Magick

It doesn’t hurt to see something new.
What about finding magic right here? In the woman in the white hoodie who seems to come up from out of the sea and hurries past the post office? In a little boy asking his father why there’s ham in his breakfast sandwich? In the hat that blew down the street, as if in the hands of phantoms, always just out of reach of the woman who chased it?
How about these scratches in the metal window frames? Looking through these windows reminds me of looking through the window of the train, the Pacific Coast Surfliner, seeing the waves through glass. Here the windows are covered in a film of dried salt spray.

What about the music? It’s  sultry rock, reminiscent of the Velvet Underground, probably something new, but slowly rocking, fuzzy, half dreamed music. Without it there is the whir of an espresso machine, the titanic hum of an old refrigeration unit.

The wind rattled all night, I was awake before I was ready, sinuses distressed by the pollen explosion called April. Rain, wind, sun, rain, sun; a conspiracy for the propagation of flowers.
In my dream the scientists lowered the lights and sang like dwarves about Terence McKenna and the deep dark expanse of space.
Then suddenly I’m here and it seems clear that this scene isn’t meant for me. I should be lighting candles and performing secret rituals behind black curtains. Whatever possessed me to attempt to balance a hot beverage and a netbook on a small round table, badly balanced on the tiles? Maybe the same thing that took the woman’s hat…

The wind! It blew me off course in the night and here I am in Pacifica, California.
Where did my train car go? I never was in one. It was a space ship and the OTHER was on the loose. I led my sister to the 24th deck were the scientists were working away on theoretical problems. I explained what was happening.
“There is an alien on the loose. It looks like…” I struggle to describe it, to remember it, “like a crayfish sort of. Well, it will lodge itself on your face and lay eggs inside of you and later the offspring will explode out of your stomach.” 
The scientists, at first disbelieving, now appear frightened. I indicate that they should cover their mouths with their hands, and under no circumstance hang their heads over the edge of the bed to look underneath. I have a pencil with which I intend to stab the thing if I see it.

“It could be anywhere at this point.”
Everyone looks anxiously around the room.
“But don’t worry,” I comfort them, “I have this.”
I indicate the pencil,
“I’ll protect you but you have to come up with a plan. You have to think of a way we can contain an area to keep it out, then a way for us to kill it.”

Earlier, I was fleeing its presence and was separated from my team. We were in the midst of taking action in accordance with our plan. I saw my team leader Cam go one way and I went another. The elevator doors opened and another Cam came towards me, I turned to see if Cam number one saw Cam number two coming.

“Cam!” “I called, “It’s you! It’s you from the future!”
But Cam from the future was in a hurry and couldn’t wait for Cam number one.
She grabbed my shoulders.
“Listen to me, it’s not going to work. You have to try something different!”
Then she had to rush away, into another glowing portal of light.
That was when I decided to consult the scientists.

“This scone isn’t as biscuity as I would like. Is the coffee cake the same price?” I ask.
“It’s less.” she tells me.
“Well, I don’t care, I’d rather have coffee cake.”
We make the trade and she gives me back seventy five cents. What am I doing here?
There’s a little boy playing Jenga at one of the round tables. An orange balloon is stuck to the window under the words pastries, cookies, cakes. Outside the waves look swollen, the sea is choppy.

What about the music? It’s  sultry rock, reminiscent of the Velvet Underground, probably something new, but slowly rocking, fuzzy, half dreamed music. Without it there is the whir of an espresso machine, the titanic hum of an old refrigeration unit.
What about finding magic right here? In the woman in the white hoodie who seems to come up from out of the sea and hurries past the post office? In a little boy asking his father why there’s ham in his breakfast sandwich? In the hat that blew down the street, as if in the hands of phantoms, always just out of reach of the woman who chased it?
It doesn’t hurt to see something new.

Leaf

Every time I catch sight of a falling leaf I feel that I have witnessed an awesome event.
Why is that?
For a moment I consider that it’s like when a baby loses a tooth, but then I realize, no, it’s more rare to witness any given tree dropping a leaf than a child loosing their tooth. You know how many teeth your child will loose as they mature, you will be there for many of them, and those extractions you don’t witness, you’ll be informed about, in most cases you’ll hold the tooth in your hand, you might sneak it out from under a pillow and leave a silver dollar in its place.
That leaf that you see falling from a tree is more like one of innumerable hairs falling from a head, which when you think of it that way, at first, it seems like no occasion for awe. People shed hair all the time, and so must trees shed their leaves, even when it’s unseasonable.
Why then the awe?
Because it’s an intimate moment shared with this random tree. I may never see it loose another leaf. The next time I pass, it may be a still bit of scenery, either naked, or covered in orange or green foliage. It will give an impression of being static, as if it has always stood thus. My attention will be attracted to the moving objects in the environment, humans, birds, cars, cats. If I take note of the tree, it will be of the whole tree, or the entire canopy of leaves shimmering with sunlight, but not of that moment of separation, that instant when a small part of the entirety falls.
I suppose that is where the awe originates.
To see a leaf fall is like witnessing a birth, the moment when something that was a part of one thing emerges suddenly distinct and isolated. Behold the brave leaf twirling gracefully towards the earth, a solitary thing, dancing on the wind, lost eventually to the mulch. It’s a lifetime that lapses before my eye for a duration of time that I call 3 seconds.
Likewise, I am still twirling in free fall, no longer what I was, not yet what I will be, a thing in motion, excited, confused, thrilled, frightened, streaking through a duration of time with definite limits. Transience, mortality, in the falling of a leaf. The mirror of my own existence.
Every time I catch sight of a falling leaf I have witnessed my own transgression.

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.

