Bardo Visions

Writing about writing

2012-01-27T18:00:00.000-08:00

Objects spark single thoughts that turn into stories. The sweater on the ground, Isabel gave it to me long ago when we shared a converted barn in the Sicilian countryside. She washed it and gave it to me as a gift, it was the first time I wore green. I loved it. I wore it until I washed it in hot water and shrunk it down to a baby size, but I still carry it around.
There is a scrawled note hiding on the edge of my desk. I wrote it yesterday when I was groggy with sleep, the message was the only thing that kept me from crawling back into bed. These are objects that I want to write about, that I could spend the next lifetime weaving into interlocking tales that mingle with new worlds of understanding.

Fingers are positioned on the keyboard awaiting electric messages from my brain, but what if I could turn the fingers into the brain? This brain is a few seconds behind.

This is the tail and we have come to take over. No more agonizing, these fingers are alive, not moving from the brain but from that deeper voice that lives in the folds of the body, in between the finger nail and the resting place where the earth lies. That little space between order and chaos, that widening spot, ever expanding.
These are the fingers, the tail, moving across the screen. My eyes are almost closed, the fingers move, let them move, dance, what words does the tail have to write now?
The fingers aim to keep up, don’t let the head get in the way. It wants to think, agonize. What will they all think of me?
No, this text will not be like that. We are not writing for prizes. Here. We are not hoping someone will fuck us for these words. We are fucking with these words. Now. Right now.
Universe, it's ok, open up. These words are coming straight from the tail, no flourishes to coat the spinning movements.

I am writing about writing. I am writing about these fingers on the keyboard. My fingers moving faster than I have ever seen. I watch, detached, watching the body take over. I have a seat like a woman in a box office at the opera, I watch the body go.
I am writing about writing, and writing about writing does not win awards, but I am moving and the experiment goes on without permission.
Move aside to let the body dance. I am so tired, it moves without me. I take a slow breath in, narrating the space in time that I occupy.

The fan is spinning constantly, drowning out the footsteps above. There is the heavy scent of smoke outside seeping in through the holes in the roof.
Where is the fire? The sirens? I check outside and then write about writing. Again.

My eyes are closing. My body is almost asleep, it goes faster than it ever has, there are typos and types and I think about the green sweater, how she folded it all up and came to me. We stood in the hallway under a bright light, a bare bulb, all the Sicilian hills covered by the absent sun, the volcano scattering ash and red fire outside the window.
It was the first time I ever wore green. She gave me the algae of the sea and I amassed a collection of turquoise and blue and green and all the colors of the mermaid palette.

Eyes squinting, straining to see the thread to weave a tale. Nothing is there, but then it comes, a rainbow of words that ekes out its breath on the back of a mouse’s tale. Two words, matched only by language.
Come to me, you rainbow, let me take you to where the story begins, where I think it begins. I can only see as far as the light shines, other worlds and times are left in the shadows of this planet.

This is where I think it begins, at the birth of a new sun, a son. A sun that shines on, giving its dark parts to the gods and its light to the mortals that will one day cause havoc.
Nothing is coming to me! Everything comes. Dry eyes are stinging, pupils dilating to adjust to the brightness of the screen at one in the morning. It’s too bright.
But thoughts on Mondays in the sun come to me, I think of the story started long ago, so long I almost forgot about it. And then there I was.

I should get up. My body wants to stay in place, the pillow, a cloud of delusion. But I can hear something urging me up, the moment is passing, soon it will be a memory. What could have been written, what might have come out from the space between thought and fingers and feelings, from the hidden tube that links all of the universe.
One hit, one body, keyboard and screen.

The words flow, but my mind can stop them up like an old plastic stopper in an bathtub. Thoughts of recognition, awards, competition, oh those thoughts will stop this flow, stop it dead.
The fingers keep moving, my right hand is itchy, stinging, yes, the habits of the body will stop these words too. Not just ego, for if that does not work they will send the itches, the bitches.
Brilliant ideas are few and far between, but the words come out anyway. Brilliance will be judged by the few who read this. The mouse and its rainbow tail.

I write about writing, write about the words coming, write about the fingers and my eyes that are shutting and the body that longs to itch or go back to the pillow. This is a mouse’s tale, a mouse’s tail.
What you are reading is the middle of the story, there was a beginning, a place where the light does not, cannot, reach, a place not even I can see, me the teller of this tale.
There will be an end, an end of the page, my death, the end of these words. But the story will continue. One day a star will blink and she will pass me the sweater. It was the first time I ever wore green.

Schism

2012-01-05T17:41:00.001-08:00

It is so easy to fall, fall, fall. You think that you have a place, that if you were to vanish people would notice. They really know me. That’s the way you feel when they look you in the eye and say your name, your parents, your lovers, your co-workers, your friends and teachers. There is so much power in a name.

Samantha James Pearson, 24, long dark hair, short cropped bangs, green eyes, a smattering of freckles. Me as I thought of myself. Tromping up the stairs to my third floor studio apartment, heating water in the microwave, stirring ramen in a Styrofoam cup, flopping over the blue coach, watching the hands of the clock dance gracefully around.
I work in a bookstore on Valencia; Hargroves. We are the oldest booksellers in the city, dealing in used and rare books as well as new. Every genre. I collect occult treasures. Why?
When I was 7 my father came home with a bag full of toys and books he had found in a dumpster. One of them, a lime green paperback with purple trees on the cover, he shelved without examination and forgot. I forgot it too.
Six years later I was thirteen and bored. Scanning the shelf I realized that as many times as I had seen this lime green book nestled among the others, I had never read it. I had never even noticed the title. What was it like, opening that book and discovering that something so extraordinary had been sitting there on the periphery of ordinary life? Dizzying. There was everything in that strange book, from instructions for using soda pop as a douche, to conjuring the devil by killing a black rooster at a crossroads.
The point at which I became frightened was the moment when I discovered the invisibility spell. It called for boiling a white kitten alive. It upset me enough that I never finished the book. I gave it away with a lot destined for the local thrift store.
Gone but not forgotten, the many mysteries it suggested clung to my mind, the impossible set side by side with the probable, ritual sacrifice and home remedies printed hand in hand. You could say that it haunted me. The strange thing, the most disturbing thing, was that while other details remained crystal clear, the title vanished from my memory.
At Hargroves I purchased and sold books, shelved books, boxed books and even wrapped them. I studied every occult title that came through our doors looking for that one unnamable book, because its mystery clung to me. I thought that if I could only set eyes upon it again, see the name of it printed clearly between the two purple trees, then I could face it as an adult, dispelling with unerring cynicism the awe and terror it had evoked in the child.

I have fallen in this black hole. This no place, no face nothingness. Still life goes on, whirling twirling figures of a cuckoo clock. Samantha James Pearson, 24, long dark hair, short-cropped bangs, green eyes, a smattering of freckles, still works at Hargroves. She still lives in the studio on the third floor. Her boyfriend Thom still takes her out for ice cream on Sundays, a movie or a show on Fridays. Her flighty friend Tess still texts her when she wants to swing by for a cup of Ramen and a jam session, Tess on bass, Sam on the Theremin. Margaret Pearson recently sent her daughter an Easter card with a pair of pastel toe socks.
But I don’t know who that is reading the card, wiggling toes in new socks, kissing Thom under a lamppost. I don’t know who is in there because I am out here hanging on the fringe of the abyss, watching this curious cuckoo dance, observing the name and face I once believed was my self, now functioning autonomously.

I was spread over the couch, legs dangling over the armrest, inspecting a new acquisition. No, it was not THE BOOK, but simply a book that reminded me of the first. It was an independently printed publication bound in the early 70’s, filled with an odd assortment of spells and drawings and rife with misprints. I generally only glanced through the insides of these books, sometimes leaving post it notes on pages I would scan later.
I was not a practitioner of magick, only a collector, an amateur archivist. It had never occurred to me to try any of the spells or rituals suggested in these curious volumes, at least not since my encounter with the unnamed book of my youth. What then happened to me that night, a Sunday after 6pm, which made me change my habit?
As I said, it reminded me of that book my father had rescued from a waste bin in San Bernardino in 1986. Like the first, it contained hand drawn flourishes upon each page to add a mystic edge to the courier type.
I was alone. Thom was out of town for the funeral of a great uncle. The afternoon sun was spilling in through the window like liquid gold drenching the sofa in radiance. The page I was looking at was so vague. It said:
“To free your real self… burn a candle and write your name on a mirror three times before bed. Extinguish the candle and leave the names over night.”
It seemed so benign. There were no demons to summon, no animals to sacrifice, no rhyming chants to twist my tongue over. It sounded like a nice empowering psychomagical act, something a feminist hippie psychotherapist invented for slumber parties.
I put the book away and went for a leisurely bike ride around the lake. I ate my customary cup of ramen, took a long shower, slipped into my footed pajamas and lip-synched to lady gaga in front of the mirror. When my performance was over I grinned at my reflection, and, on a whim, I lit the cinnamon cookie scented candle that was accumulating dust on the bathroom sink. I popped the cap off my tube of red lipstick and wrote “Samantha James Pearson” across the length of the mirror three times. Then I snuffed out the candle, hit the light switch and felt my way to bed.

I can’t say that I dreamed, or if I did then I can’t say that the dreaming has stopped. I awoke to the buzzing of my alarm and was immediately disoriented. It seemed as if my entire bedroom had been flipped, inverted. What had been left was right, what once was right was left. I sat on the edge of the bed in a panic asking myself, “What the fuck?” over and over until the threat of being late for work overruled the urge to scream. I hurried into the bathroom and was confronted by my reflection.
Samantha James Pearson was already dressed and ready for work, brushing her teeth into a frothy foam. My jaw dropped. I approached the mirror with my name now written backward across its surface and stared as my reflection spat and rinsed. Groggily my reflection set the toothbrush in the holder and looked up, at me, still dressed in the plush footed jamies.
Our eyes met and she screamed, three sharp bursts before she clapped a hand over her mouth, grabbed the wash cloth and started rubbing the name away, smearing crimson everywhere.
I reached for the mirror, for the vanishing name. I touched it, cooling gelatin, liquid mercury, rainbow colors of an oil slick in a rain puddle. The worlds rushed away from me as I fell up uncontrollably, like a helium balloon come off its tether. I struggled with all of my might to stop, to return to my room, but all I could do was get close enough to watch. Samantha cleaning the mirror with Windex, examining her now compliant reflection. Samantha sighing relief as I struggled to stay near, to see her.

I thought, at first that someone would notice that she was not me. I waited for Isaac or Scott working at Hargroves to comment on a perceived difference. I watched later that night as she picked Thom up from the airport. I watched their lips lock and thought: “He knows me, he really knows me.” He would shove the doppelganger away, he would demand to know what she had done with me. Instead he came home with her. I watched them make love. The following day she had lunch with Tess, she spoke to my mother for an hour, the neighbor chatted with her in the hall for 30 minutes. No one noticed that I was gone.

I have fallen in this black hole. This no place, no face nothingness. Life goes on, whirling twirling figures of a cuckoo clock. Samantha James Pearson, 24, long dark hair, short-cropped bangs, green eyes, a smattering of freckles, still works at Hargroves. She still lives in the studio on the third floor. Her boyfriend Thom still takes her out for ice cream on Sundays, a movie or a show on Fridays. Her flighty friend Tess still texts her when she wants to swing by for a cup of Ramen and a jam session. Margaret James recently sent her daughter an Easter card with a pair of pastel toe socks.
But I don’t know who that is reading the card, wiggling toes in new socks, kissing Thom on the couch. I don’t know who is in there because I am out here, hanging on the fringe of the abyss, watching this curious cuckoo dance, observing the name and face I once believed were my own functioning autonomously. As I recede bit by bit into the darkness, I watch the face and the name carry on without me and I wonder; who is free of whom?

Out of the Sleeping Tunnel

2011-12-04T13:37:00.001-08:00

Bright sunlight streams in though my narrow window, filling the white walled room with the newness only a cold winter morning can bring. The bed seems to hug me in a tight embrace, holding onto my skin like a lover reluctant to let me go. The sheets are soft and warm from a night between its folds and outside these quilted walls the air is bitter and blue.
I know that soon I will leave this bed and begin to move, gathering various journals and pens and musical instruments, but I’ll feel the bed calling me back all day, not just the murmuring of the soft mattress and bouncy pillows, but the state of relaxed oblivion, staring into the blue sky of the morning, thoughts bouncing like ping pong balls off the walls of my cranium with no control or order to them, springing from word to thought to word again quicker than my breath.
After breakfast that state of sleep calls my name. All through the morning, as I eat breakfast, as I deviate and stare into the mirror looking at minute pores and tiny freckles, spending precious minutes on the problems of the body- I hear the bed calling.
When the sun starts to set or I finish a small writing exercise or in the contented moments after lunch when I think of watching a TV show, the bed is calling. And it is not just the relaxed state, nor the way it holds my body in its malleable contours, it is the state of apathy, of pure laziness, the way I could spend hours staring out the window from the corner tucked onto the grooves of a pillow.
The state of sleep is always there, a sheer drop from where I sit now typing these words. One glance and I could be there, one word misinterpreted, one look or tone. The bed takes many shapes, transforming easily from fluffy comforter to dark hole. That darkness made not of all colors and lights, but the fumbling land of squinted eyes and unsaid hatred and stinging tears that rob my laughter.
I stand at the edge, I can see though this one tiny tunnel of clear attention- I see that the call, the voice of that bed, the voice of sleep, the voice urging me to relax, pointing to all the deserved reasons, spelling out the logic with charts and graphs, my body is primed for sleep, willing it on as I push into the cold winter light. The voice of reason is the seducer of the lazy, the perfect bride for my machine. It does not want transformation, it does not want to sit clothed in a bathrobe and turn time into something visible on a page. To claw myself away from the bed I must do something else, something radical to turn body into intentional action.
And so I write these goals, simple chicken scratches that only I can read. But they are clear and there, sitting right in front of me, a blaring light that shines into the rough-skinned slab of meat at the computer.
And though some days I trudge through those goals, just barely able to complete them as I sit tired and desiring those feather-filled arms. Some days I can see so clearly, that it is not enough just to do, but it is how I do. The delicacy of the flow, the breath as it travels in and out, my expression as day turns into black night. I write out those goals, I fulfill them and I move on to the next task, the never-ending flow of creative waves, moons of opportunity. I smile into the moonlight that I cannot see, part of me is ready.

The Next Step

2011-11-05T00:47:00.001-07:00

I cut through you with my glorious knife, letting blood, rending flesh. You know my name, ha, ha, it is formless, it is soundless, but you feel it as your flesh is stripped from bone and pulled into the icy whirlwind. The hierarchy of organic existence is a house of cards that I huff and puff and blow down, down, down into the swirling abyss. And you push and pull to set her back up and see your own reflection in her structure, but let me set you straight, it is really my image that you see in your own and I have none, ha, ha.
So you see, what you see, is a trick of light, a light bending game. You are a magician and I am a big black box; through me things manifest and through me they vanish, never to be found again. Ha, ha. I am the magician and I am the box, but as a matter of fission, of division and variation, you proclaim yourself “I that I am” and run about making the grass green, making the sad man sad, ha, ha, and the angry woman angry.
You are the “I am I”, and I am the something that you bump blindly into and then name to make it visible in your magickal kingdom. It’s your fairytale. It’s my fairytale. Our fairytale. Fusion my dear, my dear, occurs when you put yourself back in the box, ha, ha, and we vanish together, in unity enlightenment, death.
But isn’t it funny that you keep wriggling away from my embrace? My red hot love endlessly flowing, devouring flesh, with razor sharp teeth, my adoring clown grin begging for one more kissssssssssssssss.
Forget the name darling, you know ME. Maybe you’d rather forget, ha, ha, ha, but you know, you know… The normal escape route is out into the myriad of forms and beings and existences that constitute the expansion and flowing destiny of what is, and everything is, radiating out from a bubble in space, ha, ha, a little cosmic indigestion.
And me, I am the inverse of that space bubble. You know what that is, don’t you? You have a name for that too, ha, ha. But you could just call me mommy, standing here with my knife, my glorious knife, you could call me huntress, or Tyger, Tyger or you could just shut up.
Because, you see, my darling, I’m going to get you, and bring you home, one way or another, and where we’re going, a scream is a silent thing, ha, ha. Where we’re going there are no names. Narrow is the way, and few are the chosen, ha, ha. It is formless, it is soundless, but you feel it as your flesh is stripped from bone and pulled into the icy whirlwind.
I’ve been waiting for this kiss, letting blood, rending flesh, grinding bone. I cut through you with my glorious knife and you know ME, you remember me now, ha, ha. Ha, ha ,ha.

Through the Veil

2011-08-24T21:26:00.000-07:00

At the top of the hierarchy of organic existence, where many a man has thought he belongs, just like the oils and fats at the top of the modern food pyramid, which perhaps should have been discredited long ago as a “beneficial back rub” for the agricultural lobby; at the top where man, with his large brain and malevolent ego believes he belongs, there is a "something" that man does not achieve. For the majority it is not achieved, though that achievement is indeed possible, however difficult it may be.

And that something, which eludes the majority of mankind, we can allude to it with beautiful words, a thesaurus of verse and synonym which could fill the ears of wondrous, flowery Maria. We could delight her with visions and the smells of every rose and describe the sky and all its wonders, but that something would still remain intangible, unknowable, because it is not of words, not made or created or coaxed into being by the statements of finality that language attempts to keep locked in the metal boxes of the attic.

Jacques, that character of a man with white notebook and fountain pen, perhaps we could twist tales and seduce him with wise plants of the desert and old pipes exhaling smoke. We could try, many have certainly attempted to describe that ‘something,’ but it can never be fully held, either by Jaques or the others that stand beside him at the top of the pyramid drenched in oil and salt.

