Day And Night

She watched his smile fade, the corners of his mouth dropped slightly and the song he had just sung faded into a melodic memory. His face softened and she watched the wind blow away the last remains of his overt delight. She watched the rainbow of his mouth turn from a Technicolor pageant of beet red and hazard-cone orange into a muted palette mixed with white acrylic. She watched the fading glory, the spiral of rainbow dye that moved into oblivion with each second that passed. How long had she watched his lips? The endless transforming of emotion that played with the muscles of his face.
She sat on the bed, an orbit of delight herself, beaming in white and blue as she sat before him. She was smooth and nearly naked in her white and pink lace panties. She sat crossed legged, slightly embarrassed by her lack of graceful ballerina posture, yet unable to will her muscles and bones into spinal alignment. She watched him and the vain angel on her side tugged at her thoughts, “Sit straight! You look horrible!” And although the same thought entered over and over, it blew through her mind like a fluffy cloud. When his smile at last faded like a fiery sun, she brought her eyes to his, feeling the endless river of power that seeped from him. She sucked him out, pulling him inside by concentrating on the back splash of energy. The soft bed accepted her weight and she fell deeper into it. She sat there.
How long had she been there, watching his smile fade into a soft mouth that bore no particular expression, but was rather a statement in contentment? She had nowhere else to go, rather, she had no where else she wanted to go and this bed, this small room stuffed with books and made smaller and warmer by a heater that whirred throughout the night and continued with the day was the whole of the universe. His eyes and mouth, they were every star, every undiscovered sun.
Outside, she felt that it was light. She felt the bright whiteness of a cloud covered sky infiltrate the room with its sense of urgency. Light being the indicator of action, the time to drive and work and run errands. But she sat and held his stare and practiced moving against the rules of nature. Light was to see his smile. Light was to see the contour of his flesh expand from thigh to chest. Light was needed for holding his gaze.
When the dark would come, perhaps then she would rise and take the memories of his smile with her. She would dress, covering her white panties and sculpting her breasts into more recognizable shapes. She would find her shoes and pull up her mismatched socks and head out into the night. She would drive, up the hills that overlooked a sleeping city and insistent street lamps buzzing for the attention of moths. She would drive in silence, holding the scent of him on her mouth until she found the small house
tucked into the curve of the street. She would wait in her car, listening for the sounds of other approaching cars and then, after determining she was all alone under a cloud-covered black night, she would exit and walk across the street, entering her small room. She was then ready for a new round of work to begin.

Binary Tree

The last dash of the “t” is in place, the words are checked for spelling, the sentences for grammar…I wrap it all up with a colorful graphic that exemplifies the text and send it off, through the system of tubes and invisible helping hands that deliver it to curious brown eyes that read it with interest in a dark, warm room. And I take a breath, a plane roars across the sky like a metal dragon and then…silence…the void…there is nothing here. All is blackness and I stand naked and alone, wondering what will come next. A flicker zig zags across my mind sending sparks to retrieve my attention, oh yes, I remember, there is another text to write. There is never an end. There a dozens of notebooks, each full of ideas and within the scope of this lifetime, there could not be enough time to finish them all, and even if I did, there would be more. Each fork in the path, each level of completion leads to another task waiting to be done…a new piece of writing, a new dance. There is never an end, just the cycling of energy from one form to another. The last breath will be the beginning of another branch. A thousand lifetimes will pass and each will lead to the same set of steps, the same writing, the same brown eyes that hold the world in their soft gaze.
The infinite tree, with its infinite forking branches, spiraling off into the colorless sky of a million suns. It is never the end, unless I stop looking, unless I close my eyes and cover my head in a blanket and fall asleep within the deep knot of its trunk. The branches may exist, the endless work may exist, the infinite lifetimes may exist, but what can I do when my eyes are closed? They may spiral around me like sequined circus clowns and spring fairies, but how shall I fly without wings? I may be walking the small, slick branch right now, walking along its curving path into the orange sunset, and yes, I think I am, I feel the fading rays against my skin, but still, my eyes are closed and you promised that we would walk through the doorway together, is it still true? Each branch leads to another segment, another fork in which to choose a path, will it be the left or right? And when I come to the end of this small wooden segment? What then? Left or right? And on other trees, there are three choices, should I take the center path? Should I take the path of crying, the path of fear, or the path of containment? Intellectualizing is simple, the choice is objective and thus, clear. But sitting there, heart pounding, fear licking at the heels, demons whispering in each ear, dragons tugging at the nipples, the steps are difficult to gauge, the distance of their points cloaked in a haze. Visions of a lion strike my face, oh, a wet tongue has found me. The cry of an eagle warns of other, even more difficult choices to come. There will be no end. On my back is a tattooed map, it traces the covered veins below. Go! Go! Go! There is not much time. There is no end, it stretches on and on, two choices at each fork on the road.
Will it be life or sleep?
Work or death?
The path must be walked, decisions must be made, words must be written, melodies must be sung.
There is an infinite amount of choices behind us.
There is an infinite amount of choices ahead.
But the choice is always the same.

