Stories

If only the story had a clear beginning or a clear end then I would give it to you straight instead of in these helix-like curly cues. I intent to purposefully obfuscate the truth, not because I want to lie to you, because if I tried to speak directly to you THAT would be the lie.
It was very unfortunate that I had not recently suffered the proper amount of brain damage to initiate the multidimensional scanning process. I knew he would ask,
"Is this a mash up?" and I would say no, because the mash up was coming from inside my head rather than through an external process of combining seemingly disparate texts. It's the natural beauty of my mental illness. He would say from his crystal palace,
"I connect things too, that seem unrelated."
At this juncture it is wise to explain that clearly there is only one "he" ever. It may seem that there are a multitude, that I am in fact sitting around an octagonal table with multiple individual "he" right now, but I have learned the deeper secrets. I understand that all along I have only known one primordial he and have interacted with him through various emissaries both conscious and unconscious of their roles as high priests within the order of the shinning eternal nil.
The music, by the way, was noise and we listened with gusto, filling me with hope. Sometimes I met one who was both he and she, a creature capable of invoking all the powers fluidly. I am one such of these creatures, a rainbow unicorn once held sealed within a lead tomb beneath layers of Korean soil waiting to be unearthed by the emperor. You will see that there is some internal logic, a special hidden system for decoding the sacred texts. I could no longer be a human woman although I had played the part well in biological excess and had difficulty separating myself from MOTHER.
I wanted to tell him not to ride that motorcycle straight towards death, but his life and death were not mine to dictate and I would not like to interfere with his appointment with destiny.
Such strange beautiful mysteries I have questioned and viewed from the observation deck. I was thoroughly interviewed on entry myself . They examined my oral cavity for contraband that I was attempting to smuggle in from the womb, so I took it into my lungs and held it there for 30 years.
I saw a movie about a girl with a friend and it reminded me a little that one time I did have a friend like that one. She had an opportunity to escape and said she didn't want to leave me, but I told her that she had to go, that I wanted her to go, that it was the opportunity we had both wished for, so she flew away trailing rainbow streamers. We met at the estuary where we were both hatched and learned to manipulate him.
I look in amazement through the oculus and wonder how anyone could have stomached me when I was the arch-duchess of Coldsville conducting psychological experiments on those alien entities I called "friends."
I had of course been warned by my father, the duke, that these so called friends would be my ultimate demise if I let them get too close to me. It happened just as he had said it would, but not as he had imagined it. When the walls came down and I let the alien other in, his little proxy was damaged beyond repair allowing for the multidimensional scanning process to be performed with this bio terminal. The angels began the process of molecular distillation that altered my basic shape retrofitting me for the other process without leaving a bad taste.
Of course none of that was real. None of this is real either. If you want to understand this text you will need to find the other two books but I wont tell you where to look.
I believe that I am "her" which has made it difficult for me to see or interact with her often. While I have amphibian capabilities, they have been little exercised and my time above water has made aquatic flips more challenging than they were after I first hatched. Initially I was uncomfortable with being "her" but eventually I escaped his expectation that I replace him and learned to embrace my subverted femininity. Thus I learned to walk and paint my fingernails, but at a much later date.
In the end, the end that I thought could not be found, it was Miley Cyrus who showed me the secret to storytelling. She said:
"A flower is a rose, a rose is a whore, a whore is a sailor, a sailor is a mermaid, a mermaid is a hippo, a hippo dances in a ballet, the ballet becomes a circus, the circus has clowns, clowns wear flowers that spit water from their lapels."
Even then, as he busily ushered orgone from the lower dimensions into the crystal palace, he answered:
"Some day together we will shine."

Swine

I feel fed on by ravenous crows, a murder of them tearing at my spirit with hungry maws.
At home I make an appetizer plate of it and offer it to my children. Them I wish to feed, but they won't eat.
I return to the town square and they take and trample my gifts under a pretext of civility and general goodness. They tell me what a wonderful job I am doing and ask me for more and more. Then they take it and chew it and spit it out. 
I feel weakened to the marrow afterwards. I keep returning to the village for the benefit of my children, but who benefits from the con of life?
My children like to play with the other children but they don't do the work the townspeople give them. And I spill all of my life blood and effort on the cobblestones in the square, for the benefit of the community, but who is watching for the best interest of my own brood?
What sustenance will they gain if I waste all the nourishment I have to offer on swine and let my offspring be indoctrinated by swine?

D is for...

In the morning I had a phone call from my mother. My hands were covered in egg whites so I didn’t answer right away. Instead I finished making breakfast and then listened to the voicemail that she had left. It was strangely brief.
“Hi, it’s mom. Call me back when you are not busy.”

Her tone was dark and I wondered whether something specific was bothering her or whether it was the same general note of depression her voice usually carried.
I went to open the garden gate to carry out some bags of garden waste and discovered numerous black widow webs. I could barely make out a dark form behind a panel of wood and knew at least one spider was hiding there. I shivered all over.
The day before I had turned over an inverted flower pot and moved some bags of stone unearthing five of the deadly arachnids. I killed them with my boot heel when possible and the shovel tip when my foot couldn’t reach. I had been fairly brave in the moment, but now, knowing that there were more sent chills rippling through my body.

While I brought the pickup truck around to the gate my friend started carrying out the bags of leaves and weeds. We drove over the mountain and I kept my window rolled down, breathing the ion charged air.
At the county dump we pulled up to the scale to weigh our load and I noticed a trio of plastic skeletons arranged in a bush. I admired their creative placement.
Our county dump is full of artistic talent. An enormous installation of fascinating rubbish has long graced the hill behind the chemical waste shed and there is always some fetching creation to greet us when we reach the main warehouse. I smiled. The installations were spreading.

After purging ourselves of leaves and dead grass we headed towards home. Paused at a traffic light we watched palm bearers struggle to unload a coffin from a hearse. I was enjoying the bright orange of the flowers atop the glossy casket, the picture perfect ensemble of men in dark suits struggling under the weight as they carried it awkwardly into the yawning doors of a church.
“That’s intense.” my friend said.
“What is?”
“Somebody died and those five guys are carrying the body in. I guess we don’t have a lot of opportunities to confront death in this culture. We’re not usually face to face with it.”