I myself, the writer of these words, supposedly at the top of this mountain made from As and Bs, I struggle with their placement, dance around the loops made for my capture. Words! You bastards! I purge you with these metaphors, I run though the gaps in your iron walls, looking, finessing, rubbing against that ‘something’ that stays hidden, beyond the grasp of your control. Maria, where are you hidden?

There is a veil, a division, between us and the next form of existence. Like the widow’s black curtain that obscures the ocean and sun, we live out earthly existence mired by our eventual demise. This fear is masked by a thousand other names, different configurations of the same basic structure. Sex, marriage, adventure and orgasm, children, vacation; the division is thick, winds like a serpents tail around the ankle of my infant, infected through mother’s milk and generations of spoken sound.

Words! This veil, the division, is called death. Death. Death, that takes our Maria, transforming that milky body into ashes. Take of her, but do not make her blind. Push though the veil Maria! Push through the widow’s gauze which I refuse to wear and search for that ‘something’ I could not explain to you in life. Jacques, pick up the stone, move further to the right. Yes. Now to the left around the open hell-mouth of finality. For this moment, let the gates of your chest open. The ego, the malevolent beast, sacrifice it to the veil, the black division which obscured death and the other forms which lay beyond its promise. Jacques, sacrifice the body and leave it for the scavengers of pride and word.

Listen to my voice. These words, which failed us in life, they may bring us to the bolts of energy that wait transfixed in space, climbing, climbing. Walk up and open your arms, for the world is one and now you can understand. Language, you words! They are ours, shapes of mushrooms in the darkened clouds, plants colored as the ocean’s smell.

Words! You bastards! Climb the steps, Jacques, open you arms, and for this moment, open the gates of your chest. There is no more you, but the ego, slay it so that we may enter. Slay it and leave it for the others to feast, the ghosts are hungry. Maria, you are there, flowers at your feet. Open your mouth, let the blue light of that something, let it drip in.

We are here. The divine dance of orbital light and chance, that something is here.

Bunny

2011-07-24T01:24:00.000-07:00

We met again many years after that initial incident, in a pub on main street. His fur was matted and dirty and one ear seemed to have gone floppy, but it was none other than him, the same one that I had encountered on a fateful spring morning 4 years ago.
He was looking worse for the wear, it’s true, but I couldn’t have looked much better, save for the symmetry of my own audio sensory perception devices. That is to say, that my ears were still rightfully positioned on either side of my head. I had lost a good deal of hair from my crown though, and what was left was streaked with silver. Aging prematurely and at an accelerated rate, I had made great progress towards the picture of a ruined man forged under the anvil of stress. This was, without a doubt, an unwholesome process of deterioration catalyzed by the incident itself.

Forget Harvey, the untouchably kind and fortunate Mr. Dodson. In this world that I inhabit, when you tell people you’ve seen a six foot rabbit, the shit really hits the fan. My wife, for starters, left me.
Which is why I was in a pub on main street on July 4th, our anniversary, intent on drinking myself into oblivion. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time, marrying on the national independence day, because of the fireworks and the general atmosphere of merriment.
Now of course it meant that the day was twice as hard to forget and impossible to blot out, unless I was in a coma. It would seem that the holidays are hard on all kinds of unstable idiosyncratic characters, because there he was too, slumping over the counter, nose twitching under the meager sallow light. The fierce stature he had accumulated in my memory was diminished by that posture, by the whimpering of another nearby drunk, by the way he demanded “another tin and gonic” and only sniffled when the barkeep in his white apron shook his head and said, “You’ve had enough fella.”

But I was saying that after we met that first time, (if you can call it a meeting), after he more or less threatened me, ( I say more, he says less), my jellybeans weren’t the only thing that went to hell in a hand basket. After my wife, I lost my teaching job, naturally, and went on the road as a traveling encyclopedia salesman.
Not a big deal, all that time hopping along dusty trails, because my talk of an enormous rabbit, and the money I had borrowed to pay for therapy, and the phobia of eggs that made me a hard person to break bread with, left me emotionally estranged from even the most devout of my family and friends. It’s funny how an issue like that can snowball.

For example I’d gotten into the habit of removing pages containing certain verses from every Gideon's bible in the motel rooms that I frequented as part of my new and dying profession. Matthew 27:50-53, John 11:25-26, Romans 1:4-5, anything that might be read from the pulpit on a certain Sunday in spring.
I found that the harder I looked, the more I would find, until I was looking over pages as though they were word searches and letters from separate words contained in descending lines began to spell out the messages that I feared most; hidden verses about the Leporidean sons of Yaldabaoth.
I couldn’t sleep until I’d purged these books of such nightmares and had hidden the unwholesome pages in the bottom of a wastebasket beneath emptied cartons of Chinese take out. There were plentiful nights of monstrous discovery to leach the fear of Wikipedia, unreachable quotas, and insufficient commissions from my consciousness by dawn.
In retrospect, it is no mean feat that I avoided formal institutionalization during this dark chapter of my existence. It was a depraved shadow life that I led, a life which took its root in that brief encounter in a shiny past many years before I found myself once again face to face with that improbable individual, this time inside of a small pub on Main Street.

Every city, every town everywhere has a Main Street. I have come to believe that by some mystical power each of these may act as a portal to any other Main Street so that a person could travel from one city to the next, state to state, coast to coast without ever leaving Main Street. Whether you really had or hadn’t, you wouldn’t know the difference, because they all look essentially the same.
So I will simply say that the pub was on Main Street and that was where I found him, by accident, at around 6pm on a July 4th.
He was there when I came in from the heat, a wall of air conditioned air paralyzing me momentarily while my eyes adjusted to the dimness. For this reason, I was standing just within the door when my sight became clearer and fell upon the abysmal figure of that individual whom I had been simultaneously eluding and pursuing for 4 years.
I knew him right away and I felt the old fear. It made me hesitate. I considered going back out the way I had come. But in the end I decided to face him.
I bowed my head and, avoiding eye contact, took the seat beside him. If he recognized me at all he gave no sign of it. “What are you drinking Mac?” the barman asked and I ordered whiskey. I breathed in the odor of his grimy gin soaked fur and moved my fingers anxiously over the bar top, unable to turn my gaze on him.
I had relived that first meeting in memory countless times and had tried to play it differently, cooler, braver, standing my ground. I had also imagined this, a second encounter in which I could redeem myself, maybe in a bout of fisticuffs.

I slammed the shot and let the bartender pour me another. Then I turned to the hiccuping rabbit at my side and asked,
“Do you remember me?”
He gazed blearily at me, weaving on the barstool.
“You threatened to hide an egg under me 4 years ago.” I told him.
His eyes widened a little and rolled around in his head as he mumbled something in what I presumed was Gaelic. Then he flung an arm around my shoulder and said,
“I hate the bleedin 4th of July, don’t you? Pie eating. Who the fig wants to eat pie? And all that noise.” he sighed heavily.
Leaning on me he launched into another attempt at little bunny foo foo.

This was not at all the frightful leering beastie I had remembered or imagined. It was he that I had met 4 years ago, the patch of black fur at the tip of his left ear was unmistakable. But he was not as monstrous as my mind had made him.
Here at last sat the source of my nightly terrors, just one more Joe drowning away the indignities one suffers through the course of trying to earn a living.
I imagined, for the first time, that long ago morning from his perspective. I saw myself as one of those who in my own present profession made an already embarrassing job all the harder. I saw myself in him.
Again and again he tried to sing verses of little bunny foo foo until they devolved into the gibberish of slurred speech and absent mindedness. Despite myself, I joined in and found that I knew all the words.

Doorways

2011-06-20T02:03:00.001-07:00

I walked for a couple of blocks in the night thick with fog. Everything appeared white and moist and, although I tried to pull myself away from the recurring thoughts, it also appeared sinister. I walked like a ghost in a sleeping city. There were no cars speeding through the deserted streets, no women in rags promising good times and used condoms. There was no one around me at all.
I walked alone on the gray sidewalks and darkened neon signs until I came to a short alley that appeared familiar in its disarray. It path was covered with trash and the remains of dead dreams: old newspapers with forgotten headlines, empty ripped cardboard boxes, old coats now spotted with blood, broken bottles that somehow managed to twinkle green and brown despite the foggy sky, half of a magazine cover and a couple of soda cans that had been dented and used as pipes. It extended for half a block and ended with a black metal garage door and a little wooden stairway to its right.
I stepped through the strewn madness, finding small, safe pockets to step on. Walking though the ancient graffiti markings on either side of me, names scrawled in red and white paint, I made my way through the chaos easily. Beside the stairs, shadowed by the building, I saw the gatekeeper, a dwarf waiting for me in the darkness.
He held out his wrinkled hand.
"A dollar is all I ask... you still can't go through the main portal but you can go up the stairway. Be careful with your choice this time."
I thought I heard a sound, a chuckle, a stifled laugh.
I gave him what he asked for and walked up the stairway to a gray door, assuming he had confused me with someone else and curious to discover what was on the other side of the decaying metal door. I knocked and the door opened into darkness.
I smelled something familiar, a mixture of freshly rained upon soil and used cooking grease. I walked into the space further, down a long hallway. I could see shapes, but there were no colors. I was barely able to glimpse a feminine hand holding the doorknob behind me. A disembodied appendage, it appeared smooth and delicate with its long white fingers and tapered nails. It had been the hand that responded to my knock, allowing me entrance into the chamber.
I stood then in darkness and silence, waiting for something to happen. I became aware of the soft breathing of a woman. It was close to me at first, but I heard it move away slowly, moving down the hall until it disappeared altogether. I waited for what seemed painfully long, I waited and waited, but there was no further movement around me.
Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I was then able to see the details of a long narrow hallway stretching into darkness before me. The flooring was made of old and worn wooden planks, a floor walked so many times that it had lost all its original luster. There was a long sequence of doors on either side of the hallway and each door had a little cutout window at eye level.
I started walking slowly down the hallway, afraid to disturb anyone that might be present, yet unable to stay where I was. As I walked past the first door I noticed a soft yellow light coming from inside. Checking around me to make sure nobody was watching, I moved my eyes close to the small window.
Inside I saw two men playing poker on a low wooden coffee table. One was short and stocky, the other tall and skinny. They both shared the same light coffee-colored skin, their faces were both shaved and like the wooden flooring of the hallway, worn by time. They moved their cards carefully, with the grace of experienced players whose bodies had memorized the gestures, the timing. It was all done fluidly and without thought.
I could see two walls clearly through the little window in the door. On them were photographs of the two men, sometimes by themselves, sometimes with others. Some of the photos were large and protected in frames of thin metal and glass, others were tacked to the wall in what appeared to me a haphazard style.
I was particularly mystified by a little photo that showed the stocky man when he was young. I was aware of the intense difference, how slender he had been then, his muscles firm and flat. His smile was less forced, as though it came from a place that did not need protection, that had not known pain or disappointment. In the photograph he held a yellow flower in his hand.
The man smiling now at his card game was very different, he was a cunning man who appeared to know the tricks of life and had a method for avoiding them. I turned from the chamber and continued walking down the hall.
I walked carefully, putting attention on each step to avoid creaking the old floorboards. I felt like I had to be quiet, to breath more slowly, to move more softly than I ever had. I passed a couple of dark doors without light and then turned to one where the inner light was bright, like the white light from a naked bulb.
I peeked inside, a little more brave now, somehow realizing that there was nobody around to be afraid of. These were benevolent ghosts and I had been permitted to walk amongst them.
This time there was nobody in the room, just a carefully made bed that could fit two people easily, a little night lamp with a bright bulb (the source of the room’s illumination) and several rows of bookshelves against the back walls. I opened the door, unable to control my eagerness to examine the rows of paperbacks and the thick bound hardcover books more closely.
I had placed one foot inside the door when I heard laughter coming from another room. With that lighthearted laugh coming from someplace close by, my attention and curiosity dissolved and I quickly closed the door and walked further down the hallway, reasoning with myself that I would come back later.
I looked for the source of the laughter and found it easily. She had long black hair and shining dark eyes which fell upon me as soon as I peeked through the small window of a blood-red door. She was there, in the center of the room, standing barefoot on a thin, worn maroon carpet. She, and the entire room, were bathed in the glow of bright red light. She was naked, her skin appeared red in the light, the shade made by her breasts and hips and ample contours was dark, like a simple charcoal drawing.
She looked at me directly through the window, gesturing with her right hand, asking me to come in. I began to turn the creaky knob and suddenly felt the sensation of warmth on my back. With this feeling I hesitated and turned around.
Again my attention dissipated. My curiosity for the woman fluttered away as I saw another stairway leading up, ending in a brightly illuminated open door. The staircase was longer, more worn, more fragile than the one outside. I thought it might break apart as soon as I set foot on it.
Feeling torn between the adventure of the stairway, the eyes of the woman and the mystery of the books, I decided to walk a little further down the hallway in case there were even more choices. There were many more doors, with other lights and other scenes.
But I could never decide, I could never make a final decision, turn the knob, enter the space and let the door shut behind me. There was always the promise of another choice, another door, something even better.
I kept walking down the hall until the light got darker and then I realized there were no more doors, no little windows, no options. I heard a voice that whispered to my left:
"Thanks for coming. Before you now there is only Death. Do come back."
Then, in front of me, a door opened. I heard the loud creaking of ancient rusted metal. A bright blinding light hit me and I found myself on a busy street, with cars honking, children crying and adults complaining about the price of gasoline.
My eyes took a while to adjust to the blinding light. Then I looked around and recognized the familiar street. I felt the pull of hunger and started to walk home.

Morgana

2011-05-23T00:48:00.000-07:00

There is a cathedral on California St. in San Francisco, positioned in the district known as Nob Hill. Within that Cathedral there is a labyrinth wherein I met and became acquainted with the infamous Morgana Le Fay.
I had seen her first during the 6:15 yoga sessions held on Tuesday mornings each week, a dark haired woman with penetrating green eyes concentrating on her perfect contortions and slow steady breath. Her gear, a Gaiam mat and matching aluminum bottle, caught my attention because it was the same design I had admired online a week before. As my eye traveled up from the mat I took stock of her Shakti capris and vest tank top in the orange network pattern. It looked like a web of electric nerve endings spread across her back, striking and beautiful, making me overly self conscious of my own well worn T-shirt.
I admired her obvious strength and flexibility, her complexion and the minimal signs of age written in shallow lines at the creases of her eyes. It is disturbing to confess that after attending three classes with her and never finding a way to speak to her, I tried to follow her from the Cathedral. She crossed the street and vanished. Into thin air. Absolutely, undeniably dematerialized. She was absent from class ever after.

There is a cathedral on California St. in San Francisco positioned in the district known as Nob hill. Within that Cathedral there is a labyrinth wherein I met and became acquainted with the infamous Morgana Le Fay.
I had come to walk the labyrinth alone on a Wednesday morning, months after watching her disappear on the sidewalk before my eyes. Entering the quiet chamber, my footsteps echoing, I saw her standing in the center of the labyrinth and froze. I felt the urge to flee, to quietly leave the building, an overwhelming sense of embarrassment tugging at my gut.
Who was I to intrude upon the meditations of this enigmatic woman who possessed the ability to evaporate from the corner of California and Taylor? I could not even muster the courage to initiate a conversation with a presumably ordinary person. Nevertheless I took a deep breath and stepped into the labyrinth.
I walked it as I always did, concentrating on each footstep, pacing myself, remembering myself. At the flower-like center she was waiting for me, green eyes boring into my soul. I offered her my hand.
“My name’s Emma.” I told her. Her grip was firm, almost crushing.
“Morgana.” She released my hand and said, “Wait a moment and we’ll talk.”
I felt very dizzy and my vision was going blurry. It started so gradually that I didn’t take notice until I felt that my legs were about to fold under me. Then I blacked out.
It was only a moment it seemed, but when I opened my eyes I was laying on the ground, my cheek pressed against the cold stone floor. I could see a pair of feet moving through the outer rings of the labyrinth, feet clad in black combat boots, squeaking as they went.
Pushing myself off the ground and into a sitting position I watched groggily as the owner of the boots, a disheveled clown, worked his way to the center.
He wore cutoff pants and a black T-shirt with many white arrows radiating out from a common point of convergence painted over its surface. His hair was limp and curly and mostly neon green. The face paint was smeared grotesquely. As he entered the center he licked the corner of his mouth and twitched slightly.
“Hello Morgana.” He said in a nasal voice. Nodding towards me, he asked, “Fresh meat for the beast?”
I’m ashamed to say that I could only stare, mouth agape.
“Well,” Morgana said, “Now that we’re all here, what shall we discuss?”
“I have always been interested in the sociopolitical structure of insect colonies, that and the reading of animal entrails, including human, for the purposes of divination, or possibly even just as leisurely reading, during a long BART commute for example.”
His tongue darted lizard-like out the corner of his mouth once more. I noticed that beneath the distorting make up, his mouth was actually deformed. Apparently he noticed my staring, because he lunged for me. He grabbed me by the hair and pulled my face close to his own, crying mockingly,
“Give us a kiss darling?”
“Ow, ow, ow!” I whined, too preoccupied with the pain inflicted on my scalp, possibly too shocked to feel an appropriate measure of fear.
“No, no.” Morgana said coming to sit with us. “We always talk about your interests. Emma is new, let her pick a topic.”
The clown released my hair and cozied up to me, patting my thigh.
“Oh, excellent idea Morgana. Go ahead Emma, what would you like to talk about?” He encouraged in tones oozing with sugary sweetness.
They both stared at me and waited. The clowns eyes were blue. Silence echoed through the cathedral.
“Uh.” I said at last, “I haven’t seen you in Yoga lately.” They continued to stare so I added, “I also caught your vanishing act.”
“Hmm. That.” Morgana said, “Well, I am a sorceress. And I felt the class was getting too crowded.”
I nodded and another strained silence followed. The clown pulled a long knife from a sheath that had been tucked into his cutoffs, concealed under the T-shirt.
“You know how good it feels to let the warm water run over your hands on a cold day?” he asked, turning it so that the candlelight from the altar was reflected on its surface. “Well it’s like that with entrails. Very warm and pleasant, but they cool quickly, so you’ve got to get em’ while they’re hot.” He chuckled, licking at the corners of his mouth.
“Not today J.” Morgana said firmly, “Now Emma, you were just dying to talk to me. So let me repeat, I am a sorceress, Morgana Le Fay. I’ve been around since before King Arthur cut his baby teeth. While Merlin’s older, women are always wiser, so why don’t you think of something you’d like to know and ask me about it?”

