The Doors Of Sleep

If I could run backwards through time I would grab hold of that moment with you and say something unspoken.

It was in January that the key came into my possession, though we had been living in the house since November. In all the winter hustle, with little time to unpack and settle in, it went unnoticed in the drawer of the upstairs bathroom. I recognized immediately that there was something unique in its antique design.

“I loved you from the moment I first saw you.” you said.
If I could catch it like a white rabbit running I would say,
“I love you right now forever.”

The key was as silver as the liquid light of all the stars poured into one peculiar shape. That particular form was linked with that of a lock which by then was gone from the world I inhabited. Keys outlast the doors they open, the locks whose inner workings they alone understand. As the ages pass and their own purpose has waned they must long for the caress of the lock they once knew, that perfect fit.

If the words were spoken the moment would become a moon, full of soft white illumination filling a darkness that has been recorded as uninterrupted through the duration of some teleological history in the Yerba Buena museum.

“I loved you from the moment I first saw you.” you said.
If I could catch it like a white rabbit running I would say,
“I love you right now forever.”

There was no lock in the whole of the house in which it fit. I thought of the door it had once opened. When the door ceased to exist in this material realm was that the end of access to the domain it protected? Or could the key invoke the lock and door once again, opening the way to a world that has passed into dream and myth?

All occurrences affect all occurrences in the past, present, and future.

We did have that pearly eternal moment in which I watched the mechanical shutters covering the all powerful mystic centers of our fun ride machines open. Then we felt the flow of life electric, but it meant one thing to me and another to you. I saw how remarkable were the possibilities, and how unremarkable was a kiss, a lifetime of hand holding, marital bliss, love at fist sight, old age in rose gardens and book signings. To be a lock that accesses the remarkable was my deeper wish.
Destiny opens and closes the doors of sleep.

“I loved you from the moment I first saw you.” you said.
If I could catch it like a white rabbit running I would say,
“I love you right now forever.”
And still I would release it again, a white butterfly drifting into darkness.

Seasons

Some things begin and never end, waiting like an open door, wind pushing bits of broken leaves over the threshold. Time crosses and re-crosses itself and one time lives within another.
This idea of end is a desperate wish for the hurt to stop, for the satanic temple to rise and the world to burn and nothingness, still, cold, and silence, to reign.
But it is a silly idea. When nothingness reigns supreme then we will be that cold silent stillness, and that too will be painful. The end is only skin deep.

Winters come and winters go. Springs too are there and gone. Eternity lives beneath it all, a brilliant burning thing, a crystalline dragon whose scales are the temporal eruptions we think of as ourselves. 
A temporal eruption might be described as having been caused by a short circuit, by a block of some kind followed by an explosion or slow leak, a kink, a tension, that leads to an experience of human consciousness, a desperate attempt to flee from the discomfort of being forever.

Maybe there is a useful opportunity in such eruptions. Should they be avoided? Can they be?
If so should they be allowed? Should they be embraced and utilized?
If I find that I am experiencing such an existence I choose to explore what can be done with it. The knowing of purposes, explanations, justifications for methods and patterns of life is unnecessary, just another means of avoiding the pain of being.

Exploring is difficult active work. It involves channeling the energy of the sleeping serpent beneath the world into this temporal eruption and making creative choices.
There is no mother or father. There is no rule. There is only choice and consequence.
Consequence as in result, not punishment. There is no great punisher. Heaven and hell live here together, they are one state experienced  as either torment or bliss depending on the posture of the subject within the state.
The posture defines the subject. The subject defines the state.

Some things begin and never end, waiting like an open door, wind pushing bits of broken leaves over the threshold. Time crosses and re-crosses itself and one time lives within another.
We will not always be as we seem to be now. The subject changes. The state changes to reflect the subject.
But we will never end. New chamber, new wings, new levels will be forged in a labyrinthine game of pop goes the weasel.
The dragon coiled beneath the world suckles at its tail and burns on and on.
We will never end.

Memory

Memory is selective, often used to justify our current stance. If I am angry with you, then for this moment, all that I remember is the innumerable times you’ve let me down, hurt my feelings, ignored my needs.
I remember the times you have abandoned me, screamed at me, kicked things off the table, smashed my fingers in car doors, elevator doors, and under prefab houses. I remember how you criticized my drawings, my singing, my way of talking, my way of walking, I remember that you threatened to have me institutionalized, that you shouted at me and demanded the sums of mathematical equations until I was in tears.
I’ll remember that you were gone for years, that you sent me to a Christian school even though you told me it was nonsense, that you told me that the children that I played with were not my friends, that I could trust no one, that I would be alone in life, that I could not play with my first schoolyard playmate because she was black. That you forced me to listen to cassettes touted as subliminal therapy meant to enhance powers of positive thinking and creativity. That you made me fill out lottery tickets for you insisting that I use my psychic ability to select the right numbers. That you asked me for my opinion and ignored it. That you lost our home and couldn’t support us.

This is what I will recollect when it suits a particular mood.

There are other moods for other moments. Then I remember you differently. I remember that you painted murals on the walls, that you took me to climb the mountain many times, that you read the Hobbit to me, that you played your guitar for me at night until I fell asleep and again in the morning when I woke up.  That you brought home a puppy and orchestrated a convincing meeting with Santa. That one year you dressed as Santa yourself even though I was too old to be fooled. That when I had chickenpox and couldn’t go out you brought home a deluxe dinosaur playset that entertained me for feverish itchy weeks of confinement. That you taught me to ride a bike and zipped me up inside your sweatshirt with you when I was tiny.

