Invocation Of Spirit

Well, it's time. After so many nights wasted in sleep and so many days wasted in subservience to the almighty clock of the western industrialized world and the voices of those machines who came before and shaped this culture of diamond hungry whores ever watchful for the trespasses of their neighbors.
Like those dogs trapped behind fences that once barked at our beloved Spritzie, Spritzie who ran wild and free through the fields and streets and yards our heart holder. Her name, Spritzie, a spirit, the spirit which roams the open country side, the purple mountains, the yellow fields, the shaded areas behind houses.
She was my first familiar, the first non-human animal that I could touch and speak to and run with. I named her. I called her Spritzie. Spritzie, our protector, my protector, the protector of all those innocents who cross through her sphere. She ferries travelers safely through the dangerous terrain that is part of our kingdom. My Spritzie, my Spritzie, my spirit.
Late at night the air is cool and sweet like invisible undrinkable wine that flows through your very skin. Drinking in all of those negative ions, a long sip of ocean breezes and Moorish mists through quivering nostrils.
At night I am alive. But often I sleep and wait for the messages to come through to me from the woods; dreams, a strange Morse code from another myself whispering to me about what is out there and pointing to the Mounties of my soul.
I do not trust myself, I cannot be fully trusted as long as these Mounties who made me move around unseen. We need little girls with eyes in the walls to track their progress. I do not fully trust myself, but I murmur the litany, almost forgotten, into my pillow:
“In whom do you place your trust?”
“In myself, my teacher, and the Dharma.”
Dharma is a word I have appropriated, commandeered, liberated from the white halls of the symbolic order. I know what I mean by it, but I don’t know what they mean by it. I mean a WAY.
Like that preserved by the professor of dentistry who with a simple invocation of presence today said “Open” and I knew, here was a keeper of the WAY of dentistry. He knew more than how to recognize a possible lesion on 15, that was only what he did, but he did it with WAY. The master of teeth said “Open” and my jaw snapped to attention as though there could be no greater honor or privilege than to open for one such as himself.
Of course, my own teacher is not a dentist. When he says open it is not my Jaw that he commands.  He sings it, “Open, open Spritzie!” and I open.
Whistle, whistle, Spritzie where did you fly to? Where did you go on that cool clean air carried in from the blessed darkness of the night?
I press my finger to my lips and it is understood that something should be clothed, cloaked in silence and darkness, germinating beyond the diamond hungry eyes of the world. After so many nights it is time, it is time.
My Spritzie, I invoke thee! Holy guardian angel, oh sleeping prince of the rose, awake!
What is that stuff that drip drops into the bloodstream from some secretive gland that becomes active only in darkness, delivering its Cathar kiss to all dreamers? Stuff, stuff, do your work, anoint my cells with liquid light, oh secret Morse code tapping out to me:
“We are here, we are alive, we acknowledge your interest in Dog Farm, end transmission.”
 I place my trust in myself , my teacher, and the Dharma.
I have my little girls in the walls with tablets and pens ready to jot down secrets we keep from ourselves, ready to pounce on the photographic evidence that will illustrate beyond doubt the presence of Mounties at Dog Farm.
So many days wasted in subservience to the almighty clock of the western industrialized world and the voices of those machines who came before and shaped this culture of diamond hungry whores ever watchful for the trespasses of their neighbors.
Tonight we toss rocks at bottles and hope for the best. Free Tibet, free Spritzie, open!
There will be many days burned, many nights of waiting for the “short, short, long, short…” but for tonight a close encounter initiated from a vertical position, a simple invocation of presence, CIA tapping- Spritzie, Spritzie, open Spritzie. We acknowledge your acknowledgment of interest in Dog Farm.
End transmission.

Give

Silence. My life is like a tomb today. No music to make me wiggle. I read On The Road and I know what they’re talking about. I know exactly what IT is and I know exactly when I had IT or when IT had me. I remember being out there on the dark floor swinging and a guitar was screaming its love for me and I showed my appreciation by letting go! Getting wiggly. I let that wailing in, let it have a turn at the wheel, let it dance the body electric, shake it. I remember that I could see them, the music makers, and I could feel ME alive and willing, my heart wide open, and dimly in the background there were others and they barely moved. I remember the social animal whispering in my ear, “Perhaps you are making others uncomfortable.” Something else roared back, “Damn that comfort. Some bodies got to give. You don’t come to the altar as a spectator. You come to make a sacrifice baby, so give!”
That’s what I did in a concrete room with groovy squiggly drawing of figures dancing all over the walls and all the real humans with three dimensional apparatuses hugging those walls and the couches, hanging thoughtfully back as though they would prefer to be two dimensional themselves. There were these stick figures that wanted to get groovy and these Russians that wanted to be sticks.
I have been places though, where everybody did give. Other darkened rooms, other musicians. Places where we let IT have us until we were nauseated and fainting. How many times did we do that? There was a bunch of us then, and we got together every two or three months and it wasn’t easy because we were separated by miles and miles. Most of us lived down in the dusty desert and slithered around on our bellies like lizards most days, baking in the sun and talking about free will and the transmission of transformative substances carried in blood, sweat, semen, and saliva. The music maker lived far away in a misty bay. When we wanted to wake up and whirl around and commune with the GRANDFATHER, with the BIG TIME, with THE MUSIC baby, then we either had to pile into a car and go to the music maker or we had to bring him to us, and either way it wasn’t easy.
I spent those lazy lizard days putting people in the sensory deprivation tank or selling moonstone earrings and Eckhart Toll books and scrambling to get the music maker to come down to us. And we argued all night. Bored housewives, big middle aged Indians in button up white shirts and purple jersey T-shirts, school teachers, philosophers, college drop outs, sexual deviants, a market research man in a big black hat, a pack of sham men. Like werewolves, we were one part someone you would spit on at the bus stop, another part something unspeakable. Lonely, broken down, and crazed. Arguing all night about who did what and what should we do and could we make pornography instead of selling moonstone, and how were we going to make the rent so that we would have a place to argue. I knew, we had to make the rent so we could bring the music maker, bring him, bring him, and it was hard but we did it a few times before we exploded and showered out like the sparklers after the grand finale of a fireworks display. Whatever else we did with the torturous months and years that gurgled by, whether we understood or didn’t understand the market research man and his jive, we did let IT dance through us more than a few times.
I live by the music man now in the foggy bay. I tell him I’m thinking about the good old days and he tells me these are the good old days. He’s right. I’ll look back and think about this time later, my one dance with the Russians and the way we stay up till a reasonable hour playing board games, screaming and howling and brooding and nodding and playing air guitar to old tunes coming out of the computer. We did this on Friday night and IT had us then. I remember that I could hear everything we said as if we were performers on a stage of Jell-O and the music makers that made noise in the background were scattered or dead and still helping us with our invocation. I remember that I began to tremble towards the end, it was all so much.
And truly, even that little hoowa at my kitchen table wasn’t easy to put together. There were weeks of being sick and too much toil for the music man and the sullen little girl must have had plenty of troubles I know nothing about that nearly prevented our gathering. One of our ranks even refused to come in and participate and instead hid in the bedroom watching Anime, so even this small happening had to be fought for, but we did it.
Today I cough and roll around with a stomach ache and things are quiet and as long as I let myself get beat this way, quiet they will stay. I have to get up and do something if I want to break out of this tomb of quietude. I have to give.