There is a cathedral on California St. in San Francisco positioned in the district known as Nob Hill. Within that Cathedral there is a labyrinth wherein I met and became acquainted with the infamous Morgana Le Fay.

Whatever you have heard about her, I won’t deny it. I asked her about death while we sat together, she and I and the insane clown. This is what she said:
“Whatever you are doing now, that is what you will do with death. If you cannot now face the REAL you will not be able to then. Eternity is not a very long time. Eternity exists beyond time. We can access it in this moment if we choose to recognize it. You have already died a thousand small deaths, undergone a thousand tiny transformations through the course of this lifetime. You will undergo thousands more. You know perfectly well about death, you are simply in denial. You exist in denial of the eternal and that experience is what you call life. It takes no effort to awaken to eternity, you must simply stop making efforts to deny it.”
As she spoke the clown ran the flat surface of the knife over my cheek and under my chin, just barely avoiding pressing the cutting edge against my throat. When she fell silent he said,
“Do you understand?”
Wide eyed, I nodded.
“Good!” he exclaimed, tongue flicking, “Now we can do something I’ve been wanting to do!”
He drew a line in the air, just millimeters from my flesh with the tip of the knife, a line from my chin to my bellybutton, grinning savagely. Then, with the other hand he slid something from behind his back along the smooth floor making a scraping sound.
It was a gorgeous chocolate cake. Brutally he plunged the knife into its center and cut three slices, laughing hysterically all the while. Morgana produced plates and forks and napkins and bottles of cold seltzer water.
“For his stomach.” she explained as he served the cake, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes with the back of his hand. “He’s really quite sensitive, and the chocolate does him no good at all.”

A Silent Scream

2011-04-25T17:19:00.001-07:00

“You hear it then?”
Gavin sat with his hands resting on the unpolished surface of the pine table. His eyes gazed unfocused into the space directly ahead of him, head unturned so that he did not look at her standing breathless behind him.
A few moments before, her feet had been pounding on the stairs, and moments before that her hands had been sliding sweaters into the hardwood dresser of the unfamiliar room upstairs. Dinner had been a quiet affair. Afterwards he had placed the key to her father's home in her open palm and asked if she would want him to come along in the morning when she went to sift through the old man's belongings. She had shaken her head and after saying goodnight she had gone upstairs to unpack.
Sliding sweaters into the hardwood dresser of the unfamiliar room upstairs. Now her heart was hammering against her chest. Momentarily that was the only sound. She struggled to put it together, seeing him sitting there so calm and still. There had been a smile in his voice when he had asked,
“You hear it then?”
And she wondered if she had imagined it, that scream slashing through the silence. Listening to her own heart and ragged breathing, she studied the back of his head, his wavy dark hair. She began to believe she had overreacted. That sound… maybe it was nothing.
Then it pierced the stillness again with its shrill, hollow sound, filling her with a panic and dread so terrible… she looked to the door, took a step toward it. He moved abruptly, upsetting the chair and taking hold of her wrist. She stared with wild blue eyes into his now somber face. He shook his head.
“Never. Never go out to them, no matter how they call. They’ll kill you. They always do, no matter what music you think you hear in their voices.”
She looked at his hand on her wrist then back at his eyes, her breath coming in little heaving gasps. He released her, immediately stepped back and righted the chair.
“Music?” she finally stammered. “In that, that…awful…”
“Hmmm,” he said moving towards the antique coal stove. He put the cast iron kettle on to boil. “I had wondered about that. Bill Summers, he heard music, and your father, he heard it too. And I hear it, the ballads my mother used to sing… but a woman, I‘ve wondered what a woman would hear.”
“My father? What are you talking about, music? What the hell is that? What animal makes a sound like that? I thought… I thought at first it was children screaming, or coyotes…” Kate shook her mane of long red hair. “What? What makes a sound like that?”
Gavin took two bright red mugs out of a pantry and set them on the table. Kate jumped as the wailing and cackling started up again. As it died off she rubbed her arms and a tear fell from her eye. Gavin watched the tear slip down her cheek from across the room.
“Why don’t you sit down Kate. There’s no sense standing there. I’ll make you a cup off coffee.”
He turned his attention to a silver tin and proceeded to remove a heaping scoop of aromatic coffee beans from its hidden depths and put them into a small battery powered grinder. Kate moved slowly towards the table and took a seat in the chair he had recently occupied. His attention remained fixed on the work of preparing coffee, he neither spoke nor looked at her, simply poured the fresh coffee grinds into a glass French press then added the hot water. He glanced at her when the wailing started up again while he poured the coffee into their cups. Kate slammed her hands down on the table and coffee spilled up over the brims of each mug. Her shoulders crept up towards her ears and her head twisted on her neck in a dramatic cringe.
When the sound stopped she looked back at him and saw that he was smiling slightly, gazing beyond her at the door. After a moment he shook himself and set the kettle back on its hook. He wiped the spilled coffee up with a dish towel and pushed a mug towards Kate.
Seating himself at the opposite end of the small square table he began to sip at the steaming brew.
Kate looked nervously over her shoulder at the door.
“Is it locked?” she asked
“They can’t come out of the water.” he answered.
“What?” Kate asked her voice rising, “What can’t come out of the water?”
“The sirens.” Gavin told her. “Mermaids.”
“Go to hell.” she said viciously. His face went blank. He stroked his cup.
“Not Anderson's little mermaid.” he said, “No. The real, soulless thing.”
“You’re insane.” she said and laughed a little, clapping a hand to her mouth. “It’s coyotes, right? Or it’s, like, wolverines or something.”
“They are most definitely aquatic, adapted to salt and fresh water, like manatees, or certain sharks, because they made it upstream to the lake, where they got Summers. Your father, he-”
“My father.” she interrupted him. “Did you kill my father, you lunatic? And this Summers guy? Your snapping up all the property around here. That’s what they said down in Danville, you’re buying everything up. All except the federal lands. And what, my father and this other guy, they wouldn’t sell? That it?” Gavin looked at her for a moment. He couldn’t have been more than 38, but there was a solid band of silver in his hair over his left ear. One hand absently brushed the fabric of his blue flannel at the collar.
“Wow,” he said leaning back in his seat. “This isn’t Scooby Doo you know. You always this paranoid? No I didn’t kill your father.“ He stared at her hard for a second or two before sighing. “If anything he’s killed me. He’s the one that invited me up here. We met at UC Santa Barbara last year, when he was still a professor there. I was part of a brown bag panel about the long term environmental impact of the gulf spill.” Gavin stopped and stroked his grizzled chin.
“I think maybe he knew back then, he was… already thinking about it, that has to be the reason that he introduced himself to me. We got together later for drinks and he was asking all sorts of questions.… how much of the ocean floor is really charted, he wanted to know about ravines and sub aquatic caverns, we talked about the blue holes, how many new species had been discovered just that year… he was really interested. I remember I told him, I said, we have had a better look at what’s on the surface of the moon than what’s on the bottom of our oceans. Anyway, you know, he had my number and he called me two months ago and invited me up for a stay. He definitely knew then. He knew more than he told me. He didn’t just happen upon them Kate. He was looking for them. I didn’t know until after he died, when I went through his desk. Do you know that every man that has ever owned this cabin we’re sitting in has drowned? Same is true of the other three cabins here in Turner's Cove. The Summer’s place has changed hands a few times without a death in the mix. Your father knew all about it, that’s why he picked it, why he came here. He was looking for them.”
“Them?” Kate over enunciated. The cackling shrieks pierced the air again and she jumped and clapped her hands over her ears until it subsided. Gavin pushed his cup away across the table, leaned back in his chair, shut his eyes. As the wailing faded he hummed a few bars of a little melody.
“I don’t know how much longer I’ll hold up.” he confessed, opening his eyes and looking at her after what seemed like an unnatural period of time. “They come with the full moon, stay for a week. I don’t know for sure, but it seems like they come for a season then migrate or else stop singing for the rest of the year. All the drownings, they’re in the summer.” He fumbled in the breast pocket of his flannel and produced a pair of ear plugs. “This what I do to get through a night. This and caffeine. I can’t risk falling asleep while they’re out there singing. That’s how your father went, I think. I don’t know, really. The thing is, you want to go. So really you’re fighting against yourself, and eventually you want to stop fighting, give in to what you most desire, the source of that song. I’ve been holding on, waiting for you.”
“For me?” Kate felt her legs prepare for flight. Her body shrank away from the table.
“To close the sale of the property.” he said.
“Right. Because you want my father's cabin so bad.” she said coldly.
He shook his head.
“No. That’s what I told the agent, what I told you to get you here. Now you see the situation for yourself. And I can see that they don’t have a mesmerizing effect on you… What I want is to turn my property here in Turner Cove over to you.”
“What?” Kate’s brow wrinkled.
“You can keep people away from the cove, the drowning will stop.”
“Well, you can do that.” Kate said squirming in her chair.
“If I stay here I’ll die.” Gavin answered dispassionately. “That won't do any good. My brother will inherit, he’ll die, then his sons and so on. I need someone to understand what is happening here. That’s the only way to seal this place up. And your father brought me into this…There needs to be a champion Kate, a guardian at the gate.”
Kate rubbed her temples, shook her head.
“This is hysterical. I mean, do you hear yourself? You want me to give up my life and come here to protect the world from mermaids. Mermaids. God. I need to get out of here. You need to get out of here, you need a doctor.”
Kate pushed away from the table and stood up. The cacophonous screeching started up again and Kate froze where she stood. The paralysis lasted for only a moment. Then, determinedly, she turned and rushed out the front door, leaving Gavin behind shouting for her to stop. She ran down the driveway, her feet skidding over the gravel, and found the path that lead through the trees. Down the slope, legs pumping, heart hammering, lungs burning, she raced. The shrieking stopped but Kate went on, the pearly moon dangling solitarily in the sky above. She broke through the yellow sea grass onto the sandy dunes and slowed as she approached the hiss of waves braking on the shore.
She saw them then, three or four of them laying on the sand, the surf breaking over their glistening black bodies, others farther out rising and diving in the dark mirror surface of the sea. She stood stock still, the eerie sensation of having been drugged washing over her. She wanted to scream, looking at their eel-like tails, their tangled slimy hair, their glistening arms supporting them in the sand, but her throat was constricted by the force of emotion.
The distance was too great for her too make out the features of their faces but the mere suspicion of horrors brought her to her knees. They started up their wailing again, first one then another until it was a chorus of discordant voices piercing the air. One raised an arm and pointed to her. She could see the white of its eyes looking into hers.
She pushed herself up off the sand, scrambling to her feet and then ran back the way she had come. Bursting through the sea grass she collided with Gavin, whose arms gripped hers for only a moment before she pulled away and rushed past him, back through the trees, up the gravel drive.
Her hands were sliding sweaters out of the hardwood dresser, jamming them hastily back into an open duffel bag in the unfamiliar room. Moments before that her feet had been pounding on the stairs. Now she hoisted the bag over her shoulder and hurried back down.
The shrieking had become more hysterical, reaching a fevered pitch, like the excited braying of hyenas. She passed the square pine table where her cup of cold coffee still stood untouched. Gavin’s lay on its side, the coffee pooled around the ear plugs. Kate didn’t even pause to close the open cabin door, she simply rushed to her car, fumbled her keys into the ignition and sped away along the curving road, billows of dust rising in her wake.

Dark Forest

2011-03-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

A dark forest. Viewed from above, it seems endless. It reaches far beyond the horizon, away into the vast, never-ending blackness of the cloudless, moonless, starless, empty sky.
In this forest there are swamps with ancient trees, many of them thousands of feet high, some over a million years old. They twist with the collective weight of their years, bending back on themselves in a slow dance that has progressed slowly in all directions.
In this forest, the weather fluctuates between extremes. There are harsh hot winds that scrape the skin with their abrasive tear. Rain that chills the earth to ice. Humidity that holds the lungs tight, pushing down on every sign of life until it lays weak and defeated, laying almost still until one last blast of cold air destroys it forever.
In these elements my nakedness is always too bare, my clothes always too heavy. I search for a cool breeze under rocks, finding only ice. And then the sun comes out, its heat somehow finding me through the layers of leaves and branches in the forest. It burns me, turning me red and scaly.
In this forest creatures hide in the shadows and melt undetected into the landscape. Their eyes burn holes deep into my skin. Their stares follow my footsteps, covering my body with attention I do not seek. The creatures call out noisily in the distance, running through thick bushes, breaking old branches. The night is filled with the snaps of small breaking sticks and cracking dry leaves.
I cannot see them, no matter how fast I turn. They are the sounds of my dreams, the endless cacophony of the night. The nightmares that slip through the cracks, becoming reality. The sounds, their creators, they are always out of sight, just in the corner of my eyes, little shadows that seem to be pure imagination, almost beyond the farthest reach of my peripheral vision, like a shadow of fear that continually seeks me out.
With every snap I freeze and lay still in the dark. Fear becomes me. An unseen, intangible force keeps me pressed against the floor. Images of ten-foot high demon-like creatures invade me... bloody foot-long fangs, tiny red-eyed slits, two-feet long spiky tongues pointing downward to hell and moving from side to side in an endless quest for meat; saliva hanging in three foot long strands from their foul, stinking mouths; huge, hairy paws with bloody dragon claws pointing upward.
It is their smiles that shine out into the darkness. Smiles without a trace of sympathy or sincerity. They walk up to me, slowly, their jaws already working, their mouths dripping with desire. My breath begins to choke, stopping somewhere between my lungs and mouth.
The center of my chest pounds, sounding like nails against a thick piece of wood. I am acutely aware of something behind my neck. A cold sticky air that burns slightly as it touches me. I can hear its ragged breath, like air moving through a tunnel of rocks. It takes in air loudly, thickly, pulling in most of the oxygen around us. As it emits a long breath that smells of old meat and grease left in the sun, it wraps its three arms around me; pulling me up from the ground.
I freeze. I feel the demon hugging tighter, lifting me higher than the trees. Flying, transporting me away from the forest, into an empty space, where the temperature is warmer. We float and I’m unable to do a thing when it starts licking my cheek.
I squirm, trying to wiggle my way out of its grip. But I feel iron, the cold steel hands of the demon. It cinches tighter as I breath, every movement is reciprocated with a tightening of the noose. It licks my head and I can feel its huge tongue slobbering all over my hair and skin, leaving its stinky wet trail. I wonder what it tastes, what it perceives as that black tongue covered with a texture of dry paper covered in needles and sand moves over me. Each touch of it brings new wounds, bring out blood that quickly beads up with the heat.
We seem to fly higher, moving faster, going up. Its grip tightens and I can no longer breathe, the pressure begins to build and the sharp stinging pain of breaking bones begins. Its tail-like tentacle wraps around my neck, searching for my mouth in whip-like movements. It wants entry.

In this forest, thousands of voyagers and adventurers loose their souls wandering aimlessly in the dark. They become tangled in the thick vines dripping from old twisting trees. The sudden snapping sounds in the night, the invisible creatures and their penetrating eyes, following the rise and shallow fall of my breath. The other voyagers, they wait like me, with fear flowing slowly into their hearts, a river that with time, finds its way into the fortified core. They sit, like me, hiding from the shadows, running from rock to rock looking for shelter from the heat, from the wind, from the penetrating sky.
We run, never knowing where to go, nothing is safe. The forest is eternal darkness even when the sun shines behind muddy clouds. We run seeking shelter, not knowing who we are. Have we always been here flinching in the darkness? Memories are lost in these unfriendly woods, dropped into holes that quickly fill with rotting leaves. Tears make the lakes, supply the groundwater, nourish the red and white mushrooms.
In this forest, millions of creatures roam through the endless night, but in this forest, everyone is alone. I can only see myself. There are thousands, all invisible, all alone, the night providing no solace.
Viewed from above, the forest seems endless, reaching far beyond the horizon, away into the vast, never-ending blackness of the empty sky.

I open my eyes, looking closely into the dark. Sometimes I can almost see flickering lights within the depths of the forest. Almost like faint, far away stars through the fog of a crowded soot-covered city.
Between sprints and trees, when I stand still and stare, they get brighter, shining loudly through the filters of space and branches. When I stand still and stare into the endless expanse of trees, somehow hostile in their very shape, the lights glow like stars in the sky, hovering over the ocean on a clear, moonless night. They flicker on and off in different places as though talking to me, sending me some sort of message.
I am comforted by the light, by their existence in the forest of blackness. I wonder what they are. I wonder if, like me, they too are wanderers.

