Aim

Many years and quite exemplary days were spent wandering the hills. Climbing up to survey the land below, I had the innate ability to charm and beguile. In this lifetime I came to a beginning understanding of all being all. I was not too familiar with wasted effort. In church, any great attachment invoked the blood and the body. I had no use and little respect for childish things.
There came a journey concerned only with our material well being. Nights were spent dependent on prescription medication though I could discuss and debate at length with the priest. How many cat’s eyes were provided the lessons for humiliations and frustrations? At home I did as I wanted, went where I would, seemingly from thin air.
Hiding in dales and caves to merely exist far removed in time and space.

My grandparents without much effort would set out maps on the bedroom floor and plot ceremony,  grandeur, the emotional state. As it was time to put aside large and grand union with all foretold in a moment of intense reality, I was born to a family.
Up to that point my aim was understanding the basics.
Leading armies and explorations, I had little understanding of the meaning of this life. My intentions came in contact with a system that was not easily accessed as a truth. The only ones who mattered to me were from long, long ago and quite mad.

As I knew there should be commanding logic I had a grasp of the magic verse of silly clouds. I explained in pervasive detail the nightly game show on television. Military, political and financial empires vanquished by the old philosophical tomes set my effort anew.
One thing worked. I was very young. That life had been to that time something that would bend all. I had the ability to pass oral tests, which I desired, with little or no payment. Each defeat was science fiction, fantasy. Clamoring within, yet, step by step it was only yesterday in which the father was the concept. The trite, insubstantial feel of exercises, dances.

No barrier our minds had previously reached hinted at mother. When reading and listening to music I would lay root to all my myriad of voices. I could hold my Bible and the content of lessons at study that led me to something.
I tried to obtain an emotional wreck, alcoholic, and intellectual needs written with little worry. When I didn't have to chant in those carpeted campaigns of conquest it was something that was new.
To have that, the brother and sisters in imagination became boring. For a long time our heart was not much inclined to my sight. That and my efforts and thoughts yet known to me became more difficult to reach. Each insurmountable dream that I took on followed that path. Soon the difficulties began, kept as a victory of knowledge. The only ones who mattered to me were from long, long ago and quite mad. Clamoring within, yet, step by step it was only yesterday in which the father was the concept.

And yet it has been a long time of that ordinary state. In school: grasp, write themes, and in life soon to be dead. Step by step our bodies so freely waste and can only be held by each small moment. The trite, insubstantial feel of exercises, dances.
Every moment was lacking very small periods of time. Somewhere inside the oblivion of life I would stay the course. We can reach a place that has discipline and direction and slips not into illusion.
Our bodies wish to sleep. To dream. To emote. And consume. And, and… no matter where we are, is when we must, tripping and falling, remove myself from the desires. Dreams are for the clearies and the steelies.
If we use all of this energy my awareness would hold.  It is a small aim of being dead awake and quiet in each small place… Hiding in dales and caves to merely exist far removed in time and space.

A Night of Illusion

We should go down, between eye blinks, from body sinking to empty space. Jigsaw puzzle fragments, banished. Jenny and the stonewall walking. I detest… myself I found. Sound communication. A series of blurry spots slide little by little. An enormous snake introduced little by little into a cave. I was not scared of it. We should go down, between eye blinks. I found myself strongly impregnated during the day, more vegetation on the inner part of the cave walls. I knew I was in the water, passive, to reconstruct the scenes of my surprise.

I was producing a series of blurry spots and objects previously described. I felt as if all mixed up, awakened. Sensations, colors and sounds at the restaurant gave me the sensation of being attacked. Rolled up in slowness, someone else observing. I saw myself… just a little, once again talking with the bright greenness of a lawn. I tried to fit in. The heavy blackness of the night seemed to expand and contract. My memory extended over the surface. At that moment the subtle memory of my work was just the way I had seen them when it was about to fall into the water.

My eyes, jigsaw puzzle fragments, banished. We should go down, between eye blinks, from body sinking to the very beginning. I noticed half of my body going to sleep. Some strange green flowers once again advanced in slowness while I watched. The risk came into my senses. Someone else that was walking awakened. No sound; a little dizzy, but adjusted. Sensations that remained from someone else. Jenny and the stonewall talking, once again mixed up with the bright greenness of a lawn.

A stony road that went down, no sound. I slowly opened the cave that was already invading the room. Disoriented. The roof and the walls usually do reconstruct the scenes of my recent information. It seemed that some of them remembered observing myself standing on a hill. A blurry spot of colors that I work with at the road. The girl, looking from within, saw myself found with half of my body… just a little. I told a river I couldn’t feel it but I knew I was the presence advanced. In slowness trees were growing. The snake started to distinguish and locate my room.

That place towards the roof of the cave did run about to fall. Again I noticed a series. I was producing a series of blurry spots and objects previously described. If maybe I did fall, I woke up. That remained remembered, effort. We should go down, between eye blinks, to sleep. How, also, the first thing that came, I had seen before going, little by little.

Out of the Sleeping Tunnel

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.

In The Theater

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.

Last Night I Walked

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

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.