The Birth of Myth

We all laughed yesterday as the barriers that divided us started to crumble just slightly under the weight of smiles and eye contact.  Icy waters began to subside just slightly, and I felt the twinge of family, the strangeness of three people sitting at a round table in the middle of a night filled with fog and gusts of stinging moisture. 
The world seemed to open up and I had a bird’s eye view of three people below the roof of a house, a blue and green sphere in the midst of blackness, amidst a collection of sparkling lights. 
How strange to be sitting here, talking of myths and words, mostly listening, because I don’t know of these things.
I will forget that we live in the midst of myths, like lights being born of gas and dust, we live in the midst of words and associations and archetypes that rise from our consciousness and reveal themselves like a blossoming flower. Their shapes of darkness and pungent earth, their swirling white spheres of grand-moving strangeness. 
Some will paint them as evil, some will call them angels and avengers.  And still others will see them just as tales, like the ones that came before but painted in different colors.
The names change from story to book to legend to movie to speech to show to story. 
We live in the place of the spawning of myth. The same shapes, the same players, the same figures, the same arcs. Dirt creates them, from the soil they arise, and we are the fertile earth that gives them nourishment and the plowed mind and the twisting energy that creates them over and over, reproducing the same villains and heroes, the same turns and twists, remixing them endlessly, giving new outbursts of detail to the receptive arms of eternal skeletons. 
Great journey-makers that come from a land far away on the vast wooden ship Tharnackla. Those anti-heroes have taken a humble nation and turned it into a corrupting evil and death realm where the inhabitants are afraid to love and kiss each other. 
But once we cried together, in the arms of each other, just as the myth was born, as the people rejoiced and fell to the ground in awe. The myth was being born, and it was painful and joyous at once.
Tears ran down your face as we felt the sprouting green root take hold, as we felt the archetype of the redeemer claim victory in one shining night under the moon. 
You got on top of me and we celebrated with love and skin and soft grunts of pleasure. This was the birth of something, the celebration of a golden legend come home, the beginning of a battle to reclaim the land from sea to mountain and back again.
We sat at a table and the story spiraled between us like falling stars.
And yesterday we laughed. And we lived the myth of us as I saw it from high above.
No such thing as old. No such thing as new.

The Golden Eye

The hilltops are high above me as I search for my brother with the golden eye. 
All the others have fallen, somewhere between the sea and the desert there are many corpses, brown hair with waves, blue eyed boys who stare up at the sun without blinking, a mother who has lost her young.
They are there, on the land, in the rivers, boys, brothers. And it is me who climbs these cliffs still searching for the one with the golden eye. 
Brother or god?  Man and lover, father of life and creation.
I scan the black ravines and wonder if he can see me here on this treetop, my strong thighs gripping the bark as I cling and scan and squint.  Birds come and perch on my thin white arms like branches, they sing in my ear little melodies of encouragement.
The black streaked ones sing a melancholic tune, and when they sing my body grows desperate. Perhaps he is gone forever, our father and lover, our king and creator, our leader with the golden eye. 
Does he run or is he lost?  Does he hide or does he wait to be found? 
I am unsure as I take each step, not quite able to read my heart in the clouds.  The leaves stir on the parched ground, all red and yellow and crackling beneath my soft footsteps. They are of no help.  I can't read them, their silent fortunes are obscure and lost to the wind. 
I keep walking, I have been here before, so many times on this search.
Brother, brother- I have written about you before.  Father lover, I have written of your name and this search.  My fallen kin among the seas and sands, I have written of you in countless pages. 
I walk clutching my breasts, yearning for comfort, for the mother that is lost in these trees and shadows. I add my tears to the ocean, lending them only briefly to the trickle of the river. 
Perhaps in the next world I will drink my own sadness in a goblet of glass. These steps seem like a very wide circle, so wide it becomes invisible. 
My brothers are gone and I continue on, still looking for the man with the golden eye.

