping around, hoping for a chance to recover, to strike back.
Maybe they have brought evolution. Maybe they have brought ruin. Maybe they have made a desert.
The land collapsed beneath their unquenchable hunger. Perhaps they never wanted to keep what was ours. They meant only to touch it, to rush through it, fill it in the heat of their passion, then abandon it after it was no longer ours.
Their need was never to have and to hold. They tapped the vein of our body to feed their conquest. Now they move on in need of another boundary to penetrate, another Other to subsume. They flourish in our waste until we are extinguished.
Now they march on to farther horizons, in search of heat, to rain down upon another kingdom. Maybe they will bring peanut butter. Maybe they will bring death.

Another Myself

I had fallen asleep, and like a Maya Deren film, I watched from bed as I came out of another house and crossed the street, approaching the house where I lay. I saw the blonde haired girl walk out into the street, tossing her hair in the wind and I told the man that was tangled in my arms and legs:
“She’s coming.”
I thought he would want to disengage. I didn’t know that the girl on the street was me. I didn’t know that the man in the bed was you. He had been caressing my face and I knew we loved each other. I knew I loved him. I wouldn’t pretend I didn’t. When he told me that he had a girlfriend now, when he introduced us, I didn’t know that she was me. He had said that he could spend the day with me working on our project, but he would go back to her when night fell. He stood at a distance telling me this. It was as if he wanted me to understand that he was with her and was not interested in being with me. It was like the letter he had sent, him telling me that he had a girlfriend, and implying that I should not pursue him. I never meant to be in pursuit. I belonged to you. I was only telling him the truth without any hope of reciprocation, without any desire to change circumstances.
So I unpacked my bags across the room and conversed politely with him which is what it seemed he wanted to do. He wanted to show me the progress he had made on the project. The audio was surprising. He had used samples of my voice, and samples from a CD that you made. I was quite amazed. I told him that it was wonderful. I told him that I was proud of his progress. I realized that this was why he was risking seeing me, to show me that he had taken something from me, that he understood. I was proud of him, of the time I had put into him, of how my attention invested in him had blossomed into something incomprehensible and creative in the truest way, beyond boundaries, beyond ownership.
I was careful to stay back, at a polite distance. Then he closed the gap. He came close to me, he lay down on the bed beside me and we embraced. We held each other and he caressed my face. I should have known he was you. I should have known when I heard the music and recognized that it was your music. Or was it that I was you? I was you and he was me. You were proud of me for what I had done. I wanted to please you, laying there entwined, but then I saw myself coming, the one who would rend us apart, the one who would keep you to herself never really having you. You saw her coming and said:
“She’s coming.”
And I said:
“She is?”
And felt worried. I wanted to hold on to you, but then I didn’t know if I could stand up to her. She had promises. Words that bound us.
I was laying in bed holding another myself in my arms and through the window I saw myself crossing the street. She was coming. Blonde hair floating behind her in golden streamers. Youthful face and lithe body hurrying insecurely across the street. We had cheated her before. We might do it again despite the promises.
I was crossing the street and I got the feeling that you were in bed with her, despite the promise you had made. I had the feeling but I thought, no, that’s silly. I know I can trust him. But I had the feeling that while you had used the words sincerely as an expression of what you had felt in the moment, now while I was gone, a different moment was unfolding and the words would be gotten around. They would have meant something different now that you had this new moment unfolding before you. Things were changing. I could feel you slipping away from me.
I was laying in bed caressing your face. In that moment I loved you, I was glad to be with you. You said:
“She’s coming.”
And I realized she would not like this. She would not see how innocent this love was. For a moment I thought I would let her see. I thought she will come and see us and go and I will still be with you. Then I thought it was not too late to keep my word. I would go with her at nightfall. What was a little hug? A little caress? Nothing more than a little brotherly affection administered to an old friend. I would leave you and go with her.
You were caressing my face and I saw her through the window crossing the street. My legs were tangled with yours. Our chests were pressed together.
“She’s coming.” I said
I should have known that you were her. I should have known that I was him. I should have known that I was you and you were me.

I had fallen asleep, and like a Maya Deren film I watched from bed as I came out of a house and crossed the street. I saw the blonde haired girl walk out into the street and I told the man that was tangled in my arms and legs:
“She’s coming.”