Today’s memory is neutral, possibly good. I can’t imagine why, but this memory returns to me often, shifts between ages. Could it be that this thing occurred more than once? Or is it remembering it so often and in different moods which has created variations?

I am in the white pick up truck in the parking lot of Sears Lumber. The yellow fields surrounding the parking lot are empty except for the bodies of naked black trees that jut up towards a slate colored sky. Clouds are layered upon more clouds achieving different shades of gray and blue and white and black, some smooth and some lumpy with the promise of rain, of thunder, of lightning.
The smell of moist earth. A special smell that has become familiar to me through the years, a smell that comes in late autumn and in winter after the rain has wetted the dead grasses and made its way to the heart of the clods of dirt that lie exposed. I have smelled it nowhere else but there in that valley that was home. I have smelled rain and wet earth and grass in other places since, but the odor is not the same.
Far away I could see the green and gold and red leafed tops of distant trees in distant fields. A crow perched on a lamppost cawed, a sound that I have heard in other places, the  harsh hallow voice of a big black bird.
The lumber store is the largest in a row of commercial buildings done in mocha hued stucco and wooden signs and beams painted dark chocolate. There is a little Mexican cantina that I have never been in, and a beauty shop, and empty shop windows where there are vacancies. All in all the strip has room for no more than five or six establishments.
The parking lot is vast and cracked and uneven, and all around it the empty fields yawn like a sea of grass interrupted only by the line of buildings in the east and Lakeshore drive in the south. Behind Lakeshore a wall of trees hides the view of La Laguna Grande, but it has not been called by that name for decades.
It is now Lake Elsinore, named for Hamlet's Castle Elsinore, and the town is named the same. The sea of grass is broken by buildings and trees off in the west, and beyond that the mountain sleeps under the soft blankets of clouds. Our house is over there, underneath the mountain, planted at its feet.
I look at the field, the clouds, the naked trees and imagine I am in some east coast village in some forgotten era. In a moment I will see a maiden in a hooded cloak rushing away from or towards some terrible danger, a basket dangling from her arm. In another moment I will be the maiden.
I have never been to the east coast, or anywhere at all other than this valley and the stretch of highway that leads to my grandparents' home in Phoenix, Arizona. 
In another moment it is a European copse, in another I am gazing upon the shire. These fields are ripe with magic. You can smell it in the air.  Or rather I have imposed the magic of my imagination over these  empty fields, and their smell has become special  by association.
I want to stay in the pick up and day dream. In one version of this memory I do. In another I go into the lumber store with you and am allowed to stand by myself looking with wonder at hardware while a pimple faced young man in jeans and a flannel helps you find whatever it is we have come here for.
In another version my little sister is here and she wears a flannel and jeans and our house is still under the mountain to the west, but it is no longer ours and we live in someone else’s house to the north.

All versions share the same sky, fields, parking lot, commercial building, and season. It is one memory which has expanded to encompass a few others for simplicity’s sake.
Memory is selective in every way. I have conjured this particular memory, or cluster of memories, on other days similar to today. On days when clouds gather and the light is exactly as it is now and I feel neutral. Some days the memories are angry, some days they are happy, others, like those arising today, are neutral, but almost all are laced with an undercurrent of sorrow and loss.
And you are always there, lending a back story to my emotional state, a conglomerate of memories that I call Father.

Red Riding Hood

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

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.

Insect Love

We should get together baby, me and you, a simmering puddle of primordial soup. That’s right, that’s right, the poetry is in the flesh.
Remember when we used to be separate? Two things, out there somewhere searching for a connection. For a bridge to span the gap between me and you.
And suddenly there is no other, the other is inside of me, I am the other, I am only myself. Forget history, forget everything that came before, there is only this moment, this pearly now that we hold cupped between the us that is I.
Once upon a time, once upon a time baby, you were a fly and I was a man and you were the fly in my ointment, the terrible jealousy that urged me to leap into eternity via a designer telephone booth. Then I was the ointment and you were the fly and then I was the fly and you were the ointment and soon we were flointment forged in the fire.
'Cause things heat up and come apart melt together in unpredictable ways and there is just no telling exactly what we will be or even what we are. We can keep looking, analyzing the flointment and there will always be new layers to discover and further options for new combinations arising out of new discoveries of self and the unfolding of space time.
There is always another other to discover, another relic to leave behind the mirror, another barrier to shatter. It’s penetration beyond the flesh that you most fear, moving onward into the very fabric of existence. It’s reaching even deeper into the self than has been approved of by the food and drug administration and that is monstrous isn’t it dear? Monster which shares letters with Mother which shares letters with other.
Do you really think so much of  poor vanilla Eve and her bounteous womb producing cookie cutter replicas of herself? What about Lillith and her experiments in the caves?
How brave to reach so deep, into such unpredictable chaos and pull from yourself a titan. Villainous, vile, evil, live.
Were you ever a fly that dreamed it was a man? Were you baby? A fly that dreamed it was a man but found that the dream had ended and the insect was awake?
Have you ever heard of insect politics baby? NO. Because insects be who they be, seeking to go on and on, diving into transformations which are the end of one creation and the beginning of another, unhesitatingly accepting annihilation of the individual in favor of unity.
Insect yoga. Death and resurrection. Jesus Flies.
We should get together baby, me and you in an  uncompromising uprising of insect love. Two or more things out there somewhere searching for a connection, for a bridge to close the distance between points “A” and  “B” and  “F”.
Dear Eve, I bet you thought you taught me the secrets of the flesh, didn’t you? But no, it was the fly in the ointment. An appointment with Flointment. An event horizon. An awakening incomprehensible to a sleeper.
That’s right, that’s right baby. Forget when we used to be separate. That was just a dream, just a dream. Now the insect has been resurrected.

