Pink Satin Roses Unraveling

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

Warm Star

It is a lovely warm little star. Not the biggest type of star there is in space, a blue giant, and not the smallest type either, a blue dwarf, but a lovely yellow sun. A unique star in this part of the universe, in that it is steward of a planet that teems with carbon based life forms. A motherly star. A star with a warm heart. This little planet that it has fostered is rare too, at least within this region of infinite space. A sort of museum of varied life forms. In the minds of other planets and other stars within this locality it may well be that this planet and this star are regarded as a pair of deviants, a sort of mutant team hosting a sort of infestation. Or they may not notice at all. One must wonder over the beauty of it, the rarity, the precise positioning that makes this museum of life possible; the star doing its best and the planet offering the elements that make up its composition to spawn and sustain a myriad of creations.
Fantastic.
We humans have put a motherly face on the sun and then a fatherly face on it and a motherly face on the earth, thinking of it as male or female. We suppose that whatever we happen to be down here in the museum sets the standard for the principles of the cosmos. As if the painting dictates the nature of the painter.
We know nothing. Certainly nothing of the love of stars and planets. We see black holes as frightening, the death of a star. What if the black hole is the flowering, the blossoming of the star? Or perhaps what we know of as stars might be like the blooms on a tree, and the black hole resulting from the star’s super nova is the fruit. The fruit of one tree is the beginning of a new tree’s life. That fruit contains and feeds the seed until it is ready to sprout.
We imagine that some being or beings from outside might look upon us humans of earth and be wowed by our capacity to love and be stunned by our ability to hate. It is the equivalent of ants dreaming that their service to the queen will touch the heart of an elephant. An elephant would hardly notice an ant, or even an entire colony of ants, and if it did, intelligent though elephants are, they would not take the ants service to the queen in the same context that the ants themselves do.
We are rare and unusual, but we are not the center of the universe. All things do not correspond to our own evolution, our own processes of insemination and gestation. We are one possible outcome of certain conditions, randomly produced sequences of events. That we are a product of chaos makes us no less beautiful. That we were not planned neither adds to nor diminishes our potential. Our potential to do whatever it is that we can do using the most of our abilities.
Imagine a bucket of multicolored interconnecting blocks. That is the potential. Imagine spilling them out onto the rug and endeavoring to build whatever you can using as many of the blocks as possible. There would be different ways to configure them, many possible variations. It would also be possible to refrain from using all of the blocks, all of the potential, in order to build something that was only blue, or only white.
As far as our potential goes, we are like a child who hasn’t even seen all the blocks because he was so taken with the red ones and particularly the red squares, and is only vaguely aware that there are more blocks on the rug and he could build something other than a high red tower.
We know nothing. We wither as blossoms. The fruit never swells, the seed is never nourished, the gateway to the new tree is never opened.
Still, it is a lovely warm little star, doing the most it can. We are just a side effect of its own self explorations.

Impermanence

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

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."

The Structure and the Noise

Long before that beast, THE WORD, came and turned its yoke and whip on us, there was a subtler, more insidious structure that bound us, the primal ancestor of that beast, THE WORD, which captured our ever present self like so many silly butterflies in the shimmering flower scented threads of its net. That which was before and other than THE STRUCTURE was free and wild like warmed up Jell-O and camp fires painting naked mud and blood crusted skin with an orange glow.
That other place; we still go there through little wormholes, through the noise we make which slices through THE STRUCTURE like a hot blade through canola based margarine. That matrix which holds us captive and enthralled is a structure of sound, music as the west thinks of music; melodic, harmonic. THE STRUCTURE is a piece of music. It holds us in place with its attention directing grasp.
We tell a story, because it tells stories with us. We are made in it, encased in it like the tiny pebbles of some drug locked within the gelatin capsule that we perceive as just "the pill", when in fact it is many tiny beads of something encapsulated in a thin layer of some odorless tasteless boiled down remnant of animal ligaments.
Someone invented it, that structure of sound. Not a someone like you think of a someone who wears a tie and who bought a desk at Ikea or even a someone like a caveman who picked up a bone and whittled a whistle. Someone who was there before the structure of sound. Something other than what you perceive yourself to be.
THE STRUCTURE is the meta-form of civilization. It is a crystalline matrix constructed by the choirs of singing elohim holding us here in suspended animation. It is the grand daddy of all the forms of organization with which you are intimately familiar. It is a holographic UNI VERSE. ONE VERSE of song in which you live and die forever.
But there is a way out, there has always been a way out, because there always was something other than the structure, a place that is not a place any more than the structure is really a place. A nothingness, the marrow of a bone, a nowhere that is somewhere as far as the something that crawls at the core of us is concerned.
A warm wiggly wordless noise.
Something that you can never talk about, never hold in the palm of your hand, never remember as it is as long as you are locked within the gelatin capsule. A secret. A secret because it cannot help but be kept, its expression is pure experience.
The knowledge of it is a happening. One is initiated into its halls, one lives there for a moment, for an eternity, then one awakens with the realization that this life, this existence is a sham, a con. It is a prison of sound, a labyrinth of sound, a confusing and captivating structure, MADE OF SOUND. We can not tell truthfully what is outside of it because the words themselves, the thoughts as we know thoughts to be, are a part of THE STRUCTURE itself.
What we can do is recall that we are now inside of something and that we once were outside and might be again at some point. What we can do is act in a way that is in accordance with our deepest intuition, the subtle remains of this ephemeral recollection. We may not know how or why it was constructed, how it came about, what it means to be held suspended within it. We may only know whether or not we wish to strive to be outside of it again. We may only know if we long to be of the noise once more.
We might be just electrons drawn through these crystal filaments perhaps in an effort to generate power for something we cannot imagine, and perhaps we work for the structure, and it works for something unknown, Perhaps we are pulled by our yearning to come out the other end of the crystal conductor we call a lifetime so that we may be whole again, one with the noise.
The misery we think of as our life is a small thing. A little trick, like the trick that lights a phosphorescent bulb. I, for one, only know that I love the noise in the deepest truest sense of the word. I would go back to it. I would serve it. I would slip out of the structure again and again, making little holes in it like a worm making holes in an apple, I am for the noise.
I am for the noise.
I am for the noise.
And I am against the structure, if only because I am for the noise and the noise negates the structure, eats through it like warm water through a castle build of rock candy. And so it is not malicious, it is only what noise does. It is only what I want to do, and what I have discovered I can do with this life as a pill, whittle away at the STRUCTURE and free fall in a cascade of tiny beads.