The Three Directives

There are three directives which move a human being into action. These are “need”, “desire”, and “will”.
Need is the most basic and primordial mover. The human machine needs food, needs water, needs warmth, needs affection, needs to excrete waste. Once a need has been met there is a sense of concrete satisfaction that sets in until the need arises again according to the physical cycles of the human machine. Needs can be met.
Desires are a trickier monster. They arise when needs have been transformed through the symbolic structure. For example, thirst is a real need for the human machine so an advertisement for a clothing line might depict a well dressed man and a woman drinking from glasses. A human machine that sees the ad will unwittingly transform the need to drink into a desire for a dress or pair of slacks. The trouble is, that while drinking a glass of water will quench thirst, buying a pair of slacks will not. Satisfaction will be denied.
Desires can never lead to satisfaction because they are born of the symbolic realm and not of the real. This is true of any desire, it is what distinguishes desire from need. It is an endless circle, a wheel fit for a hamster. The pursuit of desires can never yield fulfillment. This is not because there is something fundamentally evil about desire. It is because desire is a need that has been disfigured by language and made abstract. You cannot eat, drink, or hug an abstract.
A young gorilla needs something to love in order for its life to continue. This need can be met by a kitten or a doll or a fury blanket tied to a post, as long as the gorilla can touch it, the need is met. The same is true of human animals. You don’t need a porn star to hug. You could give a squeeze to a warty old hag to meet the need. You desire a porn star, a picture from a magazine, but even if you meet a live porn model, she will never be exactly the same as the picture from the magazine. She may meet some of your needs, but she can never quench your desires, those will go ungratified into eternity.
Will stands in a category all of its own. It does not arise from the machinations of the human, physical or linguistic. It is neither a need nor a desire. It comes from elsewhere. It is infinitely more difficult to act on will than it is to respond to a need or a desire. Will often conflicts with the needs and desires of the human biological machine.
With both needs and desires occupying the attention and energy of the machine, it can be almost impossible to heed the strange call of the will. Desires are particularly an obstacle. While the human machine has a limited number of needs which have to be met repeatedly, the ghostly world of desire is as unlimited as it is insatiable. The desires will breed more desires and will come to occupy all the space of the mind, demanding that one thing or another be pursued until the will is nearly buried in an avalanche of desires.
Desires will propagate on their own without any effort being made on the part of the human machine, but the true will, if it is denied attention and left unused, will wither like an atrophied limb. Efforts must be made to invoke and support the will, efforts which may seem most unpleasant to the machine because those efforts will be of no direct benefit to it.

Baby

Remember those early days when sitting in a porcelain tub of warm water with the rubber stopper on the silver chain keeping it all from going down the drain, the world seemed so wigglly squiggly, so barely there and ghostly. Mother and father seemed to change and the others did too, and sometimes you had a sister or two and sometimes you had none and sometimes your aunt was called Robin and sometimes she was called Betty. All these people all these sounds and shapes seemed to shift around in a way that was neither significant nor lacking significance, just a bit of nature dancing for my developing powers of observation like leaves caught in a little whirlwind on the side walk, turning round and round so that the configuration is different in every moment. This is the reason that carousels hold so much appeal for young children, because they turn and turn in a circular fashion and there is no way of telling whether your lion is in the lead or taking up the rear or somewhere in the middle and meanwhile you bob up and down and with the mirrors there is no way of telling if you are the real child on the real sculpted lion or if that other child and lion are the originals. Bath time, so warm and pleasant and wet, with the water jiggling around your body, so like the womb and so like the sea from which all life arose, back when it was still hot and red, the perfect melting pot for this and that to come together in amoebic ecstasy. The wash cloth is soft and squishy and you can put it in your mouth and bite and all the water squeezes out and dribbles out of the corners of your mouth and down your chin in the most delightful way. The water moves when you move, jiggling slightly. All of life is like that when you are a baby. Every time you move you are somewhere different, with a different crowd, strangely familiar, familiarly strange, forever and ever. Then slowly, the waters of life start to cool and freeze. Things seems steadier, thanks perhaps to the magick words you have been learning. Mother and Father are almost always the same, you generally have the same set of siblings, an aunt whose name remains the same. Perhaps it’s because of the magick words, because when you say “Mamma” this is the one that you mean, the one that you invoke. It’s a tricky thing, because Mamma taught you the magick word, so really she taught you how to invoke her, and the other Mammas, the ones who didn’t teach the words for things, they don’t get called, so they never come again. Only this one, the one that tricked you with the word of power, and now you are here with her, stuck in the frozen world and your legs have grown long and stiff and you no longer bathe, but instead stand in the shower. You no longer ride the carousel, but instead read the books and do the homework and watch the world materialize around you like steel bars. A steady, stable place. Gone is the shifty watery world of infancy. Gone is bath time with all its jiggly wet wonder, and gone too is baby, and all that is left of it is a word for what it was.

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.