Now

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

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 Dreams of Monsters

What could I tell you if I could remember no dreams? I’d have no tongue to wiggity wag because I’d not remember this here fantasy where I dream of dreams forged from words. They say that it is most restful to sleep beneath three feet of ice nestled within two down sleeping bags with a wool cap clapped over your head and a little air hole dug through the snow, just snoozing away in the ice mother’s belly. They say that all the action of sleep happens during the REM cycle, all the Freudian fun that allows you to wake up and say,
“ I dreamed I drank a chocolate shake through a straw.”
But the psychologists and dream analysts know that what you were really dreaming about was fucking your father. You only remember it as drinking a chocolate shake because the brain makes things right for us when we wake up, makes it so that we can feel like a healthy drone and not some deranged maniac. There is however another cycle where the very deepest of sleep occurs and to catch these elusive z’s, they say that the best place is beneath snow or in a Turkish cave or on a whaling ship with no heat and just a thin blanket between you and the North Atlantic chill. So they say. They say that the dreamless sleep is the most restful, and who am I to disagree?
I have seen the light that burns in the darkness, the light from nowhere that burns behind closed eyelids and comes with the hum and buzz of the eternal. If you listen to it deeply you will evaporate completely, so you resist as often as you can, being identified with this dream of mortality, this dream of ATM machines and airplanes and dish washers and pop stars. But if you were to give in, to let go, then what would you be? Nothing you could talk about here, where if you told them that you saw great monsters of light shifting and changing shape in an electric light parade jungle to a music that needs no ears to pander to, well then, they would just say that you had been dreaming about fucking your mother. (And maybe that’s exactly what you would be doing.)
Or if you could tell of the time that you were a giant with purple gray tendrils rising from your crown and your body was interlocked with that mysterious other and you sang songs with the voice of a pipe organ, songs that turned purple and black and neon green and glowed through the infinite darkness, then wouldn’t they just say that it was a dream about replacing your mother so that you could be with your father?
But what, what if that was not the dream. What if that pipe organ song is the reality, the dream weaving machine, the stone dropped into a pond that makes all the little ripples that we think are the real world. What if having a mother and a father is only the dream of a mushroom headed God that comes from many and none and returns to many and none.
How could you remember this truth in the middle of dreaming that you must make it to work on time and your children must be picked up from school on time but a woman in the train station won’t help you with your ticket and you are stuck there for much longer than you would like? Is there any way to describe the translucent limb extending through space time that suddenly got crimped and caused this nightmare to be my life?
Me, a tiny pin drop of light. A partial opening in the eyelid of a titan who gently sleeps, twitching tortured through the rapid eye movement cycle of slumber, invisible limbs quaking, metropolises plunging into the sea, planets melting, civilizations crumbling, and new stars bursting into brightness to warm little clay marbles on a black tablecloth under which a wild black dog sits snarling, insisting you stay on the table spinning and rolling, for the truth of what you are is too monstrous, too mammoth to be explained to a little pin head of dream stuff like you. Your story, your life, your play on the stage of the Goliath mind will come to a close, and you cannot begin to understand what you are or what moves you, you can only be shoved across the board like a chess piece moved by a sparkling effervescent tentacle that wants to forget what it is and rest for a minute in your strange strife.
The grass is always greener on the other side.
The grass is always greener on the other side.
The grass is always greener on the other side…
So monsters dream of being human, and humans dream of fleeing or being monsters. If I were not a dream thing I could not speak these words, for the thing that sleeps has no tongue, no eyes, no ears, and wrestles with an eternity of stillness. I am made to do the things that it cannot do for itself. I am made to do the things it can only dream of.

Black Feather

This story happened before we had methods of recording stories so, just like many others before us, you must remember, in any way that you can manage to remember, and you must tell the story once again, for all stories are one story and what I tell you now will surely happen again, to you and to others and then to others once again, and if you don’t remember, and if you don’t tell it, then the story will never change.
In those days, the people traveled in a long slow caravan of wooden carriages and black metal carts, and their movement was heavy and full of foreboding, for they traveled through rough dead lands full of mystery and danger. It was a time of endless nights and savage storms and reckless lightning, a time of great fear and great sadness. The people had grown old and ugly and hateful and they had lost all hope for there was no hope to be found in the endless repetition of short gloomy days and long frightful nights drenched in wind and sand and chaos.
One night, Mother, who rested alone within one of the great metal carts, was visited by the White Birds, and they were made of shining glory that sparkled as they flew and, as they gracefully came towards her, they spread their vast wings all over the black sky and made the stars themselves sparkle with color. Mother heard them coming and she sat up and stared at them with big, round eyes, unable to comprehend their nature, but they would never stay long enough for her to ask a question and so she simply stared. They lovingly came down upon her and they gave to her what she most had wanted, a tiny helpless creature who would finally recognize in her what she truly was and what she had always been. In return, she would see in their gift what she had always refused to acknowledge, what she had most feared in her lonely nights inside the metal cart.
As he came, naked and wet, from the great Void, from which everything emerges and to which everything eventually returns, he was gentle and soft and devoid of any concepts or arrangements. In his tiny new eyes there were no conditions or assumptions. He knew nothing and he wanted nothing. He was open to the world, as dark as it could be right then, or as light as it may become in the future. There were no further questions brewing within him, and no further answers were forthcoming, not then and not for the first months of hidden existence within the bosom of Mother’s warm furry darkness, the welcoming living sanctuary that protected the little creature from what waited outside. Mother looked at her brown new little gift and she called him Son, in honor of his blazing creation and of his subtle gleaming promise of new shining light.