Stranger

The wood of my hand moves like a twig in the breeze, a whirlwind of currents brings fragments of lost conversations, escaped words from the backseat of a car, ideas glimpsed on the face of a passing stranger in an old red truck. His eyes say everything, only I imagine more than his lips would ever say, not just because he doesn’t know my name, but because even if we were intimate, even if he licked me in the most sacred places, even if I knew the taste of him on my lips and we shared a crop full of screaming, beautiful children and even if he was at my bedside while the skin dripped off me like the story of a life spiraling down the drain, even then he would not tell me the meaning of his dreams, the story behind the red dragons that always eat their tails, the fortunes left hanging in the morning air while a set of brown eyes shake into wakefulness.
The smell of coffee moves his tired muscles, like a dog performing tricks for a small cookie at the end of a practiced routine. I watch him get up, naked and soft, he walks to the coffee pot with the madness of a man half asleep and a quarter conscious. Standing at the counter, he looks to the distance, out the window, down the hill, past the small box houses of red and blue and orange, past the rolling hills that have lost their trees, out to the great sea barren, rolling endlessly, only he can’t see the rolling, he can’t hear the crashing waves break on land, he just imagines it all, his memory filling in all the details. I imagine his imagining. I devise the plots of his secrets, his unspoken desire that remains buried in the folds of his flaccid cock. His thoughts remain a mystery that wrap me in their tingling arms, forever cradling me in story lines and sadistic scenes.
The stories stay with me, year after year, beyond the day that I lay dripping a lifetime of accumulated skin and memories, spiraling down the void, the black drain that awaits me, patiently, always there, and never fully understood by the part of me that lies on the thin mattress, smelling the ammonia, hearing the iv drip, feeling bodily pain. Never grasped by the part of me that holds on to the idea of “me.” White walls close in, clouding my vision beyond the cataracts that have grown like ivy. I see it, no, not my eyes, I feel it, the pulsing center that balances on the pin of knowledge.
But the cord unravels with the sound of a small boy slurping soup, he fills the house with his inattentive sounds, reading, watching TV, slurping his wontons, sucking in his noodles like a dog with his nose to the plate. The sound of him disgusts me, his careless inhalation of liquid, his half attention for the words he reads, his inability to stop and truly pay attention to one task at a time, it all disgusts me, and I see a careless little child who does not desire to change what he cannot see. The world is his, his understanding complete, his role fixed, and I am disgusted with his arrogance, with his blindness.
And in seeing his blindness and in my disgust for his habits, I too prove to be a creature, a machine of little sympathy for the small machines that slurp from their ceramic bowls. My mirror, as ugly as I could have ever chosen, as blind as I have always been. These are the secrets that I hide in the crevasses of my white breasts, the truths that my mind cannot bare to perceive, the words I will never utter to the man who watches me from a street corner as I pass in my red truck. The strings on my arms take me to the left, up the street, towards the microwave, they make my face snag at the sound of loudly chewed food. I see the mirror, the silver thread that will never know it’s a dream, the small figure in a play with a million mute actors and a thousand glimmering suns.

New Life Forms

It was an idea found within the pages of a small paperback, sitting among hundreds on a dusty shelf, out of sight in a dark garage that smelled of mildew and curiosity. Buried in the pages, well after the colorful cover of four purple tentacles probing a busty young woman, the slimy arms spreading a look of shock across her face from the inside; after a thousand words that built momentum and teased at the sexual longing of orifice-less creatures, the doctor took his singular syringe and gingerly poked the bacterial cell, inserting a synthetic chromosome into its DNA, a synthetic chromosome based on the naturally occurring bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium.
By his calculations, the synthetic chromosome would live off the host for a while, feed off of it, incubate, grow, and then, in the final stage of the process, the synthetic chromosome would be powerful enough to take control of the host cell. The result of this takeover…an artificial life form.
I read the passage and felt a quiet grayness begin to tug at the corners of my vision. Could this be real? I looked down at my naked body, white and soft on the plush blanket below. My toes wiggled hello. My fleshy vehicle of movement, like the small metal box that takes me quickly from point A to point B, this curved tube of veins and blood that moves because of a fleshy pump, this is the vehicle that takes me from bed to desk, from sleep to dancing invocation. The “I” that writes these words is part of the machine, the thoughts, the fingers, the mouth that pouts from a night of crying…I am the host to another, the organic bacteria that hosts the silent watcher trapped within a forgetful creature of anger and rage and sexual fever. The machine eats its dinner, the machine dresses in pretty skirts and stays warm in the winter. The machine enjoys its bite of chocolate and does what it needs to do to stay breathing. In nearly every moment, only one force moves this small vehicle, it is the desire of self preservation, the “I,” the ego.
And then, in moments in the dark, when the lights of the road take on a quiet pattern and everyone in their metal boxes feels like kin, then the presence of another emerges and in those moments, no worry seems important, every fear seems like a waste of time and time itself seems truly short and precious. And then the organic bacteria takes over once again.
And I look down at my typing fingers, long and skinny and crowned with stars. Through a strange turn of events, I find my machine working…writing, creating, doing what is asked of it, despite the habits. Despite yelling at slow drivers, crying a couple times a week, looking for sweets in its fridge.
The machine, the limbed body with fingernails, the body that seeks comfort and death, this machine sustains me, it is what I need to work on earth, it is a host, a host for the Being. Perhaps one day, a new life form will emerge, strong and willful and in service to the Absolute. For now, I work with what I have.

