Then We Changed

 

You were the mountain and I was the wind.

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

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

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

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.

Un

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

Bear

Little brown bear, eyes so black peering at me from the depths of your fluff stuffed gut. My dog bit your eye off once, ten years ago, and I glued it back on, and there it still is, gazing on, winking into my soul. You and I, we have been together since the beginning. Before I was born into this world you were purchased and placed in a crib made with bright yellow and orange linens, and when I was at last brought home and laid down, you were there, looking with your unreal eyes into my own new born eyes. Your face is the face of a first friend, my first friend, a first silent companion in a noisy chaotic world. Steady as a rock. As constant as the air I breathed. Unmoving and yet alive, looking back at me when I looked at you. When I could take my first steps, I carried you. Now the unmoving could move. You moved with me and I took refuge in your stillness sitting upon a patch of sun dappled carpet and playing with your sweet round ears and tiny black nose. Your eyes were so clear then, large round pupils of deepest black encircled by irises of muddy gold. They shimmered and glistened, as lively as the eyes of the many tropical fish that swam to and fro in my father’s massive aquarium. Now those same eyes are scratched and cloudy like the eyes of a very old man or woman and your fur, once so plush, has worn thin in patches all over your body, but I have never loved you more. Though now I have friends who speak to me and come to me on their own legs and go away on those same legs, I rely solely on you to comfort me in the deepest dark of night when I am once again frail and helpless, a child adrift in a sea of violence. Even as I grew and acquired new toys and found playmates like myself to frolic with, and dressed in Velcro sneakers and waited for school buses and listened to moldy old women that used yard sticks for pointers, even through the years of changing into something else and talking to boys on the telephone and looking into the mirror for hours, even then you were with me, though I sometimes neglected you. Sometimes, the great flood of things that had come to fill my closets and the underside of the bed carried you out of my arms and into a dusty corner. Sometimes out of deepest affection I sealed you up in a cardboard box with letters deemed important and tiny dresses speckled with hearts that once fit on my now oversized body. Now, more than ever, I appreciate you and your silence, your strength and your helplessness which are the perfect counter points to my own strengths and weaknesses. Because you can not move, I move you. Because I will change, you are unchanging. Together we are complete, a magic pair, a girl and her gentle bear. I am learning to love you as unconditionally now as I did in those first days, when we were both new, and yet now I have matured enough to know that so many things come, but they also go, and as they curl back like the tongue of the sea returning to the endless unknown, only you remain. Sweet bear. We have found a way to stick together, the unborn and the born, keeping each other warm by the hearth of a common heart. It is this shared heart which gives life to each of us, but we two are two who know it, so that life is vivified and granted even more color by the solidarity of our bond.
Little brown bear, eyes so black, peering at me from the depths of your fluff stuffed gut, it will be you and I till the end, and at the end, when all things are blotted from the horizon like typed errors remedied with liquid white out, our union will already be so complete that our further adventures as one will have to be written by Angels on the underside of clouds with ink as invisible as we will have become.

