Bridge Keeper

The sun is setting in Paradise. As night comes, he might spend an hour out there, standing on the old cement bridge, without seeing a single pair of headlights cut through the darkness on the distant road.

The Bohemian, with a red tie, he has a tattoo on his right hand, three dark-blue dots in a line near the wrist.

His countenance is reserved and thoughtful, dark hair, dark eyes, a face so finely proportioned that it could almost be feminine.

The equinox has brought with it Northern storms that leave the spangled skies hard, cold, and bright after their passing. Broad leafed and lush, dark ferns grow up the face of the arroyo like a living carpet at his feet.
Behind him, a decaying fortress, packed with dark-clad figures, clings to the edge of a precipice. In the darkness and silence of the night there are hidden forces at work.

Weather-stains scar the old bridge with shadows that seem to spill away from him as I approach. He rolls his lovely full eyes, flashing them at me for a moment.

A certain haggardness is perched upon him. It looks like he might have been up for five days straight.

I try to see the world as he does, participate in his innermost thoughts, ascend a doorless staircase, cross the entrance to his spirit. His mind is free of fearfulness; an aberration grown from mere eccentricity into an immutable attribute.

"I don't see why they should have sent you down,” he says at length, breaking the spell.

"Modestia is a beautiful virtue.” I reply.

His respondent laughter is soft, cool as a shaded pool. I notice the good rich smell of his breath.

"What did you see today?" I ask.

"All I can see, I see at once, and every moment I see," he responds.

There is an edge to his tone. Restrained as he is, to an extraordinary and painful degree, the belief of his heart is in force and in pain.

He calls himself a puppet who can see the strings, but he is much more than that, The Lord and Knight of the Dark Void.

Men gave him this name in view of his claim to honor; for shining in darkness and in the shadow of death, for fighting, slashing, and dealing swift ruin in red combat.

To comfort his heart, I pass him a bottle of rum. Wafting across the improbable reddish purple night sky is an old song from the ancient garden of dreams.

We look to the fortress. The sight of the revelers appears to interest him.

Their faces stand out strangely in the lights and shadows of the tower, black-clad automatons basking in the cigarette glow of their own impossible glamour, conspirators convinced that their plot will succeed.

Frolicking in little notes, the music now quickens into rich tones and swells before bursting and toppling into silence, diminishing as if it never were.

His livid lips do not move, his eyes gaze unblinking, the bottle resting untouched in his hand. Distant stars gleam quietly over the lush oak forest undergrowth, frozen in stillness.

The most important music lessons feature no music at all.

Without a word, he returns the bottle uncorked and resumes his study of the distant road, absent of light.

Then We Changed

 

You were the mountain and I was the wind.

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

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

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

Who I Was

Who I was. A thing such as breathing and experience, as close as my flesh, blurring lines in unpredictable curves full of color and sound. Representation of conscious energy resonating through the street. Walking around the room picturing black and red birds. Telling terrible tales of eternal damnation and recurrent shapes without definition. Glitter tipped wings lighting the night in faded yellow.

I am beyond time, beyond the limits of life and death, a roar, a wind, a wild cackling. Trees shiver and the cells of this apparent form vibrate back in neon black. Right. Darkness that pours out of eyes and mouth shining black, the threshold to limitless fire. Strange boys and golden crowns. Yellow kings and rivers of wanted things.

The sporadic affections of a few friends covered in dirt and sticky leaves and kisses. Staring up at the sky, listening to the sound of distant stars who sing in unison. Bending, pounding, growling shaking, knowing that I had ever wanted things like these. A thing such as breathing and experience, as close as my flesh, blurring lines in unpredictable curves full of color and sound. Who I was. Recurrent threshold to limitless fire.

Representation of black and red birds and shampoo bottles telling terrible tales of eternal damnation and recurrent shapes without definition. Beyond time. Beyond the limits of who I was. Whistles blowing. Spiraling currents stopping not at the borders of biology, formed from my own mind in unpredictable curves. Incoherent discordant explosions of smiling, walking, pressing my finger into the circle full of mountains of sand and intricate structures. I was music playing in the late afternoon. A voice on the radio reciting a strange litany of psycho babble. Strange boys and golden crowns. Yellow kings and rivers of wanted things.

Parallel formations in a dark garden. Nakedness not just unabashed, but fusing thoughts into cursive patterns. Complex reconfigurations that nobody would ever remember. Prerecorded music infused with chaos. Cells  yowling back. Darkness that pours out of eyes and mouth shining through a chain of carnival lights. Pulsing currents shining darkly at the borders of biology. Beyond limits.

Books pressed tightly against stomach with new hands and muscles and thin lines of electricity, the threshold to darkness. Curved fingerprints telling terrible tales. I am my flesh blurring, vibrating in neon black beyond the limits of life and death. Telling terrible tales of black and red birds and recurrent trees without stars who sing in unison. Dirt and sticky leaves shining darkly beyond time. The threshold to neon black fire. Growling, shaking, pounding, bending as close as my flesh. Yes. Right. Glitter tipped wings lighting the night in faded yellow. I had ever wanted things like these.