Magick House

It is a place lost in the past, denied a present, buried in the midst of a buzzing metropolis and weighted down with hopes for a future. The walls have been battered again and again until they are only a fine powder of golden sand blown across the vast hostile desert. They have been built again and again until the people can think of nothing else but building them one more time, raising the walls so that blood can flow and appease that thing which would dwell within. That thing, that secret treasure, invisible to the eyes of men, capable of twisting their hearts into many strange shapes like animal balloons forged by the hands of a clown. Here is desire and jealously and rapture and grief and hatred, and joy, like a host of shadows dancing through the willing flesh of the people, so that they whirl and twirl and bow for that thing, though it cannot be touched, nor it’s name even pronounced. The people are always reaching for that place where they keep their covenant, where they can shuffle papers importantly like children imitating the misunderstood rituals of adults. They play games that are the shadows of the games they once played there in the house of the invisible, the magick house. Now some others play their games where the magick house once stood. Some others have come to play, but the people will not play with the others, they will not change their games on purpose, only by accident. Only when they are scattered like the golden sand hammered from the shattered walls of the magick house will they change the rules of their game to get by. They will refuse to share, refuse to play with others until the others push them out, out and away so that the others may have their turn, their time in the place that the people want so much. But however far they go, they find a way to remember. They find a way to covet the past, to reach back with hot little hands and try to pluck their special place out of the rubble. They try to play as they did once in the magick house. They wear their dress up clothes, they sing their clubhouse songs, and mull over the promise of a place all their own. Their heart, the center of the universe, is something outside, something that can be demolished, erected, taken and retaken. The people, as they have scattered regrouped and scattered again, have changed. Their games have changed. They no longer recognize one another but view each other as THE OTHER, but each other wants to have it back, have their magick house where secret things happen, where special things are kept. They want it even if they cannot remember the nature of the secret things. They long for it even if they are not the real people, for in fact none of those who want to be the people are the people. The people were cut down long ago, a final sacrifice in the original magick house, and their rituals, their mystic secrets died with them, bled out through slit throats to be sucked up by the thirsty sand, to become the invisible. There are no people who know the rites and the reason for the original magick house. There are only others, many envious others, who would be the people and claim that they and no OTHER are the only people. The chosen. The righteous. The worthy. They love not the invisible, but the letting of blood, the endless orgy of violence that may be called penance or promise. And the place, that elusive house where all that the imposter people desire can be called the will of God, remains remote and near at hand, non existent and very real, lost forever within a deluge of jealous dreams.

The Story Gets Worse

Ed wood said, "Just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."
This is God’s philosophy. The story keeps getting sorrier and sorrier, the same themes emerge again and again in an ever downward hellish bent spiral, and yet there will be no end. God wants no end. There may be an end to your personal happiness, an end to peace within a certain region, an end to the old neighborhood, an end to chivalry, but there will never be a final THE END. God doesn’t care what happens to you or to me or to Palestine or Israel or the blessed United States Of America, God just keeps on writing, using the elements to further the plot, to continue this operatic telling for the furtherance of its own perfection. What makes us think that God would be an author who spices a story up with pain and conflict and then resolves it by THE END, by proceeding those words with, AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER?
God is Phillip K Dick motherfuckers. Your story has a sad ending and so does the next one and the next one and the next one that God churns out of his rusty old typewriter and lonesome mind. Something worthwhile is transpiring through the unfolding of all the stories, but there is no rainbow crossing the sky and happy couple raising their goblets in a toast surrounded by their faithful companions to close the tale. That may happen somewhere in the middle, that one breathless moment of bliss. Then the faithful companions gang rape the bride and steal the booze and smash the cup and murder the groom while the rainbow fades, simply disappears like magick dissolved into the unblinking blue. That’s how the opera works. Then perhaps the bride births a bastard son having barely escaped with her life, and then he will seek his fortune and hope to avenge his father’s death and his mother’s honor (because his mother will swear that he is the groom’s son). He will find the fattened leader of traitors and end that life while the guilty old man squeals for mercy after the tortures wrought on him by our new young hero. Then on he goes to continue his own burning and raping and pillaging under the banner of revenge so that whole new heroes are made of the sons of the villains, and on and on into infinity.
The myth, the crude and basic outline of the story tells you about the shape of the mind of God. But his real presence is down in the sordid details, down in the single tear shed by the bride when they leave her for dead soiled and broken beside her one true love, down in the drop of blood that splashes onto her son’s cheek to replace that tear as he slits the last antagonists throat. It is down in the dirt under his fingernails and in his malformed heart aching with the longing for a peace that never comes. It is in the endless dusty trails lined with thieves ready to further the story with their unbrotherly exploits. It is in the clear blue eyes of maidens that believe that God made for them one true love, it is in the way that they wait and throw their arms around the first character that seems likely to be the one. It is in the trees that sway over tombstones where old widows drop roses. It is in the worms that eat the bodies of the heroic villains of passed chapters that lie beneath those blankets of roses. Look about you, it is there in the filth crusted upon the dirty dishes in your sink and in the air around your bathroom vent stained by the smoke of the hash you have smoked to ease the pain of existence and rejection and broken heartedness, lost youth and shattered innocence.
Existence is suffering. I read these words in Herman Hesse’s Sidhartha when I was 11 or 12 and couldn’t fully comprehend their meaning, couldn’t fathom the course that they highlighted. To be written is to be made a wretched hungry ghost, and the mystical schools along the way, the ones just off the dusty trails, behind the lines of thieves, are waiting to teach you how to un-write yourself. They are waiting to show you the way out of God’s opera. Not to new life, not to better places, not into heaven, but into the nothingness, into the abyss from which you were called by a fevered creator that hoped to know itself through the endless wriggling of your ancestral line. In the secret monastery there are Sherpas waiting to show some how to help God know itself and to show others the way to annihilation. Some will choose to pass through the door that says “Willing Servitude” and others through the door marked “Liberation” and the rest are left to have their bones and memories powdered into dust.
You were not written to praise the writer. You were written to serve. You were written to taste the wine and succumb to passions and resist temptations, and strive endlessly. Your story will get worse. And God will grow infinitely more complex through its telling.