* * *

But it came to pass that the people became aware of the little Son and they did recognize something within him that was unlike them. And they couldn’t understand what it was that they saw, and they couldn’t recognize the dance of fire behind his tiny eyes, as it was too small and it was too fleeting and they didn’t have the patience to search. But, unwilling to search, they were still eager to find something, and so they did. It became clear to them what it was that made Son obviously different from them, and in this they found what they needed. Having been brought by The White Birds, Son had sprouted gray wings of his own right away, but they were unlike wings as the people knew them and they were more like giant ears as they knew them, giant ears that flapped all around him and made it difficult for him to walk. Seeing this, the people grabbed onto his giant ears and they pulled on them and they stepped on them and they kicked at them and they laughed at Son for he didn’t know where to go or what to do or how to defend himself. They persisted in their attacks for so long that they brought little Son to tears, and the thick tears dripped down his furry face like oil and they mixed with his sweat and with the dirt at his feet and, seeing this, the people laughed even harder, for nothing was funnier to the people than to watch the pain in another’s eyes. Son, staring with eyes now as wide as Mother’s at the people that laughed all around him, regretted ever having come into this strange place, where people step on your ears and then laugh when they see that it hurts you. Little Son, being so hurt and afraid, even blamed Mother for having arranged his arrival. Maybe if she hadn’t been so eager to stare into the unknown and find confirmations, maybe then he would have remained where he had been originally, even though now he could not remember at all what this place had been and he couldn’t even point in that direction.
Mother was furious at this development, for now her only prize had been taken away from her and her one hope of true happiness was sinking into a pool of sadness, heavy as lead and deep as the deepest well in the southern lands. She turned on the laughing people, and she attacked them in a great blaze of fury, hoping to show them their wrongdoing, hoping to show them how it felt to be hurt. But the people were many, and, all together, they were much stronger than she was, and they grabbed her and chained her and they took her away to a place where she would never be able to hurt any of the people ever again. There she died soon after, drowning in her own tears that would never stop coming. Son was left behind, alone, afraid and sadder than ever, wondering what he would do now that his one and only fountain of love and safety was gone.

* * *

Mouse was a tiny creature that had lived much longer than any of the people that lived around him. Being very small, he managed to live from the scraps that the other people left behind and he managed to remain hidden among the half broken carts that formed the rear of the caravan. One day, it came to pass that Mouse saw Son alone, crying and shivering, hopelessly looking up at the sky and wishing for a sudden end to his great troubles. Mouse took pity on him and came towards him slowly and Mouse smiled at him and ran his little hand over his furry giant ears. Son saw him and loved him immediately with a fury that can only be borne of true hopelessness, when all appearances have fallen and there is only the heart left behind. Mouse recognized this fury and gave his own love back in the same way for, due to his age and his cunning, Mouse had learned to do such things when he really wanted.
Having become Son’s true friend, Mouse then took it upon himself to show Son the ways of the world of the people. He showed him when to avoid the big congregations, for they were dangerous and unpredictable. He showed Son how to be helpful to the people without raising their concern. He showed Son how to step out of the way of the giant powerful guards that roamed up and down the great caravan dressed in shining black metal armor. He showed him then how to return to his little chores without causing a wave of undue suspicion among the few people that even knew that they were there. Most of all, Mouse showed him how to pull his giant ears back and tie them behind his head, so they wouldn’t be in his way when he walked, and so they wouldn’t attract undue attention. Son followed all of Mouse’s instructions, and even though he still missed Mother, he learned to make his way in the world. And the storms continued and the nights were just as frightening and the lightning was still as reckless as it ever was.

* * *

One day it came to pass that a big man came to talk to Son. The man wore a large top hat and he had a long moustache that fell in curls over both sides of his mouth, and the moustache bounced up and down each time he talked. The man sat beside Son and looked at him sternly. Son simply stared back at him, afraid of what this strange man might have to say.
“It is time for you to earn your share of food and your living quarters,” the man said, “you cannot continue to live here and expect us to carry you as dead weight.”
Son nodded and agreed with what seemed like sensible words, even though he couldn’t really understand them, and he couldn’t really know what was reasonable to expect since he knew no other world and he had come into this one without expectations.
“I have discussed this with my councilors and we have decided to offer you a position, and I do encourage you to immediately accept it,” the man said and he smiled at Son with his eyes twinkling and his long curly moustache bouncing up and down.
Again Son could find no fault in what the man was saying, even though he didn’t understand what a position was or what would happen once he did accept it.
“We will make you a Purveyor of Laughter, since that is the one job that you have done well in your short life,” and the man made a quick gesture with his arm and, at once, two little men ran towards him, and they carried with them two big leather bags. They placed them on the ground, close to where Son still was sitting, nodding and staring at the strange man with the large top hat. The two little men opened the leather bags and took out many containers of paint and they took out several large brushes. “I assume that your silence is to be understood as acceptance?” the man asked Son and Son nodded slowly, unable to find within himself any reason to deny the man’s proposal. The two little men then went to work on Son’s face and body and soon he was so covered in paint of many colors that even Mother would have had trouble recognizing him. Son didn’t find this completely unpleasant and he even smiled when they lead him to the head of the caravan, a place where he had never been before.
At the very front of the caravan, as it laid resting like a large old snake draped across the surface of the land, there was a wide circle of torches, and there were many guards in full black metal armor riding on strong black horses and these guards looked over a large restless crowd that was formed around the circle of dancing light. In the middle of the circle, there were little women jumping and dancing, and there were men gyrating and singing, and there were other people jumping over blazing fire and rolling in the ground, wincing with pain as they fell. All of it, but specially the last, scared Son intensely and then he wished to go back to where he had come from, but it was much too late. By the time he thought of turning back, he was suddenly pushed into the middle of the circle and he found himself in right in the center of an ocean of demanding eyes and the eyes stared at him with something akin to hunger. As soon as he looked at them, with his big ears pulled back against his trembling body and the bright paint reflecting the shifting light of the many torches, they started to laugh, and they laughed loud and long and hard, and they kept on laughing for what seemed like forever. Then a man came and pulled Son up and forced him to jump through a ring of fire and then he forced him to jump into several great wooden barrels full of water that broke when he landed inside of them. With every painful stunt, the people laughed and laughed and laughed, and Son knew loneliness once again and, once again, he wished he was back in a place that he couldn’t even remember, a place before Mother and the caravan and the vast hostile land. Whatever this place had been, it must have been better than this.
His suffering seemed endless, but, like all sufferings, it did eventually come to an end and he was brought back to his little corner of the caravan, back among the restless people that laughed but not quite so loudly and the dirty little people that ran under the carts to make sure that the wheels were still held tight. Mouse came towards him when he saw him and Mouse felt a great pity for him, for Son was burned by the fires, and bruised by the many falls, and the paint had fallen in places and it had remained in others, so that Son looked completely broken and lacking in any hope. Mouse ran his hand over the fur of his giant ears and tried to make him feel better, but it only made Son feel worse, and so they simply cried together, knowing that some calamities are simply beyond the reach of any cure.