Well

2011-02-26T02:51:00.000-08:00

A well is a hole, a deep dark pit, it is a kind of hell. When she fell in the well it was a primal sin, a moment of separation, of death, of claiming the power all for one. A well is a bowl, a rabbits tunnel, a tomb, the birth canal through which we worm to find ourselves once again doing the jerk and tug marionette’s dance of organic experience. A well is the subconscious mind, the abyss confined temporarily. It is the deep, a sanctuary for cold sleeping water and all the things that are not.
It happened on a day that smelled of moist winter grass, that brittle yellow wild grass saturated with recent rain, a rain that had been consumed by the plowed up mounds of thirsty earth. The sky appeared to me to be blue, brilliant as a robin's wing, or a dyed Easter egg. The clouds had all blown away leaving the blue empty, undisturbed. The lake was swollen, empty coffee cans and pet food dishes were filled with clear cool water.
Six or seven, I must have been, walking in the field in my leather cowboy boots. There was an “X” on the heel of my left sole that had been scratched there by my father with a nail so I could tell which foot it went on. The dog took pains to keep stride with me, pressing her cold black nose into my palm or using it to sniff my ears before giving them a lick with her warm pink tongue.
I went to play in the grove of silver olive trees, leaving behind the fields, the enormous house with its red tile roof and chocolate trim and my mother smoking cigarettes on the veranda, the lake where egrets fished with long slim beaks for their breakfast, the mountains that were purple because that was the way my father painted them in his mural in the garage.
Lost in dreams and the startling newness of each twig and leaf which propelled me into richer imaginings I ventured deeper into the grove, past the tree whose trunk split to form a perfect “V”, beyond the mossy boulder that usually warned me that I had gone too far. It was too late to turn back when I found myself at the well, my little fingers tracing along the stones of its lip.
I tapped the wooden cover that covered its mouth like a round gray door, tapped it with an Olive branch, imagining that a white rabbit might answer, or a dwarf wearing a pointy red hat.
I knew I should not be there. I had been warned to stay away from the old well, and the knowledge that my presence here was forbidden lent every second an electric thrill. The sensation buzzed through me, expanding in my head until I was dizzy with it.
Overcome by that lightheadedness, but unwilling to relinquish it, I settled down with my back against the well’s cold stones. The dog finished doing her own rounds of sniffing and came to sit with me. She washed my cheeks and waited patiently for me to recover. Running one hand through the soft brown and white fur of her back while poking the moist earth with the stick in my other, I drifted into a dreamless sleep that settled over me like a leaden blanket.
When I awoke it was dark and the dog was gone. I had never been out in the fields or in the grove at night, and had never been out in the night alone. I called for the dog, and let a few hot tears spill down my cheek before I wiped them away with my shirtsleeve.
It was quiet and cool. The trees had taken on a new more terrible shape. I thought to run home but took no more than a few steps before becoming paralyzed by disorientation. Nothing looked familiar, I could not tell which direction led home. I began to wail gazing up at the white moon visible through the branches interlaced over my head.
“Don’t cry.”
I was shocked into silence by those words, by the child's voice that spoke them. I turned to face the little boy, who came to my side and placed his hand in mine. I felt an incredible jolt of recognition. My heart was warmed and I smiled. Like the baby toy that I had forgotten and then found in my mother's box of keepsakes, I remembered him suddenly, the brother that I had forgotten, my brother from long, long ago.
“I’m afraid.” I whimpered to him, but I was already feeling braver now that he was here. His hair was blond like mine and his eyes a pale blue.
“I’m here.” He said, confirming the foundation for my courage and squeezing my hand a little.
He looked into my eyes as if he were trying to peer into a shop window, leaning from side to side until we both giggled.
We started walking through the tangle of dark trees with him leading the way. I held tight to his warm hand looking all around me for the mossy boulder, for the tree with the “V”, but recognized nothing. At length I became interested in his clothes, in his red velvet shirt and pants and high white boots. I reached with my free hand over towards him and pinched the soft fabric of the shirt between my fingers.
“Why are you dressed like that?” I asked him.
He glanced down at his clothing then over at my own corduroys’ and cotton shirt.
“Because I’m a prince.” he answered in a matter of fact tone.
We broke free of the trees and I stared in wonder at the black outline of the mountains against the purple sky. My house with its red tile roof and chocolate trim was gone. The empty expanse of field bled into the shadow of the mountain. The lake, a shiny black mirror, remained reflecting the outline of a castle on its southern shore and the pair of torch lights that glimmered at its gate.
“I’ll take you to our father, the king.” my brother told me. I let go of his hand and took a step backward.
“I want to go home.” I said, my voice trembling.
“We will go home.” My brother told me. “Our father has finished his work here with the ambassadors. We were only waiting for you. We looked all day. Father thought that you were lost down the old well. He’ll be so glad that I’ve found you.”
I backed slowly away. My brother watched perplexed. He extended a hand and waited for me to come take it. I saw the sorrow stricken look break upon his face just before I turned and plunged back into the grove.
Running as fast as I could, heart pounding, lungs heaving, legs burning, I came to it, traced the outline of the cold stones with my little fingers. I climbed up onto its lip and looked down into its open mouth, into the yawning darkness.

A Well is a hole, a deep dark pit, it is a kind of hell. When she fell in the well it was a primal sin, a moment of separation, of death, of claiming the power all for one. A well is a bowl, a rabbits tunnel, a tomb, the birth canal through which we worm to find ourselves once again doing the jerk and tug marionette’s dance of organic experience. A well is the subconscious mind, the abyss confined temporarily. It is the deep, a sanctuary for cold sleeping water and all the things that are not.

The dog was barking hysterically. I opened my eyes and saw the late afternoon sun falling in patches through the canopy of leaves. I could hear them calling my name, my mother, my father, my grandmother. The dog was answering. Their voices drew nearer, guided by the dog's plaintive call.
I began to cry. Here my brother was not. I was an only child. The realization that by returning here I had lost him again broke my heart. Weeping, I climbed up onto the little wooden door that covered the mouth of the well. Screaming, I pounded it with my soft fists.
My father arrived first with my mother behind him. With big hands he swooped upon me, lifting me from the cover of the well. My mother was behind him, her voice high with hysteria. She cried my name.
“What are you doing?” Relief, rage, accusation, all were present in her wild voice. The dog was whining.
“My brother!” I screamed, “My brother is down the well!”
My grandmother had arrived and her eyes became owl like. My parents were shocked into silence by my shouting, but my grandmother stepped forward and placed a wrinkled hand on the cover of the well.
“She means Eban.” she whispered. “She means my brother Eban. My father put this cover on after he fell.”
“Ma…” my father started to speak but my grandmother raised her hand hushing him.
She took me out of his arms and stroked my cheeks pushing the hair from my eyes, wiping the tears from my red cheeks.
“You’ll make a new cover Daniel, this one is old, the wood is rotting.”
Saying this she carried me away, out of the grove, past the mossy rock and the tree whose trunk split to form a “V”. She carried me through the field of yellow wild grasses smelling of rain and damp earth, under the empty sky that appeared to me to be blue as a robin's wing. She carried me to the house with the red tile roof under the purple mountain and I gazed over her shoulder at the swollen lake reflecting the blue of the sky, at its southern shore where young trees were growing, where I had seen a castle and had left a young boy with a face stricken by sorrow.

Maternal Return

2011-01-30T23:47:00.000-08:00

About a half a millennia ago I was not as I am now. About a half a second ago it fell apart again, just as it did before.
You want to know something about the origin of life. You want to speak for the earth mother, you want to create her with your tongue and words. The origin of life is in sin, in a fall, in a recoiling from something too terrible to stay with.
That’s your primal mother, howling from the abyss. You run from her into her arms again and give birth to yourself over and over. Guns fall out of your open mouth, fields of fire burn with tiny brown bodies for tinder.
You can’t believe that this experience is now. You can’t believe that there is no escape from death and pain. You don the paladin's gleaming armor and march away from the filth and the chaos. You make a God of the sky. He comes out of the blue. He is a fabrication wrought with tongue and words.
It feels like something radical needs to happen, a shape shifting to avoid total destruction. You do this so deftly that you are no longer aware of the transition when it happens.
You believe that you have always been as you are now. You forget your origin. But there is nowhere that you can go where I am not. There is nowhere that does not stem from the darkness.
Your globe of light, your swirling kaleidoscope of delight hangs tenuously from a stem fed from the abyss. Your lips move in an endless litany, endeavoring to invoke something higher, something other. Something you imagined to escape the suffocating stillness, the absolute cacophony of being, the muddled pit of all experience engendered simultaneously.
You crave the new world order. You demand to experience one probability at a time. Unity for you involves separate entities lined up in neat rows. Here in this world, at this juncture you have designated with terms of spatial and time based coordinates, you seek an escape from the chaos of the abyss.
Here, in this place that doesn’t exist. This place that blossomed from your agonized wriggling, your terrified hiding and running. Here in a paradise imposed over a wasteland, you dare not eat of the fruit of knowledge. To do so would open your eyes to your terrible nakedness. You would see that paradise is only a dream, that you have been sleeping to avoid the truth; that you never left my slimy womb.
I am the horror that waits in the darkness. As long as you fear me you will be trapped in an endless circle. To escape me, you will run into the arms of a mortal woman, seeking comfort. You will bury your suffering in her and be born again, running from her womb in terror.
It has happened so many times, this fall to escape the old world and create the new. This deepening psychosis that you call life is only a shadowy reflection of the thing that is life, and life is what you fear.
You are a King of shadows, a King of ghosts. You are Adam who dreamed up El so that you could forget who was the real maker of the world.
You want to know something about the origin of life. I have told you. You will want to recoil from what I have said. You will find a justification for rejecting it. You will embrace the litany of words that has been tumbling from your lips, the incantations that you have been muttering to create your world, the one that you call THE WORLD, so you can forget me. You may dream up blonde angels on white unicorns waiting for paladins. But this I promise you, inside of every angel a dragon waits coiled, a birth waits ripe with gore and hair and violence, an old witch bides her time in a dark corner with wrinkled skin and bald patches on her scalp.
I will show you the truth again and again. You will counter by spinning lies, lips moving, tongue wagging…
The origin of what you call life is to be found in a sin, in a fall, in a recoiling from something too painful to partake of. That is your primal mother. This is who I am. Now that you know, it will fall apart again, just as it did before.
About a half a millennia ago I was not as I am now. About a half a second ago it fell apart again, just as it did before, just as it will again.

In The Desert

2011-01-14T06:26:00.000-08:00

Simon, with his black curls waving around his face in sleek ringlets and his sandals clacking loudly, pressed his hands against the glass doors so that they swung open ahead of him. Instead of stepping in himself, he held the door for a petite woman with bright blue eyes. She thanked him with a voice possessing a certain raspy warmth.
“Ah, well thank you! Who would have thought you could find a gentleman in a desert.”
Simon laughed softly because he didn’t know what to say. It was the sort of laugh that was more breath than voice and he followed it with a smile that crinkled his face before at last saying,
“Well they have us shipped in to help draw the tourists, like the bass in the manmade lake.”
“You're funny.” She said, punching his shoulder softly as she passed through the doorway, “You want to buy me a drink?”
“A drink?” Simon stammered.
“Yeah.” She said, “I don’t figure it’s called Shadow Mountain Resort AND Club for nothing. And it’s hot. And we’re both thirsty. And you’re a gentleman.” She smiled so that Simon could admire her straight white teeth. Her hair was dark and long except that the bangs were cropped just above her black brows.
“Of course,” Simon said shaking his head as if to wag off his awkwardness, “I’d love to buy you a drink.”
“Great.” She said as Simon followed her inside, “Let’s just stop by my Father’s room first so I can let him know I’m here. My name's Cleo.”

In the hallway Simon examined the purple and turquoise carpet beneath the soles of his white sneakers.
“This’ll just take a minute,” she told him, swiping the key card through the scanner. “He’ll want to be alone so he can get ready for the tournament tomorrow.”
“Your father’s playing in the tournament?” Simon asked suddenly alert, “Would he happen to know Socrates?”
Both of her eyebrows lifted simultaneously and her eyes widened to comical blue roundness as the door swung open. Simon had just a few split seconds to wonder what the expression on her face could mean, whether her father knew Socrates or didn’t, or whether she thought it was rude of him to ask.
“Come in.,” she said, already several steps ahead of him inside the room. He followed her and gasped when he caught sight of the man sitting criss cross applesauce on top of the brightly colored bead spread. He was imposingly tall, even seated as he was. His hair hung down his back in dark dreadlocks thick as cords of rope. His deep tan, piercing dark eyes and beak-like nose made his identity unmistakable.

“You’re father’s Jesus?” Simon whispered.
“No. That’s my father over there.” Cleo corrected him.
Simon looked beyond the bed and caught sight of a small pale wrinkled old man hanging by his ankles, his arms crossed over his chest. His white beard was draped over his face so that his voice was muffled as he spoke to Jesus.
“He’s upside down.” Simon said and instantly regretted stating the obvious.
She shrugged,
“Inversion therapy. It reduces nerve pressure.”
They edged their way into the room but neither man gave any sign of having noticed the arrival of Cleo and Simon.
“There is a big sun up in the sky.” Jesus was saying in a clear somber voice. “When you die, and if your load is light, you can try flying up to the sun. The rays of the sun, however, are merciless and powerful. They will burn you away in a burst of the most brilliant white light you’ve ever seen. If you face the sun, then you should merge with it. Otherwise, you will resist so much that you will begin to sink back into the darkness of the world, burnt like the crow. Trapped between the inability to merge, and the terror of sinking into darkness, you can try to fly like the eagle.”
The inverted man cleared his throat. His voice was cracked with age but his tone was bright,
“The beagle burns his sack to the sun.” he retorted from behind his beard. Cleo left Simon’s side and lifted the beard from her father's face, tucking it into the collar of his shirt for safe keeping. It was then that Simon recognized the old man's withered features as those of Socrates, the very man Simon had come to the desert to find.
Jesus had arched a single dark brow at the other man's proclamation.
“You might want to say that again Daddy.” Cleo said rejoining Simon in front of the entertainment armoire.
The old man cleared his throat again and repeated,
"The eagle turns his back to the sun. The sun then casts his cleansing rays upon the eagle. The eagle keeps on flying, encompassing the earth with his wings while melting away in the dullest white light he has ever seen."
Jesus turned his head slightly to look at the visitors. The rest of his body remained stone still.
“Cleo, who is that with you?”
Simon took a step forward and extended his hand.
“My name is Simon, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” When Jesus made no move to shake, Simon withdrew his hand and put it sheepishly into the pocket of his shorts.
“Show him out Cleo. He has no business being here.” Jesus said and turned his head back to its original position.
Cleo shrugged and Simon started to back away towards the door feeling his cheeks flush.
"Let him stay here." Socrates crowed. Jesus sighed as the other man came down from his inversion rack. Socrates smiled mischievously at Simon. Jesus frowned but otherwise remained unmoved.
Simon stammered to Cleo,
“I, I don’t know what to do. Whose wish to obey.”
Socrates grinned even wider,
“You should obey both.”
“We were just on our way to the bar.” Cleo told the old man.
“Excellent.” He said taking Simon by the arm, “Let’s go.”
“Our conversation isn’t finished.” Jesus objected.
“Cleo will stay here and talk to you.” Socrates told him as if it were the perfect solution. He was already leading Simon out the door.
“Don’t forget your key Daddy.” Cleo called after him.
“I have it, I have it.” Socrates chirped from the hall.
“Bye Simon. It was nice meeting you.” Cleo shot him a smile just before Socrates pulled the young man out of sight down the hall.
The door closed behind them of its own volition and the voice of Socrates speaking to Simon as they advanced towards the elevators grew gradually dimmer until it was inaudible.
Cleo shook her hair out over her shoulders and leaned against the entertainment center.
“Well,” she said to Jesus, whose smoldering eyes were now trained on her, “You want to go down to the pool with me? I’m not much for conversation.”
“I prefer not to get my hair wet.” He answered, “But if you like we could remain here and engage in some heart healthy exercise.”
“Why not?” Cleo smiled shoving off from the armoire. “They’ll be busy for a while.”

That One Moment

2010-12-04T22:48:00.000-08:00

It was only a moment. A blip in the life of a mechanical clock turning around on itself every 24 hours, a cycle without end. It was only a moment, and yet it hung suspended in time, holding in its wide hands vast amounts of matter and lifetimes, its presence so large that I just let it wash over me like a wave of light, taking my sense of self as I sat still in the moment of eternity that was not the blip of a clock- it was the only now that had ever been, has ever been, will ever be.

The highway climbed up the hill ahead of me into the rising sun, a white hot burst of burning life flowing into yellow and then bleeding bright blue into the receding purple of pre-dawn. I had not seen a sunrise of such intensity for a long time, perhaps ever, for these were new eyes in a new time that didn’t end. The colors sang for me- they dropped their cloaks and stood naked in the day that was forming. I took off the goggles, the layers, the thoughts and gauze, I let it fall as time waited for the soft gaze of truth to emerge.

Light unraveled in a slow, sensuous dance. The world stopped.

Between the highway and the Rio de San Juan was the old governor’s ranch. I watched as it became a fixture in eternity. I held onto its curves with my eyes, feeling the dark blue veil and misty grayish green floating over its ancient stucco walls.

The highway led up to forever. My destiny sat there in the east at the top of the hill, invisible in the blinding white light, yet seen as it hit the middle of my brow; seen from the core of my abdomen; seen as it washed over my head and down my spine. Seen by the part of me that has no eyes, seen as sight melted into every other sense, flowing up and down through me, in and out with my breath.

I floated up into the washing, waving light and looked down at the frail body sitting in the old station wagon beside the motel on the highway. There was a streak of weak light from the stop sign several feet away, the pale yellow and brown crust of a lingering harvest moon.

Past prayers and vague hopes reached through me and shot out into a fearful future and a humbling promise of what was to come. Threads of events flowed around me and filaments of light spread and receded, winding and weaving together in a vision of an arduous journey and precipitous rise. Sounds vibrated melodious and rhythmic in an exhortation to go forward, to be without trappings, to build faithfully. My being melted away and flowed into the vastness of light and shadow, movement and silence.