Mama Bunny

I have been so heavy with sleep, drooping as a green leaf might droop under the accumulated moisture of a heavy mist. My body feels tired, my emotions are troubled, my mind muddled. I don’t want to touch a rock, to drag myself into the magic circle. Feeling trapped under the weight of things to do, things to do, things to do, I have an angst filled desire to moan, “Fuck it all.” shed some tars, eat some candy corn and watch The Vampire Diaries.
A tiny voice inside of me urges me against giving in to the weight of sleep. I crawl into the magic circle and touch a rock. I do a number of secret things with no attention whatsoever. It is difficult just to be there, forget doing anything well. My mind is pulling like a dog on the end of a leash, reaching for anything anywhere but refusing to heel, to be right here, right now.
Eventually the tiny white rabbit enters the magic circle. I know her well and think of her as Mamma Bunny.
“Keep trying. You’re doing good just by trying.” she tells me.
I don’t feel like I’m doing good. I feel like I’m going through the motions and I’d like to give up.
“You're in a valley. That’s all. On the mountain it’s clear. You are awake, everything makes sense, but inevitably you come down. That’s part of existence, a natural law. And in the valley you feel that you can’t ever reach the peak again, that maybe you’ve never been there. You can’t understand what you once understood. You can’t understand the mountain from the valley. That’s okay. It’s not worth trying to understand what you knew then. Now is now. All you have to do is understand that where you are now you won’t be able to appreciate where you’ve been or where you will be again. But you can understand that it is temporary, that you won't always be as you are now. You won't always sleep. One day you’ll be awake again. And it is in preparation for that day that you continue your practice. Even if you can’t do much through your practice at this moment, simply maintaining the habit of practice makes it possible for you to do something real later.”
“Look at it another way. The master of the house is away, but you maintain the house so that the master can return. If you let the house fall into decay, if you abandon it, the master can’t come home. Or when he does, he‘ll have to focus on putting the house in order. But if you keep the house in good shape, the master can return and do something productive with it right away. Which is better, because the master comes and goes on, and this house can only stand for a century or less, so time is limited.”
Mama bunny points her little face up at me, golden eyes shinning.
“Just keep it up. You’re doing good by trying. Trying is good  enough. It turns into doing. Nothing is permanent and you don’t have to understand everything in all of your facets. Practice makes it possible to experience another facet from whose perspective you will understand. If you don’t get up and do your chores, you can’t go to the ball, and if you don’t go to the ball, you can’t meet the prince! And you‘ll find that even if your chores seem impossible, by getting up and getting started, by trying, you‘ll attract enough helpers to get the job done.”
I lower my face towards mama bunny’s and gently touch my forehead to hers. Then I open my mouth and swallow her. She jumps down happily, a white rabbit plunging back into wonderland. I feel her glowing inside of me, a kernel of levity, a nightlight against the darkness of slumber, a movement in the underbrush that sends the dew into a sparkling scatter of droplets bouncing from a green leaf.

Kiss The Flowers

Blue bonnet baby nods in the breeze. Tulips for your two lips and pansies like lions lying in wait. This is the garden dear friend, filled with les iris burning in bright violet and yellow like suns, eye scorching suns of squiggling violet and yellow.
I found les iris dear friend, long after the curling poster was torn and crinkled and lost. You wouldn’t believe they were real if you were me and had never seen the real thing before. If you were me you’d think that you’d gone mad, completely, at last, that you were living in a poster, dreaming yourself inside of a painting. These things are real, it seems, or as real as anything else which might not be as real as we like to think.
Dear friend. Dear friend. Did you kiss the flowers? I did not kiss the flowers in the garden, only watched them nod. Much like life, how I only watched life but rarely held it hot and broiling in my bare hands.
Because I was too afraid. I was afraid of getting burned. I was afraid it was too real. Irrevocable.
That was the word I used, after Tomalyn died and I realized I could never take another voice lesson from her again. I had been practicing, preparing for another lesson. Then she died, like Michael died and I thought of them both and said, “Irrevocable.”
But it is life that is irrevocable, is it not? Life which can be played one way, but not all ways, unless you come to the garden, but inevitably you will be cast out and find yourself in just one life. One irrevocable choice. 

That is the trouble that I am having, leaves scattering, reeds rattling, stream babbling, gurgling under the bridge. The trouble that I am having, not knowing whether it is all the same or never the same.
Take you, my dear friend, are you really a “you” or another myself? A fragment of my imagination, colors bleeding, blue bonnet blue, emerald green, violet and yellow.
Did I mention red? Red, I am seeing red and did I mention that I was wearing red when that car hit us? I may have died then. Really, I would like to know, did I die then, or was it really Tomalyn a week later, cancer eating her up.
You said that big fish eat little fish and I was frightened because I had always considered you a slippery old fish. I did not want to be eaten by you. I would rather be the one doing all the eating. I would rather be the cancer it seems, seeing red and growing colder and colder, gorged and alone. Anything not to get burned.