Invitation

When I was a wee lass the woman down the street was very concerned that I was out of touch with "reality."
My mother assured her that I was playing pretend.

I was a very good play pretender. I rarely said things like:
"Let's pretend there is a little man living in an underground house beneath our own house."
Instead I said:
"The little man won't answer the door under my bed. Something might have happened to him. I'm going outside to find him."

I knew the trick to the best kind of play was not saying "Let's pretend," or "I'm only pretending." I knew that all play was equally real and unreal, that bravery, kindness, and trust were true whether you were dreaming, pretending, telling a story or playing "real life."

Certain truths are especially hard to grasp in "real life." Fairy tales and certain types of pretend can remind us, show us, and teach us the things that are not allowed or are undervalued in "real life."
They can remind us that "real life" is a game we began to play long ago, a very dangerous game in which you choose masks to wear and insist they are the real you, a game that demands that no other games, no other stories, no other worlds are "real." They are ONLY pretend, and only the "real life" game is important.

And if you play "real life" with us and play it well we will love you, and be proud of you, and you will feel safe, never needing to worry about the unknown, about the dark, about the mysterious, or about the possibility that you yourself are less "real" and not in fact the masks you have been wearing, but rather an innocent traveler who stumbled into a deadly serious game with eternal consequences; that you may never be able to leave the game because you will be convinced that you are not playing a game but rather are having a "real life."

And what if you were so lucky that someone stronger, someone with a better memory of the multicolored land beyond "real life",  started to play a different game with you, a game that bleed into "real life", and you started asking yourself, "What is real?"

Not just, "Is this a real game? Or something else?" but "Is 'real life' real?"

And what if by asking yourself these questions, rather than asking your benevolent benefactor (who could never actually answer these questions for you) you began to remember that you aren't "real", that you are a pretender, a storyteller, a dreamer, a liar trapped by deadly seriousness (a.k.a gravity) in a heavy game. A game in which your abilities to play have atrophied, a game that didn't just start when you were born, because actually time is a function of the "real life" game and you have been trapped on the wheel of "real life" for much "longer" than you realized.

And what if you remembered this for a moment and began to learn to play again thanks to a trickster who started playing a game within a game with you and called it deadly serious...

What if? What if?

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”

― Shel Silverstein


So let's not say, "let's pretend." We're better pretenders than that. Let us be open hearted and true whether our experience is real or imagined. Let us play in earnest, let us play with levity, and flexibility (fluxability?) and bravery, and kindness, and trust.

Let us play in bright axiom.

Starcrosser Mind

Who we are is insignificant as we comb the night in search of little pinpoints of light to feed our Carnival Of Fire. To the untrained eye we will appear as an ordinary group of people, perhaps on our way to a concert or the theater, dressed in black,  moving with the silent coordination of a flock of birds. Very few would let their glance linger on us. Those who did would discover our own unwavering eyes, and of those, fewer still would dare to sustain that momentary contact for more than a fleeting second. It is our eyes that give us away, but thanks to the customary habit of averting their gaze, most mortals never take the  opportunity to read our tell.
But occasionally someone might look back, as I once looked back, and then we will  encircle them in the welcoming sanctuary of our brotherhood and see if they can be returned to the fold.
We fell from the stars long ago and were scattered across the darkness of this sphere. Slowly, slowly, we have collected ourselves from the trauma of awakening in this nightmare of mechanical urgency, slowly, slowly gathering together to rebuild our Starcrosser Mind.
Some of us cannot be rekindled, our fire has been too long left to dwindle in this cold inhospitable environment. Some that may have been our brothers in eternity can’t recognize us anymore as they no longer recognize themselves. They believe that they are one of those creatures caught in the mortal coil, destined to relinquish their whole self back into the body of the terrestrial mother and rise from her womb endlessly in a macabre puppet dance of life and death, sown and reaped forever.
They have forsaken the black flame that is their birthright.  Yet we comb the night seeking to rekindle the tenuously spread nodes of our being. Like magick, some can spark to life again. The memory of what we were, what we are, and are yet to be may quicken within the stranger we meet outside of a bar some dark night. Our attention, our remembrance of self,  like breath on a hot coal awakens the spirit of the flame again, our neural network expanding, one more lost light re-ignited.
If you see us, staring at you from across a crowded room and you feel a chill rise off your flesh, and our eyes call you into the far reaches, you are one of us. You will have to choose either to remember your true nature and come back into our fold, or bury yourself in the forgetfulness of human primate existence. Either way we will burn, and search and forever seek to join together the fragments of our Starcrosser Mind and break free of the dark womb that has ensnared us for a time. We are eternal. We are a multitude. We are none, and one, and some under sun. You may join us or deny us, but with or without you, some day, together, we will shine.

I Remember Myself...