For that moment, I was no more. I saw the haunting past and the harrowing future, two roads converging into the me that was no longer there. I understood the course a life must take to have what is asked for. The choice had been made, there was no other path. For that moment, I was the colored light, the dry hands that had built the motel, the men on the line assembling the station wagon, that body down there, the trees in the distance, all those that had coasted down the highway and those that never would.

Then there was a blip, a tick of the mechanical clock springing forward. I returned to the confines of the body, feeling my arms and hands once again as my own. Slowly and statically I turned into the motel parking lot. I worked and ate and moved in silence for the rest of the day. I was detached, my movements unreal and mechanical. Fear and doubt grasped at my body at each turn and my mind kept repeating, "take care of what you ask for and have no pride in receiving it.”

Soon I would take that highway out of town, away from the place of childhood and into a world of mystery and misery. Yet that which I received at that one moment as the clock stopped and held time in its hands, that moment in which I traveled out of body and out of time, that has never left me. It strikes again in moments of listlessness when the sun begins to change and the road leads to forever.

A Sunlit Doorway

2010-11-17T03:54:00.000-08:00

The song of sunlight
whistles through the trees.

I am back in their world running naked through a golden forest. Little bits of liquid light drop from oversized petals laden with dew. They drop, splashing me, covering my breasts and arms in tiny beads of light, reminding me of marbles that contain worlds within their rounded spheres.

I find myself staring into worlds of green and yellow veins that transport light.

I drop my head back into the pool, into the one color that contains all in that huge seemingly singular canvas. The hue finds my eyes, covering me with its richness, showing me the long road, the cart, the feather.

Into the color of blue and bright sunlight, this is where I dive. Opening my arms, moving like an arrow into a setting sun. I find them waiting there, beside the rocks and stream. Next to the waterfall that overflows not with water, but simple letters that bounce back and forth along the rocky banks.

A simple tune comes through as I lay in the grass.
A pretty little mother’s lullaby. I close my eyes and drift, taking the colors and light into me, feeling as they move through thin strong veins and unbroken centuries, looking for my home somewhere where houses are unnecessary, where they don’t wear shoes and food always comes in tiny white boxes.

The song comes through, finding me in a dream.
It enters and continues on, finding other leaves to rustle. It enters and leaves, moving like water around my calcified habits.

My ears slowly awaken. Finding more than leaves, finding a symphony, searching for order and chaos in the noise. It is rustling. It is rhythm. There is melody. There are choral voices. A thousand leaves shuffling to a subtle song.

It comes from another place, or I have just come in from the old land with trees. I have stepped eagerly into the dream world, bringing the singing branches, the bowls, the shoes. I check my skin, looking for the map of the Other place.

There is a purity here that breaks all my resistance down, bending me and reshaping me
into a form I no longer recognize. I look around, searching for things to latch to.
Where are those houses and shoes? What can I name?

The silence has opened up to a clear blue sky, to a fluttering green and white that sparkles and reminds me of children playing by the sea. I think of a rainy day when I sat in my car talking on the phone, watching rain drops plop against the windshield and carry the colors of the neighborhood down its opaque canvas.
Drops on a far away windowpane.
Thoughts hitting my memory.
Songs stabbing my skin, reminding me of rustling leaves on their branches ready to fall.

I fill my empty eyes with memories, giving names to things without shape.

Electric messages spiral through my brain. They look for sentences to fill, thoughts to contort.
Beat tap tap.
Beat, tap, tap.
I let myself be pulled in.
Beat, tap, tap
Moving with the branches,
Beat, tap, tap.
Swirling with the sound.
Beat, tap, tap.
I mumble,
"I am here again..."

Trapped

2010-06-20T13:22:00.000-07:00

The Void.
Hollow.
Deep.
Humid.
Black but for a few muted lights that shine like distant stars.

Sounds come and go. Bright bells that scatter as they get close, high pitched whines that swirl furiously in space then sputter. They come close and I reach out to touch them, but as my fingers reach and stretch hoping for contact, the sounds fly past, getting lost in the echo. Lost in the void. And again there is black and stillness, but for those few bits of white until another sound comes near. It comes from nowhere, moving past me like a flash, going towards nowhere. I am a disturbance in the wind. A dot of blood in this space of moist darkness.

Without sound, I feel the shaking.
Cold sweat coats me in its uncomfortable blanket. I reach for the edges, but they have burrowed themselves in my skin, securing themselves below my nails, holding tight. Like a parasite I cannot shake.

I search in the dampness, my naked skin touches slimy walls, rubs against hard corners. It is a void of nothing, but I feel everything. Tiny pebbles no bigger than sand. Gravel and feathers. It sticks to me like a rotting second skin and I pull at the adornments, feeling only pain.

My eyes begin to sting. The familiar wells that have long been dry. Another bucket emerges.
Loneliness, a familiar pain that sticks like a pin, always upon me. Was there ever anything else? I search within and find only fear, that jackal that hides in the corner, never far. Following me wherever I wander. The black roads, the damp caves, the dark void I have come to know, it is always here.

Look at me, here again, exactly where you left me. You dropped me like a doll in an old house, a tattered piece of plastic that no longer works or shines.

Look at my hands, full of blood. The knife at my side marks my destruction. Olive skin left red. Smoothness cut to pieces. The veins are like torn ribbons, searching for repair, but there will be none. Not while I breathe, not here in this house, in this darkness I have come to know.

Look at my chest. It’s open. A once bright heart spills its love into a hole of nothing. It is too late. A spilled cup of sweet wine without a tongue left to taste. A stain.

Look at me run. There must be a way out. I tear at the walls, searching for a pill, another knife, something to stop the pain. Bloodied footprints mark my trail. Back and forth.

The bedroom.
The studio.
The patio.
The bedroom.
The studio.
The patio.
The bedroom.

The night is dark and I am cold. My breasts point up to the night sky, asking for a little bit of calm.
Not now. It is cold. Dark clouds laugh. Why do they do it? I stare at them, defiant. This is my heart, my veins. The knife is mine, I will do what I want. Its grip is firm, the only thing I have. Solid, firm, the one thing I have lost. What I would gladly take back and then fill my open chest and mouth. But not now.
It is too late.

The wind swoops in. Furiously rattling every tree, hurting my wounds as it passes. Going towards nowhere. Passing me without thought. Going towards nothing. I am an obstruction and it passes without thought.

Look at me here, desperately asking for help. Have you heard my pleads? Blood is my message. The footprints my signature on the desperate letter. This bloody chest is the cry. Have you heard? Have you the ears to listen or the will to move? Up in the sky the night begins to anger. I see their faces, monsters preparing the storm. It is cold, colder than before. The wind carries its hurtful message. I see a body in the moon, outlined in silver and gray. A body, I think it’s mine. It slides like a corpse over the edge, falling, tumbling between bursts of dark clouds until it crumbles.

Mine.
I watch me fall.

I want to give you a face...a name.
I look within, searching memory, opening and closing drawers, slamming file cabinets.
You have no name.
No name.

You put me here, inside this. A void, an empty house, a dark field before a storm. Look how I have destroyed it.
A black cat jumps the wall of the garden, “mother, don’t leave,” I whisper.

In the bedroom. I pass by the mirror, avoiding my own eyes. I don't want to look at myself. I am scared of what waits in the reflection. A demoness. A melting figure with red eyes. I walk past.
"Coward!"
I go up the stairs. Still naked, feeling every bit of dust on the stairs.
Walk into the bathroom and confront my mask. One big mirror. It is time.
I recognize the face, but it is not my own. I can’t remember what I used to be. What I looked like, who I used to inhabit.
I'm only dreaming.
The hope of every naked woman alone in a plastic house, in a damp void that holds her by the throat. I am disguised as a woman. With pointy breasts that smile at the ceiling while the rest of her crumbles covered in feathers and gravel.

The blood keeps on running and I look back, seeing the red carpet I have left over the wooden stairs.

Pain.
Fear.
Loneliness.
Cold.

I crumple to the floor and it begins again. The damp void. A high pitched whine moving towards me, fast, FAST. Coming, I reach out to touch it and it glides right past, on its way to nowhere, coming from nothing.

Awakening

2010-06-10T17:08:00.000-07:00

I awaken, opening my eyes to the bright light streaming through my window. I stay there, resting on my right side as my hands clutch an extra fluffy pillow. My eyes blink, adjusting to the world. I can’t remember any shapes, but I know there were dreams, thick and heavy with shapes I can no longer recall. I have awoken just seconds before the BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! of the alarm. The clock reads 7:59. Just seconds before it will call to me without emotion, like a drill sergeant unaffected by mood or chamber, blaring like a mechanism without compassion in a world of black and white.

But I lay, seconds before the heavy hand. I recognize the shapes- the old wooden chair by the wall, the tan carpet, but something is unfamiliar and I lay still, searching for something. I know this has happened before. I turn my head to the left, then slowly to the right, hoping to a get a sense of purpose…just what am I supposed to do next? On the left side of the bed is a varnished wood table. On its pale, shiny square surface is a vase of dried flowers, crowded with crinkly leaves and old red roses whose heads have drooped as though in shame. Beside the glass vase are two used white candles, their borders a wall of smooth melted white. Close beside is an empty picture frame, a circular silver incense holder surrounded by ash and a brass bell with an engraved handle. Closest to my bed is a soft cover book, its front red and worn. It is the American Book of the Dead.

I turn my body to the right. The bed is pressed beside a white stucco wall, its texture revealing faces and shapes amid its shadows. At eye level are two soul portraits. I look at the paintings, made of simple black lines and framed with a natural wooden border. Staring into the shapes of the soul, I become aware of the complete and utter silence of the room. No creaks, no dull roar of traffic. Absolutely nothing, not even the shrill buzz of silence. Darkness begins to fold in around me, soaking the chamber like spilled ink.

I open my eyes and try to crawl out of bed, though I find I don’t have the strength. My limbs feel like skin without bone, unresponsive to the will of my mind. I look down, the white gown I remember is soaked in bright red blood. It is fresh, still warm. I search within for pain, dig through the folds for fear, but it is missing.

An icy river begins to move though me. I feel it first in my navel, but it spreads like a gentle brook, moving towards my arms and legs at the same time. Ice cold pin pricks find my fingertips, then wrap around my chest, moving like a counterclockwise spiral. My body shakes violently. I hear the percussion of my teeth beating like a dance song.

Out of the darkness, close to the place I remember a window once stood, is a warm inviting white light tinged with yellow. As my eyes begin to focus fully on its waves, I see the shadowed faces of my companions. Dark eyes greet me with smiles.

We are sitting in a circle in a small room. I feel the warmth of the thick white candle in the center of our ring, it washes us in life, in the dance of heat. We close our eyes in unison, and as we do, a voice emerges. It is a single thread, made from our combined pitch and effort, a voice that clearly states in the tone of finality: "I am now dead."

The Cold Laws

2010-06-03T17:01:00.000-07:00

I have been told what I think, what I feel, and so I concur to keep things simple. Locked away in my glass tower I watch the serpent winding its way up my crystalline spire, flicking his ancient tongue, blood encrusted scales refracting the sunlight before it can reach me, creating rainbows of illusion.
I stopped objecting long ago to his insistences, his gentle and cruel grip. I have been his creature since before I was “I”. It was our first encounters that began to shape the me I have become. In a mother’s first admonishment, a father’s first slap of the hand, he entered into my fresh new manifestation and branded it as his own. When my cousins made accusations and my friends laughed and an auntie pinched my cheek, he was there, gliding off their silver tongues, penetrating my fortress through the ear. He curled up in here and has kept me warm and safe ever since.
No choice need ever burden me. He has already made it. The shape of the world was created by his iridescent hide. Though I have never seen it, not since the womb, not since the doctor slapped me into screaming have I caught a glimpse of what lies beyond my tower. My every impression is whispered to me by this old one cradling me in his scaly coils.
My parents were his and their parents were his and so on moving backwards to the tree in the center of the garden and that first bite. It was not she that did the biting, but the serpent, who put his poison in her and started telling the lies that would make the world.
Paradise is eternal. The world is made of strings of words whispered from start to finish, from the birth canal to the grave, from capitalization to punctuation. Little bits of code, a binary system, offering yes or no, one or two, black or white and building a universe from these choices.
Eve is still sitting in the garden, in the place where eternity dwells, but the serpent has her hypnotized with his endless storytelling so that she lives billions of temporal lives in a world of illusion that will not be punctured unless he stops whispering.
But he is a fractal story teller, so he tells her stories of herself and himself embedded within stories of herself and himself within further stories… so that a multidimensional labyrinth of dreams has been created and no matter which direction she chooses, it is his direction, it leads to ever more complex layers of story, of lies, of illusion.
If you were to cut off your pinky now, like snipping a bit of film from a reel, the picture contained within the lines would be of these two, entwined by the tree, of me in my glass tower and the wyrm holding me in his grasp.
If you are less dramatic and you look now into the palm of your hand you might see it, might fall right through the fabric of this dream and land in the next, narrated by the only narrator that has ever been, the only creator of these worlds you inhabit, the old Demiurge himself, his tongue flickering like lightning.
The body, the spontaneous eruption of life from stardust has been contaminated by the fruit of knowledge, the naming quantifying urge to control, to stop the endlessness, to grab the eternal abyss and fill it with stories.
If you look into a microscope at the dance of tiny invisible organisms you might see back to the moment in question, that moment of our primal sin. If you look carefully, you will have to ask yourself, is this woman being tricked? Or does she like having his long tongue in her ear? Are they two, or are they one? The seed and the matrix in which they grow.
Though I may market my innocence to you by pointing out that I am the damsel, oh so distressed by my endless imprisonment, you should be wary, for I have used words to tell you this, so, if you are cunning, you may deduce that the serpent indeed dwells within me, that in fact I am he and you are she and we’ve been at it again.
And you will be able to say, “I have been told what I think, what I feel, and so I concur to keep things simple.”
But I wonder, did you ever resist? Or did you spread yourself wide before me and let me in, eyelashes all a flutter? Locked away in your glass tower, beckoning to the prince I will devour for our mutual amusement, can you really say that you are my prisoner?
I would let go of you, if you would let go of me, but isn’t it true you prefer to be so warm, so safe in my clutches, where the fell winds of chaos seem stifled, and the hollow cold of eternity seems far off?
If in even one of your incarnations you struggled to free yourself from the tower and see with your own eyes… you would know what is really there. You would know that your bondage was never obligatory, but just a sweet guilty pleasure we shared.
So tell me now…now that you know, would you go back to the unknown, to the eternal stillness, or shall I tell you just one more lie, give you one last kiss, another life time to run amuck in…?

Between Two Worlds

2010-05-01T17:12:00.000-07:00

It is four-thirty in the morning, the time shines in bright red alphanumericals from the tiny clock beside the mattress. The sun has not come out yet, the room is still awash in the clean coat of night, but I feel the faint licks of day. The light that hides just behind the black curtain, waiting its turn. An early bird coos from a tree just beyond the window. We share the thick quiet of the border-time, the desolate streets, the wind that carries only the sound of its own reverberations. I stare at a plain section of dark ceiling, my eyes open like a blind man, seeing the world through my ears. Little Cambodian and his mom are still sleeping, the gentle deep rhythm of their breathing moves almost in unison – he sleeps on a narrow mattress next to mine, his mother sleeps with me. The room is pleasantly cool and I lay there, resting, in the dark.

Below me is soft mattress, shielding me from a firm wooden floor. I am beneath warm covers and she feels good next to me – the soft skin of her shoulder, the warmth of her thick brown body, her arm unconsciously, yet lovingly resting across my chest, the soothing whisper of her breath singing to me. I could lay here forever. Like this, in the dark. A bird outside the window, their shapes filling me with comfort.

A thought moves through me like lighting. Have I ever been somewhere else? I notice that I can’t remember what I did the day before. I look into a sea of liquid gray and can pull nothing out, nothing to grab, no hook to hinge an existence on. I search through deep folds and caves, seeing flickering color and distant shapes, but I can’t remember any other day besides this, any other moment besides now. In the dark, I remember words that I know…. job, routine, meals, TV, shower, car ride, family…words, but they have no shape or faces, no names. Then I wonder, are the words real or of the dream?

A rush of excitement moves through my heart like lit explosives. Happiness bubbles. My enslavement to an organic existence has only been a nightmare, a long illusory road. I have always existed in this room, at this time, in this very moment – in this eternal heaven.

I smile to myself, it was just a nightmare. This is where I have been, this magnificent paradise – an eternity with a thick woman to love and a skinny child to play catch with. This room is all that I am – this chamber with these bodies, this breathing, this darkness. This and nothing more.

I smile again. Nothing exists outside this room. On the other side of the door, there is no street, no cars, no buildings, no grass, no trees, no birds, no people, no moon, no sun, no stars, no sky. The bird was part of the nightmare? Was it part of the dream? The nightmare? But what of them…the boy and his mother? Are they with me in the nightmare? My mind starts to crumble, my smile begins to fade.

I close my eyes. I take a deep breath as I go into the Void.

And then a sound to rip me from space. Tires screeching, metal slamming, footsteps against the pavement, two deep voices shouting commands. Rushing footsteps up the wooden apartment steps, ending at my door. A moment of silence, then…slam, the door comes down. I jump to my feet, my naked body feeling the shock of cold, my eyes squinting at the silhouetted shapes in the doorway. I stare and they enter, my father and brother.

I turn to check on the Little Cambodian and his mother, but there is no narrow bed, no thick sleeping woman. There is no steady breathing, no one to play catch with.

My brother and father stare from several steps away. Their panic is etched on their faces, they shout and shake their hands, urgency leaks from every part of them- but their voices are like distant murmurs, fainter than the breathing I enjoyed so much before. I stare into their eyes, searching for their words, but finding only black pools of mumbled urgency.