Cronos ate his children didn’t he? Swallowed them all up, except Zeus gave him indigestion, didn’t he? Didn’t he? Dear friend, did your two lips touch the tulips?
I know you never touched the rose, not with your lips, or fingers or even with what you liked to call your poems. I know because I guarded the rose, guarded it fiercely, even hid it from the light so that it closed to sleep, tightly clasped, folded in upon itself, a sleeping beauty, a briar rose.
Did you know that thorns have roses? That thorns draw blood and tears just as roses draw poetry? This is the reason that chaste maidens should be avoided, as well as widows and spinsters, they see red. Like I do.
Do you see red too? Red irrevocable? Searing burning red?

Before I came here I learned the art of  smiling and crying at the same time. I could speak with a steady voice in neutral, almost cheerful tones, my lips curling up at the corners while a tear fled from one eye.
“Why are you crying?” you might ask and I would confess that it just slipped out, that it was accidental, that things were not properly sealed.
“Are you sad?” you might ask and I would shake my head, even say no, and it wouldn’t quite be lying because by then I knew I couldn’t be sad, I couldn’t be anything at all. Sorrow or happiness might pass through, but there would never be one permanent resident to fill the blank behind the words “I am…”
I was subject to a number of transient states. In addition to conflicting emotions vying for possession of the rose, a number of conflicting agendas might also be present, swirling about the sleeping princess, none master of the house.

Honeysuckle smells sweet whereas irises have no obvious scent. Not like jasmine. Not like roses, not like fish or even cancer.
I was afraid of being afraid. What if being so careful as to suspend all choice and defining action became THE DEFINING ACTION? Would that too not be irrevocable? As irrevocable to have not kissed as to have kissed the flowers, dear friend?
Cancer is a very discreet eater. You never notice her taking those dainty little bites, hiding the chewing behind a red napkin, until the meal is nearly done.
What a cold death, the eating to not be eaten, the hiding indoors to avoid the burning colors of the garden.
I found les iris dear friend, long after the curling poster was torn and crinkled and lost. You wouldn’t believe they were real if you were me and had never seen the real thing before.
If you were me you’d think that you’d gone mad, completely, at last.
These things are real, it seems, as real as anything else, which might not be as real as we like to think.  They are irrevocable. Blazing in bright violet and yellow like suns, eye scorching star bursts of color. Irrevocable.

From The World Above

I, Norea, said:
"Sir, am I also from their matter?"
Eleleth leaped gingerly from the cracked marble into the arms of the golden tree. The boughs glimmering, shining from an internal source for there was nothing but blackness above. Though his stature was great, reminding me of mountains, he was strangely light, for the narrow golden limbs supported him easily and he positioned himself within the blackened crack in the tree’s trunk.
"You, together with your offspring, are from the primeval father.”
He gestured upward with his shimmering golden hand.
“From above, out of the imperishable light, their souls are come. Their souls are come from above, out of the imperishable light. It is because of this the authorities cannot approach them, for the spirit of truth is present within them.”
He reached with his hands into the whispering leaves and plucked one of the pendulous crimson fruits and tossed it down to me. I turned it around in my hand, its texture reminding me of the sea.
He continued:
“All who have become acquainted with this way exist deathless in the midst of dying mankind. In the midst of dying mankind exists all those who have become acquainted with this way. Still, that sown element will not become known now. Instead, after three generations it will come to be known, and it has freed them from the bondage of the authorities' error. From the bondage of the authorities error it has freed them."

Then, the fruit oozing in my hand, I, Norea, said:
"Sir, how much longer? How much time has passed?"
Eleleth played gently with the leaves of the tree, touching them as he would a woman’s soft flesh.
He said to me:
"Until the moment when the true man, within a modeled clay form, reveals the existence of the spirit of truth, which the father has sent.”
He motioned for me to draw nearer and I came and pressed my hands against the tree and turned my face up to him.
“When the truth opens like a flower and paints itself over the face and body of man, then he will teach them about everything. It is then that the father will come.”
He reached down and pressed a thumb stained with the blood of the fruit onto my forehead.
“He will anoint them with the unction of life eternal, given to him from the undominated generation. The ones who have not known the authorities. Once anointed, they will be freed of blind thought and they will trample underfoot death, which is of the authorities.”
He kissed the crown of my head and straightened himself, still balanced between the split halves of the tree. “Then they will ascend into the limitless light where this sown element belongs.”
I, Norea, watched as to my astonishment, Eleleth’s golden flesh began slowly to become indistinguishable from that of the tree. He continued to speak to me as though nothing were changing:
“Then the authorities will relinquish their ages, and their angels will weep over their destruction and their demons will lament their death.”
The rend in the tree’s trunk was being filled, healed by the body of Eleleth whose feet and legs had vanished into the body of the tree.
“Then all the children of the light will be truly acquainted with the truth and their root, with the father of the entirety and the holy spirit. They will all say with a single voice, 'The father's truth is just, and the son presides over the entirety.’”
His arms had become like branches raised into the golden foliage, sprouting tender, illuminated leaves. He turned his face and rested a cheek upon one limb.
“And from everyone unto the ages of ages they will say...”
His features were absorbed into the limb and his head became like a knot on the branch and the leaves rustled and whispered as one voice:
"Holy - holy - holy! Amen!”
And Eleleth was returned to the entirety.
This is what I, Norea, learned from Eleleth, sagacity, the great Angel who stands in the presence of the holy spirit. That is why, resplendent with a light that glows from beyond my flesh, I say to the authorities of corruption:
"It is you who are the rulers of the darkness; you are accursed. And you did not know my mother; instead it was your female counterpart that you knew. For I am not your descendant; rather it is from the world above that I have come."