Chatter

We behave as if these words, these sounds that we make daily without consideration, are something that has always been, will always be. WE feel that it is something eternal. These words really mean something. They have inherent value. But the truth is that it is all gibberish invented from necessity. When I want to eat, I grunt a certain way and it sounds like “eat” or “food” or “hungry” and then that other over there knows that I want something and learns which cries mean what. Anyone that has lived with a cat or dog for some time can understand this. One learns that this whine means I’m hungry, this yip means I want out, this bark means someone is coming and so on. We have a greater range of noises that we are capable of making thanks to our complex vocal systems. Lucky us, that we have lips and tongues and teeth and a larynx that makes a greater range of sounds possible. I can make a noise that not only means I want to eat but means that I want to eat oranges. Other primates are capable of deciding that they would prefer bananas to oranges and can even communicate this using sign language or charts pressed on them by humans in white lab coats. They simply lack the physical sophistication that would allow them to speak. Meanwhile many birds can do better in terms of speech, but lack the intelligence to say much. (This is not really to say that they are inferior in any way, but rather that they have not had a need to capitalize on that particular habit to further the evolution of their species. They have taken a different route.) Gray parrots can both reason and then speak to us in our own language, which in my book makes them superior to us as a species as I don’t see us (other than the occasional two year old or horse whisperer) trying to speak in parrot or magpie or any language, verbal, visceral or otherwise, employed by any species other than our own.
We think we are so great. We think our words are so grand. It is all really gibberish. Cats and dogs and rats even learn to respond to our prattle. I attribute this to a sort of social intelligence, meaning that they have learned that communication with our species benefits them in some way. They are networkers. They have a memory of past interactions and capitalize on their previous experiences and this is what we generally think of as intelligence: an ability to adapt to surrounding circumstances and other organisms for the benefit of one’s own survival. The reason that we think that this sort of opportunistic system for organizing external stimuli is superior to any other is that it is the method we employ. We coo over how intelligent dolphins and apes and cats and rats and dogs are because they are networkers like us, because they will jump through hoops for fish if necessary. Their intelligence is similar to our own in this respect. Their method for survival involves interacting with others just as our own method depends on such interactions. So we think that they’re the greatest.
We think we are great and therefore those things which share traits with ourselves are great. We are species-centric. The way that we evolved through time is THE BEST no doubt, and our mode of communication is ACES. Our way of approaching the world is THE WAY. We don’t consider that we are noise makers. We are the kind that cover the world with our nests and destroy the habitats of other life forms to make more space for ourselves. We have the might so we are RIGHT! We fill the night sky with our artificial light. We fuck the night over with this light pollution so that nocturnal species suffer disorientation that affects their mode of survival. We don't ’care. You shouldn't be nocturnal. You should be like us. Our way is THE BEST! We wreck everything for everybody, shit all over the world and babble incessantly, even sending our babble out into space. Because we feel that there is something special about ourselves. There is something unique about the way we think and speak.
We are a mad hatter species. That dirty old man muttering to himself and occasionally shouting into the crowd is to society what we as a species are to the universe. We are creepy. We are crazy. We take up a lot of space with our noise and filth. Yakka yakka yakka, blah blah blah. We can even write it down. Some of us used to be able to read. Now we have television and radio and cell phones so we can chatter, cha cha cha cha cha cha cha yakkity chat and listen to our own clamber day and night. We think that we matter, that what we say matters, that what we say is real. We make these noises daily without consideration, but seldom do we manage to say anything that comes even close to describing something real, something that would stand beyond language in a space that we never seem to quite reach. Meanwhile, the chatter goes on.

