The Quest

The quest for rightness. The quest to accumulate. It is the currency of power. The sun, the explosion, the internal censor within that seeks explosion.
We drop bombs out of rightness. Invade out of certainty. All the while, one part of the brain needs to believe. Lie after lie. Everything is absorbed like nutrients for the unconscious. We will believe anything, we are selfish. We are singular machines with the desire only to survive. This is what believes the lies. This is what understands superiority, this is what takes the fallacies of what is given. We invade. The world explodes. Machines die. How certain must one be to take gun and leave for war? How certain must someone be to arrest and shoot another?
We come, with the certainty of the sun. Never dying. Never ending. Any questions are burned up with the heat of the fire and with the burning core of delusion. The illusion is a circle, complete and impenetrable. The flag is our eye, the colors of our blindness. We quest after your blood, your resources, the trees, the air in which you breathe. We are the takers, the accumulators. We need more. Always more. We expand with your contraction, grow as you pale. Your exhale is our inhalation, our sprout, one more explosion, one more kernel of power.
Understanding is perfect, simple, believable. Force comes from the sky, from the point of a gun, from the threat of extinction. Power comes with your death, with your blood, with the repeating lie. Accumulation is our need. To grow and grow and grow. There will never be enough, not for this machine, not for this force, not for this great striving.
This is what we know. This is the west. This is the need to travel forward.
Our sun, beautiful sun, give us more so that we can take!
Power comes with the explosion, with another blast of force. The flag is the symbol of our desire. The beating wind the far-off sound of a war drum. The exploding fire our rapid hearts. Your death is our growth. Your release is our expansion.
Energy. The building. The transfer. The movement to and from.
This is our quest. We know it by other names, but this is what we seek. Like quick rapid fire…the lines move, the words change, the actions turn like dancers. New people, new lines, a new game. But the quest is always the same, we are the accumulators.
We seek your energy.
We seek your blood.

Never Too Late

When I looked at the birds, I saw the wind. I saw the moment of freedom that cannot be truly savored unless the cage has been experienced. There they are, way up there, specks in the blue canvas of a sky that knows no bounds. Blue turns to the speckled expanse of black and I am unable to watch.
But some can fly. Some without wings. Some without a body. We just need to learn. Whatever this body does. It might teach and eat, it might build or destroy, it might sit at an object they call a desk, it can learn to fly.
Just don’t get too caught up on the image of flight. Flight is not just a wing, not just the taste of a summer breeze tinged with jasmine, not just the rush of movement.
You can learn, but will you? Will you cry when the new nubs sprout at the place you knew as shoulders? Will you shout as the homes you knew melt into the shimmer of lakes?
A new freedom comes with the turning of a new moon. We watch from a balcony and howl in unison.
It is not too late, but we must shout and sing.
It is not too late, but we must dance, we must move.
The launch pad awaits a sure step. We await ourselves, or the thing we know as self. It does not come cheap, nor fast. But it can come.
It is never too late to learn to fly. The portal can open, deep inside that lump encased in bone. The door can open, deep in the beating organ known as heart. Steps are not always needed. Skips, jumps, hops, they will all do.
It is never too late. And so look to others that have gone before. Look for the keepers of the way…their dust is gold….their eyes a black that writes poems and sings to hummingbirds and worms alike.
For to fly is to transform knowledge. To fly is to learn and to learn again. To have learn how to learn. To learn to transform.
It is never too late. This is the sprouting of wings without feathers, flight without distance, sight without eyes. This can be the beginning. The real. The wind. The moment. There is nothing to believe, because there is no faith. But there is the taste of jasmine stained wind and there is the hurried laughter from a morning of narrow escapes.