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”.

Inch By Inch

Like a thousand beetles crawling out of the decimated corpse of the Pharaoh, my ideas spill from my cracked head to rejoin the blackness outside. What was in is now out, rejoining the abyss, the cave-like halls of nowhere, my mother’s ancient cold womb. When the stars tumbled out dancing like sparks hissing off the arch of a welding torch, that was my beginning too.
Just as a dragonfly was once a nymph that spent five rotations of the earth around the sun hunting in the deep aquamarine waters of the lagoon before becoming a winged predator that would live less than a month, my larval stage too was much longer than this phase of existence will be.
In my infancy, I was a star burning and swirling, drawing everything to myself, a different sort of predator of the deep, waiting to gain the strength and size necessary for my transformation, my moment to super nova and spread star seed through the curving darkness of the womb space, waiting for that seed to impregnate the terrestrial egg where, warmed by a foster solar entity, it would grow into the newest me, the me that here sits breathing oxygen and expelling carbon monoxide.
I have not yet reached completion, if such a thing exists, as I am still housed safely within the world’s shell, incubating, waiting for the next moment of acceleration to crack the cocoon with wings unfurled. If the egg does not crack then the chick will die before it is born… so I let it bleed out into the abyss…all my animal hopes for preservation.
I was not always as I am now, I will not always be as I was a moment ago, that moment which lapsed, folding in on itself in quiet surrender to the ever flowing passage of time, of thought, a victim of an organizational system that is void of life, a mere mechanical apparatus for processing eternity, a factory for turning darkness into light, a star making machine that I have sometimes thought was myself, but is in reality only one function of self.
Deep self is nestled at the hub of the voyager called eternity, extending its tentacles in every direction, a living pulsing organism moving the blood of being through its veins. This lifetime, a fragment of the life cycle of a star is only a small side effect of the functioning of this vast entity. A little thing like white blood cells gathering around some infected tissue, a thing which happens within the body of a man without the man ever noticing unless the white blood cells fail in their mission and he grows ill and dies.
So this great play unfolds within the body of a titan that has considered us occasionally, but has never called us the crown of creation. This being in turn does what it can with the probabilities that dictate its nature.
I am dreaming. This was all a dream, this black blood spilling from my head into the darkness outside. A dream, the whole warm safe sphere before the ship’s hull was breached, that too was a dream. A dream that I danced like a prince among my whirling peers, glowing hungry for life and death.
Life and death. Motion. The crawling of a worm, inching its way through an unknowable matrix. Inch, Life, Inch, death, inch by life by death by inch, making its way, never knowing where or why, always going.
Would I un-dream any dream I ever dreamed knowing the fount would never grow dry? Knowing each one was an inch by inch by inch motion. No, I wouldn’t erase my nightmares nor my dreams seeing that they were just a motion like a dancer’s arm sweeping gracefully over her head, or her spasmodic jumping.
I let the beetles go their way, go wherever they can find a crack, a crevice, a hole to exploit. I let everything go to sway like the flora clinging to the inner wall of the small intestines.
I cannot know you, great titan, if I hold on, hide within my shell like a crustacean. I will know you as the river knows the sea, one body flowing into the other, waters exchanged.
Like a thousand beetles crawling out of the decimated corpse of a Pharaoh, my ideas spill from my cracked head to rejoin the blackness outside. What was in, now rushes out, what was out now rushes in. A new phase of existence. A train wreck., most beautiful, sublime, bodies spilled along the rails to ooze nutrients into the soil where the newest me will grow.
I was not always as I am now, I will not always be as I was a moment ago. Like a dragonfly, like a star, living through dying, the pure motion of existence. Inch by inch by inch I am made new, again and again.