Impermanence

How many days have passed that I have said nothing at all and let the opportunity slip away? Today I had the vision of snow melting on the branch of a conifer tree, the perfect visualization of impermanence, ice transforming slowly to water as it drips away. I thought of it in conjunction with falling, with forgetting, with taking two steps down one trail then loosing consciousness and taking up another and, with it, two steps in a new direction, over and over, so that I, like all my kindred, do nothing more than stomp in a confused circle.
I see it right now. I am a machine, a clockwork doll rotating around and around like one of those darling little wind up chicks that can manage to hop to the end of the table. The voyager is not like a passenger in a car, not like the cream filling inside of the Twinkie. The voyager at first is an observer. A person watching a movie, watching a little puppet show and becoming absorbed in the plot. Upon developing particular sympathy with a particular character, it soon finds that it has fallen into the play. It drips into the story like snow slipping off a branch, little, by little. The voyager forgets itself, becoming the puppet without noticing that a transference has occurred.
Etanna is nothing at all. She is a flea circus. A trap for an unsuspecting cosmic observer to become entangled in. It could be a good show if the observer remembers themselves and suddenly takes hold of the puppets strings and moves her around in accordance with the story line and in sympathy with the character while also remembering its true nature.
I can see a little withered old woman talking to me, the kind that makes me think of apples and gnarled forests and hand sewn dresses and curly hair. She was talking just now in the back of my mind and I could almost hear her voice although I could make out nothing of what she said, and when I noticed her, she evaporated. She was kindly. But that of course is how I remember her now. She was a dream I almost dreamt, except my pillow was missing and I was in the middle of saying something else.
Everything in me is rattling loose. Good things and bad things are welling up from within me within a matter of minutes. Forget what has gone unsaid for a day. There are things arising every minute to be lost again in the next and I am not quick enough yet to make anything of them.
While laying in bed or standing over the kitchen sink I experience Satori. During “enlightening time”, while I sit poised to type away and share whatever great vision makes me visionary, I go schizophrenic more than sage. I see shadows out of the corner of my eyes moving around. They move more than ever and without startling me in the least. They continue to move for a while after I’ve noticed and turned to look at them. That strange something that I saw out of the corner of my eye is still a strange something for a few moments while I regard it. I see it, but it fits into no category at all. I see this thing which is not anything as far as my brain is concerned and so, after regarding it and drawing a blank, it turns back into the shadow of a plant or even the plant itself. It doesn’t really have to be a shadow. It can be an actual object such as a stone or a shoe or a box or a chair which begins to crawl across the floor or otherwise move around and, when I look at it, it keeps going for a minute or two and doesn’t seem to be anything I know any name for, and then it goes back to being a stone or a shoe or a box or a chair or some thing which has a name and could plausibly be occupying the space that has arrested my attention.
I know. If you’re feeling friendly, you’re thinking. “Brain tumor.” And if you aren’t, you’re just thinking, “Cuckoo”. What if I did have a brain tumor though? Could you really say that it was the cause of the anomaly or couldn’t it equally be that the anomaly was the cause of the tumor? But that’s not what I really hoped to say. I think though, that telling you something was better than telling you nothing. How many days have passed that I have said nothing at all and let the opportunity slip away like melting snow? Lost days ripe with lost worlds diminished to fine vapor.
Today I did not have a vision.
Today the visions had me.

Layers of Cake

Enough time passes and the slate is wiped clean.
All things are forgotten in time.
Small crimes disappear, larger infractions get smudged, blurred like a poorly developed photograph until no one can remember what happened clearly, and those on one side of the event will have a vague feeling of displeasure that signifies that some overly intense feeling of rage or sorrow or jealously has been buried under the sands of the hour glass whilst those on the other side may forget entirely, and eventually both parties will be sent to lay six feet below the green grass, and the timid wild flowers that are considered by trained gardeners to be weeds, and their flesh will rot and peel away from their bones and it will be consumed by worms, some of whom will suffer some slight indigestion due to the overly spicy emotion that had boiled down into sleepy forgetfulness like a film on top of hot soup whilst the most potent component separated and drifted to the bottom of the pot, the innermost chamber of the heart accessible only by the aorta, but then that worm will burp and feel much better until the gardener cuts him in half with a spade whilst uprooting one of those blossoming weeds.
Eventually the world will be covered in ash and the cemetery will be forgotten when there is no one left but roving bands of mutated cannibals with eyeballs blinking from their shoulders, the survivors of a nuclear holocaust, whose ancestors, like that potent feeling, drifted to the bottom of the pot and wallowed in the darkness of underground shelters and ate glowing green roots to sustain themselves and died by age 12 of cancer but not before producing some deformed offspring to ensure the survival of the species, although the species now is nothing like it used to be, and plenty of those early survivors of the apocalypse saw all of this coming and gunned down their entire family and swallowed a bullet to save themselves from the horror of days to come, but by the time those marauding bands of cannibals traipse over a desert that was once a cemetery, they will not have an inkling that the world was ever otherwise and no more dream that anything secret lies buried beneath their feet than you now suspect some lost civilization might be buried deep beneath your laundry room or the local mall. Like you, they will not spend much time imagining the strange life forms that they may have evolved from, they will do this no more than you fantasize about your beginning as a humble single celled amoebae drifting aimlessly through the hot seas.
The slate gets wiped clean, and whoever is has always been and will always be, until the slate gets wiped clean again, and again, and again, so that ages of strange dreams are layered one on top of the next like the steppes of an enormous wedding cake or the steps of one of those pyramids that once stood in the wet jungles beneath the equator with blood flowing down their grandiose stairs. Those that are now, they walk over the ghosts of those that were, and beneath them, the ghosts of what will be completely unsuspecting of the fact that they may be under the influence of these worlds imperceptible to them.
Dogs, no doubt, do not think that they don’t know. Like you and I, what they are seems to them worthy of perpetuation into infinity, so they hump in the streets and dig in garbage bins and evade the dog catcher with as much zest for life as you or I would have if we were in their shoes (if dogs had shoes.)
The confines of the animal mind are so safe and self assured, why ever would we dare to dream that something lies beyond the border of our own encapsulated consciousness. That would only lead to a headache of enormous proportions, to the splitting of ones self into pieces so that the insides flow out like melting jello to rejoin the jello of the universe beyond animal confines. There is something outside of our perception, distilling at the bottom of the cauldron while we bubble dreamily at the surface before bursting into oblivion.
We, as we are familiar with ourselves, will not remain. We will be forgotten, while, meanwhile, some thing rattles down in the bottom of the kettle informing the next set of bubbles on the surface of the particular shapes it might take based on where they stand in the pyramids construction. We are churned from the cream skimmed off of the top.
If the milk is sour, then so will the butter be sour, and if it is sweet, then sweet, but whether we are sweet dreams or sour, we will frost the layers of cake and be forgotten.
All things are forgotten in time

