Writing about writing

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.

A Sunlit Doorway

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..."

To Live

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.