* * *

After much crying, Mouse finally had an idea and he quickly shared it with his sad and shivering friend.
“I have traveled with this caravan for much longer than I can remember. I know their patterns and I know the places that they visit and I know how long they stay in each place. They will stay here for many months, I know, and I also know that this place is the same as the one that we visited many, many years ago. I believe I know that a place is nearby where we can find something special."
Son stared at his friend in wonder, and his words were full of such mystery and strangeness that he forgot all about his sadness and simply listened, intently trying to understand the deepest meaning that hid within his tale.
“We will travel for a day in that direction,” Mouse said as he pointed to the East, “and then we will turn and travel for another day, and then we will come to the foot of the mountains, to the land of the gray rocks. There we will find the cave that I faintly remember and, within it, we will find what we seek.”
Mouse never said what it was that they would find there but Son felt something strange that seemed somehow familiar, something that told him that he didn’t need to ask for reasons at all, something that told him that all questions that he could come up with would be superfluous. They both started walking right away, without any need for further explanation.
They walked in silence for a day, and then they turned, and then they walked in silence for another day, until they came to a region that was full of large gray rocks and narrow little passageways. Mouse then pointed to the rocks and said, “This is where the mountains begin. Somewhere among all these gray rocks, there is a cave Son. Help me find it.”
Son walked slowly around the many rocks, calling back to Mouse every so often to make sure he wouldn’t lose him. When Mouse would hear him calling, he would call back saying, “I am here Son. Don’t worry. Just keep on looking.” And they moved far away from each other, but still Son called to him in a way that Mouse could hear and then Mouse would call back to him in the same way. And the meaning of their calling was always the same: “I am still here. I am still searching.”
After much searching and much calling, Son came upon a rock that was larger than all the others. In the middle of the large rock, there was a hole big enough for the two of them to walk through. Inside the hole, Son could only see sand and darkness. Son called to Mouse once more and he said, “Mouse, I believe I have found it!” and right away Mouse came running, already sure that Son was right because he could hear it in his voice, and as soon as he saw the cave, he smiled in recognition and he pointed to the darkness.
“This is it! You have indeed found it! Let’s go right in. We have no time to waste!”
As they walked into the darkness, Son was trying to restrain his fear because Mouse showed no fear at all, and he was his friend and he knew what he was doing. After a short walk, Mouse dropped to his knees and started to crawl around and whisper, “Somewhere around here… somewhere… around… here…” and Son grew restless because he didn’t know what Mouse was looking for. But, as restless as he was, he waited quietly out of the simple trust that was borne of his love for Mouse.
After some time of whispering and crawling around on the sand, Mouse suddenly said, “Here! There are many here! More than enough for the two of us!” Son heard some more movement and then Mouse moved towards him in the darkness. “I will give you something,” Mouse said, “and I want you to eat it.” Son this time couldn’t resist his initial impulse and he had to ask, “What is it?”
Mouse answered in his sweetest voice, which seemed even sweeter to Son in the darkness of the cave, “I don’t know what it is. I only know what it does. “
That answer satisfied Son and he extended his hand and Mouse placed something in it and said, one more time, “Eat it.”
Son brought the strange soft thing to his lips and dropped it onto his tongue. It tasted like sand and dirt and he felt an urge to spit it out right away, but Mouse, sensing what Son was about to do, quickly said to him, “Chew it. Eat it.” And Son did as Mouse said.
Soon the darkness of the cave was no longer empty, and soon Mouse was no longer small, and soon there were lights all around them, and there were great circles of fire, much greater than the circle that Son had seen at the head of the caravan, and Son wondered how this could all fit within the cave, but it didn’t matter, because there were stars falling upon them in great spirals, through the roof of the cave which seemed to be moving like water. Son suddenly knew that he was where had always been, and he knew then that he had never left his place of origin and that, in fact, he would never leave it, for he was the one who was the light in the darkness, and the light that now surrounded him in great and intricate webs of flashing colors, it was all within him, it sprouted from the core of his being. He was Son and his friend was Mouse, but they were as if not unlike each other, and in a way that he would never be able to explain but that he knew beyond question, they were one and the same, and it had always been so.
The many colored lights grew ever brighter and they circled all around them in greater and greater speed, and great thick tears poured down Son’s face, but they were no longer tears of sadness but of something else that he couldn’t understand but which he welcomed. Suddenly Son reached behind himself, laughing as he had never laughed before, and he released his big ears from the knots that held them tightly behind his head. Then he said to Mouse, “Jump up onto my back my friend, just as you had a great gift for me, I now have a great gift for you,” and his voice was unlike his voice as Mouse knew it, for it was stronger and thicker and it resonated strangely within the small confines of the cave. Mouse was suddenly afraid of this unexpected development, but he quickly set his fear aside, for his love for Son was greater than any fear that could come upon him, and then Mouse jumped up on Son’s back and Son ran towards the mouth of the cave. It was then that the great ears which were truly wings finally flapped up and down as they had always been meant to do and, together, they emerged from the hole in the big rock and they rose up over the mountains, and they flew with great abandon, and they danced together among the clouds, and they flew so high that they could even see the caravan in the distance, many miles below them and then they flew towards it, still laughing and making playful pirouettes in the night sky. Mouse laughed as he had never laughed, and Son laughed as he had never laughed, and the colored lights were like stars, and the stars were like colored lights and there were great sounds that ran through their bodies like thunder, and the sounds seemed to come from both near and far and it all became so bright that it was too much to contain within their bodies and their laughter grew and grew until it became the great laughter that made the world itself dance and swim in the great dark waves of the vast ocean of stars.

