Body Snatcher

We never say what we mean.
If only we could get a little faster, a little quicker at expressing from soul to mouth without the interference of the blink of an eye. Watching mouths move and words running like hounds over the checkered tabletop cornering the poor trembling fox.
If only we could say what we mean, but we can’t and the saying shapes us into its own meaning, its own message. Its own special code that was forged somewhere beyond the beyond in the realm of the high minded hemispheres, and our poor bodies, now hosts to its alien signature, try to comply.
So confusing, this mess, tangled sinewy. There is the original and the replica, the body snatcher that has penetrated the fortress of self, cornered the fox and is grabbing its throat with spiny teeth to shake it. Such force in numbers, in an organized structure, the new utopia of words, of hounds.
God, why the hounds? Dogs snuffling the earth and catching the scent of the wild and rushing to kill it. Such power in numbers and unity. What of foxes becoming hounds? Becoming that which is eating them alive.
The eating of the enemy. Conquest and consumption as a form of love, love the gravity that pulls bodies together, knits them together compellingly, as a form of hunger. The lust for the taste of the enemy, the other who comes from outside, afar, beyond, the unknown enemy. And once you have been devoured there is no enemy, no other, only self.
If only we could express soul to mouth. Is that relevant? The babble. The invader. Promethean fire that contorts the tongue and vocal chords and makes chaos the supreme ruler.
Loneliness. What loneliness we know when we are the only ones uninfected by the babble. We want it to enter into our sacred dwelling place. Tired of running from the hounds, we let their teeth penetrate our tender flesh, let their snouts press into our red entrails. Eat me up so that I can be one of you! Eat me up so that I can stop running. I am so tired of running…
Moving in organized lines, a diabolical orderliness takes up residence within the body, expresses itself in its motion, in its appearance and actions and spreads mouth to ear, mouth to ear. The babble, the alien screech, invades the body and corners the soul, the delicate being, the true self. Cutting it off from contact with any of its kind, the invader watches the true self starve down in a dark corner. The true self atrophies into brittle nothingness until only the invader remains, licking and scratching itself in satisfaction, expelling more spores in the form of words tumbling from moving lips to creep into young unsuspecting ears.
We never say what we mean. If only we could get a little faster, a little quicker at expressing from soul to mouth without the interference of the blink of an eye, a moment of desperate sleep in which the invader takes control and alters the content.
On the surface the thing looks the same. Within there has been a take over. A fundamental change. The fox lays slain, the hounds lap the blood and grin together in perfect unity and bay with the same mouth that once yapped for the fox. Mouths move and words rush out, hot on the scent of new prey.
We never say what we mean. Only what is necessary to get inside, to penetrate the tower and watch it fall, to taste the flesh of the unknown enemy.

Weary Head

I try to rest my head… upon what? I do not know what I am or where I am or why I am here. I love someone but I do not really know what they are either. I do not know if what I experience as love is what he experiences as love, and I do not know if love means that I will have a friend forever, or if I will have a forever friend for a moment and later I will look up and see that I was never with anyone at all.
My insides are exploding out like billions of tiny diamonds flung into the sunlight and the sunlight is caught and refracted through every facet until there is no way of knowing whether one should be looking at diamonds or at shards of light or if either is more fundamental than the other.
I never was before this moment, but now I feel so small and naked and bewildered. I am adrift in the woods and I know I am lost, but that lost is meaningless as there is nowhere that I was going to, nor anywhere that I came from. Looking for “home” is just running from the forest with its tangled trees and unseen creatures making strange noises so that I may not guess whether they are friend or foe. It is an act in a dream, that act when you say I do not like this, I am not here, I am somewhere else and suddenly you are transported.
Sometimes the change is smooth and complete and other times it is slow and painful, like when a zombie is coming at you and you know that a gun should be in your hand and you lift your hand to shoot the zombie but there is no gun, but you insist that there is, there must be a gun there, and you make the shape of a gun with your fingers and you aim at the zombie and think, ‘I’m shooting now’, and there is no sound, no BANG! So you say, “bang!” but the Zombie keeps coming and you tell it, “No, I shot you. You’re dead. I got you.” And sometimes that works and at other times the zombie just keeps on coming, or even says, “No, you didn’t. You missed me” And you have a battle accompanied by a narrative of arguments.
I can say, I am going home, I can even find a home, I can even imagine that I am not lost, but I will never have left the forest. I am still there, shivering in the cold. I do not know for certain, but I think that I am lost. Everything is strange forever, emerging from a mysterious origin so alien that I cannot guess what it means or intends. If I am eaten by a big bad wolf does it matter? Does it really matter to either me or to the wolf? It must not. And yet I do not wish to be eaten tonight. I wish that the wolf would bite me and then I would become a wolf too, we might then be one wolf, maybe one wolf with two heads. And even then I might be alone, only one wolf.
Will I find out that it was a nightmare, a silly nightmare, that I am lost in the woods? I don’t have to dislike it, this feeling of being lost. I could enjoy it very much. I could delight in not knowing what I am or from whence I came. I could be merry about eternity and the stinging cold and the solitude of just myself and the tangled roots of the trees pushing up out of the moist dark earth. I could wander over the musk scented leaves carpeting the forest floor and wail like the wolves, or make the tortured yapping of coyotes my new song, a lament to shake the dark green silence while my pale bare feet churn the orange and gold leaves endlessly, never stopping to ask upon what I might rest my weary head.

