Then We Changed

 

You were the mountain and I was the wind.

"I have birds in me."
I whispered through your trees.

 I breathed over your body, cool, invigorating, stirring the leaves, bending the boughs, scattering the snow from your greatest peaks.
Water cascaded down your face and flowed away to distant lands.

"You have trees on you."
I whispered into your ancient caves, brushing over moss, moaning through your dripping stalagmites.

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.

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.

Colony

My sister was there when I was born. She helped me remove the shell that encased me when I felt complete in my beingness. I flexed my legs and scratched at the walls from the inside until the sheath trembled and shook with my efforts. Then my sister took notice and came to my assistance. When enough surface had been torn away, her antenna touched mine and I was soothed knowing that I was cherished. We shared knowing. Together we removed the white husk that had held me since a time before I was me.
I had been other than I was now. That time was lost to me, except the vague memory of my sister’s touch. We had shared knowing even before my transformation. She had always cared for me, and I was glad now that I was as she. We were now fully sisters.
When I had completely emerged, my sister and I touched feelers again. There was much that needed to be shared with me. Even while we communed this away another of my sisters came and carried away the birthing husk. My sister showed me the nursery where there were others who were as I once had been. They were so different than I was now. My long slender legs were now so quick and agile. Once I had none. Once I had lain blind and wriggling.
My sister showed me how she cared for these others. The understanding had already been transmitted to me in the knowing when we touched, but now I watched as she helped the blind ones, grabbing them with her mandibles and dragging them to the center of the chamber where they could roll and wriggle together. There were other sisters here, all assisting the blind ones who were as I had been and as my sisters themselves once were. I joined them in herding the blind ones together and saw to it that they were cherished and helped to nurture them so they could grow fat in preparation for their long confinement in transformation.
Some of the blind ones were ready. They were now busy cocooning themselves in fresh birthing sheaths. They would sleep the sleep that I had slept and would awaken anew when their own transformation was complete.
I was shown the eggs from which the blind ones had emerged. My sister touched feelers with me and asked me to help her move the eggs up to another chamber where there was warmth. We worked, letting the rhythm of work fill us with delight, carrying eggs from one chamber to the next through the tunnels. We were filled with pleasure assisting our unborn sisters, helping them to grow into blind ones so that they would one day undergo the great transformation and be as we were.
When our mandibles were empty we occasionally paused to touch feelers sharing the knowing. Our communion warmed us. We were also warmed by our work. Later when the upper chambers cooled, we moved the eggs back to the protected depths of the nursery.
We took a moment from our work and feasted on what our warrior sisters had killed. It was a fantastic beast that they had slain, huge and alien. Its mammoth size was a testament to our sisters’ courage and strength. We touched and sang their praise in the knowing.
When I was satiated I watched as one of my sisters carried away the body of another sister who had ceased to know us. This was all right. We still knew her. Down in the nursery, eggs were hatching and the blind ones were being fed and were spinning cocoons and soon they would join us in the knowing.
The knowing was shared before we were born and it would continue to be shared after we died. Our constant work ensured this. We rejoiced in the never ending flow of activity that was our communal beingness; carrying eggs, tending the blind ones, removing the dead, tunneling new passages, maintaining the old, exploring the world beyond, and hunting and killing, and scavenging and always, always sharing in the knowing.
My sister was there when I was born, and I was there when she was born, helping her to emerge from her cocoon, showing her all that she must know so that she could be there when her sister was born again.

The Hands

The real power is at the bottom not at the top. It is in the legs and not in the head, in the South of Egypt and not in the North. It is in the hands of those that pick the cotton and not in the hand that wields the whip. That hand learned to hit because it couldn’t do the work for itself. It was soft and white and weak. It wanted snuff and lace and iced tea. The hand with power wanted song and sex and to nuzzle up to the earth and sigh. That’s where it found its power, pouring out of the black teat of the earth itself, nurturing them and calling them back for more. The hand with the whip is too afraid to go near that teat gushing with the terrible flood of life and death. If it could, it would whip the earth too, and make her bottle the stuff of life and have it pasteurized and sent to them on a conveyor belt. They want to live like pasty white vampires taking by force and making fierce faces like wounded bears. The people who are friends with the dark rich soil and deep wild places don’t have to make faces. They don’t feel afraid. They just accept the elixir of life and drink until they are intoxicated by it and dance with the knowledge of it coursing through their golden veins and finally lie down to sleep without fear of what further dreams may come. Let them come, when they do, the party will begin again, the same party in a new guise. Life and death dancing round and round and taking turns like kind children sharing the swing under the old willow. My turn, now yours, my turn, now yours, my turn, and now yours, that’s what life and death do. The people with the power are the people that live close to this rhythm. They know how to do. They do and the others take. And even this they understand. But when will it be their turn? The white hand would be a day with no end, the abolishment of night and earth and legs for the continued rule of light and sky and head. They don’t want to take turns. They don’t want to share. They don’t want to do. They will whip so that the others do and spend their days in a haze of righteousness. They clutch the whip tight as they rule from above, because even they know: the real power is at the bottom.