Recognition

I saw your face again today for the very first time in a long while. Your eyes sparkled like diamonds.
When we looked at each other it was as if there were nothing separating us, we could see each other, and we each knew the other was seeing us back. It hasn’t been quite like that for a very long time. Not quite like that.
It reminded me of a night in a distant dream where you came and sat on the couch in my living room while my lover was out. You came and sat there on that maroon sued couch not far from a life size painting of Pan that my lover had commissioned months ago.
I saw you and I said:
“It’s over now.”
And you looked at me, perhaps coyly, smiling while the rest of your face and body seemed passive, immobile. You asked me what I meant.
“Seeing you sitting here. It’s like you’ve come to claim me. My life is over.”
You were pleased, because it was true. I was frightened, but you told me not to be afraid.
We left that dream together and entered another and here we have been.
This has happened many times between us, in many different dreams. You arrive and I go with you. Whatever dream I have been living, when you come, it is a pale mirage in comparison to your stark presence.
My lovers, my families, my hopes, my wishes, my plans, my hobbies, my friends, my accomplishments, my shortcomings, my possessions, I leave them and we go on.
You have led me out of the nightmare dimensions in this way, you are still leading me from them in this way. We are at this moment, in the darkest chamber of existence and in the brightest and in every place between, and in all of them, I am seeing you and you are seeing me and we each are aware of this rare experience of recognition.

Close Encounters

Something genuine is happening, is happening, right now, a radiation of some kind that has an actual effect on your mind.
Your deepest self is like a pool, a wide open clear pool, a secret landing site hidden within a mountain surrounded by military personnel and sleeping bovines.
Will the soldiers stop the visitor who comes from far beyond before it can reach the pool and submerge itself in your waters?
What if it wants to take you into its own secret pool, hidden behind strange lights? Will you go?
When the world comes unhinged and the mother screams for it to “Go Away!” will you let it go without you?
Will you run and cower between mother's legs? Or will you walk out to meet its otherness with arms stretched wide?
Will you come out and say I am here, I see you, in sounds and gestures and the simple physical truth of your manifestation?
It is something genuine, but whether you will say later that it was from outer space or from heaven or from hell or from within the earth is all subjective.
You may say that it was a dream, or that it was only a hallucination, but these words are inconsequential. We can never accurately say what it was, because we were altered by the encounter with it. The nature of what it is prevents us from understanding with animal intellect what it is.
It is not subject to language. If we talk about it, we are not actually saying anything about it, we are saying something about ourselves, about our subjective perceptions and distorted memories.
The mother, the wife, the maternal super power will tell us that nothing is happening, that we must pretend nothing unusual is occurring, that we must stay away from the mountain. Will you ignore her and chase it? Will it chase you? Will you meet in the middle, waters coming to waters, with no common language but an ability to be in the same space together, without understanding, without fear?
What game can you play but the mirror game?
Will it go if the mother screams “Go Away!” Will you go if the soldiers say “Danger! Turn Back!” Or will you meet in the mountain behind the strange lights, visitor and visitor, pilgrims sharing water on the mountain.
Something genuine is happening , is happening, right now, something that can’t be understood as it comes in by disrupting the mechanism for understanding.
Later you may say that it was a text, a video, a photograph or a phone call. You will try to frame it with words, but there aren’t any words for what it is, for what is happening. It comes from beyond the world built of words.
It is happening, something genuine, now, disrupting the system for processing information. It is not yes, it is not no, it is not one or zero.
Like a flood overtaking the mountain, it rushes in, for a moment disabling the fortress, undermining the protector, rushing in to bathe itself in the secret pool that is your deepest self.
Will you retreat? Hide from what is happening? Will you rush forth to meet it, wriggling beyond the defenses to be in the wide open clear place?
Will you let it in? Will you go out to greet it?
Something genuine is happening, is happening, right now.
A dream, a hallucination, an encounter with something Other.
Something Genuine.

Small Wonders

Small wonder, small world, little things that count. Subtle gestures, unchained sounds, unhinged motions, the delicate matrix of true Magick. With a K, without a K, with or without the letters M A G I C, it is so. I am that I am, am what I am, reflections of self, illusions sprung from the void. I choose a point and designate it the center, this motion, this happening that I think of as “I”, but which is not. “I” am not static, not stable, not what “I” says to itself that it is. Am not woman, mother, magician. Am and am not. Words drift over the surface, make changes, wield secret power while underneath the abyss swirls. A trap door to eternity. Step outside. Outside of time, outside of space, outside of language, outside of “I”.
How to do this? Subtle gestures, unchained sounds, unhinged motions. Telling is not the way out. Words alone, cruel and binding, lead only to more words, to thoughts, to associations, to dead ends, to corridors linked with more words until self is smothered in heaps of ghosts, signifiers whose signified was left behind long ago and exchanged for a doppelganger. Alive. To be without meaning, without want of meaning, meaning which sprouts from babble, the tower, confusion, separation. Mirrors. This motion through space time that I have called “I” that others have called “Mother” and “Daughter” and “Bonita” is reflected elsewhere.
Every step I take, every move I make, reverberates throughout the Globlap. Other dimensions, others that call themselves “I” reflect this motion. Others that do not call themselves at all reflect this motion. Attention, intention, will, habit, words, words like the wings of moths that eat through the fabric of pure communication. It must be done, thy will, on earth as it is in the heavens, as it is in the hells, as it is here now, at this point of convergence, this axis “I” designate as center.
Something moves through all illusion, all apparent motion. Something comes ALIVE in these reflections. Any reflection will do. Any reflection that suddenly sees itself and quakes with knowing. This too is reflected in other dimensions, other reflections which tremble suddenly with recognition. I AM ALIVE. I AM REAL. I AM THAT I AM. I am what I am, reflections of self, illusions sprung from the clear and shinning void.
Thinking deep reflective thoughts is not the way. Saying this is not the way, is not the way. Out. Step out. Tunnel out through a hall of mirrors, quaking reflections forming a bridge, a path, a via, a way, a way that is a happening, a way that is a motion, a subtle gesture, small wonder, small world, little things that count. Little things that multiply. Quivering fractals of life, swirling patterns of light, infinite extension. Existence beyond the word. Come out. Come out. Outside of time, outside of space, outside of language, outside of “I”.

