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.

Dark Moon

Don’t you know? At the core, I’m still this little dual gendered blondie in short black dresses and you can see my panties when I bend over to help the little kids at the table. I’m still hot for girls that are hot for girls and hot for boys that wear dresses and swing on swings and girls that wear mustaches and men in tall black hats and anything tall and black in general with hair all over its body. I like things that want to go where they’re not supposed to go and go there anyway. Who says it’s not okay to crawl around the dark side of the moon with your panties off and a big black dog sniffing at your crack while the stars spin round and round singing "wheeeee!" and the fabric of the universe goes "crack!’ And the black man’s head splits open and wrigley green things come out and it isn’t clear whether they are many long separate wrigglies or all appendages of one hidden thing with wagging tentacles.
I still like the desert all hot and bare with broken Indians on the side of the road selling hot pink butterfly necklaces to people that pass by in white sedans on their way to some other place. I like cacti with their prickly hairs even though a little one bit me when I was just two years old. I said, "Can I pet you?" and it said "Yes." and I reached a soft trusting little finger down intending to be as gentle as possible, but it bit me anyway. My mother had warned me. Sadly I do so much that my mother would warn me against if only she knew there were such things to do. Luckily, for her peace of mind, she can’t imagine them, so she can’t worry about the things I do where no one can see, down in the cracks of all that gray matter tucked neatly under my scalp.
I’d like to be strangled to death some day. I know that I would be nice at first and then even though I want to be strangled, I’m sure that as my mechanical creation begins to realize that something must be done or its day is done, I imagine I’ll start to fight against my own will, wriggling and flopping like a long legged blonde fish.
I did have a boy once that one hot summer day come up into my bedroom where the curtains were drawn to keep out the sun. We were both a little wet so I dropped off my clothes right in front of him and I could see that he liked it and I put on something else while he watched and then I asked him if he would wear a soft pink dress I had in the closet and he did it. He wasn’t the kind of boy that I would have pictured doing it, not lithe with long hair and a penchant for wearing eye liner. No, he was husky and short haired with eyes that bulged out like those of a goldfish, and he had hair on his belly and on his back, but he put on that soft stretchy powder pink dress of mine and I liked it very, very much and no real boy has ever done that for me since.
There was a bearded lady though, that I used to fuck with a strap-on, and when I was away at work one day she took off all of her boy clothes, which she wore because she liked to fool everyone around her, and she put on my dress without asking me, and went into the bathroom and played with herself in front of the mirror and took pictures with her camera phone and then posted them on My Space for everyone to see. I checked my email at work and was pissed off when I saw those pictures posted since it was my dress and she hadn’t asked. The worst day ever with her was when she came home with her beard shaved off and her face all smooth and youthful and it scared me and I didn’t like it because she didn’t look like a devil anymore, but I tried not to freak out too much. However, I’m sure she thought that I acted funny and asked too many questions about it.
Nobody knows how I am exactly, and if you’re reading this, you might think that I’m some cool chic that wears lots of dark eye make-up and a lace up bodice, but I’m wearing a turtle neck sweater and a pink rabbit ear cap and even I forget most of the time just how queer I am while I try to make small talk with the soccer moms in front of the school. And I’m sure that if she read this, that soccer mom would feel all the skin on her body get all puckered up with goose pimples and a hot chill would run up through her middle and it would feel as if her heart were trying to fold in on itself and she would be afraid and wonder what kind of horrible person I am and what terrible things I might have done that I’m not mentioning.
But in reality, I’m probably one of the safest people she could be around, because everyone visits the dark side of the moon when they sleep, many sleep even as they walk, but they forget what goes on in the dark side or they pretend that they’ve never been. But I can see all of that junk in my trunk and run my fingers through it and watch it and pet it and then come back well informed about the dangers that lurk deep within, but some sleep walkers start to do things without noticing that they’re doing them, because the dark side wants to bubble over after they’ve kept a lid on it for so long.
Me, I just want to dance and sing and say crazy things and make crazy things in my own image and then disappear into the deep dank soil when my time is up and be remembered by the worms when they eat me and then fly through the void as a screeching streak of magenta. There may be more to it than I can imagine, but I won’t worry about it now.
For now, I tell you to listen up- if you are a boy you should try on a dress, and if you’re a girl you should stick your hand down another girls blouse, and if you’re a dog you should high tail it out of here before I think of something perverse for you to do (and stop reading blogs because it freaks people out when they come home and find their dog looking at porn on the internet and it’s even worse if they catch you researching metaphysics). I innocently stumbled upon some very dirty but harmless images on the web myself the other day, and now things occur to my imagination that never did before. So the same will start happening to you, (whether you’re a boy, a girl, or a dog) in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

Beng's Bargain

Beware round which forbidden corner you turn, little worm. You’ve been warned that the devil waits behind the black door, and with old Beng the eternal fire burns, and suffering is assured. You have been shown that there are two paths to choose from at this fork; the path of the righteous- a straight and narrow course, and the path of the wicked- as crooked as an old man’s back. Choose the path of the righteous and your fate is painted over the door of the butcher’s shop and spelled out for you over his block. For see, the straight and narrow is like a conveyor belt carrying you most assuredly through the great factory farm to the bright white light of the slaughter house, and once you’ve settled on that course you’ve no more choices to make. You will be processed and packaged and fed back into the hungry mouth of the organic mass and the heavenly peace of eternal sleep shall be yours. Choose door number two and your foot is in a different shoe altogether, for once you go past the black door marked "yes", you will be assaulted by all the color denied the inhabitants of the two toned world. Here you will be faced with multiple choice, a never ending network of diverging branches, a veritable tree of life through which you must learn to flow like quickened sap. It is a gauntlet through which you will run with no hope of respite. Your lot is not the comfort of an undisturbed slumber, yours is an eternity of wakeful motion, of building beyond binary choices. To live well beyond the black door you must become a god. Hell is everywhere, inescapable but deniable. You were in hell before you chose black over white, you were in hell even after you chose one or the other, but behind the white door you submit to it, sleep through it to deny it, escape the difficulty involved in being responsible for it by ignoring it. Behind the black door you reign in hell, it belongs to you, every torturing moment of existence, all of the tiny and infinite details. You are a small god with the potential to grow, for whatever you can take responsibility for is yours, whatever you can hold suspended with your attention in the great cosmic juggling act becomes you, expands you, or rather you expand into it.
Honestly, worm, looking back, choosing the straight and narrow is like making no choice at all. You will be carried through that door without having made any effort at all. It happens naturally. You are asking me why I insist on calling you worm. You are looking over your shoulder to see if I am addressing some other. No, it is you, exactly you and no other to whom I speak. You are the creepy crawly larvae that must break out of the cocoon. You must crack the worlds shell if you want to fly with the dragons. Staying wrapped in the comfortable blindness of your cocoon is not life at all. You will be offered two choices to begin with. If you sacrifice knowledge, freedom, the power to create and move, you may have comfort and stability. You will be handled by qualified forces. If you sacrifice your personal comfort and stability you may know, move, and build freely. You may become a force at work in the mechanics of creation. We offer no refunds, nor guarantees on either choice. You are offered this moment, as is. You must ask yourself what it means to be alive, and whether it is possible that there is some yet undiscovered value and purpose in living, a possibility not available in the dimension of the binary. It is possible that the value and purposefulness of life can only be reckoned by those who are indeed living. And worm, I can assure you that you haven’t lived until you’ve passed beyond the black door.