Pride

Someone had been left on a porch in a basket as an infant; the classic fairytale beginning. He must have been the illegitimate son of a king, or otherwise noble born, and abandoned to anonymity to spare his life. Or perhaps a prince from another world hidden in ours from his enemies. So he always held his head high, remembering that he had something in common with Moses. His son likewise turned his nose up just slightly and remembered that he was different from those around him, and so his son’s son as well.
They were clever men, intelligent, makers of things. The son built a big house with his own hands on the corner of a popular street and two more generations were born in that house. Eventually the grandson of that first abandoned prince journeyed across the seas in search of opportunity, bringing with him his wife and their own little son. That son grew up in the distant land upon which they landed and eventually had a child of his own, not a son, but a daughter.
She only once heard the story of the basket but she never forgot it. Even without having heard it, she knew already that she was somehow different, better than everyone around her. This special pride born of nothing more substantial than white skin and wit was tempered by a Christian upbringing, so that even as she was arrogant, she felt a twinge of guilt that she should be fortunate to be so perfect while others were, by no fault of their own, born into vulgar families. She sympathized with those that she thought lowlier than herself and rarely met someone that she would see as better than herself.
Brought up in a large house in the country, she was lavished with every possible trinket, a fabulous play house, marvelous pets, her own room with a king sized bed. A golden plaque, with the Lord’s Prayer inscribed upon it, was hung on the wall beside her bed.
In her most vulnerable years, pride kept her from harms way, pride made her selective of her company and her occupations. She liked to read and could read and speak better than most of those from the country town where she lived.
It was not long however before her pride had turned to arrogance and it left her isolated. Her sympathy went to the devil who seemed to have suffered an affliction similar to her own. She lived up to the adage, “Pride cometh before the fall.” Once that pride had been a thing that allowed her to do as others dared not, to be as others dared not, but now it held her like a reign. If she imagined that she had been offended, pride commanded some action, even if affection dictated another course.
Her circle of associates grew smaller and smaller until there was only one left, a person that she held in great esteem. She seldom left her house or spoke to anyone outside of this one companion. And then, again and again, one thing or another that he said or did injured her precious pride and, more than once, she thought that she would have to forsake his company as well, in order to preserve some of this imaginatively produced regal bearing.
With difficulty, she observed that the gift of her forefathers, which had born her far into this strange and mysterious world, now threatened to throw her into a lower realm than she had previously imagined. But like the princess that refused all suitors and insulted them, she too found herself in the hands of the one that could not be insulted, a king thrush beard. Like that princess, she was put to tasks which challenged her pride and wore it away as the wind and sea erode the sandy cliffs.
Someone had been left on a porch in a basket in the distant past. The classic fairy tale end must come to pass eventually, but our prideful girl has not yet had all of her pots broken in the market place, and there can be no fair prince until then.