Love Letter

So I sit on the train, glaringly aware of their ignorance. How can they know what is happening under my skull? In my veins and along the branching network of my nervous system, demons are howling and stomping out a rhythm to accompany the dark rite that is happening in plain view, this orgy of fingers on slick paper and eyes opened wide. I see the skulls and insects and organic eruptions of form in stark black and white, and I am home.
The dragon fly. I would find one dying on my porch later, and after going inside to uncover the details of its life cycle I would determine that there was nothing I could do to help restore it to the so called land of the living. Having ruled out any other option, I would sit with it, gazing into its bulbous eyes, experiencing through empathy the alien beauty of its consciousness and I would sing a whining high pitched song in its honor. I would sit with it until it died, and then I’d put its remains on a shelf in the garage. That shelf would already have a far out collage made from National Geographic clippings and a white candle waiting for this final element to come and rest with them, encircled by purple daisies picked from a shrub in the backyard. In short I would enshrine the remains of this voyager that laid himself down on my front stair. I would piggy back on its continued cycle of occult transformation.
I had learned that large dragon flies begin their lives as something called a nymph, living hidden from our eyes in the bottoms of ponds and lakes for as long as five years before becoming those things called dragon flies. The part of their existence with which we humans are most familiar with is the briefest segment of their lives. It transpires in a flash. They are only dragon flies for a matter of a few months before they lay down and wait for some mysterious part of themselves to move once again into a world of which we humans are ignorant. I would learn all of this for myself when I would find the dragonfly on my porch, but that is a month away from now, a moment existing in a future whose shape is eclipsed by the present.
I am now only looking at a black and white image of a dragon fly printed on the pages of this thing I hold in my hands. I feel the blood in my veins dancing like witches at a Sabbath and I look at the stupefied faces of my fellow passengers frozen in attitudes of boredom, fatigue, and apathy. I look at the silly putty color of their skin and their crisp gray suits or bright red lipsticks and am amazed that they are so distant from this space that I occupy; a universe born of the lusty unification of my twisted mind and this thing in my hands. We are so physically close, breathing the same stale air of this rocking train car, smelling each others’ chemical front, the colognes, perfumes, and body sprays we doused ourselves in to disguise our animal odors, yet the distance between us is impossible to bridge because it has not been noticed. They must see another putty colored mannequin sitting here turning the pages of a magazine. They cannot see the elysian ritual transpiring within this fleshy temple, cannot wittiness with their glassy eyes the terrible magick being worked in neurons and sinews, all catalyzed by my contact with this thing. A transformation initiated by this unholy relic whose radiation is causing a mutation, augmenting elements of my self that needed only the tiniest push to come into full bloom.
Advertisements streak by the tinted rectangles of glass and a steady clack, clack, imposes itself upon my ears. The realization that something will come of this is as bright as transparent wings catching sunlight reflected off water, but what that will be is unknown. That is the terrible risk inherent in change. What I am cannot dream of what I will become, it is too deeply other. All that I can do is sit here, feeling my heart thump, feeling my spirit swell out beyond the confines of this body, this train car, beyond anything recognizable. I feel something invisible growing, like antenna reaching out from me to dip into darkest waters. I feel this and I watch the man in the seat ahead of me maintain his perfectly subdued expression as if he were afraid to alter it in any way. Clutching this thing in my hands, looking around at the other passengers, aware of the growing chasm between us, I ride the train, and flip through the pages and wait for the shapes of things to emerge.

We Wear The Music

We wear our music. That’s all that we are really interested in, what our music looks like. How it sounds is secondary. Fashion is the most important element of music at this moment. Its faciomusica coadunatio. At my high school everyone wanted a green Mohawk. Everyone wore studded leather belts and bracelets and died their hair and pierced anything they could and held their clothing altogether with rows of shiny safety pins. Hardly anyone liked to listen to Punk Rock, but everyone wanted to look like it. One boy arrived at our school dressed in all black. He had been imported straight from Los Angeles and his hair too was long and raven hued. He wore Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails and Type O Negative T-shirts. I bought albums based purely on the way he looked, and listened to them with religious fervor, waiting for my own hair and nails and lips to turn black, even though I disliked some of the music more than not. I had a serious case of faciomusica coadunatio.
My understanding of this condition is limited to my own experience with it. The truth is that my hair, lips, and nails never turned black. I never put on a Skinny Puppy tee shirt. Hell, I never even got out of my orange polka dots and electric green paisley prints and into a nice black tee shirt, until I managed to hook up with a guy who was wearing one. Then I wore his. The truth is that listening is not something we humans do well. It requires attention, a sort of non-animal interest, and we are most thoroughly animals. Being social animals we have an overwhelming need to be accepted, to fit in. Fitting in is crucial for animals. For example I once had a hen that killed every black chick that hatched in her nest and spared only the two that were yellow like her. We humans are the same way. We look for visual cues to signify for us whether or not someone is one of our kind. Image is crucial. Being highly adaptive we have developed fashion, which is a method for disguising our true ambiguous nature so that we can fit neatly into a particular clan of humans.
You can look at our clothes and see who we want you to think we are.
“I listen to country.” Means I am a good old American Christian guy or gal. I say this with a pair of blue jeans, with a big belt buckle, with boots and a hat.
“I listen to rap.” Means I’m the bad ass urban outlaw and hustler. I say this with gold chains and baggy pants and shiny new sneakers.
“I listen to Rock.” Means I’m the jaded “not quite all American” that feels a little snobbish about that not quite part but is still fairly protective of the All American. I say this with frayed or torn blue jeans and T-shirt.
“I listen to Alternative” means I am way too snobbish for the glorified country twang that passes for rock, I might even be a communist if that pisses you off.
Punk = I don’t care what you think or how many times I get punched.
Jazz = I’m thoughtful, possibly educated and I like coffee and rainy afternoons.
Classical = I’m very thoughtful, I love the arts, I think global and buy specialty shoes and sometimes have my pants tailored.
There are greater and greater levels of subtlety that might be explored, but it is all a complete ruse. We may or may not be those things we want you to think we are, but we have become adepts at the art of faciomusica coadunatio.
Now buying a shirt or pair of pants is the same as buying music. You can even buy shoes and get a free song on some web sites. The song is like a breath mint offered to you after your dinner. Clever musicians, aware that music should be free, have found a way to slip it in with our habit for primping our image. Like Mary Poppins, they realized that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” With faciomusica coadunatio, you can fuss about with your image and get some music without noticing.
We wear the music when perhaps we should let the music wear us. We should let it flow through us and move our bodies, minds and spirits wherever it wills, unimpeded by our monkey brains. The real is there, existing despite the genres and social implications. Nothing is the way it appears. Eyes lie, and so many organisms have learned to turn that fact to their advantage, developing camouflage so that they won’t be eaten by larger organisms. Knowing this, we should go forward accepting that what we see is not what we get. If we open our hearts and listen there is so much more to music than the way we look when we hear 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.