We Wear The Music

We wear our music. That’s all that we are really interested in, what our music looks like. How it sounds is secondary. Fashion is the most important element of music at this moment. Its faciomusica coadunatio. At my high school everyone wanted a green Mohawk. Everyone wore studded leather belts and bracelets and died their hair and pierced anything they could and held their clothing altogether with rows of shiny safety pins. Hardly anyone liked to listen to Punk Rock, but everyone wanted to look like it. One boy arrived at our school dressed in all black. He had been imported straight from Los Angeles and his hair too was long and raven hued. He wore Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails and Type O Negative T-shirts. I bought albums based purely on the way he looked, and listened to them with religious fervor, waiting for my own hair and nails and lips to turn black, even though I disliked some of the music more than not. I had a serious case of faciomusica coadunatio.
My understanding of this condition is limited to my own experience with it. The truth is that my hair, lips, and nails never turned black. I never put on a Skinny Puppy tee shirt. Hell, I never even got out of my orange polka dots and electric green paisley prints and into a nice black tee shirt, until I managed to hook up with a guy who was wearing one. Then I wore his. The truth is that listening is not something we humans do well. It requires attention, a sort of non-animal interest, and we are most thoroughly animals. Being social animals we have an overwhelming need to be accepted, to fit in. Fitting in is crucial for animals. For example I once had a hen that killed every black chick that hatched in her nest and spared only the two that were yellow like her. We humans are the same way. We look for visual cues to signify for us whether or not someone is one of our kind. Image is crucial. Being highly adaptive we have developed fashion, which is a method for disguising our true ambiguous nature so that we can fit neatly into a particular clan of humans.
You can look at our clothes and see who we want you to think we are.
“I listen to country.” Means I am a good old American Christian guy or gal. I say this with a pair of blue jeans, with a big belt buckle, with boots and a hat.
“I listen to rap.” Means I’m the bad ass urban outlaw and hustler. I say this with gold chains and baggy pants and shiny new sneakers.
“I listen to Rock.” Means I’m the jaded “not quite all American” that feels a little snobbish about that not quite part but is still fairly protective of the All American. I say this with frayed or torn blue jeans and T-shirt.
“I listen to Alternative” means I am way too snobbish for the glorified country twang that passes for rock, I might even be a communist if that pisses you off.
Punk = I don’t care what you think or how many times I get punched.
Jazz = I’m thoughtful, possibly educated and I like coffee and rainy afternoons.
Classical = I’m very thoughtful, I love the arts, I think global and buy specialty shoes and sometimes have my pants tailored.
There are greater and greater levels of subtlety that might be explored, but it is all a complete ruse. We may or may not be those things we want you to think we are, but we have become adepts at the art of faciomusica coadunatio.
Now buying a shirt or pair of pants is the same as buying music. You can even buy shoes and get a free song on some web sites. The song is like a breath mint offered to you after your dinner. Clever musicians, aware that music should be free, have found a way to slip it in with our habit for primping our image. Like Mary Poppins, they realized that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” With faciomusica coadunatio, you can fuss about with your image and get some music without noticing.
We wear the music when perhaps we should let the music wear us. We should let it flow through us and move our bodies, minds and spirits wherever it wills, unimpeded by our monkey brains. The real is there, existing despite the genres and social implications. Nothing is the way it appears. Eyes lie, and so many organisms have learned to turn that fact to their advantage, developing camouflage so that they won’t be eaten by larger organisms. Knowing this, we should go forward accepting that what we see is not what we get. If we open our hearts and listen there is so much more to music than the way we look when we hear it.