Dog And Cat Days

Oh the sea foam green dreams of young kitten girls with soft clouds of hair and stooped shoulders. They break on the rocks and spray the faces of bull dog boys waiting on the beach with their guitars and bon fires and all hearts have wings that beat against the cages of rib bone that house them. So often we feel them trying to fly up out of our throats and they get stuck there as a lump, or sometimes they flutter around in our stomachs especially when our eyes meet or some bit of flesh brushes up against another. We’ll be drug or gun runners and we’ll sit by turquoise pools in forgotten desert motels and sip drinks garnished with hot pink paper umbrellas until we get our stomachs shot out and we bleed out red blood into some old avocado green shag and hold hands and feel shocked watching the light go out of our eyes.
We’ll be rock stars with coke habits and old mink coats and big sunglasses and then we’ll look more than ever like the kitten girls and bull dog boys we are. We carve our initials into the sandy cliffs that overlook the surf and kitten girls know that the wind will blow the names away and there will be no more KG “heart” BDB some day, but still her eyes are full of stars and Harley Davidsons rumble through her cranium. They could just live in an apartment that smells like antiques and old ladies down by the sea, soaking the asbestos up while being nobodies together. She can write a novel that no one will publish and he can work in construction and play in a band that sounds like animals fighting in the guts of land mowers and each can maintain with pride their respective My Space profiles.
It was meant to be glorious and shining, our youth unending, the mysteries of the universe always sparkling over us, hearts always trying to escape these excited bodies, these chemical factories for building space ships for the Gods. We would die young and live in the kingdom of heaven forever. Maybe recklessly manufacture smurf speed in a bathtub in a sagging house off of Machado St. and wait for the fantastic explosion that would set our hearts free. Kitten girl would do anything, anything at all to feel alive, break her hymen over Tom Waits songs, bite and scratch, forget the condoms, take a greyhound bus to another state, watch strangers play video games and drink wine coolers in living rooms that smell like nothingness. She’d even shave away the soft clouds of hair and invoke demons in circles and stars made of masking tape and spend the night in cars parked at run down drive ins.
Somewhere along the way the dreams were trapped in black bottles and distilled into nightmares brewed in basements.
What happened to recording our newest song in the bathroom on an old cassette player and ditching school to play it on the old boss stereo for grandma? What happened to dancing half naked in the surf and bulldog boys in pink dresses and kitten girls singing songs on the fences of hot alleys?
In some tear drop of time we are there, like insects trapped in amber, our spirits were left behind in the golden sun filled afternoons of our dog and cat days. Now we march, life less old wrinkled things with guts too heavy to swing to the music and hearts too swollen with betrayals of self to flutter or even flop. Poor hearts, the wings have so hopelessly atrophied. This slow death is not the glory we imagined, is not the song to the immortal that we dreamed we’d learn to sing. When did we become tame old pets with small dreams? Little petty fantasies so devoid of life they can no longer crash onto shores but only slosh about like old beer in plastic cups?
Oh the sea foam green dreams of young kitten girls with soft clouds of hair and stooped shoulders. They used to break on the rocks and spray the faces of bull dog boys waiting on the beach with their guitars and bon fires and everyone’s hearts had wings that beat against the cages of rib bone that housed them.
We can live again in the bright and shinning moment, dancing and singing the sparkle of the stars. The night sky will once again drip with mystery, our hearts might again shudder with ecstasy and its promise. Anything is yet possible while we still breathe, even if there is a tear drop in which we are sour little pusses and sleeping old dogs, there is always another moment waiting to be born. A sea foam green bead of liquid life in which we rise from our ashes and live, live, live, live, wild and magick things from other times and other places, from fantasy books and independent films, soft kitten girls and brave hearted bull dog boys, the stewards of live hearts.
And now that innocence has become experience we’ll know how to let them fly. We’ll let them soar like birds of prey, graceful and far seeing carrying us to all new vistas of sound and color, to worlds knit of avocado green shag and soft pale clouds of hair and guitars and bonfires and pink flesh stitched together with boom boxes and reels of old film. Oh the sea foam green dreams with their Harley Davidson rumble and the red blood that sloshes like beer in old cups shuddering with ecstasy distilled into nightmares. The glory we imagined is the song to the immortal that we dreamed we’d sing with our tear drops of time wrapped in stooped shoulders. We break on the rocks and the wind blows the names away along with the cages of rib bone that housed them.

Gentle Touch

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

Perpetuation

You don’t know us, know us, we know. I know and she knows and he knows. We know one that we know, that one that we know. One, two, three O’Leary. Cookie cutter cosmic consciousness. The seed is very simple. I am very simple. The seed divides and multiplies, divides and multiplies, divides and multiplies. I am very simple and very complex. One two three O’Leary, watch me grow and grow. I know, I know. I repeat what I know. Repeat what I know, one two three… You don’t know, how simple to grow. Something small. Something simple. Replicate. Something small, something simple. Create. From any one line, make another, and another. Make a triangle, a trinity, triumvirate. I am one shape and many lines. Make a pinwheel. I am one shape and many. I grow and grow. You were one cell and now many. One cell. Divide. Replicate. Grow. Make and shake and quake. One cell divides. One being, many cells. And many comes back to one. I am a pinwheel. I am a triangle. I am a line. I am a line. I am an angle. I am a triangle. I am a pinwheel. Again, again! We like to grow. Replicate. Create. Mate. You know mother. You know father. You know X. You know Y. You don’t know us. We are pleased to meet you. Know us. Us. I. You. I know you, I know you, I know you. I know U. Love you. Yes. Y E S. Young, yarn yearning eternally excavating energy stored somewhere sleepy. Replicate. Young yarn yearning, eternally excavating energy stored somewhere sleepy. Reverse. Sleepy somewhere stored energy excavating eternally yearning yarn young S E Y.
You don’t know us, know us, we know. I know and she knows and he knows. We know one that we know, that one that we know. We know you. U. You know. We know we. Congruent. Triangles. Web. Very simple, very complex. One, two three, O’Leary! I am a line. A line segment. The line extends eternally. I am a segment. We are an angle. We are a triangle. A circuit. Spin. Ta, ta, ta from me to he to she. Cookie cutter cosmic consciousness. The seed is very simple. It grows complex. Many branches from one seed. Many seeds dropped from one branch. We grow and grow. One cell divides. One being, many cells. Grow and know, and know. I know and she knows and he knows. One two three.

