Invaders

They are coming, spreading their otherness throughout our very personal space. Here behind the wall where we were once so safe, they are thriving, squirming, multiplying.
It seems, at first, like a dance. They are floating and drifting. Exotic visitors. Maybe they bring peanut butter. Maybe these are our lost brothers.
Their numbers increase. What was an interesting bit of choreography has become a swarming mass of bodies. There are so many more of them than there are of us. They are inside.
Maybe they bring liberation. Maybe what they bring is death.
This hostile presence, this thing that does not obey the laws we obey, this thing whose code is its very own secret way, it is an invader. It is the Other.
It is intent on making what was ours its own. It has come for our vital resources. It is feeding on the vein of our land, our body, the kingdom where we dwell. It is feeding on us, wearing us down, overwhelming us in numbers.
There are so many more of them than we can deal with. They breed so quickly. Clouding our skies with their awkward birth. There was a time when ours was the only culture. Now theirs is here, growing, expanding, reaching in beyond the boundaries.
Something is coming, closing in, frenzied by the heat of conquest, eager to breach our walls. It reaches into our space. This alien thing. Its shape, so unlike our own, so similar in startling ways, inspires our awe.
What? What does it want? Maybe it is playing. Maybe it is giving us a gift. This alien thing. Its shape, so unlike our own, so similar in startling ways, inspires our fear.
It is inside of us now. Its way is not our way. It does what it wants with us, this occupying force. We are infected by its presence. We are becoming they.
We resist. Our insurgence matches their hostility with violence. Their numbers are greater. They tumble out of the sky, out of space, from the abyss, they tumble, are hurling towards us to explode in our warmth.
They come to dig in. To make our body their own. Their culture will be grown in our soiled ruin. Whether we accept it. Or reject it. Something is coming.
There are so many more of them than there are of us. They are inside now. This is their kingdom, their land, their home. They are the “Us”. We are now the “They”, creeping around, hoping for a chance to recover, to strike back.
Maybe they have brought evolution. Maybe they have brought ruin. Maybe they have made a desert.
The land collapsed beneath their unquenchable hunger. Perhaps they never wanted to keep what was ours. They meant only to touch it, to rush through it, fill it in the heat of their passion, then abandon it after it was no longer ours.
Their need was never to have and to hold. They tapped the vein of our body to feed their conquest. Now they move on in need of another boundary to penetrate, another Other to subsume. They flourish in our waste until we are extinguished.
Now they march on to farther horizons, in search of heat, to rain down upon another kingdom. Maybe they will bring peanut butter. Maybe they will bring death.

Biological Creation

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

Magick House

It is a place lost in the past, denied a present, buried in the midst of a buzzing metropolis and weighted down with hopes for a future. The walls have been battered again and again until they are only a fine powder of golden sand blown across the vast hostile desert. They have been built again and again until the people can think of nothing else but building them one more time, raising the walls so that blood can flow and appease that thing which would dwell within. That thing, that secret treasure, invisible to the eyes of men, capable of twisting their hearts into many strange shapes like animal balloons forged by the hands of a clown. Here is desire and jealously and rapture and grief and hatred, and joy, like a host of shadows dancing through the willing flesh of the people, so that they whirl and twirl and bow for that thing, though it cannot be touched, nor it’s name even pronounced. The people are always reaching for that place where they keep their covenant, where they can shuffle papers importantly like children imitating the misunderstood rituals of adults. They play games that are the shadows of the games they once played there in the house of the invisible, the magick house. Now some others play their games where the magick house once stood. Some others have come to play, but the people will not play with the others, they will not change their games on purpose, only by accident. Only when they are scattered like the golden sand hammered from the shattered walls of the magick house will they change the rules of their game to get by. They will refuse to share, refuse to play with others until the others push them out, out and away so that the others may have their turn, their time in the place that the people want so much. But however far they go, they find a way to remember. They find a way to covet the past, to reach back with hot little hands and try to pluck their special place out of the rubble. They try to play as they did once in the magick house. They wear their dress up clothes, they sing their clubhouse songs, and mull over the promise of a place all their own. Their heart, the center of the universe, is something outside, something that can be demolished, erected, taken and retaken. The people, as they have scattered regrouped and scattered again, have changed. Their games have changed. They no longer recognize one another but view each other as THE OTHER, but each other wants to have it back, have their magick house where secret things happen, where special things are kept. They want it even if they cannot remember the nature of the secret things. They long for it even if they are not the real people, for in fact none of those who want to be the people are the people. The people were cut down long ago, a final sacrifice in the original magick house, and their rituals, their mystic secrets died with them, bled out through slit throats to be sucked up by the thirsty sand, to become the invisible. There are no people who know the rites and the reason for the original magick house. There are only others, many envious others, who would be the people and claim that they and no OTHER are the only people. The chosen. The righteous. The worthy. They love not the invisible, but the letting of blood, the endless orgy of violence that may be called penance or promise. And the place, that elusive house where all that the imposter people desire can be called the will of God, remains remote and near at hand, non existent and very real, lost forever within a deluge of jealous dreams.