The Burning Princess

I need more time in the dark, like a mushroom nestled at the underside of a fallen tree, drinking in the moisture and nutrients necessary without being prodded at my the nosy sun. I have so very little to put forth. I am a field that hasn’t recuperated properly from the last harvest. What will spring up out of this soil? Something has gone awry upon this day, some small thing which has led me to feel scorched inside as if I had been splayed open like a fish for the sun to blaze down upon my tender insides and burn them like a laser smoothing out the unwholesome imperfections on an aging starlet’s face.
What if I do have a monstrous deformity, one that can’t be seen, one that affects my thinking, my feeling, my perception of reality? Would you correct this deformity that is me? Would I be me without it? Perhaps I am the deformity, an asymmetrical thalamus made for communing with things left undisturbed by proportionately formed minds. What if I choose not to use my deformity to pray for money, health or peace? What if I don’t care whether there is a god greater than me, or if it hears me? What if I am only interested in the quest, in rescuing the princess from her deep slumber in the inky hot depths reeking of sulfur? Not because I have to, not because it would make me good, or better than any other pale ape, but because I heard her call out to me, I heard her say, "Please help me. You are my only hope."
So I run the gauntlet, which looks like a cluttered apartment filled with children and the belongings of a displaced girl and a tangle of electronics; computers, cameras, and cell phones. I make my way through the deadly maze that is blonde hair and blue eyes and acne scarred skin stuffed into tight jeans.
From the outside, from beyond the glass-less window they might look in and say:
"Her life is a waste, look at that dump that she lives in, she has no car and lives off government money. Why won’t she get off her ass and do something, make some money?"
"Mother," I say, "They’re playing our CD on the radio."
"Will you get any money?" she asks.
Money, money, money, and things, that is the measure of worth from that other side of the window. Without it you will suffer. Worse than not having it, is not wanting it more than any thing.
Lazy.
Shiftless.
Do nothing.
But no, I can see the princess burning down in the flames, hear the crackling of her flesh, the rustling of her shackles.
"Please help me. You’re the only one who hears me crying. Please, please…"
If I am the only deformed creature that can hear her plea, then she is unreal. Yet she is real to me, as real as any other thing, the deformity which I am acerbating causes me to see it that way, so I will have to best the labyrinth, make my way through the pattern forged of hopes, fears, desires, things made in the intense heat by a clumsy smith.
If I run this road, it will change, with every step it is made anew. I can run rabbit run and it will be known to me only as it is coming undone and reconfiguring, like grains of sand lifted by a wind and laid back to rest.
If I am ill made, will you stop me?
Tell me why, if my princess is imaginary, why should you stop me?
What has the world to fear from deformities like me?
What have you to fear from imaginary princesses?
I need more time in the dark, away from the prying light of illuminated minds. I need a dank place to nurse my defective nature into full blown monstrosity. Then see what comes forth from this point of convergence called human, from this crossroads where sacrifice should be made on behalf of shadowy things. One day of sun can be undone. You have witnessed its undoing.

Is It True?

Is it true?
Am I just one little shadow come to displace another and send an entire pantheon of Gods into exile behind the black glass?
It seems that I am a character caught in a sticky web of cause and effect. I remember that as my first daughter was being born I realized that maybe one could never have their cake and eat it to, that perhaps the having displaces the eating, and the eating displaces the having, and that it is written in the laws which may escape ordinary perception that one simply cannot have everything all at once. Only the Gods try to have everything.
I find myself as a character gravitating towards such a God, like a moon orbiting some larger cosmic body. It is endlessly troubling to feel that you are only a supporting character, and yet, this is the one life that you seem to have access to. In all of the confusion of selecting one dream over another sometimes something that you desired is displaced by some other thing that you desired. Only a many armed blue skinned deity can juggle so many probable dreams, hold them all in mind all at once crossing from one into another through nexus points, little places where one dream bears some similarity to another, to engage in rich microcosmic adventures, all the while still holding the multitude of possibilities in mind.
The shock that the character experiences when it realizes that it is just one of an endless supply of shadows, as readily available as paper clips or number 2 pencils in a K-5 elementary school, might cause a momentary recoiling from that truth. This we call identification with the sleeping state which means that our window into a dream, the character that we currently inhabit is resisting opening up to let the dreamer, that blue skinned terror, in. But like virgins, dreams can be wooed or pressured into slutdom, eventually spreading wide and either enjoying being taken or at least tolerating it.
When do peasants become magicians and magicians become Gods and Gods become animals? It seems that I am a moon ever hoping that if the gods visit here often enough I will acquire a supernatural increase in gravity which would make me eligible for promotion to the rank of sun. How to go from being a cold dead moon to being a burning star, the center of a system around which small dead moons gyrate giddily uttering their wishes to "become real" to the blue fairy?
It is very dangerous to make requests of faeries. It is almost certain that they will help you to become more acutely aware of your wooden condition, which could cause a sudden burst of reckless animation that may ultimately transform you into a jackass before leading you into the belly of a whale. If the whale is white you will at least have found your way into a mythology worthy of the likes of Oberon or Merovee. The fabulous thing about being made of wood is that you will burn easily, and stars need plenty of fuel to shine so bright.
How do you go from being pencils to puppets to stars? You do it by doing as gods do, by crossing the bridge from one ghost world to another. Where did I recently see the book about traveling between ghost worlds? Ah no, ‘twas not a book, it was the old magician whose raven hair is frosting over into strands of silver who sat in a folding chair and explained to me how one manages to escape from a ghost. You must do something unexpected to disengage, you must change from pencils to puppets. Pray that the pencils will not begrudge the puppets the honor of wearing the spotlight for a moment in some neighboring universe where lord Shiva dances and burns forever.