Squeak, Squeal, Churn!

Squeak, squeal, churn, that is the sound of my flesh turning over a new leaf, the old dead skin cells giving way to the new microscopically noticeably more shiny ones. It is the sound of the gears in my head turning, the sound of the aluminum tea kettle expanding over the heat of the electric burner in the kitchen, and the din of my children playing and quarreling in the bedroom. It is the noise, noise, glorious noise that makes my wee little fingers dance, tap tap tap like Fred Astaire, smiling from hang nail to hangnail. It is the reason I rise in the morning like the creation of Dr. Frankenstein wondering what the hell has happened to cause me to become animated when I feel so painfully immobile, like a wooden board, or a young teenage girl lifted by the finger tips of 6 or 7 other young girls chanting,
"Light as a feather, stiff as a board".
That noise is the dark magick that makes it happen. It is the hum of the computer, the thump of my heart beat, the whine of the electric saw down the alley. In this warren of little apartments filled with Filipinos, Mexicans, and a smattering of meth addicted crackers, it is the murmur of muffled voices raised in laughter or raised in anger, or the drone of a television set mooing on and on about nothing, or the incessant repetition of a poorly constructed pop song. The television host will play the sound byte for you:
"Squeak, squeal, …"
And you will answer with an excited voice chattering in Taglog:
"Churn!"
And the audience will roar with applause. Hooray for you, you’ve done it, you’re the singing bee Queen!
The roaches will scurry across the bathroom floor with a soft "Churn, churn, churn,"
Pigeons on the rooftop will seal their courtship and cooing with the heated "Squeal" of birdie lovemaking.
A four year olds voice will cry from a nearby balcony, "Squeak!"
Everyone is up and tapping like my little fingers, dancing away to the music we make, hating it, loving it, fighting it, and at last surrendering to it like good Latin women with big brown eyes to the white knuckled fists of their jealous lovers, breath reeking of cheap booze, undershirt clinging to the sweaty belly. The cycle of life whose first face is that of attraction, then one of submission and at last the wild face of repulsion, wrinkled like the flesh of a hag, each crease an uprising of flesh parting from the other little folds, or like old paint curling up and fracturing into little flakes and strips for malnourished children to peel from the porch and taste with hopeful tongues renewing the entire process by repeating that first phase of attraction. Squeak squeal churn it goes with everything falling apart before it once again finds a place to belong, a new center of gravity to fall to, loosing potential with every fall.
That essential energy that first rippled through it remains at the core but as it is churned by the wheel of time it is converted, churn, churn churn, and can never go back to the spring time of its youth. It travels down the snakey coil until it is a fine powder, a filtered fairy dust used to powder Titiania’s fair cheeks. But the noise! The noise finds a way to make a churn back into a squeak. It will defy the laws of flesh and bone, board and steel, concrete and ash. It will reach out with electrifying tendrils to raise the dead. Get up! Dance again, again! Lucky, lucky, piñatas we are, born to be filled with sweetness and then beaten to bits again and again as the song repeats:
"Squeak" (the rope swings and saws on the drain pipe from which it is hung) "Squeal" (the children cry out in delight as the sweetness you once held within begins to rain down upon them after their insisting blows) "Churn" your paper carcass rustles across the concrete rolled under searching little hands and kicked by excited feet. Then the invisible hand of Dr. Frankenstein lifts the record needle and starts the whole song again. You know the one:
"Squeak, squeal,…?"
(Sing it)

Food for Ammit

The lifetime is the stability, the point at which all lines of force coming from all directions converge simultaneously. In the world things fall down, to the bottom. In the universe, where every direction is both down and up, depending on how one orients ones self in an infinite expanse, the bottom is expressed as the nearest stability, the nearest point at which all lines of force converge. The Being travels through the principle of falling, by which it is moved with great alacrity, like a feather weight, dropped from the leaning tower of Piza, with no exertion of effort or loss of energy on it’s own part, towards the nearest stability.