Earth

I come from the earth and to the earth I will return. It’s no wonder that I should chase after the horned God of the underworld. I remember springing from the dirt. I come from the land and the land comes from me. I never was, I never will be. And still the grass grows and the worms crawl beneath it’s yellow coat and the earwigs creep into the cracks of the houses that men built. The black widow hides in the cedar. Death resting quietly in the shade, spinning her scattered incoherent web.
My father showing me the creatures of the earth, holding the black widow in his vice grips, calling me to come and look. Frightened, I hover at a distance. He assures me that it’s safe, come closer look at death so that you will know her when you meet her. He shows me her belly with its red hour glass. This is how you will recognize her. Stay away from her, don’t touch her, don’t play with her, and be careful in the dark places, she is there.
Another time he calls me and, when I come, he is holding a brilliant green snake in his hands. Again he tells me to come closer. This time he shows me the beautiful snake glittering in the sun like a length of new garden hose and tells me it won’t hurt me. This is a good snake, it helps the trees to grow. It kills the gophers that nibble their roots. It may bite you if you frighten it, but no great harm will come of that. It is a beautiful snake and I feel happy looking at it in my father’s hands and happier still when he sets it gently down. I laugh excitedly, watching it slither away, disappearing in the green of the grass as though it had never been there.
I come from the earth. I’ve carried it under my fingernails and in my hair. I’ve felt it under my bare feet. Its thorns have buried themselves in my flesh, its barrel thorns and fox burs have embedded themselves in my clothing. I’ve crawled around in its strong wooden arms and plucked its fruits and danced naked over its grassy back. I climbed to the tops of the trees and balanced above the deep dusty green canopy and drank in the sight that surrounded me; blue sky, yellow sun, dull golden grass like a head of blonde hair, the old broken fence of a brown so dark it is nearly black, sloping and falling, letting its planks return to the earth in broken rotted bits, the white house with the red tile roof, tall and proud and frightening and sad and hopeful, the mountains dark and round, mysterious and menacing and inviting.
I knew as I looked around me that I must remember the sight, that it was an important moment to be so high and see it all. I knew it was more beautiful than anything I was ever likely to see again. I knew it, but was at loss as to what should be done with such knowledge. I tried to hold it inside of me, but could feel it slipping even as I grasped at it, like sand through my fingertips, thoughts of school and playmates and my parents in the shape of words formed inside of my mind, washing the sight from my eyes even as I beheld it and, eventually, I climbed back down into the dark shade and silver branches below.
I nursed a black goat with a white star on her forehead from a glass bottle and a smelly rubber nipple and called her baby and watched her grow, the little nubs of her horns slowly working their way up just as the teeth in my own mouth would do from time to time. The goat disliked the smell of the awful rubber nipple and refused to take nourishment until my grandmother took her into her soft wrinkled hands and doused the nipple in milk and insisted, her old steely blue eyes shining mischievously. Then the kid drank and wagged its black nub of a tail and flicked its delicate furred ears.
I remember earth. Even here, sitting in my plaster box over the concrete and asphalt that reaches as far as I can see, I remember the untamed earth. The dirt and insects and serpents and death and horns which push to the surface where once there was nothing. One day I will return to it. I will be home. I sprang from the earth and to the earth I shall return.

Enjoy The Trip

As a passenger you get to sit back and enjoy the trip. You don’t have to know what is happening in the cockpit, you don’t have to know what is happening in the communications tower. You are entirely unaware of the 5 other hunks of flying metal that are lifting off the ground in the same second that your own is rattling out of gravity’s finger tips. You have no idea that another plane has just been redirected so that it won’t collide with yours as it attempts to come in for a landing 59 seconds early. You know that the charming woman up ahead is going to bring you peanuts, (mmmm… peanuts) and a fizzy beverage after the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt lights. Your mouth is watering and you’re trying to decide whether you would like a Coke or a Clamata and wondering if you might persuade her to part with two bags of peanuts on your behalf while death is soaring around with you, talons neatly spread, wondering if it can make off with two jet planes full of people (mmmm… people). While you fret over the discovery that this airline no longer serves the honey roasted peanuts you had so perfectly envisioned and has switched to serving pretzels instead, some prematurely balding man in a button up white shirt is determining your fate. All you have to do is sit back, relax and enjoy the trip. When you hit that bed of clouds where veterans of the war that decided Satan’s fate are swapping stories and drowning their woes in tankards of still born’s tears, the turbulence makes your Sprite (the caffeine in Coke makes you pee and Clamata sounded too salty for this time of day, especially without vodka and celery) splashes all over your tray. Damn! You wipe it up with a napkin that conveniently sports a map of the US with all of the cities which this airline serves highlighted. When your plane changes course to avoid a lightning storm, you’re oblivious, reading the latest issue of Forbes that you bought in the gift shop back at the terminal. When you’re done with that, you ogle the flight attendant as she comes around again for your garbage and enjoy the view of her rear as she works her way up the aisle past you. Soon your plane is engaged in a whole new ballet of high speed hunks of metal guided by fallible human directors who may or may not be distracted just now because this high stress job has taken a toll on their sex life and their significant other stormed out this morning with packed bags. Death perks up again, hopeful, but you land safely and get to see the fasten seat belts light turn off and smell the armpits of the guy next to you as he reaches into the overhead compartment for his duffel bag. As a passenger, all you have to do is sit back, enjoy the trip, and say thank you when it is over.

