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.

Schism

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?

The Next Step

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

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.

Dark Forest

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.

That One Moment

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.

Trapped

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

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

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…?

A Moment In This Life

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.

In The Labyrinth of Dreams

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.

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.

The Missing Key

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.