The Elsinore Princess

I have lately made very good friends with a big green reptile with razor sharp teeth and a hefty appetite. What he hungers mostly for is watermelon, and purple cabbage, and green grapes, but now and again he pretends to want to eat from my hand just so he can get a taste of my fingers to determine whether or not he’d be better off just eating me and forgoing all social niceties. Here in this special place, he looks at me from behind alloyed bars and nods to his empty food dish while I try to press all of the stray voices out of my head…
I am the lake Elsinore princess, imported from Long Beach to be made a spectacle of in a mud hole imbued with mystical powers. From my glass bottom, the denizens of this fair town have enjoyed looking down past their sandals at the murky green water fed by over 300 hidden springs and the San Jacinto river. When it dried up before 1880, Charlie Sumner still lived in the old adobe Machado house, built by that late great Californio, Augustin Machado himself. Then it transgressed to the rank of puddle, lost at the center of a pestilent pit of mud laden with decaying fish, their eyes eaten out by the very gnats that they themselves had once supped upon. The cattle got stuck in the muck in search of water, and there they mooed mournfully until the heat did them in. Then the gnats could start on them too, joined by the turkey vultures and crows, who cleaned away the carcass until only the bones gleamed white under the glaring sun, before returning to their post in the big blue sky, circling and waiting for the next bovine to expire. At the heart of the puddle a small geyser erupted and a fount of sulfurous water the color of blood gushed wretchedly, flaunting itself before the thirsty herds.
The Mexicans and the Indians had the smarts to stay clear, they know the work of a demon when they see it, but old Sumner wasn’t fazed. With a bit of British tenacity and a fair helping of humor, he set to poking around the choking little valley with a walking stick striped from a water starved cotton wood. Determined to make the best of a curse, he engaged in an exploration of the dried up lake bed, taking care not to get swallowed up in the gunk like a common cow, and thus he discovered those more than 300 secretive springs.
Oh, he had known about one or two of these geothermal water holes before the lake up and evaporated. He’d even tried to fence one off to keep the cows from drinking the hot stinking water, but one of his Indian vaqueros kindly informed him that the water was good for the cows, and that they were drinking it because they were sick, so Sumner bottled it up and sent it off to Los Angeles to be analyzed by a bonefide chemist, and lo! The chemist verified officially what the native had known without the use of a test tube, (which just goes to show- there’s no better way to get good help than to beat and enslave an indigenous people with a little help from the Catholic church).
At any rate, no Mexican has ever set foot on my clean glass bottom, except for the woman that cleans it and her son, a clever handyman. Only clean white feet have had the honor of dancing around on me after a wedding. I am after all, a movie star. Well, I was in one movie anyway, and the stars delivered their lines to one another while standing on me, and that is probably more than you can say. They dragged me overland to set me down on this little pea soup lagoon, and here I’ve been moored ever since.
Once upon a time, I ferried folks around Santa Catalina Island and the briny sea lapped at my chops. They retired me though, and sent me to die where everything else dies, here at the bottom of this valley. Everyone, every creature, every thing that has come here and died, came for the water and got stuck in the mud. This is how we have all met our fate; in search of water. They come for the water, and the water comes up from the hot depths of the earth, smelling of sulfur. How is it that no one has put two and two together? Didn’t they think that the devil would ask a price for his warm life giving elixir?
They used to cart people down here in wheelchairs to dip them in the lake. The hot sulfur ran from the tap in every house in the valley until the 1960’s turning the children’s teeth yellow. At the bathhouse built in 1884 they built a swimming pool in the 1920’s. A little boy drowned in it though, (I’m told he was an idiot anyway) and after that they filled it up. But you see, he came for the water too.
And what is water, my precious? Tell me that. What is water in a dream? The water and the sun set to work on me long ago, eating away the paint, rotting my wood. I fell apart in the wetness. They had me dismantled, because the water had made me unstable, unsafe. Now, if you want to see me, you will have to look through ghost eyes. Pick any that you like, those of a cow, those of an idiot boy at the bottom of a pool, those of an old gambler that died alone in a trailer near the lakes shore, or those of a prostitute wandering away from the old rodeo grounds where her remains were hidden among many. Look through any pair of dead eyes that you choose and you may see me moored out on the Laguna Grande, a phantom on a liquid bed of diamonds, paddlewheel still and silent under the moon’s ivory glow.