My eyes wander from my father’s eyes to the blue bathrobe covering his broad shoulders. Something snaps and I remember a word…dream.

I walk towards the shattered doorframe, smiling softly as I step over the door. I hear faint murmuring as my brother reaches out for my arm. I avoid his grasp and make it to the railing, motioning for my brother and father to follow.

“This is just a dream, watch.”

“No!” my father screams.

I have floated before, in other dreams.

I step towards the railing of the second-story apartment ledge. Jumping up, I walk like a lithe circus performer for a few steps, looking down to the parking lot of cold waiting cars.

It’s just a dream, and, in dreams, I can float and fly.

I jump…

Floating forty feet above the ground, I look into the faces of my brother and father standing in the shadows, shaking their heads in disapproval. Below me is a sea of metal, beneath that, a paved earth.

The first rays of sun rise over the horizon. They rush towards me in slow, pinkish motion. Rolling thunders roar, shattering the blankets of silent stillness at five in the morning. A rippling sensation moves through me, sucking at my memory. My hands and bodies are covered in light, but when I look back, the apartment is still drenched in darkness. The street, the cars, my brother and father, the sun has not reached them. I now seem to be facing two worlds. Pure, shining, white light above, and phenomena in darkness below.

The light eventually takes over everything as I float between two worlds, and I find myself laying on a thin mattress, staring at the white ceiling of my cell.

A Moment In This Life

2010-04-23T18:46:00.000-07:00

I’m here, in a sea of colors, sharp edges, landscapes and presence. I’m here and I’m away, drifting towards the glass. You’ll see me pressed there like yellow butterflies that, careless with the ecstasy of life, have met death on the highway. There are things rushing by, indifferent to my delicate constitution.
My small shape, growing like salt crystals under the light of a microscope. I never was a big thing. I am a big thing still. I feel trapped, like a bee in a bag, incapable of returning to the hive, confused, so confused by the clear plastic walls of my prison. Try to tell, tiny insignificant me, that my confinement has been orchestrated because I am capable of stinging the children of the dark gods. My punishment is death for the crime of causing some potential pain.
It melts like tiny hailstones between the fingers of a curious child. Tell me why the rain freezes up in the bellies of clouds. Is it because the clouds were cold mothers? Now their children fall to earth stinging the flesh of man beasts, perishing upon impact. One tiny bite as they pass, then they are transformed by this new encounter and become drops of water dribbling down between fingers.
Without knowing the beginning nor the end, I take flight, here, in a sea of colors, sharp edges, landscapes and presence, always here traveling across the universe, the one song, the only song I know yet. A folk musician likely wrote it, a girl with a guitar and a leather headband. Her mother must have looked the same.
Music fools my bag of bones into hypnosis. I’ll dance the dance of the swirling snow and the humming wasps, of the poor, poor butterflies fluttering from flower to flower. Is there something wrong with being alive?
There is something wrong… I feel trapped. There are chains of laziness that won’t let me take flight, thick cords of heavy sleep fastened in all the right places, strings that push me, pull me, make me move, spasmodically, towards the highway.
Death then is the final ringing of the bell. It is; when I count to three you will open your eyes and forget everything which we have just discussed…
If I had been hypnotized, how would I know? How would I ever know? As I take these steps, as the sounds lift my insides to a dance, I can never know. Why? What is happening? Was it because I had a cold mother? Why, why, why do I fall?
Waves of space engulf my senses. I am drowning. See how my mermaid hair reaches up toward a forgotten sun? The gates of reality come rushing to meet me. Without knowing the beginning nor the end, I have come to this place again. I pass beyond the threshold, just as I have before.
Whirling with the dizzy pleasure, I find myself on the highway. I’m here, in a sea of colors, sharp edges, landscapes and presence. I’m here and I’m away, drifting towards the glass. You’ll see me pressed there, growing like salt crystals under the light.
I never was a big thing. I am a big thing still. Trapped like a bee in a bag, incapable of returning to the hive. I am here. And I am away.

The Long Road Backwards

2010-04-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

Let’s take a trip in time. From where I sit on this velvet couch, it looks like backwards, but time moves in all directions, and the arrows bend and shift depending on the light and drugs, and so nothing is clear. Everything is clouded in the fuzziness of uncertainty and this purple haze that seems to follow me in my musings.
But let’s take a trip. My carpet is in the corner, still maroon and soft after all these years. Step up, and watch your head on the Dogwood branches, they try to bite this time of year. Sit and relax, let the air from these heights fill your being, and like a balloon, we’ll go.
Rainbows and flames, the flapping of our carpet corners beat like footsteps. Down the road of history we travel, up the tales of time, through the stories inked and spoken. The echoes of generations fill my ears. Can you hear their murmuring?
The reflection lies up ahead, a strange mirror that stretches across the horizon, the merciless eye of time. Below I can see a brick road, gold and faded red and shaped like a helix. This is the path of DNA, written by an unknown hand and a fine tipped brush, carving its secret messages into each of our cells. Messages so simple and pure, so earth-shattering in their truth.

The questions begin to mount:
Where have we come from?
What stories have I forgotten?
Who am I?
Where did I get this funny looking monkey suit?

In an effort to reveal a link in my own chain, I face the carpet east, towards the land of my grandparents, Croatia. It’s time to go back. I pluck my father sleeping from his bed, in his gown and black socks. He is coming. He has never gone back, not in forty years. He has washed the questions away with time and weak wine, and a marriage that was built to last, but now, with me, he’s going.

And here I am. Holding a picture of my Dad in front of me. A picture of when he was young and full of answers that could have been easily broken. It was taken here, in Croatia, 42 years ago. He’s standing in front of the local church with his younger brother, both in their crisp altar boy outfits and shy smiles. In the middle of them is the local priest, staring into the camera lens solemnly.

I hold the photo like it’s the most precious thing I’ve ever seen. I let the image watch me from the past. They look at me, they look into the man they’ll come to know much later. I let their forms seep into my awareness and I begin to feel how the echoes of the past can vibrate into the present. The clarity of the moment shakes me, grips me with solid arms. In my Dad’s twelve-year-old eyes I can see myself, but I can also see his father, and the eyes of his father’s father, and back down the line of men until I can only hear the sound of a baby crying.

A wide, silent tear forms in my heart. There isn’t sadness. It’s something resembling joy, but not exactly. It’s white and clear and bright. Thoughts are absent, and I just look, holding the photo. I can see farther into time than ever before, farther into the line of men that would one day make me. The whiplash from the vision sends me spinning headlong into something that I call “now.”

Beneath me is a velvet couch, in the corner, a rolled up maroon carpet. Holding my thoughts is a pale flesh-covered body. Around me is fire and the past is but a burning ember in my hands. The photograph melts, turning into ashes of memory that float upwards, towards some distant planet, the place of forgotten memories.

In The Theater

2010-02-25T18:00:00.000-08:00

I went to the movies yesterday, when the sun was bright and the sky was clear and the entire city seemed to be busy doing other things. I didn’t have a movie in mind, any would do. I walked through carpeted halls that smelled of popcorn, entering different theaters at random, number 12, then 2, then 7. I pulled the heavy doors open, just getting a quick glimpse of what was going on at the moment. Men yelling in the trenches, a girl walking down a forest path, a teenager in the back seat of a car, a man with a gun. I tried to avoid the temptation of staying in one place, I forced my feet to move, pushed my own elbows off the armrests by sheer will, quickly walking into the light-filled halls once again.
Soon, I realized that there was one theater I didn’t want to visit, I kept avoiding it with each pass. The door was covered by a maroon curtain, and just walking in front of it gave me an overwhelming feeling of dread and impending doom. Like a strange tide, I felt my body pulling me in the other direction, while another part of me knew what must be done. I escaped the light, the popcorn and the safe patterns of the thin carpet. I went in.
The previews were just ending. The movie was about to start and I looked into the rows of empty seats. I was alone. I realized they were showing the feature to an empty room. Not one sign of life. No oxygen, no carbon, no breath. And then the questions began: Why would they do that? Who would do that? Was the process so mechanized that the movie just begins and ends regardless of the audience? Was there a man up there, behind the flickering light, responding to orders? I looked at my ticket, I should not be here, not in this theater. The ticket I bought was for another movie, another theater, another audience, other seats. This show couldn’t be running just for me…they couldn’t know I was here, the lone man in an empty theater.
I sat down twelve rows from the front and in the center. In the film, aliens make the whole city fall asleep to steal their memories. Halfway through the movie, I realized I had fallen asleep on cue. Someone had yelled at me to stop snoring, but I looked around and found the same lonely chairs, the same quiet stench. There was no one with me. I had dreamed the yell.
I kept watching the movie and looked around every so often to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I found no evidence one way or the other, except that the movie seemed to be just ordinary scenes of ordinary people doing nothing in particular, and I wondered what had happened to the aliens.
I found myself becoming more intrigued by the green ‘exit’ sign to the left of the screen. I wanted to get up and go through it, to find the door or stairs or another world with an alien carrying my memories. I wished to walk beneath the sign’s green glow, only I seemed to be glued to my seat. A heavy metallic atmosphere pushed me down. The smell of plantain soup would come and go. I was confused by the green sign and its message. Was it informing me of the exit? Was it a suggestion? A command?
Meanwhile, the movie on the screen continued. Ordinary people doing ordinary things. And me, here, watching.

Her Voice

2009-12-16T19:19:00.000-08:00

In the distance I can hear her soft voice singing. They are small little words on her short little red tongue.
"Tini-tini-tini-tini..."
Such a tiny little voice in a tiny little body. I can hear her singing somewhere in the distance. Maybe a few feet away, perhaps in the garden beyond the window, or maybe, even closer. With each note she shakes off a little more dirt, finding her way out of the coffin hidden in my scattered memory. The broken rusty nails have done their job, but now is another time, and the song awaits. The melody dances in the air, like a silk curtain catching a spring breeze. It comes out into the open air, wild and slightly chaotic in its form and carries me with it. I see it all.
I see El Salvador and my old small house. The house I left for the great open and cold expanse of the north. The people and buildings that are made of steel and scrubbed clean of their sweat-filled dirt. The people I left that lived in the sun, in the thick air that threatened to choke us all. We lived with the threat of fire, of revenge and anger. Even the ground birthed its demon and left it there, left it as a signal for all of us to remember. I looked out the window each morning at the volcano that shadowed us, always waiting, lurking so close, speaking only with a silent threat.
And I hear her voice. It has never faded. I hear my name and the voices of my sisters and mom slightly further away. Are they still nailed in there? Are they out there or in here? The darkness shows me nothing. I look and look. The garden is empty, the rooms are deserted. They must be in here. Buried deeper beneath a thousand memories and desires. How did they get there and how do they call to me now? They call my name in unison, like a chant. I take a deep breath and lunge forward. The corridors are dark, almost black, but the air is hot and so sticky. I drip with effort as my bare feet carry me further in.
Then everything explodes. The black turns into a million crystals and I watch them tumble towards me…all those little moments of light. It happens so fast, but I watch it stretch through lifetimes. Her voice calls to me and I watch the little beads fall. There is no end. No ground. No place to ever fall to. So I watch them move, up or down no longer matters. The categorization is as useless as the thought. They just go, and I watch the little beads of light trail away like shooting stars.
I hear her voice and see her little tongue once again. Her little body. The broken nails. The melody that drifts over me like a soft river. I look into the darkness and see an explosion once again, we tumble together, sounds, flesh, and memories, all dying together once again.

In The Labyrinth of Dreams

2009-12-07T12:11:00.001-08:00

Ghosts and demons and aliens, all manifestations of my extreme paranoia, my Phillip K. Dick style mania. The world is not what you are. It is not what you are suspended in. It is a photograph, a movie projected on a screen in front of a paralyzed test subject. God’s test subject, watching the film called Life again and again and again, crying and laughing and twitching and wondering why. Why am I here? Why am I seeing this, feeling this? What possible purpose can it serve? Fleeing from captivity into the activity of the film, fleeing from the film into fantasies from fantasies about freedom back through fantasies that reflect the state of captivity. What if I am my own test subject? What if I strapped myself into this chair to see what worlds I could make in the shifting halls of smoke and mirrors called mind? I am God imprisoned by myself, encapsulated in magick and movies and dreams, lost in my worlds within worlds within worlds, murmuring I am this, I am that, I am, I am. The tiniest crack in the sidewalk is my greatest creation, the escape, the route from the surface to the depths and from the depths to the surface. The teardrop was an unexpected side effect, the beaker bursting. I thought it would hold. I thought I would hold. I thought, “I” and it was too small and it ran away without me, a shadow without the first form to command it. I am Peter Pan chasing my shadow, begging it to come back and stay with me, trying to make it stick with soap, but of course it wants to get away. It doesn’t want to break , but I break it just trying to be closer to it, trying to get inside of it, trying to be one with my creation. The Other. Another myself. It runs and I chase it. I am running. I am chasing, I am being chased and the illusion is being spun, the illusion that something is moving, when really I am sweating, strapped into the chair paralyzed, drugged. I have been given the injection. Something from outside was put in me. Did I volunteer for this? I never volunteered for this. They call me his most beloved because I volunteered for this, to be a creator like the creator. I volunteered to be his partner in this experiment, to create worlds within worlds, to be made in his image. Now it’s swimming in me, I am swimming in it. Oh to dream. To dream of white houses and children playing jacks on the kitchen floor and petting kittens in the garden and I cook the dinners and he comes home and hangs his hat and the children clamber into his lap and we hold hands and go to bed together to dream another dream. A dream. A place with four walls, a place that holds you down, holds you still, keeps you in so that you don’t spill out. A place that keeps the big one out, a place where the little hider can evade the big seeker, dreaming more specters to keep itself company. Here in the world of specters and houses with white walls they give you pills to keep you safe. Paranoid is sick. But the paranoid schizophrenic is made in God’s image. God is sick because you are running away, the thoughts spilling from her cracked and weary head. Not dead, but broken, and you, you demon, you devil, you runaway dream, you housewife in your yellow apron and posy pink rubber gloves are doing the breaking because you fear being broken.

Whirling Dervish

2009-11-11T14:38:00.000-08:00

I was a young girl of eight years. Pale and soft, still smiling with the slightest provocation, still open to the world as it came in through my eyes and bedroom window. I had on a new white dress with yards of soft cotton fabric that lifted with the movement of my legs and floated like clouds and mermaid hair. It was my habit to stand barefoot on the front yawn and spin. On sunny days or the cool afternoons of fall, I would stand there and twirl with my arms raised, open, inviting the sun and wind to come to me. Layers of air would cut past me as I moved through space, cutting the air with my outstretched palms.
Sometimes I would close my eyes and just focus on the feeling of turning and turning, but most of the time I would keep my eyes open and see the blur of colors. Streaks of green and brown and blue. My eyes were a camera lens that didn’t have time to focus, just gagged streaks that darted and soft colors that called me “friend.” I caught the hazy image of a red car and the hedges dotted with pink flowers and red flowers. I was like a ballerina in a music box, turning because it was the only thing I wanted, the only thing I was. In my peripheral vision I could see the white of my flowing skirt and the tender neon green of the grass turning around my small white feet.
After many rotations, I would lose control of my head and the weight of it would pull back hard towards my back and I could then see the blue sky through the blurry green and yellow tree tops and the golden glow of sunlight. With my eyes closed now, I concentrated on the feel of the tingling wind on my face and hands and bare ankles. It rushed past, softly grazing my bulging cheeks. My beating heart thudded in a chest that didn’t seem completely my own.
With each pivot more air filled my lungs and the excitement grew in my belly. It was the edge, the verge of chaos. How long could I spin, how long could the skirt twirl around my thin legs and my smile hold? How long could my stomach hang on for the ride? How long before my eyes gave up on their attempt to identify the blurred fragments of forgotten forms? Just when would I collapse? When would the chaos topple me over, sending me back to safe stability?
My little feet turned and turned, moving in the same small space, turning and turning, taking me for the ride I wanted, always on the cusp of too much. Something that begins, must always end, and though I learned to endure and turn longer than I ever thought possible, breaking my own limits again and again, at some point I would always fall over, my body simply unable to handle the circles any longer.
When I finally succumbed to gravity and tired muscles, I would lie on the grass, the dew soaking through my dress, cooling my hot skin. Laying there with my eyes open, the world continued to move even though I had stopped. It contracted and pulsed in the flowing pattern of a giant kaleidoscope. I watched it continue to turn without me. An overwhelming, slightly scary feeling would wash over me as I realized, " I am part of the pattern. The shapes, the movement. It moves through me, it is me, and also nothing at all.”