Now

For one moment the world is startlingly clear. I can see it, beyond the veil of senseless brain chatter. The world is a bathtub, the kind that doubles as a shower, and I am staring up the tiled side and at a square air vent. I can see the fuschia towel hanging over the frosted plastic doors that roll on their aluminum track. I can see a bottle of ginger beer, green and perspiring on the ledge, but most of all I see the tile wall rising up on one side of me, I can see where it gives way to drywall and turns into the ceiling and pools around that square vent.
It is the most beautiful world. Strange and alive. I stare at it from the bottom of the tub where there is just enough water to warm the back of my neck, head, shoulders, buttocks and feet. My knees are bent because I am too long for the tub. The water level is too low to reach over my breasts and belly so they are exposed to the pleasantly cool air while my back side soaks in the salty wetness.
Then I close my eyes and drift back behind the veil to visit ghosts of princes past, I can see their eyes, angelic eyes, so sweet and troubling, (we know what angels do with earth women when they’re rambling down around the upper crust, the bible tells us so), and I wonder why they rode off into the sunset without me, when we could have seen the world as I have just glimpsed it together.
Whatever other ruminations blanket me are lost when I open my eyes to see again. Let me see again for a minute. My eyes go wide and look upon the ivory chamber encapsulating me and everything is silent. My mind holds its breath.
Then again I close my eyes and my mind exhales a torrent of thoughts. The first few bursts are poetry, words winding around the experience I have just had, like weeds choking out a garden, but lovely flowering weeds just the same, the sort I will use if I ever leave the bathtub and find a place to write them down, if I can remember them then...
Poetry gives way to crystallized theories, ideas about what it means to be alive, to perceive what I have just perceived. Courses of action are suggested and examined based on these new theories and then it comes down to a simmer, to a vaporized mass of memory and desire.
But for one instant I pulled all of the desire overflowing from my cup back into the vessels and let it boil. Too much. It overflows like water from a bubbling fountain and my focus is lost, a sailor adrift in the fog, waiting for the disabling conditions to pass. I do as much as I can with the situation as it is and wait for the mists to clear again, some time.
I sit up and drink the ginger beer. I slide back down into the water and it sloshes over my face, disturbed by my movements. Again I gaze upward, but this time I am thinking about what I saw before. I am thinking about the previous experience so that even if I am having a similar experience now, I don’t notice due to this trick of effleurage.
This is how I birthed my children; by rubbing my fingers on the bed sheets so that the sensation of doing so was carried to my brain, and due to the extreme sensitivity of the nerve endings in my finger tips, that message was received and processed by my overwrought nervous system before the notification that something tremendous was going on below the navel, thereby deadening the sensation of birth pains. In the same way, the mind froths with postulations based on the past and makes projections extending into the future to escape the intensity of NOW, the now that, like a star, is too brilliant to hold onto for too long. But if you can manage it, then for one moment the world is startlingly clear. And deathly quiet. And starkly radiant.

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

Campside

Alright now. It’s time for lunch; come and toast your marshmallows over the roasting pit that is my groin. Look here, just like a pit dug for a fire in the wilderness, here lies my own personal camp site blackened with the soot and charcoal so that it looks like a dank and dripping cavern that goes on and on. There is a physical limit to its depth. Like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, if your travel through this tunnel you will hit a wall where you will have to leave your body behind, but by then you’ll be flying so fast you won’t need that body any more, glistening as it does with beads of sweat like the sequins on an absinthe intoxicated flappers dress. By then, you’ll be flying with me in perfect seamless unity powered by the engine of grinding hips and in the faint distance you can hear the heavy breathing and moaning, but by now the blackest abyss has opened up in front of you and you spiral into it with me. We are a nameless formless thing swallowing itself endlessly as it deepens.
This is how we feed ourselves, when no one is looking, we come out like black eyed deer to drink from pools that reach down through the center of the earth and back out again into the farthest reaches of that star flecked darkness. Slurp! We suck in the dreams of our ancestors, the dreams of the first flecks of electrically charged specks of flint dust that came together in the nothing for a camp side sing along. Mamma electron in her shredded fishnets and leather mini skirt dances around Papa proton reclining in the cool shadows licked by flame, the rolls of his flabby stomach creeping out from under his greasy white tee shirt to hang over the black leather belt studded with silver, his beard trailing down over that unmovable gut. And then after she has wiggled her ass for him a bit she spots another camp fire not too far off and splits and he’s left muttering and weeping,
"Goddamn cunt! Got no fucking loyalty!" And another little dancer in the dark hears him sniffling and sees his sad little fire and aching with tingling desire brings some more kindling, rubs her tits in his face and says,
"Hey Papa don’t cry. I’ll keep you company." And so it goes on and on forever, and we drink deeply of it, letting it soak into our insides like kerosene poured over old rags.
It seems that this primordial dance is everything, a center for our worship to reside in, a Mecca to travel to and then, foot sore, throw ourselves down upon our knees and sway. Then we discover that it is not the destination at all, but rather the mouth of the true road, the point from which the real pilgrimage will be launched.
It is the matrix we skip upon like fantasia fairies skating on the surface of a freezing pond, the stage from which we may launch any story at all. We make our roads in the forge, from out of this primordial union, all pattern, all twisting labyrinths emerge. All of that rubbing and gasping, shuddering and screaming is our play dough, ready to be made into new shapes.
What do I know about the universe, about the cosmos?
Men go away and study at universities learning the mating habits of hydrogen and oxygen. I go to bed and look at what bubbles up from my only connection to every experience I have ever had; my self, spreading out like the scattered pieces of a fractured mirror.
What is this stuff?
What am I?
What is this experience we call life and its nympho sister death, always sneaking into life’s room to suck at it while everyone looks away frightened, ashamed, and embarrassed.
How can I pretend that it isn’t all me?
That it hasn’t all arisen from me, or that I haven’t arisen from it so that any nightmare that can crawl onto my back and make me scream and every dream that awes me with tantalizing beauty is the face of my own origin.
I am the ugliest.
I am the most lovely.
I am all things scattered upon the floor and I am no thing reflecting the face of no other thing.
When the black man comes to me and asks why I haven’t called him, I know that it is because I have forgotten him, lost in the maze that we made together, but in the very shape of my hands lie the clues as to who I am and who he may be. And we two are made to fly together, writhing by the fire.
So come now and warm yourself and feed yourself at my pit. We have many camp side stories to tell in the language of dilated pupils and advancing heart rates.