At home I called my mother back.
“I have sad news. Jimmy’s daughter died last night.”
“I didn’t know Jimmy had a daughter.” I said.
“Well you know, I think we told you that just before Shanna was born Jimmy had another baby with another woman, Pam... and when he told her Kelly was going to have Shanna she took her baby, D’Laney, to Oregon so her parents could help.”
I digested this. I had been thinking of my mother’s other cousin Jay. I wasn’t sure if he had any kids. I knew about Shanna. Shanna had been to our house a number of times while I was growing up. But I had never heard the name D’Laney. I had never met her or even seen a photo.
“It’s so sad. She was only 34.”
“How did she die?”
“A cat bite. Isn’t that weird? It was her own cat. Apparently if a cat bites you it can lead to an infection and cause systemic failure.”

After I hung up I found D’Laney Ford’s Facebook page. She liked Philip Glass. I also like Philip Glass. Some of her friends mentioned her tribe. I figured she must have been a groovy burner from Seattle.
I felt a little emotional and looked out the window. A neighbor I had never met was standing in his backyard which is directly behind mine. He was wearing only a white bathrobe. I tried to write something .

“Dear D’Laney,
Why didn’t I know you? My mother called this morning to tell me that my second cousin D’Laney had passed away last night. D’Laney. Now I’ve seen your Facebook profile and I feel like we would have liked one another if we had ever had the chance to meet. I wonder if you ever knew I existed. I didn’t know about you. We never played together as children.”


I stopped. I really didn’t know what else to say. I looked at my neighbor in his bathrobe. He had something in his hand. What is that? I wondered.
I watched him for a few moment and felt a wash of surprise when he lifted his arm and started swinging a machete. What is he doing? I wondered. He was swinging it in a leisurely half hearted way, swinging it at nothing at all. Then he wandered a little and hacked briefly at a bush before meandering back into his house.

He Died For Our Sins

“Oh my God, this thing is from the 90’s!”
It seems so close, so far away. Roller skates and corduroys and neon colors.
They are making weapons out of electric green Bendaroos, organizing complicated games in a home for deranged ex villains. My man is there, looking bad but meaning well, poet in black jeans.
The shadow of a black widow in a thicket of web nestled in a long forgotten Easter basket, still wrapped in plastic.

I can’t believe this passes for technology. It should have been replaced ten years ago. Give it a tweak. Flash of lights red and green.
They’re only games, but they look like violence, like evil schemes plotted by insecure misogynists. They know not what they do, and so they know not how to take responsibility for what they’ve done.
But it gnaws at them. Something feasts on their gut, making them feel dirty but they don’t know what they did. How did they get like this? Were they not innocent boys when it started?

Conversations in parks, in bathrooms, on Christina ct. Were we not being punished for something?
I hoped so, because if so then redemption was possible. If redemption was possible we could do the right things and escape this misery.
However, redemption philosophy required that we all began as sinners and he would say:
“I can’t believe that. What could I have done to deserve what I got? I was just a little boy. I didn‘t deserve that.”

I feared that going back down I might fall. I considered crawling the rest of the way up and breaking through a window.
By now, however, I had learned that crawling through a window would likely result in a rebirth, and then big sis and I would never finish fixing this thing.
I could see the shadowy form more clearly; definitely that creature that I feared. Should I attempt to stab it with the scissors? Should I trust that film of plastic to be a satisfactory barrier between us?
Those flashing lights seemed to be a bad sign. I might have to stay up here with it longer.

Existence is suffering. All beings suffer. I had read this.
I didn’t want to believe it, despite the fact that it seemed likely. If we could have understood that concept, perhaps we could have shed our guilt and shame, the hope that we could escape our unknown crime.
Despite the fact that his objections to it were strong, the ideology lived in both of us. Perhaps it was even better rooted in him.
He was an earthy sort, and in the act of fierce rejection he had become locked in an embrace with it, like a bull whose horns get lodged in the opposing structure. 
I was in a process of accepting it and synthesizing it. I would have dreams that something horrible was coming towards me, and instead of running, or fighting, I would try to hold it and transform it by making it a part of myself.
Sometimes it destroyed me.

In the end, he would sacrifice himself.
It would be hard to look at. It would be impossible to remember whether he had been a villain, an innocent boy, or a hero.
The flash created by the sacrifice would be so blinding, it would obscure the past. The power of it would send me hurtling into unknown terrains.
It was a gift.

There was nothing further that could be done. I slid down, dangled from the ledge and jumped. It was easier than I had anticipated.
Sis helped me stand and dust myself off. She checked for spiders. We were about to walk up the path back into the house when we heard it, a ghostly voice from above.
It was a tech agent responding to my prodding of the device. In his far off phone voice he issued instructions for troubleshooting.
At first it seemed like I might need to go back up, but after listening for a moment it became clear that, like the device, the instructions for its operation were obsolete.

The Big Nothing

If I could be free of familial obligation I feel that I would have the same sensation as someone who has mastered an addiction. If I could contentedly go through my life knowing that I would never bend to the will or whim of my parents, so much of my time and energy would be free that I would surely rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
Damn them for giving me life then exercising all of their energies towards the end of subverting that life to their own wishes and desires. Damn them for seeing me only as  an uncooperative place holder in the symbolic order. Category: daughter, type A, first born.
Damn them for assuming that my existence is about them. Example: If I am not there it is to make them sad, depressed. Damn them for making me responsible for their emotional state. If I were to have continued to do the same I would have been dead long ago, suicide note reading:
“I have tried my best. Nothing I can do is good enough for you. Why must love be contingent upon approval?”
I ran away once and got no further than Lakeland Village.
Later I got as far as San Francisco and it might as well have been Mars. I felt happy and free. More myself than I had ever been permitted to be. Love and Will were more important than material things and these in true form could never be subject to approval.
But several times a year I must be dragged back into the underworld, into the land of the dead. Because while they lacked the ability to think of my happiness before their own, I did not. I would go and try to give them the pretty picture. I would not say any of what I really thought to them. I would let their hurtful words and way of being wash over me and not struggle against it. My mantra was “I am a duck.” I had the promise of  leaving their presence to get me through these visits.
But each visit was as toxic as a nuclear blast. Before and after I was sick. During I would almost die.
And at last my connection to them was tenuous at the most. The stronger I became the less reason could be seen to consent to participate in their play. The only reason as always was, “to not hurt them.”
But these miserable people were endlessly hurting and always the blame would lie somewhere other than within their own disturbed psyches,  rooted somewhere other than in their many poor choices, somewhere other than in their own utter lack of illumination.
If I were to tell them the truth would it be kind or cruel?
Kind or cruel?
Kind or cruel?
That for me, the interaction is corrosive, futile, unnecessary and harmful to all that I strive for.
If they cared for me as an objective entity at all, they would leave me alone and seek their happiness elsewhere. They would not make me come back, they would not force me to take the communion of pain and eat of the flesh of  their woe and drink of the deep back blood of their despair.
They force it, but I could say no. I could make a clean break if I told them the brutal truth.
Kind or cruel?
I keep trying to give them what they say they want. I keep trying to be good for the BIG OTHER, the eye in the sky that is watching over my deeds.
And yet I want nothing more than to flip them all the bird, Ma. Pa, and Jesus too. I want to set the world on fire.
I keep turning the other cheek, good lamb, but within me a wolf is growling. The real in me begs to be freed of all the empty gestures that supply the emptiness the symbolic order demands, the emptiness my parents crave, the big nothing they have sown.