Fractals

I pick you up with the slightest of efforts, your form rests in my sweaty palm as though it has always been there. The web of your surface transforms in the light of midday, and I gaze in tenderness at the mountains of your flesh.
I look further, deeper, and for this discovery, my eyes are reborn with new lenses equipped for this sacred task. The beauty of this form is revealed, a pink flower of petals that get smaller and smaller with each successive layer, smaller still until they shift dimensions and move back in on themselves, covering the tunnel with their soft scent. In my hand, mountains stand mighty and tall, gazing down at the rivers that course though you with unsentimental love. Red waters and clouds carry your thoughts. A basket with gifts floats with a gift from the gods, a word from the people of air, a token from the people of stone.
Inch by inch, a further examination proves that you are covered in even smaller lines, lines that create valleys, valleys that create hills, hills that stack to form more mountains. Bushels of hair smell like sagebrush in the south and I breath it softly, it will be my last. Like the roots of a tree, the source fills you with a substance even more powerful than air, more delicate than oxygen, more polluting than the carbon you spill. Beyond the window of my eyes, ants travel the length of this coast, trees branch forever in a quest to reach infinity, my mind stretches, allowing me a moment of access beyond the lazy mood of this room.
With one hand stretched out, I reach out to grab for the nearest star, and you laugh at me, truly knowing how far it is, yet I hear you in my mind, telling me to stretch just a little further, that the sun might be within reach, that we might soon have a new home, if only I stand on my tiptoes and if only I devote my heart to the task and if only I focus just a little more. I hear you and my muscles lengthen in the stretch, my heart expands to the balloon size it once had, before I knew a possibility of breakage, before I knew that everything that begins must end, before I realized that there can be no joy without the contrast of sharp pain.
The pendulum swings, and I ride it with the thirst of a lost bear, with the yearning of a mermaid searching for the sea. On the metal gauge, my hands gripping the metal string like a lifeline to the heart, I hold on, balance, wait for the descent. It will come, because truly, it cannot be any other way. It is the force of rain, the growing grass, the lifeless squirrel, the movement of time. It will come, and as I go down, maybe I’ll remember that I have been here before, maybe if I remember this time the journey might not be as hard. Soon I will be heading up, and then, after a short stay, I will go down again.
Yeee! Here I come, make the bed for me, prep the tea and here I come… The grass catches my fall, I land with a soft thump and taste a bit of soil. Bright blades poke me like little itchy fingers, an endless blanket of them, they tell me their secrets, a million whispers mingle in my ears and I blush with their intimate details. Who knew this would all be so kinky?
Sure, tell me more, think of me as a new bed of soil, a new fertile piece of earth to plant with desires and old memories. Give me what you have and we’ll see what new shapes emerge. Will they be the formless structures of seaweed which lack names, will they move like pink feathers on the wind? Will they come as droplets of my tears, blinking in the dark night as I head for my car?
Everything and nothing, you give, I take, and soon, just as the pendulum swings and just as the earth opens up to accept its lost child, I will give back to you, giving my body of material, take it all and send my stories off to the next little girl.

Moon Water Heart

I was born of water. In its wet cave I sparkled to life. Within its slippery grasp I grew and formed a beating heart. On the full moon, I felt the pull and began to swim, towards land, towards a realm which distinguishes between day and night. The people of air greeted me with a slap and a gulp full of moist oxygen and I opened myself to their ways.
And here, on earth, the moon calls to me twice a month, calling me with relentless screams when the tides are at their peak. The arms of the cypresses point me to the waves, to the power that keeps coming and coming, stopping at nothing to reach shore. I stand ankle deep in the biting water, it tries to find its way in, searching for an orifice that will bring it to the center of my watery heart. “Try if you must, but know that we are the same, you needn’t yearn so much! I am here, brother, I am standing within you. Feel my beat, my lunar pull!”
The skies open and shower me with the semen of a bearded god. The sea rises in its nightly lust and coats me in its desire. The center of my chest pushes out, moving through every thin vein, reaching fingertips and tiny toes, trying just a little harder to extend beyond the barrier of flesh.
“We are here,” the tide murmurs, “you needn’t cry so hard! You stand amongst the waters of the womb, you rise tall above the hot liquid of earth and below the sweet tears of the sun. You are one among us!”
The night is without a moon and I run in circles around the boulder in the sand. I run til the water in my heart begins to boil and I run until my knees begin to drip. I run on all fours, chasing mountains of white foam and sheets of mist that tousle my unkempt mane. I orbit the rock like a satellite, speeding like a dying star, howling like a rabid dog.
I collapse in the arms of peaking waves. They hold me while the black sky kisses my eyelids and while the absent moon sends down crows with secret signals and while little bubbles tickle the sides of my cheek. The waters rise higher still, entering my mouth in salty rivers that carry news from the deep. Hold me my love, my brother, let me live just a little longer.