* * *

Son woke up precariously perched on a thick branch of a very tall tree. Mouse was cradled in another branch just a few feet away from him. Son looked at his friend and he wondered how they had gotten up here and Mouse opened his eyes and looked at him, still ablaze with wonder.
“How did we get up here, Mouse?” Son asked in the soft voice that Mouse knew so well.
Mouse looked at him and he realized that his friend couldn’t remember anything that had happened, and he looked down and determined that he would have to remind his friend how they had gotten up here if they had any hope of getting down.
“We flew,” Mouse said, in a voice so soft as to be almost silent, for Mouse himself couldn’t quite believe it and he felt that the words themselves could banish the memory from the place where it rested behind his eyes.
Son shook his big head and noticed for the first time that his big ears were loose and they were once again flapping wildly around him as they used to. He was then afraid that he would lose his balance and he looked down towards the ground below with fear and he reached out quickly to the thick branch on where he lay, holding it very tightly. Sweat formed around his brow, for it was now clear to him that he was in terrible danger.
“What do you mean, Mouse?” he said as he trembled with the fear of falling over.
Mouse realized then that this would be much more difficult than he had originally thought. He looked around him then and he saw three Black Birds perched on some branches above them. Mouse called to them in their secret language and the Black Birds came towards the two of them, cackling in the way that Black Birds do.
“What do you want of us?” the leader of the Black Birds said to Mouse.
“Did you see us arrive here? Did you see how we came to be here?” Mouse asked him and the Black Bird nodded, “yes, we did. You were both quite a sight!”
Mouse then stared at the Black Bird in the way that only a Black Bird would recognize and then he said, “But do you know how we got here? Do you know exactly HOW it happened?”
The great Black Bird smiled in the mocking way that Black Birds have of smiling and he nodded his long black head. Then, without a second thought, he grabbed a black feather that was resting on one of the leaves of the great tree, ready to dance on the wind, and he raised it high above his head.
“It was this feather… the black feather that your friend here held in his mouth.”
Son stared at the Black Bird and shook his head, unbelieving. The Black Bird then flew toward Son and, without shame or hesitation, placed it between his lips.
“See? Now with the black feather in your mouth, you can fly!”
The Black Bird then pushed Son effortlessly off the branch, without any further explanation. Son at first panicked and, full of the weight of fear, he started to fall. But soon his great ears, which were really wings, started to flap, and he floated in midair as effortlessly as the Black Birds did.
“See?” the Black Bird said, “I would not tell you a lie. Not unless I had to!” and at that, all the other Black Birds cackled and the leader cackled as well.
“You can keep that feather, my friend, in case you want to fly again!”
Mouse then jumped on Son’s back and they flew back towards their home in the caravan, the black feather held tightly in Son’s little mouth.

* * *

The next time that the man with the big hat came for him, Son was ready. Right away, he showed the man what he could do, by lifting himself high above the man and then circling around him in midair like a giant moth. The man stared at Son in wonder as his great ears flapped up and down and as he flew all around him and as he flew over the caravan, and as he flew far towards the clouds and then back again. The man immediately recognized his great luck and he made the proper arrangements to put on the greatest show he had ever been able to organize.
Son was still painted up, but he was now painted in different colors and the crowds that came to see him didn’t laugh any more. Instead, they stared at him in wonder and they pointed at him as he flew higher than they had ever seen a bird fly. Son was happy then and he was very thankful that the Black Birds had given him his feather. If it hadn’t been for the Black Birds, he would still be sad and lonely, and the people would not stare at him in wonder and the man with the big hat would not smile when he approached.
His only concern now was ever losing his black feather, so he held onto it tightly, and he never let it out of his sight. Sometimes, at night, he would wake up trembling, afraid that the feather had been taken away, afraid that he would then have to return to being the Purveyor of Laughter, the heart of a circle of mockery, painted in bright colors, sad and bruised and burned. He would then look for his little black feather, and when he found it, he would then calm down and go back to sleep, knowing that his feather was there, and so his place in the world was safe as well.

* * *

In those days, many people wanted to talk to Son, and they came from all around and they would ask him to fly a little for them and he did, and when they saw the wonder of his flight, they applauded with admiration and they asked him many questions about things that Son knew nothing about. Son quickly learned to tell them what they wanted to hear, for what they wanted to hear was easily found within the question itself and it was only a matter of turning the words around and giving them back in a way that seemed pleasing. The visitors would then walk away, happy that they had received what they wanted and Son would be happy that he had been able to give them this gift. The truth was that Son had nothing to say and all he really wanted to do was fly some more, and dance in the great winds among the clouds.
In the midst of all these new people and all this fame and all this growing happiness, he forgot about his old friend who had found him alone and crying one day so long ago. Meanwhile, Mouse went back to his old life of hiding from the people’s sight, in the dirty outer reaches of the ancient caravan. Sometimes he would go to see the big show, only to see his old friend flying over the crowd with a little black feather tightly held between his lips. Mouse would then remember that first day when they flew together, and he would be a little sad because that day had been strange and scary and wild and it seemed to him that such a thing would never happen again. But he was also happy because his old friend was happy and strong and because the crowds were ever growing and that meant more food for him and more places to hide.