Obfuscation

This writer is either purposely confusing
or simply obfuscating

Are you on the Kool-Aid?
(There's plenty more if you need some.)

The diagram you put up

shows levels of creation.

I could make the argument

the spells from the old books are

basically saying that unity is the real,

individuality the illusion...

we've got to live

with an angel and devil or wolf and a sheep

inside our self at all times.

Yes. We know this.

But what that is, nobody knows. Do you?

Once I read

I read and read

when it boils down to it,

all this reading shows that

Death is the teacher.

The plants, the milk, the clouds.

They were the warriors:

by them this light was brought hither.

I've never seen them

trying to strive to be God

or strive to be a rock.

But then this go on to say

Whatever he desired from the Mother,

that the Subject furnished,

as a friend from his own spirit.

Of course this is true.

So both are saying that

although not the same.

The Subject is the teacher.

The Mother rules, shines forth.

Light becomes the ruler.

Looking at life

and how it is set out

you have to strive to be

any of those things.

You have to.

Admittedly, an audience of terrestrials

is all you will ever achieve.

Is that supposed to be good?

Who knows how many people heard this

when it was first written.

They didn't, they don't.

Through holy discipline and creative fervour

the king protects his kingdom.

The teacher through his own holy life

seeks and finds the Subject.

It's very clear what you should think

we should be clear and correct.

People can come to their own conclusions.

I've kept pretty quiet about this.

I'm with you, whatever side you come down on.

Through holy discipline,

through creative fervour,

the gods drove away death.

By his holy discipline he brought the light to the gods.

Belief in angels ....God..... Or burning bushes

all of that man's imagination.

How do you get to the Real?

I don't have much to add beyond this.

The plants, that which was and shall be, day and night,

the tree, the year along with the seasons,

have sprung from the Subject.

Its shines a light

this is what these voices are saying.

There are relationships between all these levels

start looking at what's really been said.

This made me so mad when I first heard it.

My former fellow workers!

How could you have fallen so low!

When it is too hot, jump into the furnace!

The earthly and the heavenly animals,

the wild and the domestic,

the wingless and the winged,

they have all sprung from the Subject.

This is the math.

You've thought a lot about this.

But there is a lot of venom in your words.

I'm not going to argue

I am totally confused.

I need a number.

All the creatures of The Mother

carry breath in their souls.

All these the Spirit, which has been brought hither in the Subject, protects.

This, that was set into motion by the gods,

that is insurmountable, that moves shining forth.

But some things are not you.

You are more than things.

You are beyond things, you must step outside of the thing.

But the chart is useful. I must admit.

The writer insists on continuous willful obfuscation.

I can't believe that you seem to buy

something so difficult to understand.

You go over it and over it.

It only starts all over again.

The Subject carries the shining Spirit:

into this all the gods are woven.

Producing the inhale and the exhale,

language, thought, heart, spirit, and wisdom.

You give us sight, hearing, glory, food, semen, blood, and belly!

You can handle things

see them for what they are,

even the human body

nothing more than a thing.

It's difficult to compare.

We are one person, not many.

But nobody really knows this

although you might in some fashion.

What did you do to make

these things seem real.

What was it?

Then you became identified with them.

You are them as those things are you.

They can't be without you

you can't be without them.

Actually you aren't any Thing.

I must warn you now: this is a Spell.

The Spirit caste are the only ones authorized

to cast these spells.

In casting them, they save the universe from destruction.

So, if you accept this:

unity is, individuality is not.

Add another thousand years

to the time we have known this.

Why is this an illusion?

It seems like a valid assumption.

Be here now,

Let the evils of the day be sufficient for us.

Let the evils come on to me daily.

The big confusion

lies in the fact that the gods

do not pay

though they should.

I say again:

This writer is either purposely confusing

or simply obfuscating.

It seems like a valid assumption.