Infantilized

They are our fathers. They are the quick hand that will slap. The quick word. Any behavior that is out of place. They are The Name of the Father. And we, we are their unloved children. They look for the wayward. The strange car, the colored hair. What have we been up to today? What will they catch? Our fingers sticky with jelly? They look, and they find.
They are the men with unlimited power. The power of the bullet, the license to kill, maim and hurt. It is part of the job. It is part of the power. It is the power. They are the wielders of force. The mighty slap that will send us back in line.
We are the society of eternal childhood. The culture of the church, the culture of the flock, the followers. We need the structure. We need something to fall into, something to believe in, something to follow. This is a country of laziness, and because of the inability of the mind to work for itself, we need them to provide our outline.
We need others to explain and punish. We keep these ropes. We help them tie them. We are the sheep, fully mobile, but not awake.
Fathers in blue. They look for their wayward sons. Without a glimmer of mother, without a speck of softness, they punish the misbehavior. They punish the realm of the chaotic. They need lines. They make lines, they want lines.
The palate is black and white. The lines are thick and black and there is either right or wrong. There is no room for the blurry vision of a new dream. Life must be lived within the bars.
The territory is marked and clear and not even a toe should venture into the limits beyond the known world of sight and lines and simple color.
Do not shout back, do not cry. There will always be more steel. More bars. More swift action against the streaming world of the chaotic.
They watch. They do not miss. Your vision was illegal. Your march was wrong. Your hopes naïve. Your actions unconscionable.
They hold it all on their hips. Power requires only a second’s thought. Force is what they hold. This is what they have. Brute. Steel. With rightness wedged between.
Stay within the bars. It is safe. It is known. It is right. The world has been clearly defined. There are boundaries, step outside and there are no rules.
Power must maintain order.

Anxious Clash With The Other

I feel the pain. I feel it often. So often now that I don’t run, yet I do not smile. I hear her laughing and I cannot stop my heart from beating a little louder. Thump, THUMP. It hurts. I hear her walking down the wooden stairs and my chest begins to pound, each footfall is another kick in the gut. She is coming with a story. She is coming to suck a little more attention in her direction. And as I feel a vortex of energy coming, I feel a little vacuum grow. I feel the pull of a star-less space. There is a tug on my toes. My attention is going elsewhere, like waves on a shore that only recede, its going to a place where little spindles fly in circles and dive into my joints. They join together, tight as a brick in my jaw and I cannot talk. I cannot laugh or smile. I am stuck. It’s hard to move, it’s even hard to breath. And it would seem like it’s coming because she has walked in. She has come down the stairs, she has started to spin the tale of her day. That’s what I tell myself. It is because of her. Her voice, her laugh, her story, her sucking in all the energy of the space, pulling me out and robbing me of my smiles and my air. Anxiety swirls around me like a conscious whirlwind, moving to the right, to the left, wherever I step like a fast-footed athlete. She is the reason, the source, the pain. That’s what I tell myself.
And that could be the story forever. The little explanation that lasts until the carousel breaks in a puff of smoke and all the plastic animals tumble out. It is so easy to blame. Just so easy. Wrongness comes from the outside, from people who do not have it right. From people who just haven’t learned or understood or developed the right brain cells. The Other. But it is that which is the source of the problem. The belief in right or wrong. There are only habits. The habit of politics and speech and body movement. The habits of the machine, transmitted and programmed since birth by parents and school and friends and church and society. The learned habits of an entire culture run amok through this body. The habits of a western man, the habits of an Indian woman. They are different. But neither is right, neither wrong. Two sets of habits. Each person has some. Each is convinced of their rightness.
And as I hear her coming with the force of a train, my habits begin to creak. The pain begins. She brings her habits, she exhibits them. Her hands move wildly. Her voice rattles the walls. But it is the clash of habits which hurts, not her. It is the reaction of one machine to another. The Other has a different set of habits. There is no fault. There is only learned mechanicality. The differences are what cause the pain. The clash between what I want and what they are. The clash between how I want things to be and what Is at the moment. It is the clash that causes the pain. Not the Other. The Other is just me in a different form.