Another Myself

I had fallen asleep, and like a Maya Deren film, I watched from bed as I came out of another house and crossed the street, approaching the house where I lay. I saw the blonde haired girl walk out into the street, tossing her hair in the wind and I told the man that was tangled in my arms and legs:
“She’s coming.”
I thought he would want to disengage. I didn’t know that the girl on the street was me. I didn’t know that the man in the bed was you. He had been caressing my face and I knew we loved each other. I knew I loved him. I wouldn’t pretend I didn’t. When he told me that he had a girlfriend now, when he introduced us, I didn’t know that she was me. He had said that he could spend the day with me working on our project, but he would go back to her when night fell. He stood at a distance telling me this. It was as if he wanted me to understand that he was with her and was not interested in being with me. It was like the letter he had sent, him telling me that he had a girlfriend, and implying that I should not pursue him. I never meant to be in pursuit. I belonged to you. I was only telling him the truth without any hope of reciprocation, without any desire to change circumstances.
So I unpacked my bags across the room and conversed politely with him which is what it seemed he wanted to do. He wanted to show me the progress he had made on the project. The audio was surprising. He had used samples of my voice, and samples from a CD that you made. I was quite amazed. I told him that it was wonderful. I told him that I was proud of his progress. I realized that this was why he was risking seeing me, to show me that he had taken something from me, that he understood. I was proud of him, of the time I had put into him, of how my attention invested in him had blossomed into something incomprehensible and creative in the truest way, beyond boundaries, beyond ownership.
I was careful to stay back, at a polite distance. Then he closed the gap. He came close to me, he lay down on the bed beside me and we embraced. We held each other and he caressed my face. I should have known he was you. I should have known when I heard the music and recognized that it was your music. Or was it that I was you? I was you and he was me. You were proud of me for what I had done. I wanted to please you, laying there entwined, but then I saw myself coming, the one who would rend us apart, the one who would keep you to herself never really having you. You saw her coming and said:
“She’s coming.”
And I said:
“She is?”
And felt worried. I wanted to hold on to you, but then I didn’t know if I could stand up to her. She had promises. Words that bound us.
I was laying in bed holding another myself in my arms and through the window I saw myself crossing the street. She was coming. Blonde hair floating behind her in golden streamers. Youthful face and lithe body hurrying insecurely across the street. We had cheated her before. We might do it again despite the promises.
I was crossing the street and I got the feeling that you were in bed with her, despite the promise you had made. I had the feeling but I thought, no, that’s silly. I know I can trust him. But I had the feeling that while you had used the words sincerely as an expression of what you had felt in the moment, now while I was gone, a different moment was unfolding and the words would be gotten around. They would have meant something different now that you had this new moment unfolding before you. Things were changing. I could feel you slipping away from me.
I was laying in bed caressing your face. In that moment I loved you, I was glad to be with you. You said:
“She’s coming.”
And I realized she would not like this. She would not see how innocent this love was. For a moment I thought I would let her see. I thought she will come and see us and go and I will still be with you. Then I thought it was not too late to keep my word. I would go with her at nightfall. What was a little hug? A little caress? Nothing more than a little brotherly affection administered to an old friend. I would leave you and go with her.
You were caressing my face and I saw her through the window crossing the street. My legs were tangled with yours. Our chests were pressed together.
“She’s coming.” I said
I should have known that you were her. I should have known that I was him. I should have known that I was you and you were me.

I had fallen asleep, and like a Maya Deren film I watched from bed as I came out of a house and crossed the street. I saw the blonde haired girl walk out into the street and I told the man that was tangled in my arms and legs:
“She’s coming.”

The Sun

The sun dazzles in yellow over summery aqua skies reminding me of lemon drops and vinyl wading pools. When I was a child my grandfather had a wondrous supply of balloons decorated with smiling suns wearing sunglasses. This sun startles me so, not smiling, very serious, bordering on mysterious with those almond eyes boring into me. So alien it seems. How it reminds me of the moon. The sun and I regard each other. Do I dislike the sun? No of course not I tell it, but that is not all true. I do associate the sun with qualities that are my enemy. The domineering world of men, of light, of lances and other surgical instruments, prying, demanding, and superficial. The night always comes. The winter always comes. The sun laughs at me and argues that the sun always rises, the summer always returns. It sends its emissary, a friendly little naked baby on top of a white horse, his crown capped with a red feather, a red flag waving, sunflowers bursting to life behind him. Yes, you make warmth. You make things live. I would perish without you. Are you not your sister’s captor then? You are her support, her twin, different but complimentary? Yes. Of course. And the photographer with his bright lights, he is testament to the artistic creative use of light. There he is capturing an image with lights. There he is concentrated on the invisible other, bringing her to life just as the sun concentrates on the moon and endows her with some of his own light. She is his reflection. He was first, like Adam in the garden, lonely in this cold garden, so he called some others to come orbit around him, including his wife, the earth, Eve, and he made for himself, from the collision of two larger planetary bodies, a little moon to be his mistress. But the moon was cold and barren, a Lilith for this Adam, while the Earth gave him all the children he could want. Now she hangs around Eve and her children, making them mad and delirious, desirous of a life eternal, a life a sun and an earth cannot offer. “Something else,” she whispers, “there must be something more.” Cruel little mistress. But the sun continues his great labor with the earth, and perhaps that mysterious look on his face is the key to it all. What he won’t say to either Earth or Moon, his great secret, is that they are all three the makers of life, and that those other companions drawn into his orbit are also involved in his labor. And if no one understands the nature of that labor, it matters little. So long as they orbit around him, they help his work. So long as he labors to pull them round and round, it is good for his work. Life, the real thing, is a process more than a state, and the sun knows this. He knows that it is through the combining of things, many different things pulled together, crushed together until they burn and melt and change, that the process is furthered. Like the photographer, he can work his magick without the others knowing what exactly he is doing. The serious mysterious sun glitters and dances mischievously over all, as it did when I was small, coming down in rivulets of light to line my face and shimmer over the water’s surface. The sun and its many flowers blazing in warmth and glory, red banner waving in a sigh of the earth’s warm breath. The sun and I regard each other. Do I dislike the sun? No of course not I tell it, but that is not all true.