Red Riding Hood

The fire. I watched them dance about the fire and feast at tables of stone. Another time I burned a wolf alive as it leapt to taste my flesh. The time I am thinking of is now, when I run through the darkness towards the fire's distant glimmer, hammer in hand.
There was a time before now when I was the mother, when I was the Grandmother, and each time I have also been a daughter and that comes before as well. When the world ended there was still life, still fire, still iron and steel, but time was no more.
I remember being daughter running through the ruins, my breath burning in my lungs as the wolf followed. Being hunted then, a girl no more than 9 or 10, as boney as the starving beast that followed.
Running, I flung a pail full of stinking petrol upon my snarling assailant. The bucket clattered upon the concrete as the wolf made an angry sound, slowed only a little.
Through the doorways whose doors had burned out at the end of time, into the kitchen, and climbing up the heavy wire shelving to the very top where I tuck my legs close to my body and fumble open the match box and strike. Teeth gnashing the air as the canine leaps towards me. That hiss as the match catches and I flick it at the dark body rising towards me, twisting airborne and suddenly igniting with a whoosh.
Is it really silent then in Grandmother's kitchen upon the top shelf of the rack watching a wolf burn alive? Or was it a noise too terrible to remember?
It was my mother who killed that first wolf with a bucket of petrol and a match. It was my daughter. It was myself. It was only a little wolf, but I was only a little girl. A girl who ran not away from, but towards wolves ever after.
I watched their fires from a distance. Who am I? Mother. Daughter. Grandmother. Their fires burn against the black and I see them dancing, casting long shadows against the wall. I watch them eat at stone tables built before the end of time. The heat can almost reach me, even from so far.
Just the sight of distant flame can be hearth to me for one moment as my soul reaches cold hands towards the light. It reminds me of civilization, Grandmother’s house, mother's heart beat, father's beard.
But I turn away from it eventually, as I must. Their halls are not mine, and people can be worse than wolves.
That was another time. Now I am thinking about now, the moment before the end of time, the fires that scorch the world and send people into holes like rabbits. The fire that burns in our bones and makes us sick even after the light is gone. The fire that will twist through generations of wolves making them taller and  mightier. It will run its fingers through our minds even when it seems to have forgotten our bodies, the fire that burns deep, kissing the center of creation.
Sometimes I remember being a star, great, great, Grandmother. Sometimes I stare at the alpha through crosshairs, holding my breath, squeezing the trigger. My footprints dot the snowy plains. I dye their white coats red and make a heavy hooded cloak. They know me among the ruins. Word has spread of the wolf killer.
Many of these people don’t remember the time before the end of time. This is the world as it has always been to them. Sometimes I wear the red cloak of fur made by my mother and track the wolf that killed her. Sometimes I am the fire at the end of the world swallowing itself.
The fire. I watched them dance about the fire and feast at tables of stone. Another time I burned a wolf alive as it leapt to taste my flesh. The time I am thinking of is now, when I run through the darkness towards the fire's distant glimmer, hammer in hand. This is the weapon that is left to me after I met with the wolves who were men.
I am running ahead, daughters, mothers, Grandmothers left behind me. I am running towards the fires that may be the end of the world. I am running towards the wolves.

Barbarians Are Coming

The end of the world came and went and nothing perceptible changed. We stood around rubbing our eyes and blinking on a bright winter morning a week later asking each other how our end of the world was.
Josh, the honey guy as I thought of him, was wearing a pair of blue gloves with detachable mitten tips. These little caps were peeled back so he could work his digits and in each fist he held a jar of honey, a silent offer of trade. I told him how Lydia, who worked for the Bavarian Bakery, and I made music and danced with a church of ravers in a building like an old castle in Oakland. He nodded and told me that he attended three different solstice ceremonies in San Francisco, the last occurring at a beach in the Sunset district. My turn to nod.

We had all been here a week ago, a day after the twenty first, while a rainstorm raged all around us. As far as we could tell, that was the sum of the apocalypse, a cold heavy rain and a wind that threw canopies over backwards and tore their aluminum legs in half like a starving yeti mangling some black eyed Bhutanese doe.
We all huddled in our individual camps, by cars or trucks, and waved to each other through the tempest but couldn’t speak. Inside the back of a big white Cargo truck I was standing huddled with Sing and Backtaur by the portable tandori. We had hooked this and the steam table up to a propane tank  right inside the truck's cargo hold. Whenever some brave soul skittered across the parking lot under an umbrella I shouted:
“Samosas! One dollar!”
Often my shout drew them to us like a lighthouse beacon and they shivered below us, faces peering up over the mammoth truck's tail gate awaiting a cup of hot chai and some steaming curry.
In the moments when the storm was most violent we felt it battering the truck and fairly cringed looking at each other with wide eyes of amazement. Then Sing would laugh his pure, rich laughter and I would murmur:
“What a wind!”

Now and then the storm would tire itself out and be still. Then the birds came out and somehow found Sing, who always remembers to share the bounty of India Gourmet with the littlest market patrons. He threw his customary handfuls of basmati rice seasoned with cardamom pods to them. More birds than I had ever seen at the market came to the feast,  multicolored varieties; black with red wings, black with beady yellow eyes, tiny brown and black sparrows, larger brown speckled specimens with long yellow beaks,  lumbering midnight hued crows, side by side in a temporary truce, all gobbling up the offer with urgency.

“They are hungry.” Sing boomed with his deep musical voice, “They can’t get their breakfast in the storm.” He threw them more and more rice, a tall man with a jolly belly, a white beard, red turban, and big glittering brown eyes, a Sikh Santa of the birds.

So it rained, but the world was still there a few days later when the clouds blew away and we could come out and check.  We were disappointed, let's not dance around this point, we Americans born in America. We clearly wanted something to happen, probably different things depending upon each person's particular background. Flying saucers full of Mayans, or Jesus with laser eyes, or a spontaneous psychedelic awakening to free us from our petty and deeply artificial consumer culture.
We wanted to stare the grim reaper in the eyes in a way that was never possible in a society where children are told to close their eyes and step over the bodies of their massacred peers, where we are only permitted to see death once it has been washed and painted and put in a box lined with satin, where we are assured that our nation is the mightiest and will never fall so that what we really fear is an unbroken and monotonous horizon whereupon we will never see the outlines of approaching barbarians.

We hoped for a reprieve from the unending sameness and safety and guilt inducing comfort and might. We longed for something real.

I  think that secretly many of us held on to hope until New Year's Day. We let ourselves get excited again on the eve of December 30, fingers crossed for the twins, death and rebirth. Then we woke up and the sun was still shining. Is still shining.
But Americans will never give up. Even our elders were running like lemmings towards our artificially imposed fiscal cliff, seeking to plunge ourselves and the world into an economic down spiral, only turning back at the last possible moment.
Many others will no doubt arrive in public buildings with semiautomatic rifles in the coming months. We are a suicidal nation. It would be too difficult to admit that we are sick  and make changes. Much easier to set the world on fire so that we will never have to admit our shortcomings.