Annihilation Shall Be The Name Of The New Federation

If only my fingers could flap fast enough, my synapses fire rapidly enough, my elaborately configured mechanical creation respond with electric lightening speed to the whispered request of that other subtler I… The "I" that is the emptiness between the human who sits cross legged on the floor and the white candle flickering a foot away. The "I" that has never existed and will never exist and is eternal and imagined, very real, as real as the Narwhale, hunted to near extinction for its magickal horn. The "I" that is not at all and yet is, voiceless, a whisper of nobility, dignity and nothingness. The "I" that is free of any agenda and waits silently, aimlessly, for something to come and rouse it from slumber. The "I" that is locked in a high tower and awaits its prince, the "I" laying out on the table with electrodes strapped to its inert body waiting for the lightning to strike and for the good doctor to shriek with excitement, the "I" sagging under its crown on the throne, listening to the whispers of the deceitful counselor awaiting the arrival of the replacement that may slay him and make the kingdom anew.
That eye suspended in the invisible skies of mind is one thing, and the thing that can move is another. This wriggle jiggle body bot, this conglomeration of nations, the united states of human experience, pumping blood, pressing out Carbon Dioxide and gulping in oxygen, producing subtle chemical cocktails which cause my breasts to be tender and swollen and my voice to be high pitched. This other thing that I am, this thing that is, this thing tied to the earth, to the planet that is an extension of its lesser body, this mortal creation with its precious and fragile shelf life due to expire in another 60 to 80 years if it isn’t knocked abruptly from the shelf before then, to shatter upon the sterile linoleum beneath the fluorescent lights and then be no more, it is something Other.
These two "Me"s, each one representing it’s own federation; on my right hand the federation of the dying and on my left hand the federation of the undead, both sides ever at war and yet ever longing to embrace in some final ecstasy which will blot out the existence of each and birth something new and entirely unknowable; the new empire of the eternal light and night, the explosion that results from the union of opposites, the newest latest and greatest coming of Christ; half worm, half eaglet, a winged serpent twisting through the forgotten tunnels of time and beyond them in the endless abyss of the uncreated. One eye blind in the light, the other blind in the dark.
Whatever either "I" imagines, whatever either "I" hopes for cannot be the end, for our children are never as we imagine they will be, they are something else, unpredictable, a synthesis of what came before, a frightening new evolutionary mutation which may succeed or fail to meet the standard of any of an infinite number of categories in which they will be judged by David Hasselhoff or Paula Abdul.
This right now, this moment, is the frustrated lovemaking of the sky and the sea, one which seeks the clarity of the stars and one that seeks the tangles of the deep. No, not one, one nation and one other nation causing a sensation, an appalling congregation of fertilization on behalf of the acceleration of creation fostered by intense aggravation.
Who are the judges really? And when and where, by which angels from which rung of what ladder will the categories be drawn up and decided upon?
What you know is not real. What you know is the fictitious nonsense of a sedated dreamer. What you deem wisest and worthy is spittle on a mad man’s bib, wait a moment and a nurse will wipe away your loftiest definitions of self, the universe, god, and everything.
Yes, I have been like one of those bad moms on a day time television talk show, broadcast to the populations of the Western hemisphere of that planet earth in the milky way galaxy (which goes by a different name in different company) that confesses that she has allowed her teen to have sex under her roof, only I’m much worse than that, I have allowed serpents and birds to mate within my own consciousness, and not (like those other moms profess) because I thought it was the safest place for them to be, but because there are few other places where angels and demons can get together and do the nasty. There are only so many mind blown mortals, walking about, staring wide eyed at the world, wearing around their necks signs, written with invisible ink, which say:

"Speakeasy through me ye Gods and Devils…
and fuck prohibition!"

This that you have stumbled into, these ramblings, are the dirty linens left behind by monsters of sky and water, alien entities like Spaniards and Indians, attracted like the opposing poles of magnets, things which come together via compulsion laced with reluctance. These things meet here in the house of the holy, in this den of sin with the understanding that Annihilation shall be the name of the new Federation.
If only I can move fast enough to be of service. If only my fingers flap fast enough, synapses fire rapidly enough, mortal body bends and bows gracefully enough, heart breaks open wide enough, then let me serve the new kingdom. Let me be servant to the Federation of Annihilation.