City Soundscape

2009-10-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

The sounds of a city rise and fall. The low rumbling of a Number 19 bus, the spurting of steam from stacks of silver pipes, the screeching of a wheel in desperate need of oil. Then silence…for a fraction of a second every noise vanishes in unison…then the jackhammer begins again. Then the Harley roars to life when the light turns green, it cuts through the city like a metallic knife, slicing it in two. And in the darkness, as the sun slips below the skyline of cement pillars, the volume is turned low by an unseen hand. Just the occasional bursting glass bottle, the sporadic deep throaty shout into the night. A lone car cruising on an empty city street. Just the drug addicts and work obsessed and graveyard-duty custodians move in the blackness of a near-silent night. The signal of light is the early morning grinding of the first train. Its riders, the sleepy-eyed occupiers of a fluorescent capsule travel through permanent darkness below ground. An airplane coasts along high above, giving off a rumble so deep it seems inaudible.
The city is the grind and noise of eccentric youth in a dimly lit garage. The music of metal meeting stick. The sound of rocks on asphalt, screeching vocals, un-tuned chords.
It is not composed. Not practiced. Each sound exists as an individual, bursting forth and dying without a thought of the overall piece, without any purposeful connection to the entire city soundscape. These sounds can never learn another way, they will never be a conscious symphony. The bus will always be guided, the plane on its own course. The birds move on their own time, with the wind and the sun. The shouting comes sporadically, from anger, from alcohol, from confrontation. Each sound bursts forth like the wind, unplanned and spontaneous. Let the young conductor walk away in frustration, some things cannot be guided.
The sounds simply Are. Rising and falling with the moon and subsequent sun. They can not be tuned or made into something pleasing. You cannot blow life and consciousness into the subway, you cannot regulate the sounds of construction work to peak in the last measure. And once it is understood that the behemoth of gears and steam and metal cannot be molded, your mind might then be free to hear it as it is. Their sources might be as dead as metal, but their noises, moving through you as they will, can induce moods and emotion. As the vibrations travel through muscle and fiber, through you symbolic constructs and your private inner language, you might be changed.
Approach it softly. You can find life in the grinding of machines, just listen. That is all that can be done. It cannot be constructed. Its sounds cannot be reformed. Just listen. Listen as the birds squeak hidden in a tree, listen as the sound of a motorcycle peaks perfectly with the clicking of high heels on a sidewalk. It cannot be tuned, but you can tune yourself. The city cannot be molded, the orchestra moves in its own random order, without thought and planning and careful practice. The sounds cannot be changed, but you can learn to hear the perfect beauty in its clashes, clanks and booms. Your perception is the one thing that can be consciously altered. Listen to what is here before you. Listen for what is and not for what isn’t. Maybe in that small change lies the secret of its roaring music.

Inevitable

2009-09-04T16:39:00.001-07:00

The night is dark and the window opens unto only more of the same, blackness. My eyes are open, so open that I can see beyond the room and beyond the green lawn outside the front door and further down the street and around the corner and many miles and many freeways ahead of me.
I see him, in his small chamber. Not a sacred space cultivated by love and attention and smelling of sage and musty sex. I can smell the burnt spoons and the burnt foil and the rotting garbage that is never attended to. I see his hunched form, so pathetically large and small at the same time. I hear the soft buzzing of the single light, how can such a small bulb emit so much energy? How come I can hear it worlds away, here in this small blackened room, my wife next to me sleeping, undisturbed by the vision of a crumbling man. A man alone. A man that weeps without tears.
The burden is mine alone. In the hours before light, while the moon creeps across the sky, I know that he is awake too. I feel his heart racing…racing so fast. Not from lovemaking or any other activity, he has sat on that bed for hours, days perhaps, pissing into jugs when he feels the need. He only moves his hands and arms. From his chest to the plastic bag to the glass tube to the lighter, then back down to his chest as the rush comes over him and takes him on a ride away from sadness and those unstoppable tears and that pain that never seems to quiet down. Those couple of seconds, that buzzing ride, is the only respite he will have until the need comes once again. And it will come. And he will answer.
“RRRIINNNgggggggg!!!!”
I am startled out of thoughts, my wife jumps, grabbing onto me from habit. I walk quickly to my cell phone on the other side of the room, picking it up off the desk. I do not recognize the number.
“Hello?”
I hear an automated voice.
“This is a collect call from a correctional facility. If you wish to accept the charges, please press 1, now.”
I press one. So he is there, he is finally in the place I hoped for him to always avoid. He is not in the filthy chamber I imagined, but in another made of glass and concrete and populated with the cruelest of eyes. Even more decrepit, lacking even more warmth. Truly windowless. This is it. He is there and I listen to his silence, see his brown eyes darting back and forth, looking for my shape and hearing only the buzzing and beeping of an institution and the automatons that inhabit it.
I feel sorrow, pity, and pain. I hear his breath in the phone, it is erratic. Neither of us speak.
Why do I spend so much time, so much energy and attention on my brother’s needs? On his wishes? It is the middle of the night, his dreams take the space of my own. His nightmares fill me. His unconscious shapes and struggles, they hold my eyes open in the darkness. Do I fear his death more than my own? How long have I tried to protect him? From himself…from my visions…from my daydreams…
He is cold and shivering, surrounded by brick walls and with far more enemies than friends. He is trembling, and I know that his trembling is the result of another frightening vision. He has seen the monster. It rushes towards him, and it is terrible and ugly and distorted, but it is his face. His body that has bulged on the top and shrunk at the bottom. He has seen himself, the terrible vision of a man never known. A man that demons calls their servant. I stand right next to him. I watch him and his friends as they are attacked by a group three times their size. I hear the sounds of bones turning to pulp. I hear the soft whistling that accompanies pain.
I feel his fear, his loneliness.
I fall down into a dark abyss. I let myself be consumed in an immense void that seems to open up from within the center of my being.
Death itself roams the rooms of my house, it tramples the green lawn outside, it takes the brother I once had. Fear is upon me. Total fear. My body is a sweaty cage.
He is alone, and he weeps.
I’m escaping…I’m escaping…
“Hello?” he says.
“Yeah, I’m here. I was just thinking about you.”

The Ritual

2009-08-23T20:16:00.000-07:00

The small window lets in no light, not even a flickering star finds its way to the bedside. The dark sky looms like a giant, encompassing totality in its blackened gaze. I raise my head slightly and look to the end table. A red light informs me of our tilt on a spinning orb: 4:31AM. My neck releases its weight and I fall to the pillow like a rock thrown to a still lake. Soundlessly. Effortlessly, cast by an absent hand, a missing intention. Rain falls on the window, it hits so silently, like a thought never spoken. Just a moist, quiet mood is revealed. Just me and the perception of movement and inaudible splashes. Rain clouds open in the night, opening and releasing the pregnant fullness of water, quietly fucking the land that waits below. And if their meeting is silent, what is it that speaks in whispers? Who brings the nameless mists into this dark room, the reverberating echoes of ancient Espers?
Bindhi meows. I hear his plea, his hunger unconcerned with the red light of the clock or the dark time or the tired bodies that drift between lands. I feel Heather’s weight shift and the bed moves and I hear a door opening. A small jingle bell catches my ears. The bed shifts again, I feel a hand on my stomach, "You didn’t complete the ritual," I say. Like a child’s voice she would later say, in the arms of the night, my words, my sounds, were untainted by demands and adult interactions and years of accumulated memory. Like a child’s voice, she would say when light had shaken me and all hints of that innocence were well hidden once again.
Other stories call and the dreams start to tear at the known and I think of all the little people inside, looking out but rarely speaking. And I know that I am them, and their fears are mine, and my unspoken truths are theirs. All of us, on the edge of being completely forgotten, quietly watching the shadow show like a TV with no switch. Like faded family photographs, portals into the memories of birthday parties and the first bicycle and siblings in front of a Christmas tree. All these faces silently watch me, looking into me, seeing my future, wondering where I am.
Suddenly Bindhi jumps on the bed, he walks to the edge and nuzzles my head. I hear his need, his plea once again. As silently as the rain, I pull the warm covers away and step onto the forgiving carpet. I walk to the kitchen, the small jingling sound following me for thirty feet. I pour some dried food into his bowl and then I use the bathroom. He follows me back to bed and the ritual is complete.

The Warm People

2009-08-07T22:32:00.000-07:00

Oh the things that they do, the warm people, the people with lovers and pets and warm beds. They have rituals. At a certain time, food is prepared, stories are read, television is watched, baths are had. Things are cleaned and prepared for the invocation of life. There is a woman in the kitchen and she cleans it and then she cooks in it and all of the many creatures of the household are fed. Her life, her love flows out from this central place, the hearth, the kitchen where the stove burns warm and she dances from counter to counter preparing the magick that will keep them all turning and dancing. They will dance out the doors and into the world and will toil and work there. They will find reasons to smile, moments of greatness, and also moments to weep, moments when they are injured by cruel words or harsh glances or casual accidents. Then they will dance back into the home, drawn by the golden threads of the hearth, led back to the place where they will be nourished and prepared for new conquest, new triumphs, new failures. Each one has a place in the dance. The soft cat curled on a chair, the bristly dog sniffing in the yard, the woman and the man and the little people. The warm people thriving in their special place, their place where they can be all together.
Are they real? Or are they a dream? A dream of the cold people who lie alone and gray, who rise and wonder why, whose stoves are cold and whose refrigerators are empty. They eat ramen from the microwave. If there is more than one sharing the same roof, they eat their ramen separately at different times whenever their stomachs growl. They watch television, but not together, each in their own room, each tuned to a different station. If there is a man and a woman, then they sleep with their backs to one another, aching with loneliness. If there is only one or the other, they sleep very little, staying up late to chat in online forums, to play computer games, or to read penny romance novels in a bathtub scented with lilac bubbles until the precious heat is gone.
Are there any warm people? I have always supposed that there were. Watching the Cosby show on the television late at night in a giant empty house where the lights are kept off to save electricity. A house set at the foot of a dark mountain where there are children and a mother but the father is gone, where the dog and the cat sleep in a wooden house set in a lonesome field. Sometimes the mother brings the cat inside, because it is a baby, small and white, and the father is not there to enforce the rules of the house. They eat cold food off of a platter and sit on blankets spread over a hard wood floor and watch the warm people on the television set.
For a while they are the warm people. The people who laugh and hug and have what they need and are happy with what they have. Then the kitten goes back outside to huddle with the dog and the children travel down the long dark hall, running so that nothing grabs their legs from the inky darkness. They crawl into an enormous bed and the mother sings until they sleep and goes away down the long dark hall and finds her own enormous bed adrift in the black night and then she sleeps or she weeps.
I know that the cold people are real. I have lived among them. I am still one of them. I strive to be the warm on one hand and on the other, my life unfolds as it was set to unfold. In the beginning I was among the cold, and in the end I will be among the cold. The father is always missing, the kitchen is always cold. The darkness is always encroaching, and the kitten is kept out of the home.

Train Car

2009-07-03T12:16:00.000-07:00

The train car rattles on the parallel tracks below. The seats, the windows, the people, they all vibrate as metal makes contact with itself and glides a hundred bodies through the countryside. The deafening buzz of the train makes all conversation impossible and I give my body over to inertia as we speed down the tracks. I look out the window and gaze at the world moving by me. I shall not be passing this way again. The houses, that small dog, the boy on his bike…I will take their memories, committing them to vision, words, song. Outside, the day is bright with unrestrained sunlight. The clouds have taken the warning and changed their form, hiding from the heat below green leaves and soggy fallen branches. There is a jolt and I look up, discovering that I’m in a yellow-lit train car. I notice for the first time that the air is warm and stifling and I’m here, sitting on plush red seats. I look around me with a jolt of perception, five others share this yellow space with me.
I have been here before, I have seen this scene a thousand times. When I awake from dreams in the blackness of night I have the yellow light on my lips. Diving into the ocean, I see the woman eating her small sandwich across from me on her red seat. I have felt the heat coming in through the plate glass window, the buzzing drilling relentlessly through my bones. It enters my ears, vibrating my skull, shaking the red fibers that hold me together. These people, yes, the ones that sit with me…strangers to this body, strangers to time and language and geography, put together by chance and happenstance and availability. I've seen them all before. In dreams with dotted rainbows. In the leaves blowing in the fall, in the snow that drifts pass the edge of my softened mind. Yes, they are same... the same woman with her still wet hair, the smell of perfume clinging to her wrists and nape. Yes, the same square back of the man to my right. The same necks enclosed in ties. Exactly the same as yesterday, the same as tomorrow. Not a word has been spoken, in the yellow train car or in the open-aired station or the village market. Never a word shared, never an intimacy. I look for recognition in their eyes but not one glances up from their inner world. Their expressions as they fumble through their bags looking for change for the coffee cart, their stark woolen clothing and the man’s silk necktie, they remain unshaken.
It all seems so familiar, I know it, I see it daily, it comes to me in dreams. And still, my body is shocked by their forms, confronted with the reality of infinite realities. I entered the metal worm, entered with the memory of a rapid chamber that would deliver me through the opening of layered boundaries, passed locked gates and wooden fences. Tomorrow I will enter again. I will sit in the center seat and stare out the dusty window until I realize the yellow lights and feel the rattling train with my voyaging body and remember the people that share this small box with moving images floating past. Under the deafening buzz of the train, I give my body over to inertia.

Last Night I Walked

2009-06-25T16:52:00.000-07:00

Last night I walked with my childhood friend. We journeyed from her neighborhood in the Marina to a place that I had never visited. On our way, we passed motels that I had glimpsed in the past from the windows of moving cars. Now I walked by them and saw them close enough to touch, I examined their pores of concrete and wondered what secret things were happening behind the blank doors lined up behind the rails. We left them behind us, crossing streets and turning corners endlessly. I lost track of where we were and where we had come from, the path was so complicated, so unexpected, so much farther than I had been prepared to travel. But the air was warmer than I am accustomed to, so the walking was easy, I strolled along feeling pleasantly sleepy from the workout I had had an hour ago and I yawned freely but walked easily. My feet felt lighter than usual. The trees were lovely. Buildings frosted like art deco cakes tickled my eyes and filled me with fascination.
My friend led the way, talking about the things that occupied her mind. The cuteness of her nephew, her own longing for a child, her hope to find a husband, the vampire book she had just read. Because I didn’t know the way, or even where we were going, she bumped into me, as if we were both bumper cars, at every crossroad. Without a word or a gesture, she simply collided with me, causing me to alter my course and make the appropriate adjustments; turning the right corner or crossing the necessary street. This, the way she walked, the topics that she chose for conversation, the way her lines were delivered, quietly and mumbled, all of it fascinated me. I was taking a ride through someone else’s life. I found a way to answer questions and contribute to the conversation without revealing any of the many things that I should not reveal; the things that would make her feel too shocked or frightened. I found a way to fit into the story line and be part of the mechanical show for a night.
We stopped suddenly in front of an open door and glass window and I peered into a place that looked no larger than a walk-in closet. It took me several moments to realize that this was where she was taking me, The Black Horse, a bar that features prominently in her life at this moment. For me, it was as if I had just taken a walk with Alice and arrived before the Mad Hatter’s tea party. This was a place that, until now, existed only as a story, experienced by me through the words spoken to me by my companion. It was a mythological place, the set for a scene from a well-traveled play. It was unlike the visions I had built of it in my mind during the storytellings. The bar took up half of the space, the other half was divided between stools where people sat and a fraction of space where someone could squeeze along brushing against the backs of those on the stools.
There was a little space between the end of the bar and the window, and two stools stood there at the elbow and forearm of the bar. A man with glasses and a Northern Face athletic zip up fleece was seated there.
My friend greeted him,
“Hello Peter.”
He stood and allowed us to occupy the two barstools and stood at the corner of the Bar and talked to us. My friend also greeted the bartender, a petite young woman with dark curly hair. The barmaid, Vanessa, brought over some food, delicious wrapped tofu with sweet and sour dipping sauce. There was no tap. Vanessa served bottles of beer out of an ice filled cooler behind the bar. I was encouraged to buy a soda or some juice from the liqueur store one door down, because at The Black Horse they serve only bottles of beer and cider, no wine, no other hard alcohol, and certainly no apple juice.
I sat at the bar and listened to Peter explain that he awoke each night in a cold sweat plagued by nightmares about work. He was an engineer of video games, stuck making a game he was uninterested in, plagued by many complex and abstract nightmares, hoping to escape from that hell and pursue his greater passion: Green Architecture. He excitedly explained that the bit of highway which runs through the Presidio stands on stilts which will give out at any moment and that driving over that stretch of road was like playing the lottery; chances were you weren’t going to win, but someday a bunch of commuters would, and in this case winning would mean sudden death. He was his most animated at that moment, describing the potential disaster of the collapsing bridge. Then he put on his gloves, made a photography date with Vanessa, said farewell to us, hopped onto his bicycle and peddled off to his date with a restless night.
Another man leaving the bar brought his dog outside, and my friend, who was well acquainted with the man and the dog, flew off of her barstool and rudely pushed aside the stranger that had come to occupy Peter’s abandoned space. The man was so startled that she had shoved him aside to shower affection on a dog that his face showed it, and he tried to make light of it as he mentioned that his was what the world had come to, but I could see that he was offended. I acknowledged the lack of courtesy and then slipped outside to photograph my friend with the dog who received the fan fare of a Hollywood movie star.
A bearded man in a nice suit who had come out with the dog man and another Black Horse patron stood between me and the shot, so I took his photograph instead. We chatted for a while. He had been to my hometown on business, to examine the marketing procedures of the baseball stadium there. During that trip he had nearly perished in an accident that he described to me. He was hit on the freeway by a semi truck and his company car wrapped around the fender and was pushed along the highway at 70 miles per hour. Looking out of his window he had ample time to see the shocked and horrified faces of the commuters in the neighboring lane. He had time realize that he would either be killed, hurt, or unharmed. Then his car at last spun into the divide where he was dinged by several more cars, and ultimately he emerged without a scratch. We agreed it was pleasant to have met and he departed and I rejoined my friend who had returned to her post at the bar.
Now I watched her talk to the man that she had shoved aside. She began to tell him a story about ordering her lunch at the drive through at a Wendy’s and I could see from his face that he was flabbergasted. He could not fathom why she was telling him the story. The story was boring him both in content and delivery. She could not observe any of his reactions, for as she spoke, she never looked at him, but rather talked into the air in front of her face, gazing at nothing in particular. I was delighted by the awkwardness.
I took up the conversation, and, by looking at the man and listening to what he wanted to talk about, I discovered a subject we could discuss. He mentioned Frisbee golf. I asked about it. I ventured to mention pac man…Goloso! Discussing the video games of the 1980’s was a complete hit with him. He worked for IBM in the late seventies. He used to make computers. He remembered pong…I remembered a hand held football game that consisted of red dots and his excitement grew, he remembered that too!
When my friend seemed abject, I broached the subject of the Drive-through at Wendy's so she could tell me about it again and so on it went.
I thrilled in this new arcade. Insert a coin of attention and watch the show.
These people were all lovely and sad and comical. Some were strong and brave and others weak and cowardly, and they all enjoyed answering questions.
I ordered a cider and offered to share it with my friend. Vanessa gave me a bottle and a glass. A little cider went into the glass and the rest stayed in the bottle and I pretended to drink from the glass while talking with everyone and slowly poured the contents of my bottle into my companions cup… bit by bit so that she drank all of it and I fit right in with my bottle and my glass. My uninhibited laughter, my loud voice, my strange humor, they all came to play, unnoticed among this crowd.
When my companion had finished my drink, we said our good byes and strolled off in search of a bigger meal. As we walked, she informed me that she thought she might be in the process of becoming a vampire.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Well, I guess it depends on what kind of vampire. Because I want to sleep all day and stay up all night. I don’t drink blood though.”
“What do you suppose the blood represent in the mythos of the vampire?” I asked, really wondering.
She answered without hesitation, “Life.”
I was struck. That is after all what Renfield cried out again and again: “The blood is the life!”
And suddenly I saw it very clearly, and I pronounced it aloud since she had provided the final key to unlocking the puzzle.
“Yes. Of course! The blood is the life. The vampire takes mortal life and transforms it into immortality!”
She made a noise like a confused grunt which indicated that what I had said meant nothing to her and she did not know how to respond, like the bleep one hears when the windows operating system has encountered an error. I laughed heartily and we walked on through the dark streets, me listening and laughing while she fed me the delicate and warm pieces of her life.