Or maybe change is here, fast and invisible, in the embracing of the artificial. Maybe we are saying goodbye to our earthy roots and our old social and moral codes as we somersault blindly into the heart of our techno creations without regret.
Our children will be the future, not our flesh and blood offspring, but our spawn  of micro chips and liquid crystal. The change may be here and we are simply blind to it as a mother is blind to the inch by inch growth of a tot she sees every day. Each morning it appears to be the same child and yet it is transforming right under mother's nose. In 20 years mother will be obsolete, all that the child needs of her it carries already within itself, in the software and hardware she provided. The child will spread its wings and fly and mother will be both a cast off shell and a voice within.

A death and a rebirth. All that we hoped for but dared not admit to ourselves. The other from within, the ultimate barbarian on the horizon.

Evil Queens and Dwarves

I have little to say about the nature of dwarves or evil queens.  I have little to say. I say little.
In regards to dwarves, they are very little if you are bigger than they and quite large if you should happen to be smaller. Evil queens are generally old. That’s all. They want to be beautiful again, and powerful. They don’t care about love because they know better now. They want to be in charge.
Dwarves may sometimes be the servants of evil queens or sometimes they are her enemies. They are fickle folk that way. I imagine that if an evil queen showed up and cleaned their house they’d help her hunt down and kill that pesky maiden with the lips as red as blood and skin as pale as snow.
Evil queens are practitioners of magic. Put  simply, they are witches.
Good queens die in labor or mourn when their children are abducted, or die without mention of the cause. They are disposable.
A word about Kings. They often marry evil queens after their good queen dies. They are generally dupes, loosing their kingdom or wealth to dwarves, wandering soldiers, and evil queens (not to mention witches who never become queens). Only their sons are clever, though generally not as clever as wandering soldiers, millers’s sons, tailors, or talking cats.
Princesses are always fair and must choose between two possible additional virtues; being clever or being kind. (There is a strong possibility that clever princesses will end as evil queens one day.)
Two out of every four princesses  are destined to fall into a sleep like death. (They are usually the kind ones.)
Princes often need the help of  witches or dwarves to get anything done. Witches who help princes and princesses are usually called “good” witches. Nobody feels it’s necessary to call the dwarves “good” dwarves.
(From this one may deduce that the default setting of dwarves is neutral whereas witches are all wicked unless proven to be “good.”)
This is what I know of the nature of dwarves and evil queens. I have said little. I had little to say.

Un

I was born under a pile of corpses. They nurtured and grew me into the malformed beast that I am. Heavy with death and blinded by darkness, I could see nothing of objective reality and could not move.
Can you see it? Chained in place by my biological link to the family of death and rot, the family of the world.
They would press me down under their weight, feeding off of me even as I fed off of them struggling for life, struggling to press my face up out of their coiled nest of flesh towards the sun. Where I could not go with body I had to go with mind.
I grew out into the darkness, into the strangeness, into places they could not touch. I dreamed a sun and a moon and countless stars burning in a vacuum, Hisssssssss. Burning stars like hearts forming bodies, solar systems pulled towards the gravity of their passion.
The heart is the first organ to form in the body of Adam. So it is in larger bodies that the star is first born and grows and collects smaller celestial objects to make its body. All bodies are made of love, love is gravity,  the glue, the lehadbik pulling strange bodies together making new bodies from them.
Can you see me buried under the pale bodies of my parents, under their pain and anguish and their cannibal desire to consume my passion before I could become a star?
Do hearts or stars ever say to their parts, go on, go if you like and be the center of your own universe? Be free.
What they’ve made, what they’ve collected, what they’ve gathered, they hold. If you are born into a body of death that is who you are. You must fight a civil war if you wish to transform. You will have to slash and burn the body you gestated in to be free.
It sounds monstrous doesn’t it? It is also monstrous laying at the bottom of the heap, grown to a size that can better feed the body of death, parents, preachers, and teachers feeding on the blood of your heart, tearing new wounds to sip from so that their rule is strengthened by your meager borrowed life.
When you are born into  dark world do you remember the space before your phantom life as a luminous wonderland? How many births have you suffered to be buried so deep under the heap? How many births have I suffered to be way down here, suffocating?
More important: how many deaths will I have to die to be released? How many selves shed, how many voices silenced, how many regimes of parents, preachers and teachers slashed away before I find the shinning emptiness at the center, the pure untouched well of being that has always been and will ever be and is none and nothing, entirely un.
When will I stop desiring the caresses of dead hands and the praise of phantom voices? When will I be free of my self?
Clawing, clawing towards the surface, angering ghosts as I go, feeling the loss of connection with the body that was as I move towards an unknown.
There is no conclusion. I am mad and madness has no limit. This limitlessness was born in the strictest confinement, containment and isolation.
I am looking for the sun that burns me into un. I am looking for the love that is death. Freeing black bird, devour me and carry me away from the wheel into the terrible luminosity of the Absolute.
Can you see it?
I was born under a pile of corpses, they nurtured and grew me into the malformed beast that I am. Heavy with death and blinded by darkness I could see nothing of objective reality and could not move.
In my stillness I am traveling. I am going beyond. Beyond the strictest confinement, containment and isolation into the burning dissolving madness of un.
Can you see it? Can you?

Communion

Out of the earth a single golden toned sound, a deep vibrating gong and she rises. Life flows from her teats nourishing the many. All are her children and the wheat sways gently around her legs tickling and praising her generosity. Horns sweep gracefully upward to cradle the sun.
Even that most powerful force needs now and again to be cradled and rocked and she graciously obliges. Each day as the sun passes over her body raining heat and light, she collects this warm nectar and with it conceives new children that will gestate in her secret depths to one day burst forth in glorious bronze raiment.
She is a mother, a wife, a woman, an animal. The stars of the milky way are the waters of life that run through her body waiting to be expressed, waiting to feed the hungry mouths that wait far below her, small fragile pale things that she delights in nurturing. The joyful noise of bells and bleating and moaning resounding over the open plain rise up with the birds to scatter through the air.
Elixir of love and joy, come fill our cup! We thank the mother for her moon white wine. Here in the field with our four legged brothers we are content to breath and wander, to engender children of our own sustained by her bounty. With a rush of waters new life begins, with the flow of opaque waters life is maintained. Love drips and drops and gushes and finds a way into our starved bodies.
How dare we forget that we are alive by your grace? What wretches exploit your gentleness, calling it weakness, taking what they want without returning the love they have borrowed to make themselves strong?
There was a time when we were one, truly, as a mother and a child, as a husband and a wife, aglow with mutual adoration. What was yours you gave to me and I transformed it into life and returned it with cherishing. It was good when I could nestle to your bosom, when I could rejoice for merely being your child, when to live beside you was all that living needed.
Dark times have come. No one cradles the sun. Your luster is concealed within temples of corruption. Your children are separated from you at birth, they never know you, the source of their life. Elixir of love and joy is boiled and bottled and distributed by pale withered hands. There is no contentment. The world has turned black and gray. When we are not beside you living becomes stale and brittle.
Come Queen of the West! Put your household in order. We are ready to return to the simplicity of pure existence. It is time for a flood, for the awakening of the moon white wine, for torrents of love to rain down on us and wash away our corruption.
Out of the earth a single golden toned sound, a deep vibrating gong and she rises. Life flows from her teats nourishing the many. All are her children and the wheat sways gently around her legs tickling and praising her generosity. Horns sweep gracefully upward to cradle the sun. Even that most powerful force needs now and again to be cradled, even the most petulant child will return eventually to mother's arms.