BOOM

All of that careful work, the seeds you gathered for the harvest, painstakingly filling your little gunny sack, careful to brush the dirt away and separate seed from stone and branch and refuse, all of that effort applied to accumulating and the accumulating itself leads to a precarious position. Each day you have made efforts to contain the energy of life, taking care not to raise your voice or titter and twirl like a squirrel on caffeine, abstaining from orgasm, and carefully taking measures to accumulate more, and more, and more. More fuel for the rocket ship, more fuel for your work, but it is so much more than you have ever had in your life, it is so much more than others going about their days and their lives have ever held in their sack. It is exciting, dizzying, tempting, difficult to bear. As the sack grows full, you wobble and weave under the weight, you are intoxicated by its volume. You may feel teeth chattering excitement, or you may feel as powerful as a Titan. If you indulge in sorrow then every seed will back you up with the power of plutonium. If anger comes a knocking and you try it on for size, then every drop of the energy you have accumulated may flow into the bulging veins of wrath. The seeds will apply themselves to whatever vice you apply yourself to, and the machine, the mechanism for harvesting will supply an endless array of dead end distractions on which you can blow your hard earned savings. The trouble, terrible trouble is that you must not only accumulate but apply the energy accumulated to a suitable task. All that fuel pooled together in a barrel is nothing special until you put it in the rocket, and the rocket is no good if it has no navigational system, no link to mission control. A moon launch would go horribly wrong if the computer running the mechanical functions of the ship suddenly feels it would be better to head for the sun or take a dip in the sea, because after all who the fuck needs mission control, I AM THE ROCKET. Naturally it leads to disaster. The operating system is not the rocket, it is part of the rocket just as mission control is not the rocket, but it is meant to be a part of the operation. A link between mission control and the operating system must be clearly established and maintained so that Mission Control can guide the rocket to uncharted territories. The energy accumulated for voyaging must be utilized properly for the voyage and not be allowed to pool up by that guy with the cigarette dangling from his lip glowering at the whole thing and muttering that space travel is not possible, and who gives a damn anyway, and someday I’ll be the one in charge, and BOOM!

Exchange

The banks take your money. They really take it, they don’t just hold it for you, they help themselves; $20 dollars here and another 20 dollars there and a dollar fifty here and here and here. Not so much, but it adds up over time. And what do you get? You get to feel human, like an outstanding citizen. You get to have little pieces of paper with your name on them to shuffle around and around and you can use a highlighter pen in electric yellow to circle random sums. You get more little pieces of paper to exchange as legal tender, you get green paper and paper in a fancy book and you can have pictures of Garfield or Mickey Mouse or dolphins copulating printed in the background while in the foreground it says PAY TO THE ORDER OF_________ You get plastic too. Mmmmmm…plastic. That means shoes and lipstick and hot donuts and shiny cars and fancy electronic gadgets that can play movies or music or accept a collect call from your mother. FANTASTIC! You can borrow money from the bank. The bank will gladly loan you money and then collect interest, which is perfectly fair. Sometimes though, when it comes to plastic, they will slowly charge you more and more interest on the amount you owe, and if you haven’t been shuffling through your papers you may not realize this is happening, and soon your card is over the limit in bank fees, Eeee Gads! It might have been better to wait until next month to pay for that pair of shoes with cash, hard cold green papers, the ones you get after a day of sweaty labor. You don’t labor? Oh, I see, you work in an office and never even see cash. Your pay is electronically deposited into your bank account and then you get by swiping your debit card, here, there, everywhere! They have made life so easy, haven’t they? The power that passes from your employer to you to your favorite pizzeria is all transferred in the form of numbers, data exchanged digitally. You function like a straw. You toil for one corporation that transfers numbers to you and a myriad of other corporations siphons those numbers away so that you never have to handle any cold hard cash. The bank handles your vital resources for you and skims a little off the top for itself. That is only fair. They should know. They made it that way.

Perpetuation

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

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.