Union

Tell me, little electric pulses that take the shape of white letters on a liquid crystal screen, tell me what I do not know about myself, about you, about us. I have gone around turning up stones since I was a little girl, turning up stones not just to see what lies and lives beneath them, but to reach down with lightening quick fingers to catch what has been unearthed and press it to my lip, lick it with my tongue, and drop it into that cavern that is my mouth so that I can eat it up, letting it wriggle down my throat with all its crawly legs. This is how I have forged a relationship with that which is beyond the surface of my skin; I welcome it in. Answers bear no weight with me. Questions are only useful if they draw me into a real encounter with something that I am not. Something that I am not until it has found its way inside of me, then I am. I am without sorrow or regret my own worst nightmares, those things that I found brooding in the darkest depths of my psyche. I opened me up and looked in on what was there, then beckoned with a welcoming finger,
"Come here you strange obscene things. Come here and let me eat you. You will like it, I promise, it feels so good to be digested rather than shoved off the plate. Let me try you, you will see, it feels so good when you are me."
One night death came in and sat on my roommates couch in a black denim jacket. I sat cross legged on the floor, criss cross apple sauce Indian style with a nervous smile. Looking upon its pale grinning visage I said:
"It’s all over now that you are here. I understand that." And I spread my legs wide and said,
"Come in. Your welcome."
Because, you see, with me the unknown is always welcome, the fierce, the frightening, the unknowable, it’s all quite edible once you’ve acquired a taste for it. Like black licorice, its flavor is distinct and stains your tongue so that others will suspect what you’ve been up to. Yes, yes, it’s an acquired taste, like eating worms or drinking urine and others will be able to smell something on you that isn’t quite right, but most will be willing to ignore the signs which point to your unwholesome appetite. Most will be happy to ignore you completely, in fact, because they wouldn’t care to share or spare a bit of attention, seeing as they have so precious little to begin with and they plan to blow it all on shopping or watching sports.
So you can smell like dog shit and have worms crawling out of your head, and then they will not want to be friends with you, but bless them, they won’t interfere with you. No, they will gladly perfect the art of neglect and let you wander from garbage can to dank dark garbage can where you can extend your hand into the darkness and let your fingers close around something without quite knowing what it is, and then you can pull it up into the light and find that it’s a paper box from a nearby fast food chain, and opening the lid you will discover a half eaten crispy chicken sandwich which you will not hesitate to bite into yourself, right there, on the spot, achieving union with deep fried foul, minus feathers, plus secret sauce and limp yellow lettuce.
You can count on such measures of freedom it you live in a city big enough, if you live in a hot bed of civilization and if you are willing to sleep alone on a cold hard sidewalk beneath a sheet of newspapers. You can find what you don’t know and embrace it if you aren’t afraid of being infected by it, if you have no reserves about becoming something other than what you were just before such a fateful encounter. Those who have such hesitations do not turn up rocks or open mysterious boxes or admit to themselves that they have had dreams about fucking dogs.
Those who want to remain as they imagine they are, with a nickel’s worth of attention left to burn on their favorite diversion, so that they may easily forget those queer dreams and ignore those unusual packages, and dismiss the strange apparitions sitting on their roommate’s sofa, will be just fine. They are free not to explore. I am allowed, even encouraged not to notice the creepy crawly things that live in my head, the heads of others or under stones.
However, I choose to embrace self knowledge without conditions, which means that I will change shapes. Oh yes I will. And you may look at these little symbols blazing on a liquid crystal screen, and eat the forbidden knowledge I have pressed to your lips without ever suspecting that you are in fact eating me. (Unless of course I mention it…) If what I have just said about myself, about you, and about us, manages to wriggle down your throat like a slimy green alligator’s tongue, you may find that it will change you too. That is the magick of union, my love. That is what I offer you now.