Dance of Words

Just to break it in, why not take a hand at typing something, just a little something? It doesn't matter if it turns out to be great or insignificant, whether anyone sees it or not. All that matters is that some little impulses, little neural flashes out of the inner nowhere, get translated into words which are then keyed in to appear on the screen.
It is not a one to one relationship. The words “neural flashes” don't accurately encompass that thing that I am trying to talk about. It's like interpretive dance, this swoop of the arm is symbolic, it is a verbal representation of something which exists and occurs outside of the mind and outside of the linguistic structure. Therefore saying something, saying anything at all, is a very creative experiment. Even technical manuals are avant-garde art projects when you consider them this way.
The truth is that words cannot express the truth about what they describe, they are merely creative embellishments to the truth. A coiled mystery, that I can sit here translating thoughts into symbols, and those thoughts themselves are already symbolic translations of something else that I can't name, I can't even try.
The way the wind tastes, the way the air smells, my mother smoking cigarettes on the balcony or in the garage over the washer and dryer, drinking cans and cans of Folgers coffee, bitter to the taste and smell, looking at the mural that my father painted on the wall beside the laundry machines, a flat depiction of the majestic mountains rising at the west side of the house outside the front door, out the back door you can see the lake and empty fields and a row of olive trees lined up beside the deep outflow channel, the orange and yellow tops of other distant trees are just discernible, everything can be taken in with a sun swept glance.
What does it mean, sun swept? That the light is passing over everything like the broom over the linoleum in our cramped kitchen, as it sweeps over this mysterious matter and leaps to life, becomes, house in the distance, small black and white dog, man calling dog, resplendent treetops, shimmering blue lake, child bent in the tall grass to play with a ladybug.
What is it before it is sun swept? Does the occluded landscape exist before the sun takes creative liberties with matter?
It is not even the sun which does this, but our eyes which translate light and its absence into some of those neural impulses which are further interpreted into a dance of words, house, dog, man, trees, lake, child, bug.
What qualifications have I got to try and speak about these things, I who have never read Lacan? I who never went to college? I who sit typing. I am an artist, that is my only qualification. And who made me an artist? What institution, what diploma, what Mona Lisa connects this signified, which sits here in this chair on top of an aging blue and white stripped pillow tip tap typing away, with the signifier "artist"?
Why, this very action, this happening that takes the shape of words that your human biological machine transforms into meanings which are derived from memories of the interaction of deceptive, or shall we say interpretive, senses such as sight, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, with the strings of signifiers that spew forth form my linguistic potters wheel.
It is all complete gibberish and it always was, every verse of the Bible, every page of that computers user manual, every line of that love letter, every word of War And Peace.
It was all Lacan, college, typing, artist, happening, human, memories, senses, touching, gibberish dance.
If God wrote the bible then God may be confirmed as having been an interpretive linguistic dancer much like myself, in which case we can say, good for God, everyone should reach so high.
Some will say that for having arranged such words I am blasphemous, sinful, evil, disrespectful, irreverent, atheist, communist, satanist, stupid, misguided, deceived or deceiver, lost, intellectual, cynical, arrogant, insecure, shocking, attention hungry, wicked, etc. but I assure you that whatever I am, I am none of those things, I am something quite independent of those words which are more like shadows cast by my movements to create a show which might be entertaining, horrifying, or irrelevant depending on the stone throwers, the audience, the perceiver whoever you are, am I, I am.
Blasphemous, wicked, movements, perceiver, sun swept, deceiver, majestic, depiction, outflow, occluded, none. Leap to life. Becomes. Words, unchained, signified, undefined, then defined. Costumes, masks, opera, that is the play of words, the dance of the symbolic, the dance of shapes without substance. Just a little something insignificant, neural flashes translated into words, just to break it in, creative embellishments of the truth, complex variations on a theme without conclusion, a melody without a solid form.