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.

Good Morning

Good morning world, good morning sun, good morning song unsung. Do you hear it yet caught in my throat, the first cry of the day, the first scream of the new born infant just expelled from the mother’s womb and grasped in latex covered doctors hands? A shout of anguish, of excitement, an announcement of arrival. I have come world! Be prepared for what I bring. Though not even I can tell what it will be, I will make my contribution to the cosmic din and it starts with this note; "aaahhhh!"
Good morning carpet blue and houseplant green, drinking up the morning sun. Good morning squeaky faucet and ghostly telephone voices. I am ready, like a Scottish warrior painted robins egg blue and waiting on a windy hillside, I am ready to tumble into the fray, ready to roll like soap bubbles up out of the churning bath water, ready to dance on air like a Kung Fu master. I may fall or I may burst, but gravity and time will have to catch me first, and I have been made to run, like the prince with a thousand enemies. Behind every corner a trap lies hidden, a foe in wait licks at its sharp fangs and spreads its pointed claws, but I have been made hummingbird quick so that I may pass before the trap has been fully sprung.
So good morning foe, and good morning friend. Good morning eyes that might glean the difference between one and the other, round and blue and creased at the edges. A new day begins, a chapter in a story which starts with the lines: the day began like any other except that she couldn’t remember any other day and was stunned to find that she lived in a spacious apartment with steel bars over the windows and piles of recyclable bottles shifting and sliding around on the back porch. Her bed was like a cloud, or a birds nest suspended high above the carpeted floor. The ceiling as white as a frosted wedding cake spread out above her a mere 3 or 4 feet from the tip of her nose. Anyone awaking thus would well wonder how they came to be so close to the ceiling.
Peeking timidly over the edge, she found that it was in fact a loft bed with no ladder, so she sat amid the folds of lavender and blue sheets like Titania in her bed, waiting for the fairy maids to come and lower her down, but none came. Instead two small frightening creatures came roaring into the room and cried,
"What’s for breakfast?" They were children and they seemed to think that she was their mother so like baby birds they chirped, "We’re hungry. What is for breakfast?"
Like a dreamer she guessed what might come next in the dream and steered as best she could in a favorable direction by answering: "Cereal."
And like a dreamer, she willed the cereal to be there as the little creatures clambered away to open a refrigerator door and pull chairs around so that they groaned as they were dragged over the linoleum to be stood upon in order that the cereal, (which miraculously was there), could be reached. She gazed out the window between the bars and was delighted to see a small hummingbird hovering near the top wrung of the fire ladder hanging on the side of the building across the alley. This seemed to be a good omen.
"Good morning bird." She said, and then after finding a way down the loft, "Good morning children." , and after looking around, "Good Morning world, and sun, and song unsung."

That Which Dwelt There

The contour of the candle- the contour of my body. The heat of its flame- the cinnamon fire of my heart. Every little knock, every little bump is a pulse or a beat in the larger chaotic body of me. I am not entirely separate from the mass and I am not entirely a cohesive part of it. I am the right shape on the outside. I have two arms, two legs, two breasts, two hands, two feet, and seven holes in my head. Like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle I fit in the most basic way, cut by the same blades that cut all the pieces of every puzzle ever made. And yet I have begun to create a puzzle of my own, a micro-puzzle assembled of a being with two hands, two feet, two legs, two arms, and seven holes in the head, a puzzle that I rebuild daily, each time adjusting the configuration just slightly so that the changes are subtle, almost unnoticeable from day to day, but over the course of years they will begin to form an entirely new picture. A little picture within the greater picture. A little picture whose story is encompassed within the matrix of the bigger story, but whose themes flow in the opposite direction. A paradoxical piece within the greater arrangement. The murmur of others from the room next door is the murmur of blood in the veins. Their raucous disagreement is the argument between a cancer and the nearly defeated quietude once enforced by the paladin-like white blood cells. Murmur, murmur, whine. They negotiate endlessly, unhappily for eternity, for ten dollars an hour and for want of anywhere better to be. I am the cottage cheese ceiling holding me in under its bumpy white mountains of plaster. I am the textured walls hugging me without warmth in a formal gesture of caring and duty. I am the window with its blinds turned shut and the bed with its covers pulled closed and the soft dark green carpet upon which every fleck of debris is embarrassingly apparent. I. am a backyard filled with mud and a front yard carpeted with green grass, lawn reindeer, and wild brambles. I am an artificial tree raised upon a table and adorned with ornaments passed down four generations. It is all here, painted into the jigsaw piece with it parts swimming upon the surface, two by two and with seven in the head. And each day it gets adjusted slightly, like the details of a dream; a wall disappearing, a ceiling rising, bending, a window opening to blink out at the universe like a sleep refreshed eye. A muddy yard that becomes a swamp inhabited by a giant toad with a dog’s fangs, and lawn reindeer which spring to life and carry elves away into the deep of a forest. The endless winding roads lined with identical houses become a desert void of life, and in the distance upon a hilltop, the water tower is the forbidden tower in which the old wizard lives, and when I arrive there I find that he is my own father and it is my own living room organized around an artificial tree. In the depths, I will overturn the phony tree and in the green carpet I will plant some seeds that a giant gave to me, and the Halub tree will sprout in the center of my house, crashing through the cottage cheese ceilings, breaking open the windows, making the plush carpet a moss covered forest floor. The maiden of light will come out of the tree and dance with her son the planter. The angel that fell from the top of the phony tree when it toppled shall be called Samael and he will guard this new garden and its wild things, and make music for them to sway and frenzy to. The elves and the reindeer will trickle back in and the old wizard’s head will crack open as a young man bursts free to join the spectacle. The cancerous murmur will become the beat of the tympani. The whiners become lutes played by nimble fingers. My heart becomes the bonfire around which all will dance.
Looking back we will see how different this world is now from what it was when it began. Looking closely, we will see all of the elements of the old world still present, but we will see how they have adjusted to house a greater spirit, much greater than that which dwelt there before.