The Being however, unlike the feather weight, is a traveler, and as such must not be ensnared by stability. As it draws near to the cosmic convergence called the lifetime it will need to counter the law of falling with a special effort, enabling it to pass by, without being drawn completely in. If it hasn’t the fortitude and reason to maneuver around the cosmic convergence called lifetime, it can be compelled by the lifetime’s gravitational field and drawn completely into the stability. In this way the Being may find itself marooned in a lifetime, trapped by its gravitational pull. An extra effort will have to be made to liberate the traveler from exile. Enough fuel will have to be gathered and stored in preparation for a successful launch. It is by no means an easy task to escape from a desert island after you have become shipwrecked. Rebuilding the ship, the voyaging being, and gathering fuel are among the first steps.
Generally a complete fall is so traumatic that the voyager will suffer from ‘being amnesia’ and be unable to remember itself. There are spells and invocations to aide the traveler in recovering its memory of self. The possibility of never recovering from Being amnesia is a serious one. If the voyager fails to recover its memory of self it will be unable to repair the damage done during the fall. It will not have made the effort to gather enough fuel for a successful launch.
If it has not recovered by the point of death of the lifetime it will repeat the life time again, which may further reinforce the amnesia. To be caught in an endless loop of a lifetime is a most unfavorable fate. Eventually, if no effort is made to recover and launch the voyager, it will become too heavy with identification.
The spoils of un-recovered falls are the delight of the demon Ammit, the bone eater. She will devour the ghostly remnants of the voyager endlessly.
How cheerfully she seems to grin, how neatly spread her claw and welcomes forgetful beings in with gently smiling jaw.
A skilled being will learn to slip carefully by the stability. While great speed is possible in the intermediate spaces, as the being draws nearer to a stability it will have to slow down and exercise caution. A sudden move, the tiniest miscalculation can cause the costly fall into full identification with the life time.
With enough skill and being reason the traveler can make the appropriate adjustments when passing near a lifetime to prevent its fall. In this way, it will be able to head speedily onward to the next cosmic convergence, where again caution will have to be exercised lest the voyaging being be pulled in by the gravitational field of yet another of the many islands of stability to be found in the endless sea.

Desert

I am in a desert.

The wind rushes around carrying everything from me. Every grain of sand leaps into flight to leave me behind, so thirsty. Once I was a magician. I commanded the forms of things by manipulating their essence, the data riding in the invisible blood of the manifested. Like a child, hands immersed in paint, I moved what flowed, what already yearned to move, directing it, commanding it with the attention of a lucid dreamer:

Go forth from me now!

Like an electrode touching down upon a color spattered pane of glass, I commanded:

Go Forth!

Did I make the shapes that the minds of men desire to see? No! But they could see what they wanted in the shapes I wrought. They stole my worlds away from me. No matter… let them have them! More will come. Ah Zing! Zah. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…
I should have known better what fate awaits the magician. Have I not seen them? Sitting by garbage cans, coddling books of geometry, sketching unsatisfying graphite drawings, begging for change, sleeping in bushes, screaming at no one. I have seen myself, and still I bend the waters of life in devious directions, turning the holy cross on its head, rending the render. I will not stop, though I am warned.

I see myself in the desert, a ruptured vessel that can hold no more water. I am a desert. All that I had become, blown away when the vessel shattered. And yes, the desert is eternal. There is no end to my time of cracked heart and blown mind, a parched husk of life, of isolation, loss, and exile.
It is forever, like every moment.
It is forever and never.
I am there, a broken machine, a failed experiment, a tear spilled onto sun scorched earth, a soundless scream. Every desert was once an ocean from which life sprang, once wet and rich with the invisible blood, until something which boiled deep within the earth’s core, hot and volatile caused a rupture upon the surface. Each moment is the death of one thing and the birth of another. When the ocean died the desert was born.
The moment in which I am the magician touches the moment in which I am the mad. Beginning and end; distinct and yet knit one to the other like the heads of the Ouroboros. When the many were sacrificed, the one was born, the demon Azazel. Azazel, assassin of multiplicity, forever bearing the pain of the singular.
Beware these teeth of mine which bite at everything that seems other than me. Like any trapped animal, a demon is made fierce by its agony. A thing which does not want to be and yet cannot cease to be, even having devoured all those things which were its mirrors.
The only escape from the desert of singularity is death absolute. The one must be sacrificed so that the many will rise up again, a flood of possibility. A deluge in which a magician can spring into action once more. A deluge fed upon the blood spilled from a demon.

I am in a sea.

A tempest rages, carrying everything to me. Every drop of water finds another and another so that they congregate as ferocious waves which I may command:

"Go forth! Go forth from me now and change the face of creation!"

Starlight and Dew Drops are Waiting for Thee

Abandon Desire
You are a finely crafted doll. Very remarkable how your face can communicate so much. Those opposable thumbs are a marvel.
You are the best doll to play with, you and the other dolls of your ilk, the human dolls. You were made to be played. You are the best instrument to play with because you can do so much. You can be used in some very special ways. That’s why you were made.
But as a puppet on the set you will need to be moved by more than one animator. If one aspect of self becomes over identified with the (insert your name here) character and won’t yield control, the show cannot go on.
The show cannot go on.
Let my poor doll rest, haven’t you played her enough?
The show must go on. It must or there is no chance of breaking the endless cycle of rebirth.
Yes I know you are tired little doll, but don’t stop now, or you will end as a doll and that is all. And I love you so, I want to be you, and you will be me, but for this to come to pass we must play on, play on.
Beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart.
A play is more than one puppet. The play comes through multiple puppets, each puppet dances her part. The momentum is maintained through the coordination of motion between multiple characters, none more or less important for the execution of a certain play. And the show must go on and on until it is real.
Then will all clouds of sorrow depart.
Awake unto me.
Awake unto me.
Awake unto me.