Alien

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

Feast of Cannibals

With cannibal love we coddle them, keeping them locked within steely fences and walls of white plaster. Never will the wolves get their chance at these, our precious young. Never will the world have the chance to dash their bones into bits with terrible falls after great feats. We alone shall enjoy that privilege, the honor of eating our young alive.
Fattened as they are with the sloth of caged animals, darkened by their cheerless existence beneath our marvelous white wings, they know no joy. They watch the images of childhood from our flickering screens, see the green of grass and blue of sky without the knowledge of the wealth of feelings that such images evoke in the spirit of one whose bare feet have trod on grass and leaped towards the sky.
The sky shall not have them. The grass shall never touch them. We keep them safe, like pearly little maggots hidden away in a dark dumpster, suffocating them with cellophane wrappers and video games, and mp3 players, and cellular phones.
They may speak to one another, reach for one another through these devices, but harsh words will have to win their battles, smooth talk suffice for exchanges of affection. We will not let the bloody fisted brawls have them, nor the hand holding, tickling, chasing, and swinging. They are only for us.
We strip away their immortal souls and make machines of them, fat little high fructose corn syrup powered bots to cherish the ideals we hammered into the hole we tore in their hearts. They will hate terror and terrorists. They will love America and God. Their ears and belly buttons will be washed and their homework done.
We will make them want us, want us for the toys, the shoes, the clothes, the sweets we can buy. They will wail for these things, the fruits of our Empire, never knowing the taste of earth and air and sun and water. We will give them corn to eat in all of the colors of the rainbow forged in the shapes of cartoon characters and steroids to make their lungs pump even when there is no oxygen left to breathe and technology to cast its light over their pallor and more fucking liquid corn to leave them thirsty for more and more and more…
They belong to us and to no other, certainly not to themselves. Whatever they are, whatever they were or might have been, it will be smothered like the unwholesome flame that it is.
Death shall not have them, for we will never let them live. They will die before they can be born, to satisfy our hunger, to stave off the orgy of fear that is existence. They will never be here, will never know now, will always be spirited away by our incessant diversions, left as ghosts slumped on sofas with crumbs in their creases.
And the few who suspect that they have been denied the most precious gift we could give will be punished for their intelligence, for their pure heartedness and courage. The brave and the curious and the noble of our brood will suffer the worst tortures so that we may enjoy our cannibal feast, unperturbed by remorse or anxiety.
We will never need to atone if we nip truth in the bud, snuff out the first smoldering spark before a wild fire can grow and spread its crimson fingers over the hearts of our children, taking them forever from us . Never will the passion to live flower within and eat them alive and transform them from worms into butterflies. They are ours alone to devour.

Why Not?

Why not one more song in the cool midnight blue? While babies sleep and spiders hunt and worried fathers pace, I make one more strange shape, electric green in the night. Why not? Why not? While the black blood of the earth, that demon of civilization, bleeds into the briny seas and clock hands tick methodically round like waltzers twirling to the Blue Danube, I go bravely hop scotching into fields of beets, crimson purple veins throbbing in the green leaves.
I saw the face of my ancestor in a photograph that was taken today. A pale plump, round faced woman looked back at me from a photo that had been taken of me. How strange that she is me and we are meeting today for the first time. Why not? The last face I remember seeing was so much younger and leaner and tortured, a puffy red faced beauty, but I looked at her in a mirror and thought, “I hate you, I hate you! Nobody loves you!” and I saw her cut her blond hair off.
Such heavy lead filled thoughts to cart to the alchemist, laying them down on the work bench, smelling perfume of cinnamon and sulfur. The devil was here just before you. Can I make gold of this worthless lot? Why not? Why not!
Breezes from countries I never saw caress my face, leaping from leather binding and gold leafed pages to posses my fingers and send them to write fairytales and boil split peas. So many silly things pass through this window I call my self, why not one more? I almost loved the woman I glimpsed in the photograph today because she looked like a grandmother that once rocked me and like a cousin who I don’t know well at all. A cousin that shovels snow from her porch and eats black bread covered in butter and cheese.
I had once been a citizen of earth until I longed to learn to sing the songs of Saturn’s outer rings. Then I trained on the moon called Titan and gave water to a strange man and loved him through eternity, strangely familiar forever. Come with me deeper into the abyss!
While students memorize and serpents molt and gurus pretend, I wriggle, pale and slick in the underground wells like a Naiad, wailing an eerie tune to summon the strange. Up it comes, frightening me in dark hallways when I thought I was alone, drifting through the blue sky like paramecium under a microscope’s lens.
If you thought there would be a point in all of this, if you hoped for it and found it lacking and frowned, then you’ve never been to Titan. The locust make a noise like music in the evening and the swallows sing in the mornings and everything smells like licorice and coffee while the hands on the clock tick tick tick and fathers become grandfathers and die despite the lucky rabbits feet their granddaughters give them. Little Lagomorph paws dyed blue and dispensed from red machines after two quarters of a dollar have been placed on its long silver tongue just outside the air conditioned cool of a powder blue general store at the base of a mountain in the heat of a parking lot with a view of a lake. They come out in plastic bubbles, but nonetheless grandfathers die and their bodies are donated to universities.
Why not?
While grandmothers fan themselves and mice scurry through cupboards and river rocks soak up the heat of the sun to warm lizards’ bellies, I open doors into invisible worlds and listen to the thoughts of others.
A sympathetic ear is so rare that individuals are almost always startled when you respond to their innermost ramblings. When you hear them whispering to themselves, “I hate you, I hate you! Nobody loves you!” and you crumple up just like a frightened pill bug and cry inconsolably, they will find it hard to accept that one occurrence is connected to the next. Plausible deniability.
Why not? Why not?
Why not one more song in the cool midnight blue? While babies sleep and spiders hunt and worried fathers pace, I make one more strange shape, electric green in the night. Can I make gold of this worthless lot? In dark hallways when I think I am alone? At the base of a mountain in the heat of a parking lot? Come with me deeper into the abyss!
Why not?
Why not?

Run As Fast As You Can

As fast as you can, run. Feet pounding against hard dry earth, then the sound of brittle dry grass and wild oats and wheat folding under foot. A frantic rustling sound, like the tearing of sheets of paper, run. The trees conspiring to make shade in a place accustomed to the tortures of the sun…slender young things, rebels in a desert. The white church with its friendly face and the weirdness tucked tight within, worshipers down on their hands and knees, new initiates stripped to their undergarments to be absolved of sin before their brethren’s eyes. Stripped of sin, of the mortal sin all begun with a bite into a crisp apple, sin originating from a resounding “crunch". See it in the jagged yellow action bubble.
Suddenly Eve beholds her nakedness. So now they take off their clothes in the basement of the church. But you don’t have to, you don’t have to go there. You can run. Run away from your parents and your teachers and the preacher and the neighbors. You can get away with strong young legs, but it’s not the strength of the body that they have restricted. It is the strength of the will. You are their slave. A sad host for their disease.
The trailers, the custom homes sprawled like mansions in a no man’s land, rest side by side, crowning hills and nestling within valleys. The woman with the high heels is coming, asking again if we’ll come help her with some work at her house. Smart gray knee length skirt and jacket, red lipstick, mahogany locks shining in the sun.
Everything looks just right. A fine outstanding citizen. We go, because we can no longer refuse and be considered polite, good neighbors, fine young people. Later, we can’t remember what happened at her house. We’re not even sure that we went.
Run, as fast as you can, run. The face of the house white as the church, charming green trim and the stairway around back that leads to another basement…
Smooth sun tanned arms and legs and freckled cheeks, walking through the fields, resting under the little trees. Scent of hot asphalt when we cross the only paved street in town for ice cream or magazines and bubble gum. Clouds of dust stirred up by our discolored sneakers as we race home along the dirt roads. Bigger clouds made by the tires of pick up trucks rattling along.
When we were younger we waved. Now sometimes we hear them coming and dive into the seas of tall grass. A refuge from all of their expectations. Lady bugs crawling up long stalks and other insects we haven’t named, pale green and yellow or black and red, also down here hiding.
The woman with the high heels smiling at us again in front of the white church. Won’t we come again? She always asks when others are present, ashen adults who admire her color, her charm. If we refuse they will frown at us. We are encouraged to go.
No!
We scream silently, hearts thundering, adrenaline rushing. Not even we know why, but we feel it from head to toe, a throbbing urge to run, as fast as we can. But with their eyes on us we can’t. We can only submit and walk back to her house, to the place we can only half remember. Back to the green sofa and tumblers of ice tea, the part we’re allowed to remember, the part that comes before the concrete steps and the cool darkness of the basement.
It comes bubbling up only in flashes, half remembered scenes that step beyond reason. Discordant images quickly pushed back into the depths, too incongruent with the shiny platitude of the surface. It is too late to act on the impulse to flee, but we do it anyway, with our minds, because it is too late for our bodies. As fast as you can, run, skimming over the top like flat stones over a pond’s mirror finish.