Secret River

It all comes from a different place. Not the little thoughts that wander through like children on the floor of your mind. It cannot even be understood by the mind that thinks it knows what it is. It all comes from a different place. How strange it is to even hold that inside for a second. They are little black ribbons, nearly impossible to grab. How can you? You need the mind, the very thing you do not possess. It is a secret river that moves deeper than bones and fiber, deeper even than memories and hopes. It is what moves those limbs. It is what laughs. What eats. What quests. It moves without your consent, but more than that, it moves without your knowledge. You are the earth on which it flows. The soil over which it meanders, but you cannot feel its chill. Cannot even see its desire. It moves you with an invisible blindfold tied around your face. The knots are tight, so tight. The actions you have taken, nearly since birth, have been derived like drops from this river. Movement does not come from hopes or thoughts, does not come from learning or training. All comes from the secret river. All comes from a place we might never see. Can the journey inwards begin from a small canoe? Straight back through the center of an eyeball and then down, oh so far down. Once in, can it ever emerge? Or does the sight of the real puppet master frighten the last breath out of any witness?
It is the entrenched machinery. The habits that function to keep a machine locked in place, grinding and moving at sixty miles an hour, gears squeaking. There is a great river inside that moves and turns, it flows icy cold and then turns to steam and into screams and curses. The current of the machine, moving without words. You are its host. You are it. Every laugh and jump. Every read book, every orgasm of delight. Every friend, every kiss, every walk in the park. And if you really understood, would you be nodding in agreement, or convulsing naked on the ground, drool at your mouth? If you actually understood this? Would you be standing on the edge of a great cliff, looking down into the abyss with tears and laughter that rocked the tepid skies? It is too great to understand. Too big and black. It does not come from you.
What are you? Nothing comes through, if it is not the river’s desire. You are in so deep that you cannot see the trees. You cannot really see a face in the mirror. You have never known anything at all.

Big Goverment

“Big” is the word that is used.

Big is shouted through microphones and heard on car radios

b….i….g
big is the word that is used
spit out like venom
absorbed like fodder
spewed again like a dollop of sperm
big
a word with no meaning
a word that carries your red and your black and the blindness of white

the echoes have reverberated through generations
man to boy
a gap, then
man to boy again
“big government,” they whisper the words in dreams
it explodes in their hands with another release
it feels so good to say
so… fucking…. good

they shout
they cry
their pale skin grows red in the sun
take the “ B” from a tv ad
take the “I” from a politician
take the “G” from a radio show

now chant
now scream
tell the boys
tell the men
understanding is an ocean away
a drifting cloud
a moon that never rises
the word moves through your fingers like piss down a drain
you call after it
“bbiiiiiggggggg!!!”

“big govement”

the fears are already here.
They are already chained
Can you not see the blood?
My life
If I swallow what I want to, it is in my life
And you are here, in it
If I fuck the way I want, they are already here
You say it’s wrong
If I strangle my lover, they come
They take me away
Another interference
They are here
Big is here

Big….massive….government….involvement…..everyday….lives

It is here
Warped and huge
It is here
It has been here
All along.

Cloven Foot

She looked at the painting for the first time. It rose from the wall, levitating in its massive form and monumental message, leaving its gold frame far behind on the white background. Small and open-mouthed next to its size, she gazed up at the man that was not a man, at the animal that was not quite an animal. The beast that was not on all fours, but wearing a tailored jacket and a small hat that had holes for his horns. His face was red and long and hairy beside the ears. He stood in the middle of two iron gates, held slightly ajar with the weight of his body. Behind him a city burned red and hot. His lips betrayed a small, sly smile. Half a dozen women with large round bellies were in various states of falling, some lay lifeless on the cobblestone streets. Babies lay in piles by closed wooden doors. Just behind the gate was a copulating couple on fire, streams of smoke rose from their flesh into the dark night. He stood at the gates of this mayhem. His kingdom or his punishment? His legs were long and hairy, with thin ankles and the strong thick thighs of a horse. His penis was long and engorged, sticking up like the black spikes of the metal gates. He leaned on one of the open gates, leaning just slightly on his right elbow in a gesture of satisfaction and contentment. A creature completely comfortable in the chaotic setting of smoke and dim, reddish lights and the smoking couple and fallen babies and women who would never be mothers. His left foot reached out to her, a cloven foot of gray with streaks of black. His other foot hung back in the shadows, five toes of a pale, reddish hue. The ground below him was a mixture of dirt and black ash, beyond was a barren landscape of dead trees and smoking bushes.
“This is us,” she thought. “Our lineage vilified and made shadowy and dark and full of horror. This is the full blooded fear of man. The fear of birth and death. The fear of sex and pussy and earth and the mushrooms which spawn beneath the visible surface. We have watched through centuries, as large skirts have given way to slips and then jeans. Watched as the fires burned flesh and the screams curled with the smoke. We have watched it all. The vilification. The quest turned to the dirty kiss. We watch still, knowing, just as the smile implies, that what we do will always remain in the realm of the mushroom and the roots. The fires will come and play with the land and play with our flesh and we will be of the darkened shadows and the red clouds. We are of one, of the other, of earth and air, stardust and bright light.”