* * *

But all things that can happen do eventually happen. So one day, when Son was flying over the crowds of admirers, he opened his mouth to laugh with them, and he did it carelessly because he now felt invincible and he knew that nothing at all could possibly hurt him. As he opened his mouth, a great wind came upon him and the black feather flew away from his lips, much too fast for him to reach for it, and then the treasured black feather was lost in the shadows of the foggy night. Son suddenly knew the taste of fear once again, even as he thought that he had forgotten it. He was very high up above the crowd, in the midst of the empty night sky, and he had nothing to hold onto. He immediately felt himself growing heavy, and his ears didn’t flap as fast anymore, and they moved slower and slower until they didn’t flap at all, and then Son started to fall, like the big gray rocks that sometimes fall from the sky.
It was very lucky for everyone that Mouse happened to be in the middle of the crowd that day, for there would have been no hope at all if he hadn’t been there. Calling forth every bit of strength in his little body, he called to Son, in the same calm but forceful voice that he had used when they were hunting for the cave in the land of the gray rocks, and in the same way that he had done back then, he made his voice travel across a great distance so that Son would be sure to hear it.
“Son, you don’t need the feather, you never needed it at all! It was a lie all along! You flew because you could! You flew because it was your nature! You flew because of your wings that were always a part of you and always will be! You can fly now as much as you ever have! Fly! You don’t need the feather anymore! You never did!”
Son, who was now rapidly falling and could feel the hard ground approaching like a giant train reaching up into the sky, heard the voice of his friend as if in a dream, like a soft whispering next to his giant ears that now refused to flap. He was so afraid right then that it almost seemed to him that it couldn’t be true, but he suddenly found that he still had within him the love that he had once felt, and with that love came a deep trust that overcame all obstacles and all questions and all manner of doubts. He looked up towards the sky and to the stars and he once again saw the lights of many colors all around him, the same ones that he had seen on that fateful day. And then, right then and there, without any further effort, his great gray wings started to flap, as strong as ever and even stronger.

* * *

Very few people noticed what had happened and even fewer noticed any change, but Son was now surrounded by the lights of many colors and they were not going away. He now knew that they wouldn’t ever go away again.
Since that day, the shows at the head of the caravan came to an end, and there were no more crowds, for Son refused to show himself off in that manner. Instead, he simply flew so high as to seem like a tiny star in the horizon and the caravan followed him as they would follow a star. It was in this way that the caravan at last turned from its endless circles through the rough endless land and, by going in a direction that they had never before explored, the people found a land of rivers and forests and great fruits full of color and juice.
When Son saw this, he decided that the people no longer needed him and he left forever, flying towards the great darkness beyond the stars, with Mouse laughing on his back. The people soon forgot about the strange events that had occurred in the past and they simply blessed themselves as great travelers, for they had traveled through the wasteland and they had at last arrived at their true home.

* * *

This story happened before we had methods of recording stories so, just like many others before us, you must remember, in any way that you can manage to remember, and you must tell the story once again, for all stories are one story and what I tell you now will surely happen again, to you and to others and then to others once again, and if you don’t remember, and if you don’t tell it, then the story will never change.

Good Morning

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

The Structure and the Noise

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

That Which Dwelt There

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

Velveteen

I want to tell my Dad that he shouldn’t have gone to jail, but more importantly, I want to tell him that they, (he and my mother) should have told me that he was in jail. Then, at least, I would have known that his being away from me was not optional, he didn’t choose to leave me, somebody else had locked him up.
I want to go back in time and tell Peter that my heart was broken, that it mattered very much to me, that I cared a lot that he had suddenly disappeared without explanation. I would tell him that he was my friend and if he had only told me that he needed to go and be with Janarai I would have understood that. At that time it would not have hurt my feelings too much. But suddenly and inexplicably loosing my friend and musical companion, that was painful. Agonizing. It made me less than a friend, a nobody. I would tell him now, if I could, that after that, I wasn’t able to sing again for 7 years.
I would go back and tell my weeping awkward teenage sister,
" I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything. I’m not sure what anyone should do."
But most importantly I wouldn’t say more than that, instead I would listen, and maybe suggest we go roller skating afterwards.
Maybe there is nothing that I can say or should say. I am just a character in a sad story. But something strange has possessed me so that now there is something more to do, something other than being that sad character. Now there is devil’s work to do. I will always be the same sad puppet, but I will do more than play my part. It would seem that I am a salvaged play thing for the old devil, and like any good toy I will happily serve in games the manufacturer never intended. Perhaps the old devil is like me and hopes to rescue sad toys from sad games by inserting them in strange games that adhere to outrageous rules and are filled with unusual circumstances. For that I am grateful.
If all of this is the product of a cracked or warped mind, then nothing is lost. There is no chance for me to be made right. I was already made wrong. So now we will take this broken thing we call Etanna and make it something neither right nor wrong. We will invent a new game for it, a game which suits its warped disposition. We will play with it until the day comes when it can no longer be manipulated, but even should its head pop off, we will find a use and a new game for it until time has ground it to no more than a fine powder.
Then we will say farewell Etanna. And in her most secret pocket of hopes, she may cling to the notion that, like the velveteen rabbit, she might be given new life after she has been burned to ash. If not, there was never anything to loose, and there is always something to gain by wild striving.
Put your tender ear to my lip child and I will whisper a story to you, a new story, a secret story that the dolls from the old sad story can never know about. Rest your head on my chest child, for a moment, and know that I am not the kind who throws broken things away. I mend them if I can. I make them other than they were and I breathe new life into them.
So cry if you must, for I think your first maker drew a tear drop on your cheek, but if you give me time, I will turn it into the petal of a flower opened wide under the moon’s pale kiss. Such horror and delight will be ours in these new games we make together. We shall do it all on tipped toes with fingers pressed over our lips, and though there are things that we might want to say, we shall never tell anyone anything at all.