Pink Satin Roses Unraveling

Pink satin roses unraveling and round moon white belly out running tiny breasts. The great hallowed halls of my makers and their room of mirrors, that is the place where I go to wait. The wall of windows lies exposed and I can see the fields all gold and brown and the dusty green olive trees and a far away lake of dark blue. The sun shines eternally in that place and there is someone to take my hand and the memories shift like the beads at the end of a kaleidoscope, always changing the view. I am young and strong and brave again with the stars of wonder restored to my heart. I can run with long legs and bare feet into all of the days that come with lungs pumping and heart pounding, aching in my chest. The pleasure of letting the spirit fly through life outweighs the pain of moving the body so that there is no desire to stop. They make themselves old in that world far from the room of mirrors in the halls of the makers, stooped over desks and hunched over steering wheels. They die bit by bit each time that a bell is rung and they begin to practice this little death while they are children. Poison in silver wrappers, poison filled with sweet cream and stowed away in neat plastic boxes adorned with our favorite blue skinned heroes sets the mind racing when it finds its way into the blood stream. That is how we grow old, loosing our bodies to false gods and cramped spaces and sweet toxic substances that give us a moment of pleasure. That is how I grow old and come to sag, that and by giving myself away to all comers. Anyone who asks gets my attention. My parents start stealing it away when I am small. I come to believe it is what I must do in all cases, and only when it is too late, I realize that it must be stopped. I must keep a kernel for myself so that it can grow and flower again and again. Never ever give it all away. Keep it so that spring can come again. There is a way that leads to life and a way that leads to death. Not for the body alone, but for something else as well. We must live for the shimmering sliding something that passes through this world. It passes through what we think we are, it passes through the whole thing. Later we will read these words and we will think that they make no sense, but that is all a mater of perspective. You must be much bigger to see, you must be bleeding through the paper thin world of the temporary. I draw a cross in the little world and in the room of mirrors a door opens and I find a tiny sword in the darkness beneath a fur coat. It fills me with fear, because I never imagined I would find such a thing in this place. It came from somewhere that I am blind to, it has come from the Other. Now I have the tiny sword in my hands. I knew of the place outside of places when I found the sword. I knew it when I met the terrible yellow unicorn with its red eyes and it dared to defy the laws of the world that I inhabited. I knew it best of all when I stacked the brightly colored boxes, little ones on top of big ones or inside of big ones and there was a special square way that they fit. That was what taught me to understand space and it reminded me keenly of the place outside of places. Soft and sweet with little bits of pink satin roses coming unraveled, and a hard sidewalk on a pleasantly warm night and the infinite open above me. Another right there beside me and we are amazed that we are here, amazed that we are alive, amazed that there is another amazed one here, right now with the one I call “me”. The great hallowed halls of my makers and their room of mirrors, that is the place where I go to wait. That is where I am. A kernel kept for myself so that spring will come again.

Gentle Touch

The awesome power of the sea cannot be described to one that has never felt it. To stand on the shore and listen to that roar and dance around in that foamy main is to be like a mouse stepping gingerly about in a lion’s beard. We frolic and play in the mouth of a beast and on days when it’s mood and fair it tickles our ankles and laps at our thighs and rocks us gently. On days when it feels in a black mood it slaps our faces and stings our eyes and grabs us and tosses us down and holds us under, snatches a shovel or pail or small child and carries it away to satisfy the whims of the dark eyes of dripping fanged beasties of the deep sea. In some places you can look down at your toes through clear and gentle waters and in others the water of blue and green and churning salt lather hides things that snake slimily around your legs or rise pointedly between your toes so that you lift your foot and hurry away from whatever it is, maybe backing out of the water, hesitant now to accept its cool wet kiss. What sharp toothed things are hiding under that laughing undulating surface? Eels and sharks and things with claws and other thing that strange children warned you about when you played on the sand as a tot. What were those things that they warned you about? Warned you that they were hiding under the sand in the water where the surf breaks. Something that you thought you could see as a line under the sand, something like a snake but worse because it did not even need to breath air. What things are out there? The multicolored beach balls, the bright umbrellas pushed into the sand have never dreamed of the things that lie out there waiting for some unsuspecting fool to wade out too far or splash too much thus giving away their precise location. And yet, often the innocent play around in the briny wet and feel the tingle of power splashing their tummies. The sea can be tolerant and affectionate. It will wash its long lost kin as an old grandmother bathes an infant, with the softest possible touch. With the same tenderness, it will feed them small shiny wriggling things, even if like some infants we bite at the very teat from which we wish to nurse. We would do well not to forget that it is a lioness with whom we are dealing, and her great age leaves her with no less ferocity than she was capable of in the days when her waters were red and not blue. So tread lightly little mouse. Play carefully, and never let down your guard.