Transmission from a Galactic Winged Bard

Now the time has come my pretty friends to tell our tale, our rainbow story, of how red and blue and yellow and orange fade from one into the next without warning or remorse. Now I am this. Now I am that. Draw near and I will whisper into your ear something like the trickle of a leaky faucet, a fountain at which roaches impervious to the years and poisons and harmful radiations have come to hear the songs of their troubadours. Tell us now about the district under the kitchen sink… are there still wars raging between the underside of the refrigerator and the crack in the pantry?… it’s not right the way our people were pushed into the narrowest margins of existence…in the shadows we have always thrived…yes we will always be, so long as there are others that waste, we will be here to make life of the refuse of the Gods…
So many lines, some touch and others are separated by yellow and never even suspect the existence of red on the other side of that sunflower resplendence. A great kaleidoscope of dreams and fantasy. The play of the eternal mind with its many distinct bands, its parallel worlds of fancy. See now, this motion of my fingers typing upon the keys has correspondences in all parallel tunnels. It does not look the same in green as it does here in red, and yet this that I am doing now sends ripples through the multicolored pool. It is like a doughnut shaped pool, with a great drop off in the center, the end of all worlds, the eternal silence, the no mind, the void, our holy mother.
All beings approach this event horizon simultaneously, the children drawn inexorably back to their root. We are all reactionaries. We are all a reflexive motion away from the great nothing. It is not enough that I live and breath. I am not. I never was. The conspiracy to separate myself from the multiverse, to create a sense of permanence, to cryo-freeze this world, this shade of blue that I have come to identify with, it is a vain attempt at immortality. But I cannot live eternally for I am already life eternal and her sister death. I cannot freeze, I cannot exist, I cannot change, and yet I am all variance. I am everything at once.
Profanity of course is a silly notion. The ogre’s hand protruding from the wall is only an offense to my illusion of individuality. There are of course other realities, other vantage points, other highs and lows. This knurly slimy pasty ogre’s thumb with fungus blackened finger nail emerging erect is only ugly here, lodged midway in my bedroom wall. Elsewhere it is sublimely beautiful, the most perfected of all creations. Everything that is, was, will be, is the perfected creation.
Breath deeply now, take it all in, the odor of sweat and mold, the garbage rotting upstairs, your neighbor’s rose water perfume, the dogs breath, the musky opalescent substance oozing from your lovers miraculous genitalia, the tiny blooms of the English lavender emitting their scent to attract small furred bees that produce the antiseptic propylis which has it’s own scantly perceptible odor, and sweet honey too. It is all the crown of creation.
Humanity is a tiny drop in the sea, and all of those things which we can see, hear, smell, and touch are but a thimbleful of the rainbow nectar of the gods. Those things which you cannot even imagine make up the rest of the great roaring sea, along with just a pinch of the things that you can. If you should happen to be experiencing this as a sudden unexplainable knowing as you drift disembodied out past the milky way recalling your life as a griffin on a blue moon somewhere in the Sirius star system, then please do not be alarmed by the limitations imposed here by the workings of my own handicapped consciousness. They have sent those of us who are especially disabled to come and live in the home for the challenged which we call Earth. Here I am to be rehabilitated by engaging in various arts and crafts, which I do find therapeutic. After all, it has allowed me to make contact with you, which has expanded my heart a bit and helped to melt some of the inhibitions which might otherwise cause me to recoil like a snapped rubber band, sending me into a deeper state of dementia.
Thank you so much for flowing into me as I flow into you in this senseless, purposeless, blessed, dance of unity. If we should become displaced and exchange places as a result of this etheric copulation, look into the lines of the hand of the body you have come to occupy. You might as well look now, as it seem that the transference has taken place (although you should note, as part of your rehabilitation, that you never really were you, nor I). Look into those lines, into the tiniest wrinkle and detail. See how the ectoderm nearly sparkles in the light, as if a few stars were still embedded there just to see if you’d notice. When you look at this deeply enough, without fear of the dark and direction-less fall, you will automatically enter into a series of summersaults and be seized by a series of undulations that would be laughter if you were still embodied in that home (or some other) for the transdimensionally impaired.
You know, there are some patients there who do not use their stay for our benefit. They only become further habitualized and lost in their addictions, forming relationships with other inpatients in denial, taking advantage and making ill use of medications and a situation that could help under the right circumstances. Here is the problem with all organizations and institutions, and in fact every kind of structure ever formed (not excluding the present configuration of ideas): its destruction is knit into its very fabric. The thesis and the antithesis dwell back to back, Siamese twins, one black, one white, conveniently blind to one another. Neither is actual. The synthesis was always present.

Alchemical Marriage

The creature from the deep needs a surface dweller to beget life.
Each lives an existence that is lacking, inhabiting one realm and powerless in another. If they may combine, the product would be a being that hails from both worlds; the eternal and the apparent.
What could such a prince do? One that is the embodiment of the union of spirit and flesh, the holy and the profane, would access a territory that we of mortal origins can scarcely fathom.
What lies beyond the horizon of the known?
Only the dragon born, one that is the serpent with wings, can come to know the kingdom. All others will be blind to it. They cannot see beyond the invisible boundaries that hold them in place, past the limitation of death. To that which can die, that which cannot will appear alien, monstrous, and unnatural. And yet, only the product of the marriage of opposites can offer progress and the furtherance of Real Life.