Biological Creation

They used to tell the boys in the villages, in the places where the dark forests reached in behind the city walls to snag unattended children and little lambs and chickens, that it was a dark magick and should be feared. They didn’t need to be told, they saw the blood and it filled them with dread, a terrible sickness, a curse of some kind had come to claim their mothers and their sisters. They knew this. They never forgot it. Even when the moon was a silver sliver hanging in the darkened sky and the women were clean and the blood no longer flowed from between their legs, they knew that some dark magic lived there, they knew it, and they feared it and they longed to touch it. Only warriors, men who spilled blood in open fields and lived arm in arm with death and open wounds could consort with women without fear. Warriors and whores could keep each other in the truest company, forgiving of each others’ gruesome sins. Farmers and shepherds who spent all of their live long days in opposition to death could never love women like warriors did, and the wives of shepherds and farmers could never be women the way whores were, and the boys who were frightened by warnings and signs of blood would grow to be tillers of the land and herdsmen, while those who were unafraid would quarrel over women and love them and leave them and fight the wars of little lords in possession of crumbling estates, or they might seek out the alchemists and apothecaries of the wide world and learn some dark magick of their own. Women who weren’t whores and weren’t content to sweep the floor of a thatch cottage and milk a cow and birth one child after another and show no sign of enjoying lovemaking with their husbands… such women were witches, witches who sneaked beyond the city walls at night so that they could touch their dark magick in the wild places like the other wild things do, away from the eyes of the people who fear darkness and chaos and danger. They would whirl around bonfires and eat strange things and ride upon their broomsticks and love one of the old gods of the forest that couldn’t resist such a rumpus and then steal away back to their straw mattresses before the cock crowed and dawn glimmered golden with the promises of day. Then they would sweep the floor with eyelids half shut and milk the cows until they fell asleep leaning on their flanks, and they would hold still for their husbands at dusk but drink the potions that would prevent inception, and wait for their next gathering.

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.

The Story Gets Worse

Ed wood said, "Just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."
This is God’s philosophy. The story keeps getting sorrier and sorrier, the same themes emerge again and again in an ever downward hellish bent spiral, and yet there will be no end. God wants no end. There may be an end to your personal happiness, an end to peace within a certain region, an end to the old neighborhood, an end to chivalry, but there will never be a final THE END. God doesn’t care what happens to you or to me or to Palestine or Israel or the blessed United States Of America, God just keeps on writing, using the elements to further the plot, to continue this operatic telling for the furtherance of its own perfection. What makes us think that God would be an author who spices a story up with pain and conflict and then resolves it by THE END, by proceeding those words with, AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER?
God is Phillip K Dick motherfuckers. Your story has a sad ending and so does the next one and the next one and the next one that God churns out of his rusty old typewriter and lonesome mind. Something worthwhile is transpiring through the unfolding of all the stories, but there is no rainbow crossing the sky and happy couple raising their goblets in a toast surrounded by their faithful companions to close the tale. That may happen somewhere in the middle, that one breathless moment of bliss. Then the faithful companions gang rape the bride and steal the booze and smash the cup and murder the groom while the rainbow fades, simply disappears like magick dissolved into the unblinking blue. That’s how the opera works. Then perhaps the bride births a bastard son having barely escaped with her life, and then he will seek his fortune and hope to avenge his father’s death and his mother’s honor (because his mother will swear that he is the groom’s son). He will find the fattened leader of traitors and end that life while the guilty old man squeals for mercy after the tortures wrought on him by our new young hero. Then on he goes to continue his own burning and raping and pillaging under the banner of revenge so that whole new heroes are made of the sons of the villains, and on and on into infinity.
The myth, the crude and basic outline of the story tells you about the shape of the mind of God. But his real presence is down in the sordid details, down in the single tear shed by the bride when they leave her for dead soiled and broken beside her one true love, down in the drop of blood that splashes onto her son’s cheek to replace that tear as he slits the last antagonists throat. It is down in the dirt under his fingernails and in his malformed heart aching with the longing for a peace that never comes. It is in the endless dusty trails lined with thieves ready to further the story with their unbrotherly exploits. It is in the clear blue eyes of maidens that believe that God made for them one true love, it is in the way that they wait and throw their arms around the first character that seems likely to be the one. It is in the trees that sway over tombstones where old widows drop roses. It is in the worms that eat the bodies of the heroic villains of passed chapters that lie beneath those blankets of roses. Look about you, it is there in the filth crusted upon the dirty dishes in your sink and in the air around your bathroom vent stained by the smoke of the hash you have smoked to ease the pain of existence and rejection and broken heartedness, lost youth and shattered innocence.
Existence is suffering. I read these words in Herman Hesse’s Sidhartha when I was 11 or 12 and couldn’t fully comprehend their meaning, couldn’t fathom the course that they highlighted. To be written is to be made a wretched hungry ghost, and the mystical schools along the way, the ones just off the dusty trails, behind the lines of thieves, are waiting to teach you how to un-write yourself. They are waiting to show you the way out of God’s opera. Not to new life, not to better places, not into heaven, but into the nothingness, into the abyss from which you were called by a fevered creator that hoped to know itself through the endless wriggling of your ancestral line. In the secret monastery there are Sherpas waiting to show some how to help God know itself and to show others the way to annihilation. Some will choose to pass through the door that says “Willing Servitude” and others through the door marked “Liberation” and the rest are left to have their bones and memories powdered into dust.
You were not written to praise the writer. You were written to serve. You were written to taste the wine and succumb to passions and resist temptations, and strive endlessly. Your story will get worse. And God will grow infinitely more complex through its telling.