Vulnerability

There is always enough time for some lost bird to come careening out of the storm and fly through the gap between thoughts and words, crashing into your soft brain matter with the force of a hard cold gray stone sending your blood spattering in every direction. A spray of your valuable attention, your magick mojo, the blood of life that swirls through your veins like molten lava rushing to the head to make your squishy gray tissue into the crown of kings, now bursts into a bleeding mess of moist tissues. The careless mechanical munch, munch, munching of the caterpillars of the world. The ones that will grow fatter and fatter and never make cocoons, they are so busy with their cacophonous munching, gnawing right into your inner sanctum if they can, disguised as your lover, or your sister, or your grandmother, or your friend, smiling and lilting sweetly all the while preparing to launch that kamikaze attack on your mind, that ble de de de de de de dah of machine gun fire into your delicate magickal body, masquerading as a series of questions, objections, or comments, or they may launch a stealthy psychic attack, thinking so loudly that you feel stabbing pains in your chest, shoulders and side as if you’d been running a mile while breathing improperly, staring at you silently, morbidly from under veiled lids, not speaking their poison but letting it ooze, hiding sharp knives behind their backs and waiting for the ideal moment to slash and stab and drain you of your fire. They don’t know why. They munch, munch holes into the gossamer magick walls of the kingdom of God, filled with intellectual justifications for every bite. They are killing you while saying, what? What did I do? Munch munch. I only offered you a sandwich, I only reminded you of an errand, I was only talking to you about the GREAT WORK, munch, munch, gurgle. There is always time enough for these bandits to sneak in and steal the treasure. They steal it in the murky shadows between syllables and the blinks of an eye. They are your own thoughts, the thoughts of others, the stereo pumping from that pimp mobile paused at the curb wailing, “I need money”. You are never more than one sling shot away from loosing everything you worked so hard to gather, all of that blessed hot air lifting your balloon sewn of Persian rugs into the wide blue sky and blinking stars shining like the many nipples of that bitch goddess Nuit, feeding all her suckling pups, worthy and unworthy alike, with her twinkling light. All of your precious lift, lost when a single pin hole puncture procured by an act of mechanicality compromises your space. A solitary word, spoken or thought, launched like a grain of sand to a blind giant, a delicate crippled giant that suffers much from it’s affliction/gift, never having terrorized a villager or swallowed a child in its life, it has always been the tiny terrible peasants that have wounded the giant like vicious bloodthirsty monsters with sickle sharp teeth, tearing and gnashing, munch, munch; the fat caterpillar people crying, “Come down where we are, where you should be. It’s so much nicer in the mud.” They slash your wings, those delicate paper thin wings that you worked for long hard months in darkness and solitude to manufacture from your own flesh and blood and strength of will, now torn and waving like ribbons after an attack from one of the caterpillar people, the one outside of you or the one that will always live inside of you, the one you are making yourself from, the one that doesn’t know what is happening to it, or why it should fly instead of crawling and munching. You are besieged by a thousand enemies, both within and without, all waiting to take you down in one of those unprotected gaps, in one of those places where your attention is stretched too thin, or doesn’t quite reach, leaving chinks in the walls of your flying machine, neat little crevices where saboteurs can wedge a stick of dynamite and plug their ears and watch you burst in a shower of crimson and salty tears. Even a mighty dragon, if it is missing just a single scale, can be brought down with a piercing shot aimed into that small but fatal gap. There is always a space, a bit of time, a weak point where the guard is down, the sentry fallen into gluttonous slumber, a way to ruin ages of work in a moment.