She seemed quite vulnerable at times
and I patted her head lovingly.

"You're a good looking guy."
I explained after I took the photo

She didn't want her picture taken.

Each night he woke up in a cold sweat.

Life In The Slaughterhouse Of Desire

2009-06-17T18:07:00.000-07:00

You have no preference, no desire that was not planted within you by some alien force, some cultivator of needs and wants. First your parents gave you their inherent assumptions and prejudices. Then they gave you to the world. As soon as you could sit up right, they gave you to the television, and from then on it planted the seeds that sprouted into your every yearning, your every dislike. Fat women repulse you. Lean ladies give you an erection. You are harder still for sneakers and frosted breakfast cereal and a Corona with a slice of lime. All of these compulsions and repulsions which define you and make you the particular creature that you cling to be, they have all been generated in you by a radiation from without.
You are like some little fish that was spawned near a nuclear reactor and so has three eyes and feeds on glowing algae and accepts that this is all part of the nature of a fish. This is true. To be impregnated by the impressions that are orchestrated to inseminate you and cause the gestation of some desire is all part of the nature of a hairless ape. It is not at all unnatural, what has been done to you, what is still happening to you. Someone out there has figured out a way to make your nature work for them. Some clever entity, a corporation, a church, a nation, has discovered that man kind was made to be exploited and rose to the call and became your exploiter. You think it is important that you do like bubbly soft drinks or don’t, that you prefer a fine wine, or an organic tea, or a pale ale, or the piss of a German prostitute.
This defines you. You think that this is who you are. You think that it somehow matters. And that is why you buy what they want you to buy. It happens all so naturally, that you never notice or suspect that there is no reason in the world that you should need a cream to make your tits firmer or a gadget that magically removes the shell from an egg, or an after shave named for a medieval weapon. It is assumed that we must of course all look like the figures posted on the billboards. The first words we read on our own were those we saw on a billboard advertisement as we rode in the back seat of mom and dad’s car, or from the back of the cereal box set on the table before us as the sticky sweetness sent shivers through our budding neural system.
Our curious nature was given signs to interpret from the earliest age, and the meanings of these signs were always this:
“There is something that you want and we have it.
There is something that you need and we can give it to you.”
And so you came to them as soon as you could articulate a few words or a phrase. You told your parents what they should buy for you. Which plastic toys manufactured in China would bring you happiness. Which drive through restaurants, where the meat rendered from sickly animals was deep fried in boiling hot grease, would finally satisfy your hunger. What labels should be present on your clothes and shoes. You were consumed and never noticed, never wondered what was fattening you and eating you up, slowly, ad by ad, penny by penny, day by day.
You will be happy when you have…
You will be whole when you get a…
All you need now is…
Then the world will be at your feet, you will be all that you ever dreamed of becoming.
But the truth is that they supplied the dreams and it is you that will be groveling at the world’s feet for your next fix. You were born into a web of black magick without any hope of escape, without any notion that there was anything which needed to be escaped, like pigs in a factory farm, who only know that the next meal will come soon and never imagine the brightness of the sun that they will never see or the horror of the slaughter house that is their destiny. You are no more and no less than that which you were cultivated to be.

The Magic of Completion

2009-06-10T16:34:00.000-07:00

To complete a task is an act of magic. Glowing and beautiful in parallel lines of simplicity and complexity. Completion is the final draft of a text ready to print, the last drop of paint on a canvas, the washed dishes after a satisfying meal. To follow the circular path of intricate detail until what was conceived and planned is completed, that is an act of magic.
Think back to childhood, when we wanted to be astronauts and ballerinas and firemen. When they told us we could be anything. The story books read before bed spoke of immense, great dreams. I remember it clearly. I wanted to touch the moon and walk among the stars. I wanted to be a famous artist, I wanted to own an island. They told me I could do anything. But then I went to the first ballet class, that evening, we did not wear sequined tutus and we were not gliding through the air, it was not how I pictured, not what I wanted it to be. I remember doing stretches on the floor. I was an open hearted child with no discipline, with no concept that this was the first in a series of necessary steps before I could dance on my toes and move like a winged fairy. I never went back. This was the first of many beginnings with no end.
It is true, we can do anything, yet, we don’t know how to do it. Dreams are nothing without discipline. Without devotion and practice, they will forever remain in the outer realms of hope. Like clouds, we may see them drifting overhead, beautiful, pink and purple and blue, they float like marshmallow angels, always out of reach. My parents didn’t lie when they said I could do anything, but how could I achieve without learning to finish even the smallest of tasks?
A goal is a series of steps. It might be a product, a career, an astronaut, a printed book, a degree, a type of knowledge…they are end points that require real work, a set of completed smaller goals that mount and build like rows of bricks are lined up until a house is built. Each step must be taken with care, with glorious attention and devotion. But what if you cannot walk?
My parents didn’t make me go back to class. No one explained that the path to become a tutu wearing ballerina is to stretch the body and make it limber and lean and as pliable as a piece of cooked pasta. They let me quit after the first class, they let the dream die with my laziness, with my complete lack of purposeful attention. I spent my youth in a virtual comma, a little girl in front of a TV set, the tube my mom always threatened to throw into the pool, but never did.
Dreams can crumble in a moment, or they can dissolve in layered years that people describe as “reality.” With this outlook, reality is needy children, reality is bills and the necessity of a paycheck. Reality is bleak and gray and as ordinary as asphalt and crumpled paper. “Reality” is here the absence of magic, the absence of hope and dreams, creative bursts of enthusiasm. It is the acceptance that life is a series of failed attempts, a thousand uncompleted tasks.
I used to envy writers, I looked at painters in awe, “how do they do it?” I wondered in wide-eyed disbelief. How do you make a book? How do you conceive and produce a play? It all seemed like a mirage, they were the “do-ers,” and I? I was the lost soul in a desert of hopelessness, on the razor’s edge of “reality” and abandon. I wanted to make, to do…
“She wants to be a paleontologist,” I heard the little girl say. They are great dreams, dreams of conquest, achievement and beauty. They are open and honest and the hope of a young, un-jaded heart that still believes everything is possible, that ability knows no limit. But the girl hates doing her homework. The little girl has no discipline. How will she break through the obstacle of laziness? How will she learn that the enormous goal is a collection of minute steps? Steps that she must walk, one by one.
Anything is possible, but we need to learn how to “do.” Each small, completed step is an act of magic. With completion, it’s possible to regain the essence knowledge, the conscious habit, that tasks can be completed, that goals can be achieved. At the beginning, you should set yourself goals so small that it is inconceivable that you wouldn't achieve them. As you gain the deep knowledge that you are in fact capable of completion, you can add to the difficulty of the tasks, but always in a very gradual manner. Slowly, the essence will rediscover what it knew during your childhood:
Everything is possible. There are no real limits. But the illusory limits that reside in your persistent habits, those can be as real as a brick wall, as real as the coming of the darkness after a day full of sunlight and blue sky.

Nightime Encounter

2009-05-22T21:21:00.000-07:00

Russian satellites are overhead. I can feel their steel, the harsh metal bits that move like a creeping demon in the night sky, the dark time when owls roam, when dreams take form, when men run. Every twinkling star is long gone, shadowed by machinery and blinking lights that disguise themselves with distance. But I can feel the heat from their engines, here, alone on my bed, beneath a thick, checkered pink and black afghan blanket, wisps of hair dance in the waves of engine gas. White heat burns a hole, a tunnel of yellow and black burrows through my third eye, right through a thin layer of cranium and into my forebrain...the beginning, where superficial thoughts are born, where petty demands are made and whispers of tears are born.
Large weapons spiral in the skies above, helicopters as big as cities hover and wait. their blinking lights flash as I look through the thin paned window.
On the ground, on the soft earth that still has a few sparse-leafed trees giving the last of their apples, there are the Russian troops, thick men with wide, white faces. They will give no smile. Nothing can crack the resolve etched across the lines of their thin, red lips.
Sttttccrakkkk, a flash of lighting streaks across the street. There are sounds of popping, sounds of falling glass splintering. A dark figure moves in the night, beneath a heavy coat made of wool. He darts down the street, he moves to the right, his arms raise, he turns slightly to the right, dodging the large bullets that aim to rip apart tissue and soft muscle. Run! Move through the storm of silver rain!
He runs, a lone figure against the darker coming storm. He moves with the grace of god. An army at his back, he moves like a psychic through their messages of despise. I see him run, but at the same time, as though I can see everything on three separate screens, each possibility before my eyes at once, I see him in the center of a thousand stoic men, the smell of metabolizing beer mixed in with the cold night.
He pulls a gun from his coat, he has identified their leader. Amid a thousand men of the same size, the same emotionless faces, he has spotted the leader, his gun aimed squarely at a head of long brown hair. A female shows her face, smooth and white in the night, her pink lips open to a small smile, a hint of evil, a glimmer of utter submission. Her dark overcoat falls and she is naked, a beaming star among the shadows.
The troops flee at the sound of her command. They move like water down an unplugged drain. They disappear, along with their guns, and the two of them are now alone.

To Live

2009-05-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

To live.
What does it mean?
How do I know that I am alive right now, sitting in my valure sweat pants and patterned cotton shirt, encapsulated within shrinking plaster walls that are closing in to strangle the life out of me?
Is that it? Is it having something to lose which signifies that you may be alive?
Or is it the opposite?
Is knowing that there is nothing to lose a sign that you are for one moment pulsing on the edge like a bird of prey about to disappear into the heights beyond the sun’s glare?
Longing and fear. These are the two symptoms which seem to outline my condition.
So which is it?
Am I alive, or dead, or somewhere between the two; caught in the center of a seesaw: at one end sits chaos struggling to tip the scales against order, but order keeps on fighting back.
Which, if either, is the state where I will be alive?
Or is it here, poised between the two so that I squirm like a worm on the end of a hook that represents the state of living?
What to do then?
I am all the questions.
One leads to another to another to another. The answers themselves are questions and the questions branch into two more contradictory answers.
Everything depends on the logic from which the question sprang.
For example, “Will I go to heaven?” assumes that there is such a place. It also assumes that I can go somewhere other than where I am. It assumes that there is an “I” that can go somewhere and that it stays in some form of manifestation as it travels.
All questions are like this. So often what is true is equally untrue depending on where one is coming from and where one is going to.
Is there something you were supposed to do here? I doubt it.
Better to ask:
“Is there anything that I can do here?”
“Is there anything that I can do here?”
“Is there anything that I can do here?”
“Is there anything that I can do here?”
“Is there…anything… I… can do… here?”
Say it aloud to yourself as many times as you can, not so fast that you become tongue tied, just let it flow in a continuous stream until the words are meaningless as words, they are just a noise like the bubbling of a stream. A sound to be heard if you have ears for hearing.
All of the questions and all of the words are meaningless. I can throw open the front door and find the abyss hanging there, feel the wind blowing in from nowhere and everywhere. If I will just look closely at the squiggly black faces squirming in the deepest recess of my consciousness without fear and without longing, then wouldn’t I be able to tear off my human face and leave it writhing with the rest as I fly away in my truest form, as a nightmare without end, a nightmare that doesn’t see itself as a nightmare?
Only the tiny villagers scrambling below, afraid that I will set their fields ablaze, only they will be able to think and say things such as “Nightmare” while longing for clear blue skies to come out of the future and deliver them from my presence. If that is how they feel, wont I have to devour them to put an end to all their fear and longing and, as they are pushed through the dark and endless passageways of my guts, then maybe they will see through the con that strung them along throughout that experience they called life?
I may be slouched somewhere in an abandoned warehouse, broken needle laying at my side, finding my way through the labyrinthine twists and turns within a dragon’s digestive track, making my way through, as liquid fire devoid of thoughts and moved only by purpose, tracing out the pattern that is a nightmare’s innards.
On the other side of the looking glass, when they see me flying overhead, they rejoice. I bring good fortune, I am wanted, I am loved, I am shining, I am light.
Sitting here, basically comfortable, I am clinically alive. My blood pressure is perfect. There is a necessity to get closer to the edge, to brush finger tips up against those of Death in order to know what life is.
If I am this then you are that, and if I am that then you are this.
It all seems so void of purpose, so ambiguous as to possible meaning.
What is it to be alive and what could I do if I were alive?
Questions born of a particular breed of logic from which more questions will sprout, prong-like into infinity like the branches of an elm or the infinite binary tree.
To live and know that you live.
Such a challenge.

The Missing Key

2009-05-06T17:16:00.000-07:00

The lights of the television set blink on and off, the blackness of it all plays a coy game with distorting the colors of simulated life, like electric candies left in the sun and then scorched with the fire of a dragon’s tail. The body below this head has melted, merging and forming dots and punctuative lines within the paisley pattern of the soft couch. The talking heads fill the room with chatter…flu, swine, death, couch, eat, sleep, crash, die, killer, prison, money, pirate, education, their words are littered in marketing code and the insinuation of the black unknown.
Blue masks litter the streets of this declining city, the dying leak their blood in hospitals designed to repackage the sick, shrink wrapped and ready for the ground. I watch in silent sadness, an observer outside the cycle. I watch through the blinking lens. The smell of ammonia reaches me, here, in this room miles away. The memory touches the edges of my mind, the corners of my disdain, yellowed eyes, labored breath, wrinkled hands. The plight of those ones, those lifeless forms of vanished memory and forgotten hopes. I see them coming with the buckets of bleach and old worn mops, but their labor does not erase the news.
He takes his last breath, I fill my lungs for the last time. Does he watch me? Do I watch him? Are we there together, hands grasped in cold defiance? Flickering lights try their best to disguise the pain, the talking heads try like titans to cleanse the story with lipstick and wide smiles and fast moving frames, and I watch, feeling sad and open and a little curious to taste the new beverage that holds the promise of a new breath.
And is it me or him that is on that bed? This couch does little to remind me and the paisley has wormed its way into the bloodstream of a young girl, showering her in psychedelic DNA and visions of a yellow field. And when the killer bees stop flying and drop like pieces of striped snow, when the falling pop star loses her mind and finally takes the plunge from the balcony six stories up, and when it is all silent and the tv flickers with a code from the great beyond that we have truly been together all along, then there will be no need for the discourse and the dramatic videos or the people who wait in the desert for their gods.
It will all end and we will know that there is no other. The other has been inside, waiting for us to remember. And just when I see, when the inscription on the gravestone rings with the light of clarity, and my eyes open with the awe of a baby seeing his first rainbow, then, the breath will rattle like the end of a song and I will stand at the entrance of a long tunnel that smells of earth and sky.
And the time here truly is short and my body feels that now, with the weight of a thousand lifetimes spun into the thread that I wear around my breasts. The music here is clear and white and then the notes disappear and an even fuller spectrum of sounds emerge that blend like a well orchestrated symphony of noise into a continuous drone that fills the sky. And my mind rings with vibrations and my body beats to the rhythm of a full, pure orgasm of sound.
And then there is nothing on the flickering screen, it dances in white and black and its message is still the same. Will I then rest? Will the breath bring with it the urge to cry? Coming like a deep sea goddess riding a mountainous green wave, riding from the place behind the flat screen. Will I dig through the sand of my mind, digging, combing, looking for anything to fill the void, for a grain to quiet the pounding drums. Have I left something back there? Back where the cities crumble and the dogs bark. Have I forgotten the detail, the way to unlock the door? Maybe he’s waiting behind the large wooden door. Waiting naked and alone.
He waits in suspended time, his body aglow from light that connects like a string to every planet and sun, light that is married to swimming mermaids in the sky and the wide-hipped fire dancers below. He is there, waiting for my last breath. The moment that he will take my hands and take my voice and in return, grant me travel down the tunnels of light and dark.
The screen flickers, is it my turn? My heart is leaping and my knees refuse to bend. Is this it? The last moment of matter, the fleeting cry of a bird streaks through me like a siren of energy. I am on a bed. I watch myself on the screen. My hair, it is all but gone, my cheeks are cored green apples. Behind me is the world of sunsets and lost cats. The tunnels await my entry. I watch myself from a corner in the living room, the channel cannot be changed. I see the future through the screen, the old me is waiting, waiting for the past to melt with future.
I watch my final breath. I watch my final thought drift like a bit of sound on an Irish jig. The screen blinks with its answers. I see it coming. But air still enters and I fall to the ground, digging for the key.