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.

The Ritual

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

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.