Puppets Made of Flesh

So it goes that I sympathize with the most unhappy and with those who harbor a bleak outlook on the situations born of civilization, of the great con of man, of life as we know life to be, and I don’t just mean human lifestyles, but the condition of organic life with its maddeningly pointless design. For a moment or two, knowing that somewhere out there in the big black jungle made of frowning faces and the legs of dark gray pantsuits that reach up sky high where they give way to a canopy of industrial smoke, there are a few others who can see what I see, or at least something akin to it. Eventually however, I find that hearing of their own oppressive loneliness makes my empathetic heart tremble.
Sure, we are brave ones, we who see what we see and then go further to say what we can say, paint pictures, sculpt sculptures, make collages, write plays, anything that we can do to transform shit into exotic blooms, as part of one last desperate attempt to make something of our ridiculous woes, but it makes me sad anyhow.
Usually I can turn all this hysteria into a joyful performance. I will laugh, joke, sing, and dance. I will do what I can to make the other smile. Then nature catches up with me, (because I don’t always manage to outrun it) and then tears are just tears and not jokes or crystal ants or anything at all. Just salt water squeezed from little ducts set in the innermost corners of my eyes because the world is loveless and dead and it is infecting me while I am failing to infect it. Affection passes itself off as love around here, and you will be rewarded with affection only when you are not taking something that somebody else wants or when you are giving somebody something that they want, but if you should fail to appease, then the affection stops and you don’t even have the emptied out representation of love.
Here and there maybe, you might find a mad hatter through whom love flows no matter what. Usually not though, because when those crackpots come to the attention of the general public it is generally agreed upon that the best thing to do is have that nut case nailed up to a cross so that the buzzards can pick out his (or her) eyes. As you can imagine, anyone like that is either dead or making themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Meanwhile some other clown is passing himself off as a fountain of loving salvation from which comforting answers spring forth like popcorn from an air popper so that you may paste them over your hollowed out heart like little hello kitty band aids over a 35 caliber gunshot wound, and that in exchange for a little bit of the green, if you know what I mean, or sometimes they’ll swap for sex or just attention, power, and glory, or all of the above.
Anywhere you go on this bumpy globe there is someone waiting with a pair of shears in hand, ready to fleece you, pat you on the head and send you back out into the cold Siberian winter so that icicles will crystallize on your eyelashes and your breath will freeze in your mouth so that you choke to death on a maw sized ice cube when you attempt to bleat for help. There are plenty of perky folks running in circles after their tails, glad to be doing so if the other option is to look over their shoulders and notice the master, and then the master’s master, and so on until they realize that it’s Emperor Palpatine holding the end of a long string of leashes, and seeing how low you are in the pecking order, it can mean only one of two things: you are either a clone, or worse (and most likely) an android. Of course the key to keeping androids happy is to never point out that they are androids and to additionally conceal the fact that they are working for the Empire.
The saddest part is that androids, like you and me, as eager as Pinocchio to be real boys and girls, are happy to swallow the lie. We live out our mechanical lives insisting that we are the real deal, that we are in control of ourselves, never really wanting to find out that all of our likes and dislikes were programmed into us by Geppetto back on the Death Star and that, even now, he’s streaming new programs into our highly sophisticated systems through television and radio transmissions. He probably works for some low level General who also likes to forget about the Emperor and fancies himself to be the real deal, the ultimate power. Once you’ve pulled back the green curtain and caught a glimpse of the icky sticky lonesome chaotic truth, it’s hard to push that image out of your mind, and even if you do manage it with lots of bon bons and day time tv, or prescription drugs and booze, or even illegal drugs and underage sex, you find that the uneasy sensation that something is very wrong will not be to far off.
And if you do look it in the face then even your own moments of happiness will seem sickeningly superficial. Your own mechanical arm bringing a cherry ice cream cone closer to your own mechanical mouth and the fleeting sensation of gratification and pleasure that follows will become a horror to you. Then I am told, that you will need to either go back to uneasy sleep or finish waking up so that the horror of it becomes a delight and you yourself are one of those secret mad hatters, cruising the world without worrying about the crosses they are manufacturing down at the saw mill, doing your best to infect the Empire with the strange radiation leaking from your bursting heart, laughing at the crystal ants marching down your cheeks.

Chop Wood

That’s right, I’m back mother fuckers! You thought I would just go quietly into the night, subdued by an ooey gooey green dose of night time cold medicine to bring me dreams of monsters and immigrant gang bangings in the garbage facility behind the top secret key code lock at the back of the ferry building? Sure I maybe dallied there, took a good long look at the dark recesses of my being, down at the tangled roots connecting me to all the collective muck, and sure I bared a yellow toothed grin of delight at such a dark and disturbing sight. Certainly I slipped right on down there to fuck the tin man only later to discover that he had incinerated the robotic maid his mother had left in charge to cook for him. That’s how we met you know, he liked to go out disguised as a regular human, except he was very tall and lean with an unusually long shapely nose, and he’d sell strange robes with all sorts of esoteric designs on them. I stopped to inspect the robes, then after one look at this very strange character I knew,
‘Oooh I want to have that, whatever it is, up inside of me and see how it feels!’.
So I sent away my familiars, a giant iguana named Astheron and a sweet little yellow and orange corn snake called Lixus or Ixux or Xixus depending on my mood. A very convenient trick that, when I want them I just extract them from the fabric of illusion that surrounds us holding us suspended in its sugary sweet web so that we can creep along its cables from one desire to another, in avoidance of a battalion of fears, from this great stuff I pluck my pets Astheron and Xixus, right out of the code of life, because at some point you see, everything can be traced back to a strand of lovely reptilian DNA, and when I don’t want to be seen with such telling company, I just store them right back in that matrix of Maya.
So with my pets safely stored, I stroll up to the gangly long haired disfigured object of my desire and communicate my enthusiasm for getting to know him (this hidden aspect of myself) a little better. He’s tremblingly enthusiastic and whisks me off to his place. I’m not at all surprised to discover that his living quarters are hidden behind the tiled bathroom wall of some unsuspecting strangers who come in to bathe and shit and sometimes even to masturbate with their faces twisted into the most disgusting grimace of agony verging on pleasure, never suspecting that behind their own grimy shower wall a timid and yet calculatingly diabolical tin man is tentatively exploring the female anatomy of his new found cohort. Ah! At last his overwhelming loneliness has come to an end! Here is a companion to sit with him in their narrow space between walls and look out over the golden sunset from a bay window seat and peel the leathery crimson flesh off of pomegranates, and with her he needn’t disguise himself as a man, he can be just a mechanical boy. She is curious and accepting of his true nature and they idle away years in which she pulls him into herself and listens close with her ear to his hollow chest to see if he has a heart beat, cold steel in hot flesh, one intoxicated by that alien warmth, the other by that mysterious cold.
So yes, I went down into the gear works of my psyche and traced out some of the primal pattern, the eternal labyrinth that I can call myself. I met with some of the deep symbols, some of the keys that I will store on my ring of power and tuck away into the folds of my rain flecked wool robe. I will tell you the solid gritty truth, I can not really walk the pattern yet, I am not so noble born. I can hold only three or four chambers of reality at once before I betray myself and the structure comes crumbling down. There are still fears that torment me and master me, beating me into submission causing me to grovel on the electrified web, wishing to wriggle away to a place that I can control. So I must keep diving into the dark depths in search of new alliances, practicing the principles of the dragon born until I can finally embody them consistently. I don’t know what will happen if I succeed. Perhaps you would get your wish and never hear from me again. But as the saying goes,
"before endarkenment write 600 words and post to blog,
after endarkenment write 600 words and post to blog."
I suspect that you will hear much more from me. I have yet plenty of black secrets to vomit up and lay at your feet. Therefore, bring on the green goo and the demonic voices of the deep! I am ready.