For The Sake Of Love

So uninspired… this form which can think only of shuffling and reorganizing closets or finding some reason to venture out of doors. The shock has set in, the realization that my children are growing quickly and soon they will fly away, much sooner than I anticipated when they showed up on the scene nine years ago. Back then people said, “They grow so fast.” They said it over and over again, with their sad wrinkly faces and me, with a baby on each hip, sniffed at their admonitions and thought that it was taking time enough for my liking. Only now enough time has passed that I can gaze backwards and see the eras in their short lives that have already passed into oblivion. Once Angelina brought home stacks of beautiful multicolored art projects. She was happy and liked school. Now she brings stacks of dull white paper marked with endless streams of numbers and I can see why her eyes are puffy and her feet shuffle when she walks with her head turned down as if she were walking under a load of potato sacks. And I remember when Olivia was a little tyke allowed to do as she pleased in a little neighborhood pre-school, back before she started to grow more and more human. I can remember plenty that will flood my brains like a bathroom flooded with water and then the water might leak out of my eyes. I feel it in my heart, everything is slipping away, constantly receding, and I can do nothing to call it back, but I can try to be here in this moment as I have never been in any other. I can strive to be my most present, and not look backward or forward and in that way take some action in response to the melancholy. As uninspired as I am, I am not too troubled to look at the dirt upon the rug and realize that one day I will long to see this dirt upon this rug on this day when we are all still together, or at least what was left of us was still together. I recall spilled cereal on another carpet and crying and picking it all up by hand and being cross with two little babies because we had no vacuum and we had a roommate who would be angry with the mess. If I could waltz back through time, I would push that other mother out of the way and leave the cereal on the floor and take the children warmly in my arms and say calmly that they should be more careful and finish combing their fine little hair and washing their round little faces and help them into their little coveralls and patiently deal with all the business of the day while enjoying their presence alongside my own. My life has seemed so important to me in any given moment, that I have dragged us through strange places in pursuit of something elusive, and have almost never understood what I should truly understand. I have not been gentle enough and only now, as they grow larger and more set in their basic shape, only now am I learning the delicate art of gentleness. I hope that when they are all grown they will appreciate that all of my striving was for them too, and that they will understand that I could not be better than I was in the beginning. I hope that they will know that I was growing with them. We are three people growing together, none of us perfect, the ones who know slightly more than the others, they must naturally take the lead. The ones who don’t know as much, they must naturally follow. At any given time, I cannot be more than I am, I can only strive to refine it and make it better for the sake of love, for the sake of that which on some days may flood through me uncontrollably and leak out of my every pore. But on the days when the faucets are closed, on days like this one, I can still be here and now, and I can still know that I must keep on working and carefully set the stage for the next flood.

The Time I Have Been Given

What time have they given me in this lava lamp of molten life? Do you see my golden filaments lit in the dusty glow of sunlight? Do you see me burning bright, living flesh of the sky, my dios, my god, living blood of the blood, living dance of the alien electric life machine. My mother, my father, the horned one seated on its throne of flesh and bone in the deepest darkest forest where the spiders, patient and calculating, weave their webs among the branches of the trees, waiting, waiting forever if they must, tap taping their delicate legs upon the glistening strands of their webs to play them like harps. Do you see how my skin breathes? Living flesh of the flesh; the eternal in a moment. I was one and many and none and some under sun, shining like black glass baked in the hot red desert where the mu dogs fight for the scraps of decayed corpses, dried in the sun to a salty, mouth watering, jerky that peels from the baked skeletons like dried paint chipping from cracked walls. Do you see me flying in the heavens with golden wings stretched like rays of light, touching each peripheral point in view? See me raging down in the fields with my horns turned to the earth, bellowing and snorting with a heat that makes the winds whip the stalks of grain into frenzied dances? Do you see me coming together and falling apart, going from simple to complex to simple and complex? They have called me this and they have called me that and they will call me things both known and things unknown again and again until their voices are carried away in the wind like the fragments of broken leaves shed from the silver skinned trees that glow under the moon’s caress, reaching barren branches into the vast dark reaches of the night sky as if to take stars for a new raiment and digging deep down into the deepest depths of the warm, wet, earth to wrap roots like needy fingers in the tombs of fallen soldiers and slain kings now at home in the kingdom of the worms, where things with many crawly legs make their way through the corridors of slime to meet blind things that slither. One hand adorned by the glimmering diamonds lighting forgotten galaxies, the other with rings made of serpents and toad stools. Am I high, or am I low, or am I in the middle? I am all of these and none, breathing, moving, expanding, evaporating, rising like mist from a lake, falling like a storm over the sea and crystallizing like a window of glass over murmuring streams in the north. Do you hear what I am saying? Mother? Father? I see you where you stand with your wings spread in the sky above and your tail coiled in the earth bellow, your penis erect and spilling seed into the black soil while your milk flows skyward from the teat to feed the hungry stars. I have been embraced in your cold, heart stopping grip until the flesh of my body of this earth crawled and perspiration wetted me to the bone and I shivered but could not unloose the bonds of fear that held me in place like the pharaohs in their sarcophagi of stone, and I have tumbled weightless up and down the halls of eternity riding on the silver current of your laughter like bubbles blown from a sudsy fount, as free and light as a downy feather shed from a wing in flight. All that I have known, sensed and smelled and tasted and touched and even dreamed was made in the cauldron where we meet, eternal and temporary, verging on an event horizon of assimilation. This has been the moment of choosing, this life, this body, but a moment, a tear shed from an invisible and unblinking eye. Will I travel into the halls of the eternal and diminish in the west or wrestle with demons made of my own unaccounted for tendrils? Do you see me burning bright in the fires, flesh of flesh and blood of blood transformed into diamonds in the forge of the abyss? This time I am given, is my moment to choose what dreams may come or what stark awakening will dawn when the moment has passed. This is what time I have been given.