Quiet Place

In a quite hidden place, a place just barely missed by white padres and Spanish soldiers on their excursions in search of a new home for yet another one of their adobe Missions, which they planned to introduce throughout that great hot oven called California with the same zeal as those that would come later to fill it up with golden arches and Wal-Marts, crispy French fries, greasy slabs of processed meat product on white buns drowning in maroon pools of salty tomato render, matching short and T-shirt sets in hideous floral patterns with a few loose threads left dangling because Ming was very distracted as she worked, worrying that the pennies she was earning would not be enough to prevent her husband from selling their daughter into prostitution- in this quiet hidden place, the water sparkled, birds fished in the reeds and antelope grazed along its warm shore.
When white people talk about a place, we talk about its beginning as the moment in which we, the great white race came along and began the tedious work of defiling and reducing it to nothing more than a series of plaster cubes and parking lots. If we are extra gracious, we mention that there were some other humanoid life forms dwelling in that place before we rode in, Injuns, and that is what we commonly consider prehistory. However, this quiet hidden place had a history before the Pai ah che were a people, before they left the banks of the Colorado river and wandered into a little valley, circled by purple mountain ranges with a wee little puddle sinking down at its center, and decided to stay. Before this place was Etengvo Wumoma, its only name was that uttered when a breeze passed through and sent the leaves of cottonwood trees a’ shivering with delight. It was defined only by the eerie wailing of coyotes in the foothills, or the occasional scream of a puma. The sun baked dirt and dried grasses held still and silent, offering no utterance to define themselves. Occasionally though, the wind had her fun with them too, and then the parched dusts would be lifted up from the rock hard terra like a lady’s night dress lifted up and off, and the wind would whirl it round and round until she had made a devil of it, setting it free to spin like a top, knocking tumbleweeds aside like marbles before it was at last spent and allowed to settle back down on the hard body of earth.
Void of the chattering of three brained apes of any color or degree of spinal erectness, this place had a life of its own. It was ruled by spirits of an unruly and completely incomprehensible nature. Neither you, nor I, who can decipher, understand, and dream dreams inspired by the ideas conveyed through this assemblage of symbols, (whether we see them in print or digitized upon a liquid crystal screen) can even begin to grasp at the existence of such spirits. Their motives are entirely unlike our motives. They will never be released in death. Therefore they have none of the fears or concerns that dominate the minds of beings which must struggle and strive to exist and self perpetuate. No, these things will endure, and their fears, if they could fear, would be different from our own.
If they could dream, they could fear. If they could dream, perhaps then they could have imagined or foreseen what would become of their very body, their corporation of earth, fire, wind, and water. If they could have imagined a future, then they could have had a moment for fright. But they can only know the present in intimate detail. They can only find themselves channeled into the fiber optics of massive glowing arches and fluorescent tubes of light. They can only feel themselves flowing from rusty faucets into waxy paper vessels that touch monkey lips before they go coursing down into the belly of a beast, where at last they can take some revenge before eventually finding themselves expelled into a porcelain bowl to be sent spiraling down into dark pipes and into a vat somewhere where they can meet and mingle with chlorine and some limited filtration before being sent to another rusty faucet. They can only feel the weight of asphalt and tons of steel rushing over their skin.
Once mighty, once free, now subjected to tortures inflicted upon them by lesser beings than they, these spirits can know no end to their woe. As we white men go about applying for loans and slapping up mini malls and tracks of residential housing, and writing down the history of a place we have named and regarded as our own, it is entering our systems in ways so subtle that few of us would dare to imagine it. Beware the land that has endured the humiliation of domestication. Those spirits will be ever making the careless monkeys pay for the silence that they have swallowed up with their chattering. They make us pay for the quiet hidden place that we have erased from existence with our banter and banknotes.
Our greatest enemy is that one which we have just conquered. Now that we have digested our rival’s flesh, how do we intend to protect ourselves from it, now that it has become a part of us? How do we intend to combat the inevitable experience of indigestion that accompanies the consumption of an unwilling party?

Experiment: Shahanshah

Prepare a space where you will be undisturbed.
Burn frankincense and myrrh.
Light a circle of candles and conduct this experiment within their circumference.
From the center of the circle perform a ritual of banishment in one form or another.
Remove all of your clothing and paint one hand black and one hand white.
Use these hands to paint two intertwining lines along your torso like the serpents of the caduceus or Ida and Pinghali.
Stand with your arms outstretched and say aloud:

“Here stands Shāhanshāh.”