Is It True?

Is it true?
Am I just one little shadow come to displace another and send an entire pantheon of Gods into exile behind the black glass?
It seems that I am a character caught in a sticky web of cause and effect. I remember that as my first daughter was being born I realized that maybe one could never have their cake and eat it to, that perhaps the having displaces the eating, and the eating displaces the having, and that it is written in the laws which may escape ordinary perception that one simply cannot have everything all at once. Only the Gods try to have everything.
I find myself as a character gravitating towards such a God, like a moon orbiting some larger cosmic body. It is endlessly troubling to feel that you are only a supporting character, and yet, this is the one life that you seem to have access to. In all of the confusion of selecting one dream over another sometimes something that you desired is displaced by some other thing that you desired. Only a many armed blue skinned deity can juggle so many probable dreams, hold them all in mind all at once crossing from one into another through nexus points, little places where one dream bears some similarity to another, to engage in rich microcosmic adventures, all the while still holding the multitude of possibilities in mind.
The shock that the character experiences when it realizes that it is just one of an endless supply of shadows, as readily available as paper clips or number 2 pencils in a K-5 elementary school, might cause a momentary recoiling from that truth. This we call identification with the sleeping state which means that our window into a dream, the character that we currently inhabit is resisting opening up to let the dreamer, that blue skinned terror, in. But like virgins, dreams can be wooed or pressured into slutdom, eventually spreading wide and either enjoying being taken or at least tolerating it.
When do peasants become magicians and magicians become Gods and Gods become animals? It seems that I am a moon ever hoping that if the gods visit here often enough I will acquire a supernatural increase in gravity which would make me eligible for promotion to the rank of sun. How to go from being a cold dead moon to being a burning star, the center of a system around which small dead moons gyrate giddily uttering their wishes to "become real" to the blue fairy?
It is very dangerous to make requests of faeries. It is almost certain that they will help you to become more acutely aware of your wooden condition, which could cause a sudden burst of reckless animation that may ultimately transform you into a jackass before leading you into the belly of a whale. If the whale is white you will at least have found your way into a mythology worthy of the likes of Oberon or Merovee. The fabulous thing about being made of wood is that you will burn easily, and stars need plenty of fuel to shine so bright.
How do you go from being pencils to puppets to stars? You do it by doing as gods do, by crossing the bridge from one ghost world to another. Where did I recently see the book about traveling between ghost worlds? Ah no, ‘twas not a book, it was the old magician whose raven hair is frosting over into strands of silver who sat in a folding chair and explained to me how one manages to escape from a ghost. You must do something unexpected to disengage, you must change from pencils to puppets. Pray that the pencils will not begrudge the puppets the honor of wearing the spotlight for a moment in some neighboring universe where lord Shiva dances and burns forever.

Live and Burn

If you lack courage you always loose. If you never strip yourself bare and roar at the wind as it lashes at your puckering flesh, then you go out like a candle snuffed swiftly by mitten swathed finger tips, having never had a chance to get knocked over onto your side so that all of the wax comes pouring out, hot and translucent and your little flaming tongue flickers out hungrily and meets with some kindling, a synthetic fibered rug or the gossamer drapes employed to veil the houses big unblinking eyes.

Goddamn it! You will never bring the house down if you don’t burn a little yourself. It is painful and terrible, and then you get used to it, bit by bit. The heat becomes a thing which you can bear for small and every increasing increments of time, but by golly, that will never happen if you don’t stay in the kitchen, or even go into the kitchen to begin with.

We can see only later how things might have been different if we had been undeterred by the threat of pain. When we are distanced from the experience of discomfort we think that we will be brave warriors, proud champions, and yet whenever we have the chance to get into the ring we shy away, like spoiled little girls that run off to hug their grandmothers legs and suck their thumbs rather than clean their rooms. So the toys lay all over the etheric floors of our mind, our play things, our fantasies slowly transforming into nightmares as they mingle together unrealized, seasoned with guilt and doubt and sloth. The meek of heart will wither and vanish without a lasting trace, leaving only a transcendental curl of grayish smoke which will dissolve into the atmosphere moments after they are snuffed out.

You loose everything when you do not take risks. As the saying goes; “Use it or loose it.” It is as true of life as anything else, even truer perhaps. Death is a real concern, especially for those who don’t make the effort to live before its inevitable dawning. Standing on the sidelines, playing with all the playthings in our minds, never coming out to slay the real dragons or fuck the real princesses, growing weaker and pastier at each missed opportunity, we let the entire cosmos down. When, because you fear some trick, you fail to accept that beautiful girl´s invitation to sit beside her on the bus, or stand with her in line at the movies, you not only let yourself and the princess down, but all the heroes and all the gods in the heavens.

Everything in creation is depending on you to rescue it with a measure of foolish and heartfelt passion. Do not be the last unicorn that sees that the unicorns have all disappeared and so takes up work as a mare in some dirty stable, waiting to pull the plow or be penned up with some intolerable stallion for the furtherance of horsekind because it is unfashionable, embarrassing, or silly to be a unicorn. Be the last brave heart, busted open and bleeding bright crimson all over the blue and gray world.

There is no shame in being the last or the only one of your kind, doing the painful work of seeking out the other shinning immortals, their hair full of stars, their hearts and bodies fringed with cerulean and titian flames, blazing through the cosmos, wailing in the wind that feeds the flames melting away their breasts. There is only shame in hiding in your room, in your placid life, in your filthy stall, watching the glimmering of passions go dim behind a cage of bone and softly fluttering pink lungs, like butterflies witnessing their precious one day of life descend into the awaiting twilight.

The Riddle

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

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