Transmission from a Galactic Winged Bard

Now the time has come my pretty friends to tell our tale, our rainbow story, of how red and blue and yellow and orange fade from one into the next without warning or remorse. Now I am this. Now I am that. Draw near and I will whisper into your ear something like the trickle of a leaky faucet, a fountain at which roaches impervious to the years and poisons and harmful radiations have come to hear the songs of their troubadours. Tell us now about the district under the kitchen sink… are there still wars raging between the underside of the refrigerator and the crack in the pantry?… it’s not right the way our people were pushed into the narrowest margins of existence…in the shadows we have always thrived…yes we will always be, so long as there are others that waste, we will be here to make life of the refuse of the Gods…
So many lines, some touch and others are separated by yellow and never even suspect the existence of red on the other side of that sunflower resplendence. A great kaleidoscope of dreams and fantasy. The play of the eternal mind with its many distinct bands, its parallel worlds of fancy. See now, this motion of my fingers typing upon the keys has correspondences in all parallel tunnels. It does not look the same in green as it does here in red, and yet this that I am doing now sends ripples through the multicolored pool. It is like a doughnut shaped pool, with a great drop off in the center, the end of all worlds, the eternal silence, the no mind, the void, our holy mother.
All beings approach this event horizon simultaneously, the children drawn inexorably back to their root. We are all reactionaries. We are all a reflexive motion away from the great nothing. It is not enough that I live and breath. I am not. I never was. The conspiracy to separate myself from the multiverse, to create a sense of permanence, to cryo-freeze this world, this shade of blue that I have come to identify with, it is a vain attempt at immortality. But I cannot live eternally for I am already life eternal and her sister death. I cannot freeze, I cannot exist, I cannot change, and yet I am all variance. I am everything at once.
Profanity of course is a silly notion. The ogre’s hand protruding from the wall is only an offense to my illusion of individuality. There are of course other realities, other vantage points, other highs and lows. This knurly slimy pasty ogre’s thumb with fungus blackened finger nail emerging erect is only ugly here, lodged midway in my bedroom wall. Elsewhere it is sublimely beautiful, the most perfected of all creations. Everything that is, was, will be, is the perfected creation.
Breath deeply now, take it all in, the odor of sweat and mold, the garbage rotting upstairs, your neighbor’s rose water perfume, the dogs breath, the musky opalescent substance oozing from your lovers miraculous genitalia, the tiny blooms of the English lavender emitting their scent to attract small furred bees that produce the antiseptic propylis which has it’s own scantly perceptible odor, and sweet honey too. It is all the crown of creation.
Humanity is a tiny drop in the sea, and all of those things which we can see, hear, smell, and touch are but a thimbleful of the rainbow nectar of the gods. Those things which you cannot even imagine make up the rest of the great roaring sea, along with just a pinch of the things that you can. If you should happen to be experiencing this as a sudden unexplainable knowing as you drift disembodied out past the milky way recalling your life as a griffin on a blue moon somewhere in the Sirius star system, then please do not be alarmed by the limitations imposed here by the workings of my own handicapped consciousness. They have sent those of us who are especially disabled to come and live in the home for the challenged which we call Earth. Here I am to be rehabilitated by engaging in various arts and crafts, which I do find therapeutic. After all, it has allowed me to make contact with you, which has expanded my heart a bit and helped to melt some of the inhibitions which might otherwise cause me to recoil like a snapped rubber band, sending me into a deeper state of dementia.
Thank you so much for flowing into me as I flow into you in this senseless, purposeless, blessed, dance of unity. If we should become displaced and exchange places as a result of this etheric copulation, look into the lines of the hand of the body you have come to occupy. You might as well look now, as it seem that the transference has taken place (although you should note, as part of your rehabilitation, that you never really were you, nor I). Look into those lines, into the tiniest wrinkle and detail. See how the ectoderm nearly sparkles in the light, as if a few stars were still embedded there just to see if you’d notice. When you look at this deeply enough, without fear of the dark and direction-less fall, you will automatically enter into a series of summersaults and be seized by a series of undulations that would be laughter if you were still embodied in that home (or some other) for the transdimensionally impaired.
You know, there are some patients there who do not use their stay for our benefit. They only become further habitualized and lost in their addictions, forming relationships with other inpatients in denial, taking advantage and making ill use of medications and a situation that could help under the right circumstances. Here is the problem with all organizations and institutions, and in fact every kind of structure ever formed (not excluding the present configuration of ideas): its destruction is knit into its very fabric. The thesis and the antithesis dwell back to back, Siamese twins, one black, one white, conveniently blind to one another. Neither is actual. The synthesis was always present.