Foundation of a Shadow

Give me your hand and let me take you into the tangled jungle of flesh, blood, and bone. Let me take you into those caverns where chest cavities gap wide open, making the walls that hold you and tangled indiscriminate masses of fleshiness make an uneven carpet of malformed shapes. The colors here are peachy and dripping crimson and veiny royal blue. Shredded muscle tissues hang like scarlet drapes, windows look into the hive-like interior of bone where the marrow rests maroon in its pockets. You will find that everything drips here, like melting wax. You needn’t move at all to journey through these chambers, they do the moving for you. Morphing, they collapse in on themselves as a new interior design emerges on the back of the old. We can walk through the catacombs of gore in their bright colors until deformed skulls emerge in the landscape, stark and white, being swallowed by blackness that eats itself until a new bright white set of bones bleeds into the forefront and strange vines of darkness reach like tentacles from every corner, weaving their way through the forest of ivory skeletal structures.
Vaguely, you think that this must be a bad trip, except nothing about it particularly bothers you and even that doesn’t bother you anymore, not the way that it used to when you wore little golden crosses on delicate chains around your neck and imagined that God dwelt in a palace of crystal surrounded by English gardens. Now you can tumble within the swirling black vapors like a sky diver through clouds, without fear of Gods or Devils that struggle over pure souls like Counts and Dukes over the young virgins of adventure stories. Now they are just these two things that give you the benefit of travel; shadow and light, and neither one loves you more than the other and neither one will hurt you more than the other. They are not your parents. They are your children, your toys, your tools. They are the tricks that make something out of nothing, motion out of stillness, form out of void, and whatever you are, wherever you go, you’re just passing through, crawling through sticky bloody hells as tantalizing to the senses as any heavenly field of lavender under a bright blue sky.
Crawl out into an office of clean white walls and blue Berber carpet and white laminate counter tops stocked with jars of tongue depressors. Slip up onto a cushy rainbow colored bean bag and make yourself comfortable, because you are a body now, a human that knows the words for “bean bag” and “laminate” but not the words that describe the other places where you have just been. The therapist arranges herself on another beanbag. Her coat is white, her hospital pants are powder blue. There are pens in her pocket and glasses on her clean friendly face, framed by straight auburn hair, fashionably layered to balance against the spectacles and make her seem perfectly ordinary, not too much of anything, nor to little.
“I like bean bags,” you tell her.
“Yes,” she says, “they do the job.”
“I’ve always meant to get one/ wanted to have one/ am meaning to get one soon/ saw some when I was little.” You say all of these things at once but it is organized into one concise sentence such as,
“I’ve always liked them.”
There are some juggling balls out on the floor. You pick them up because they seem to be out of place and you think that you are preparing the room and making her comfortable while she waits for the person she is going to help, so you tell her,
“I can juggle.”
“Really?” she is sincerely interested, but not overly excited, just right, like warm water.
You try to juggle but you don’t catch the balls. Apologizing, you try again. When you throw them into the air, you experience a temporary blindness. This shouldn’t hinder you because you know you don’t need to see the balls to catch them. You try not to look at them and focus on the woman’s face the way you were taught, but it seems that you are also throwing them out of pattern so that they spill onto the floor far from reach. Collecting and examining them, you notice that one is smaller than the other two. You explain that this may be the reason you are having trouble and trade the odd ball out for another that seems to be of the same size as the other two. Then you notice that all three are of slightly different sizes and decide not to throw them all over the room again.
You tell the analyst:
“I’m out of practice. I used to have a friend that I practiced with. He taught me how to juggle. I could juggle three when I met him…”
A vision of when you first saw a jester with jingle bells on his cap standing under a canopy within a circle of hay bails. You looked at the straw on the ground as he shows you how to throw the ball so that you catch it again. And you bought three little sacks, like tiny firm bean bags that were delicately furred and took them home with you.
“…but he taught me how to pass with a partner…”
You picture the different ways that you passed, sometimes facing each other and standing perhaps three feet apart, sometimes side by side with one arm each wrapped around the others waist, locked together like Siamese twins, your left hand passing to his right.
You describe the different methods to her and continue, “And he taught me to juggle four balls, and two in one hand so that I could juggle four that way.”
While you are speaking, you begin to suspect that she is here to listen to you. She is not waiting for anyone else. And you wonder what you will discover. You wonder what it means. And you decide not to finish the story because you are afraid of what it reveals. That is how the blackness eats itself here, how the scene falls away so that another will emerge built on the foundation of a shadow.

Binary Man

Here we go loop de loo, here we go loop de lie. Around and around like the waters spinning down a toilet bowl, spin, spin, spin. We will be back where we started again. One step forward, two steps back. Oh you pudgy balding little binary man. My hero, Binary Man, coming to slash through reality with his machete made of ones and zeros. Give him a yes or a no. That is your only choice. This was my hero? I have to confess that I also like Rorschach. I side with the deviant losers. *Sigh* . We are all going to get our hearts broken over and over in this sticky bubble gum web. Why did I make my baby wait every day after school? Just a little baby waiting for her mamma who’s off crying and fighting and sometimes running down the street alone to rescue her baby when the bus is late, and arriving disheveled and puffy eyed. And baby asks, “How did you get here so early?” But I’m a half hour late. I don’t know why baby, I thought I had friends, but then I had none. How did this all get rolling? I was standing in line behind a pleasant black man at the DMV. He was getting his motorcycle license. I was sixteen. This was the last day before my driver’s permit would expire, my last chance to take the driving exam and get my license. Sink or swim time. In line for hours. The gentleman explained to me, “People are either for you or against you. Sometimes it’s people you love, people who love you who are against you. But you have look past it all and see that they are either for you or against you.” The first incarnation of binary man. I thought he was right. My parents for example were against me, although they’d swear they were for me. But they were really for themselves and for their version of me which was not the actual me, but a me that served them. So I’d need to break clean. But I couldn’t do it properly for a long time. Soon I was alone. There is nobody here that is for me. I am not even for me. Damn you Binary Man! I think you were my father whispering in one ear all of the time, extreme and righteous, bending me, bending me, bending me until I was tweaked. The data that comes in is always tweaked as I process it. They are all against me. There is a distinction, however, between everyone being for themselves and everybody being against you. They are not all automatically against you, they just aren’t for you. There is a subtle difference. It is not a one or a two yet, not a yes or a no. There is a big gray forest that we may abide in, a shadowy place from which many shapes and possibilities may be plucked, raised, lifted, conjured. Yes and No man is coming with his machete. His goal is deforestation. He wants us to join him or die, twisted and alone in the desert he makes for us. Fuck you Binary Man. You are no hero! You are a mediocre Villain. I’m not going to join you. And I’m not going to be alone. I’m gonna fill my pockets with seeds of ambiguity and Johnny Appleseed it across the globe. You can loop de loo all you please, but you won’t get me. I’m gonna run up, up, up the holy mountain planting these little seeds. Like Luke Skywalker, I can still see the good in you father, but you are mostly machine now. It you come any closer I’ll lop off your machete hand with this gardening spade and watch you twitch. You are not a magick man, you are just THE MAN, taking names and asking, “Are you with me?” *chalks an x on your skull and slowly guides the machete to the mark for practice* “Or not?”