Intelligent Life

We would not know it if an intelligent life form or species of life forms was attempting to contact us even if they were. We lack the openness and unbiased power of observation that would allow us to perceive intelligence in an organism or system which was not very much akin to ourselves in physicality and ideology, but neither of these attributes signify intelligence in and of themselves.
Consider that as human beings we have been unable throughout the course of our brief history on earth to grant that other human beings who were physically different from us and whose language and culture varied from our own were equal in intelligence to ourselves. We have been unable to recognize intelligence in others of our own species. We have denied them freedoms, taken advantage of their perceived weaknesses, abused and tortured them, and only now, in the 21st century, are we beginning to consider it politically incorrect to assume supremacy based on race, and that is still up for private consideration in the minds of many. As long as the bigotry can be thinly veiled, it will still be granted entrance into mainstream politics and our day to day interactions. Supremacy based on creed yet runs rampant and no consideration whatsoever is given to the notion that our philosophies, our ideas and habitual mind sets are not inherently worthy, they are just ours.
We as a species may not even be adequately equipped to interact in a meaningful way with an intelligence functioning on a vastly different level than our own. For example, something could be transmitting a message to you right now, but, without the appropriate aperture to receive that message, it will go, metaphorically speaking, right over your head. Forget that what we consider a message and what we consider intelligence may not in fact be very intelligent or ripe with meaning in a more universal context.
We are not alone in our ability to self perpetuate and colonize, we are only unique in some of our methods, in the applications of certain tools. Are we really better than all the other life forms present upon this planet because of our linguistic skills and cognitive reasoning? Perhaps these are aberrations more than special qualifications.
Evolution functions via mutation, and that mutation which caused our Cro-Magnon ancestors to beat out (possibly even violently, contributing to the course of their extinction) the Neanderthals may be the cause of our isolation. We perceive ourselves as being alone in the universe because we are mutants, creations with an deviant consciousness that has been cut us off from the rest of the cosmos. Skills that have allowed us to flourish as hunters and conquerors, have usurped abilities that would make contact with intelligent systems possible. We may be the psychopaths of the natural world, deaf to the voices of those that we crush, unable to feel the harm we cause ourselves through the course of our conquest, because we are somehow neurologically damaged.
Our cunning, our breed of intelligence, may be our Achilles heel; the secret to our success and our debilitating weakness. We are surrounded by life, by organisms and systems which behave intelligently, which reach out to us with soft tendrils of warmth and light, speaking to our disabled senses, the senses that we have written off as nonexistent. The hardware may be there, but the software is damaged, infected by a virus that we have misnamed intelligence.
We have supposed that our own abnormal consciousness is the real deal, and that the rest of the universe is cold and dead, but it is the other way around. Our primary waking consciousness is cold and dead, and all of those things which we have considered beneath us from that vantage point, are in fact vibrant, and primal, they comprise the true kingdom which has been patiently awaiting our return.

The Riddle

"Mr.White expected a seriousness of purpose in us which provided discipline and willpower in those early years; and we learned the electrical and ideological trades from the ground plug up; for there’s no substitute for brain conduction."
-William T. Vollmann, You Bright & Risen Angels