Sculpted From An Alchemist Dream

I hear whispers. They come from the darkened alleyways and linger in the narrow stairwells. From the sewers they rise, snaking around my legs and urging me on, there are secrets to discover…hidden cookie factories and old tea tonics, dragons that sit under plastic awaiting their birth each New Year’s Day. I pick up the gray video camera that has hung around my neck like a dead snake. The object is hard, cold and small…it’s all but dead. No soft breath, no lungs, no heart. My fingers reach for the circular knob that activates the machine, Biiiiiinnnggg…there’s the green light. It’s waiting, now it’s time for me to act. The screen reflects my perception of the sidewalk.
Chinatown is clustered with German tourists. They stand, just as me, filming the swinging paper lanterns, just like me, they turn their cameras toward the rooftops and preserve forever the small windows with laundry hanging to dry. I hold up my camera and trace the lines of a man as he takes a photo of his plump wife. The video camera trails him as he walks down the street eating from his bag of fortune cookies. I follow him until the smell of sweet bread assaults me like a lover in the morning. I turn to the right and see a bakery laden with sesame encrusted buns and a crowd of small Asian women waiting to be helped. My eye is transported through the camera….my attention travels through the machine, the gray piece of plastic that comes to life in my hands. I watch them for a moment, but they live on endlessly in the code, women who fill their bags with cookies and moonpies.
I drift away from them and see a family gathered a couple steps from the entrance. There are two little girls sitting on the ground, one is probably six, the other three. The older sister has her arm wrapped protectively around the younger one in a gesture of fierce love. The mother of the two is kneeling in front of the three year old, fixing her shoe. The father is close by, leaning on a metal post. No one notices me. No one sees a young woman with a camera pointed directly at them.
Standing there, watching them, I feel the sweetness of love from one sister to another. Will their love turn and wiggle and flitter through life’s complications? Will the younger girl lie alone in her bed decades from now, remembering something soft and tender that breathes on her like an alchemist dream? Or maybe she’ll forget everything, her memory robbed like so many other things that get lost along the forking path. I stand and record, until the shoe is tied and the older one reaches down and extends her hand to her little sister.
Their forms drift out of site and I am left with their memory, their tender forms. I step into the shaded quiet of an alleyway. On the right is the open backdoor of a flower shop, the room is covered in buckets of dyed carnations and bright daisies. Five feet away is a doorway outlined in aqua tiles, the address reads “79.” The little gray machine is my third eye, my hand moves with it as I scan the shiny tiles, left from a era when color was king, when cars were moving rainbows on the highway of asphalt. I capture the Germans sipping “horny tea” at a tea bar, I grab bits of their words, sentences in their lives that flop on the floor like forgotten fish, but I swoop them into my net and store them for later.
The streets are crowded and they give me a piece of themselves that I will mix with the graffiti covered vegetarian restaurant and the old woman sitting on a stool at the far end of a jewelry store. I will mix her with the images of barbecued ducks and the young couple that kisses by the mammoth lions who guard the gates of this old town. With their forms, with captured words, with the stolen kiss and the forgotten newspapers that blow like runners down a hill, we will sketch a new story.
Like the Tequihua that we are, the builders, the masons, the musicians, the creators that we are, we will shape it into something new. An ordinary creation. A creation from the ordinary.