All For One

Our writer may not now how our story ends. He may not care, dabbling thoughtlessly, letting spew forth his every imagining. What contortions we may perform at the command of his pen driven by a fevered and unconcerned mind. Or perhaps he starts a life thinking, Ah this is the hero, there will be adventure and romance! But before the tale is finished, the author suffers some change of heart and all those adventures culminate in misfortune and romance becomes tragedy because some cloud has intruded upon the writer’s spirit. So Mme Bonacieux must die, D’Artagnan must at last become one of the Cardinal’s creatures.
Thus the life of all characters is drawn out by a mysterious author. Are we ourselves that author, that author that has become so identified with one character in his masterpiece that he forgets himself? Are we yet not even the written copy, but only the many fevered dreams of our writer, ideas and personages not yet put to paper?
Now I am with my dearest friends, in a moment, I will be alone and scorned by all. Here I am with my husband, now my husband is dead and I care for our children, now it is my husband that has survived me and does his best for our offspring, now it is a child that has died and we are driven apart by the tragedy. One little skip, like a frog from one pond to another nearby, or like a finger turning a page, or a pen writing first one version, then another.
Am I a story like the one my children watch in the nearby room, etched into a silver disc by some means beyond my comprehension, accessed by a laser scanning it like a beam of attention? Today it is this story. Tomorrow it is another. Like Audrey Hepburn, I can be a nun, or a sweet little chef, or a princess, or a white trash gold digger, depending on which story the laser accesses today. These are stories that have never happened, and never will happen, because they are the wild and incoherent dreams of an unknowable creature locked in a comma.
We say here, in this story that I inhabit, that man was made in God’s image. This may be, it may be that we are dreamed thus because the one who dreams us is trying desperately to remember herself, running through the dark mazes of an intoxicated mind, opening doorways and discovering chambers that range through the spectrums of light, each one presenting some clue, some key to the great puzzle. I am this and I am that. What am I?
Imagine the horror contained in the Being of this God. Imagine the delight. Imagine the wretchedness of being trapped not only in one unconscious and unsuspected dream but in many simultaneously. Imagine also becoming lucid, not in one dream only, but in many different strange scenarios all at once. Imagine finding that key in one, knowing it is a key, knowing you are a dream, and unlocking a doorway into the next related dream, another fantasy that is the difference between blue and violet.
Conceive of it, opening these chambers, holding these chambers at once like a juggler keeping so many balls suspended in the air, knitting together a vast network in which you can recall that you slumber somewhere. Some sweet dreams are stubborn and refuse to yield to that notion. Who wants to leave a pleasant dream behind or discover that it is not a final paradise? Some nightmares are equally unyielding, hugging us tight with their clammy grip of fear and confusion, drawing the spirit of the dreamer to them like shards of metallic dust to a lodestone.
The spirit would need its own strength to pull itself free. This thing might be accomplished with effort. Who knows how difficult it is to move one’s spirit, a usually passive being? Who has tried? Is it possible? Ha! What isn’t possible with dreams?
Once I could not fly, then I could, but only by flapping my arms, then I could lift off with just the will to do it. Why not? But all of these trifles could only be accomplished when I was certain that I dreamed.
Here, now, where I sit, it seems that I cannot fly. I can barely walk. I seldom leave this room. I have no mastery of this dream, only the occasional suspicion that it is a trap into which I have fallen. It is a terrain that I have been unable to connect to the network being weaved because of that fateful condition of being unable to maintain that I am an agent of a dream.
But what would I do to be more convinced? Go through other people’s houses uninvited? Kill someone? Make love to an abhorrent stranger? Attempt flight? It must be something shocking.
And even with the help of some little shock, even on the verge of seeing clearly that I am a dream, I recoil. Is this nightmare, this one lone bearable fantasy worse than running the gauntlet? What could be worse than the promise of Jacob’s ladder?
We begin as a brave D’Artagnan, adventurous and honorable, and become a somber Athos, wizened and drenched in grief, brave not because there is so much to gain, but because there is nothing left to loose.
There are those characters that raise their fists to the sky and cry out that the author is cruel. And then there are those that understand that the characters suffer because the author is suffering, and of these there are those that are unaffected by this revelation, those that are swallowed by a sense of helplessness and apathy, and also those that respond with pluck and a measure of irrational chivalry; "If my God needs rescuing, then however small I may be, I shall be his redeemer!"
After all, where this third class is concerned, if they fail, what have they lost? Absorption in their own role in a comedy or a tragedy that may as well have been decided by a roll of the dice? It is something to loose- the conviction that you are real, that you are important, that all stories have been leading up to your singularly fascinating tale.
On the other hand what is there to be gained? Ah! There is no real method for discerning what the outcome of such a success would be.
But one who is chivalrous and honorable is not so because they hope for a reward for themselves, if they did, they would then not in fact be chivalrous or honorable but something else all together. It would be only a very special agent within a dream that would be moved to search for a key and a door and hope to liberate a mysterious dreamer from the lethargy of a deep and confused sleep. The only motive that could see one such creature through would be a sincere desire to be of service to that other mysterious benefactor and sometimes torturer.
It is an occupation for one willing to embark on a quest for the sake of the journey itself, whatever the outcome. Our writer may not know how our story ends. He may not care. Whether we are beautifully written, or feverishly dreamed, what more can we ask for from one that is a prisoner of their own fabrications? And if that troubled dreamer requires our service to be liberated and we decline the responsibility, what cowards we have let ourselves become? What an apparition of diminished spirit I would be, having heard that the greatest princess I can conceive of is imprisoned in slumber and having declined undertaking the quest to free her because it would certainly mean my undoing?
The book is not called D’Artagnan or Athos and certainly not Monsieur Bonacieux. It is given the name The Three Musketeers. All for one, and one for all. A promise of sacrifice that flows from great to small and from small to great equally.
It is the mouse after all, who must save the lion.