I open my mouth and the story pours out in white hot streams like geothermal spring water boiled down in the kettle of my belly an inch or so above my navel. What comes from here will be out of the hands of my brain, that is to say that my waking consciousness is being restrained so that the wily so called "sub" consciousness can come out and speak its piece, play its games, and in general, enjoy its witching hour. You never do know just what things do come out to play while your head lays sinking into your triple stuffed pillow and the clock ticks slowly from 11:30 to 12:30. I personally have seen the demons playing under the moonlight at my window sill. This fortunate glimpse was afforded me due to my unusual habit of staying awake in the dark so that I may pour the Serotonin which is being produced inside my head during the sun’s absence into little cups of digital delight. I use this substance as the central ingredient in recipes for disaster which invoke worlds of every kind shape and color.
Just last night, for example, I awoke disturbed by a rustling which sounded like some one going through my most prized and secret documents, the seeds from which the aforementioned worlds sprout. This was long after the witching hour had past, which goes to show that the devil has reign over more hours of the night than the lore tells us. I awakened myself by shouting,
"Who’s here?"
Sitting up I grappled for the flashlight kept near the head of my bed and hastily clicked it on, directing it towards a small shadow scurrying away from my head.
‘Ew, a mouse.’ I thought just before the palm sized creature was caught in the ellipse of yellow light beaming from my big black battery powered tool. At this point I had risen from my bed to scuttle after the evading intruder and get a good view. There, under the spotlight, I caught sight of the thing which plainly was not a mouse, but rather something like a tiny triceratops.
‘I am dreaming’. I thought. I even said it aloud, but I had goose pimples all up and down my arms and was in fact too cold to be snuggled warm in my bed merely imagining such a phantom. Clearly I was awake. More awake than usual in fact. I hurried to the kitchen and found a large jar and rushing back scooped the critter up so that I would have evidence against the supposition that I was hallucinating. It was then that I looked much closer at it and realized that it was not a dinosaur as I had originally assessed it to be, but rather a very small rhinoceros.
As this dawned on me, my spirit leaped from me, extending into a parallel world where I asked someone that seemed vaguely familiar what a Rhinoceros could stand for, what it could mean. That someone was a female with short dark hair and pale skin. I became her and began to suggest to myself that it was something male and strong.
Meanwhile, back in my bedroom, I startled awake for the second time that night, still hearing the suspicious rustling. Gone was the mouse turned triceratops turned rhino. This time I didn’t use the flashlight and switched on the lamp. Oh good heavens! It was just the cat. (Cat? I don’t have a cat.)
"My god," I thought to myself, "it’s the cat I brought in to feed a week ago before leaving to vacation in sunny southern California. (Is that true?) I left the poor thing alone in my apartment for more than a week. It must be starving." I think, (if this is true that I actually brought it cat food before I left.) "Come on Riddle, here kitty kitty." (I let the Riddle in and fed it?)
Together we went to the kitchen, and I opened the refrigerator slowly. If there was cat food in there then this was real. There was. An open bag of kitty kibble was spilling out on the white plastic of the bottom shelf. I noticed that Riddle had one distinguishing feature: a white star on his/her forehead.
I then woke up for the third time.
So you see these things do exist, they do come out to play, and you should be concerned. You should recognize that you too were visited last night by something OTHER. You convinced yourself that it was only a dream, or perhaps you shut it out entirely and imagined that you slept without dreaming. Both possibilities are a lie. Something real visited you last night, or perhaps more accurately, you visited it when one part of you, the watch dog, wasn’t looking. Even more accurately I would say that the wall came down, just as the antichrist has suggested that it should, and what you found outside the city’s keep was another form of yourself: The Riddle.

I AM NOT

What I found in the cracks between those yellow tiles installed in the late 1950’s is a mystery. The sight of it made me weep diamonds. They trickled down my cheeks like tiny crystal ants, their antennae twitching observantly as they made their way over the dunes of my cheek bones and crawled around behind my earlobes to march in a line down the nape of my neck, moistening the forgotten curls of hair hidden there.
I will never tell you what I saw. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. They say that it’s possible that the ancient Greeks couldn’t perceive color in the way that we do. This theory is based on certain curious passages in the Iliad which suggest that the sight of the author was somewhat different from the sight of the modern man, used to sitting upon his sofa watching Spike TV on a high definition plasma screen television, his Bermuda shorts catching the survivors after he crams greasy handfuls of brittle potato shavings into his open mouth, pupils dilated attentively as crimson arcs of blood splash across the screen before him.
When Homer looked out at the arid cliffs of the Mediterranean, he saw something more akin to black and white, only we haven’t got the words to accurately describe what he actually saw, and at this point we have even less imagination than words, so you see, ours is a desperate situation. We will never actually uncover the secrets captured in the blink of a Greek eye.
For that same reason I cannot tell you about the landscapes that I have visited in the lines of grout near the kitchen sink, nor about the craters around the abysmal mouth of the drain. I look at the mouths of the humans nearest to me and watch them move in complicated contortions of tongue, lip and teeth, and in the end all that I can hear is my own whispered interpretations, like a gentle Zephyr blowing through my mind, bringing back to me notions tied to my earliest perceptions. Sensations tangled in my fathers beard and the sunlight glinting off the window frames to shimmer on the gossamer web of a green spider.
These things outside trigger a little pop fizz inside, a torrent of psychic and physical sensations. The muscles in my own face jerk and contort correspondingly as part of this miniature animal dance. The flicker of an eye lid, the slow rise of brows, mouth curled up at the corners, a flash of teeth.
No, I have no idea what any of it really means. It transpires automatically. I like it better when I put the scene on mute so that nonsense is the only sense left to me. I cut the line between the outside and the inside. What I see on the screen of the mind will not make me jump and dance. I will dance when I say "Dance!" All of this human twitching and confusion is draining, a waste of the liquid fire running in figure eight from prow to stern of the biological space ship I inhabit.
With this vessel, which as far as I can actually tell, despite the appearance of others that would seem to be of like kind, is the only one in existence, or at least the only one I can influence directly, I voyage into an arena of color and sound that combines to create a chaotic roar, (we call this noise) and when the anarchy reaches critical mass it becomes silence. It is like turning the television on to watch the snow and hear the static as you meditate in a straight back chair, a mechanism for blotting out the more distinct noises of your neighbors talking through the paper thin walls and car horns bleating outside the window. All of those very distinct sounds which call me into human existence, I drown them out with the hiss and roar.
I do this to lessen the great shock that I will no doubt experience when I die and discover that I was never human at all. Why insist that I am human now? Oh it’s true, I am in a human spaceship now, but that does not mean that I am a human space ship.
I am not.
I am.
I am NOT.
When they see me in those places that I cannot describe to you, they, the indescribable others, say, "Welcome back Not! We’re so glad to have you!" Then all of us Nots crash together and howl, bouncing one off of another, creating a din that can only be appreciated by the initiated Maenad, who standing barefoot on the forest floor goes stock still, eyes widening as she feels us crashing in through the open portal in her chest, mud smeared upon her bare arms, twigs lodged in her hair, crystal ants crashing down to shatter upon her naked breast.