Balloons

There you were, a slightly something nothingness to pat the blonde crown of my head. Even in my sleep, I see you, and the characters that were a part of the story that held you suspended like a shiny red balloon set among a bouquet of little white ones. Imagine the heights you might explore entirely on your own if you were to be cut free of the bouquet, tethered as it is to that small lead weight ensconced in a plastic smiley face to make its purpose seem friendlier. As a balloon, bound to the other balloons, your sole purpose is to delight and amuse, and yet I’d wager that you dream of something loftier. I’ll not say that I think one is truly better than the other. The fate of the balloon that rises unhindered towards the golden sun… well it is doomed to POP! While on the other hand, the balloon that remained tethered to it’s bland brethren will eke a few delighted exclamations from one observer or another, and eventually it will begin to shrivel and droop like a withered flower at the end of a flaccid stem until it is just a wrinkly little flap of rubber. Either outcome is somewhat dismal, and still I think I’d like to soar before the end, and well, perhaps that is what I am doing.
That may be the reason that I catch a glimpse of the lot of you in a dream now and then, when a gentle zephyr blows me near the carnival grounds and I see your bulbous heads bobbing up and down in time to the floppy footed step of some horrible clown. What does it mean, soft breeze that you sometimes afford me a glimpse of the bunch I left behind, and especially that red balloon, which surely I admired once as much as any other white balloon might? What does it mean that I sometimes wish for the red balloon to escape a slow demise and soar with the birds of prey above the world and above the clouds? The moment that my own tether was cut, I left the red balloon and its pearly entourage behind, and their fate is their own as mine is my own. How then can I imagine that I know anything of their existence, as I am no longer one of their ilk?
I could not expect them to think of my flight as a worthy way to spend the days until the roller coaster comes shooting out of the final curve and the ride is over, because they choose the tether and the lead weight and I the unclouded sky. I imagine, or perhaps I was once told, that they hope to lift that weight one day as a whole, through an act of magic, via a measure of defiance against the holy laws of nature. One day they will all make an effort which will be unaccountable, given that as time passes they loose strength and buoyancy rather than gain it, and yet, through a special effort made collectively by each individual, they will rise. Or so they hope. It is difficult to get so many air heads aligned to work for a common purpose and then to further make an effort which only they themselves, individually, can hope to invoke.
As long as the bunch is big enough it will always be easier to say, "Well, we would rise if only Bobo would lift his share of the weight." And "The reason we aren’t getting enough lift is because Balin is leaking." And by thus placing attention on all the other balloons in their company, they fail to place the necessary attention on themselves, they fail to apply as individuals the supernatural attention that makes possible the impossible.
Or so I imagine. What can be the reason that my imagination, my dreams, my mind bends back towards you now and again? In my dreams alone all balloons are reconciled and accepting of each other’s fate. Like the animals of the Wind In The Willows, in my dreams we all know that there is no use commenting on the sudden appearance or disappearance of another animal. We are glad when we are together, and remorseless in parting, and ever accepting that otters must swim and moles burrow and sparrows fly. There will be times when we take the path together, and times when our destiny demands that we part, and that is all that there is to it.
Or so I imagine.
So I have dreamed.