Made In China

It was night outside the double wide glass doors of the discount store where it smelled faintly of chemicals and leather. Beyond the thick walls housing many items of desire, the moon shone down, bright and brilliant in its glorious fullness.
The taste of mint chocolate ice cream still lingered on the back of her tongue as she wandered the aisles, looking at the assortment of pants and shirts and boots with an apathetic gaze that sometimes crossed over into brief curiosity. She rode the escalator up to the second floor and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored pillars that stretched from the ceiling to the white tiled floor. 
Bright maroon lipstick over her lips, her wild mess of hair restrained by a furry white beret. Her oversized green pajama pants were tucked into the wide cuffs of suede boots. There she was, allowing the moon to travel above, for the night of blinking stars to pass unnoticed as she slowly walked through the two floors of metal racks and clear plastic hangers and more discounts than she could have ever wanted.
Every now and then she picked up something and held it for a while in her hands. These things were all cheap, her mind would immediately come up with several reasons to walk over to the registers, put them in a bag and take them home. There were lots of reasons: warmth, comfort, beauty, but the nagging thoughts kept coming in. 
She looked at the label of the sweater tights she had picked up off the back wall by the shoes: made in China.  She had heard a story on the radio seven hours before about the province of China where most of America’s cheap products came from. 
As she drove to the warehouse to drop off her leftover pastries and bread from the farmer’s market, she listened to the stories of young Chinese workers whose hands had became deformed after several years of repetitive movement. They made the clothes, the hangers, the phones, every item that surrounded her. They wore out the workers, till death or deformity set in, then got new younger ones to fill the positions. There were just that many people in China.
Hours later she wandered the store and felt the hands of the workers on every item. Her seven dollar tights were paid for by those distant unknown lives. She took the elevator up to the second floor where the household goods were waiting. She picked up a shoe organizer and looked on the bottom of the label: made in china.  She looked at a cutlery set that advertised itself as hand-crafted: made in china.
As she walked, looking at the brightly colored things, the shoes and jackets, the rugs and feather pillows, her face sunk more and more.  Her feet shuffled along the ground as she began to absorb the meaninglessness of almost every item. The manufactured need, the desire for more and more. 
She could feel it inside, she wanted that rug, those sweater tights. She could hear the voice in her head, she needed them to stay warm, some were even made of bamboo, was there really any harm?  Did her small almost meaningless purchase really make a difference when there were thousands of stores across America like this one? 
She could feel their hands, their eyes, their lost lives. 
She walked through the aisles, killing time until she could leave and drive to the house were her friend sat with sweet smelling long black hair and stories of explored language. She walked, sinking, changing as the story she had heard earlier moved through her. She could feel the pull of the American need, the hope that with this one new thing everything would be better and change, change forever, change until she needed one more thing- until she needed that other thing, until a new desire clung to reality just beyond her grasp.
Just as one orgasm was ending she would pause and think about the next time it might happen.  There was no rest for desire, for the want to fill it-  she could hear the stories of the people in her mind, the deformed hands, the jumpers off the factory roof, the utter desperation to end repetition.
All done so people like her could buy those cheap sweater socks and discounted shoes. It was for her and millions like her. She walked and walked, hurt by what she saw, but unable to leave.

Thoughts In The Labyrinth

They sit in a circle in a dimly lit room.  Candles flicker on the fireplace mantle and cast shadows from the wiry kiwi branches onto the ceiling.  The black curtains are drawn and they are all alone- three bodies who try for a moment to leave the labyrinth and cortex behind, to emerge new from the trappings of intelligence and talk without walls. 
She looks at the man in front of her.  In most societies he would be considered an adult, a man with graying hair, more than forty years of age.  He sits in front of her illuminated in the golden light, imitating her sounds and creating syllables without meaning.

“dooooahhh” she says.
“dooahhhhhhhhh” he repeats one octave below.
“ti ti ta ma to sooooo.”
“ta toooo ta ma to sooooo.”

They all smile.  Someone shifts slightly on the futon.  A part of her ego breaks off and wanders down the labyrinth alone.
She wonders just where she is and who she’s with.  Who is the man in front of her?  The man making sounds? 
The strangeness of the moment hits her, rustles up against old thought patterns and rubs at convention.  Do adults do this?  Do they sit in a circle, letting the stars and night turn to day? Do they make sounds and sing together, pushing their bodies beyond normal comfort to remain seated in a circle?  Do they breathe loudly, moving their hands wildly as though there were music, though none is playing?

“MUUahhhhh, sahhhh, tiiiii.”
“MUUahhhhh, sahhhh, tiiiiiaaaaaa.”

Her ego searches through the known, all those layers sitting, accumulating since birth, waiting for a moment in the light.  “Known” meaning words, thoughts, convention. 
She looks again at the man, long wisps of white hair shine in the candlelight. 
This is not what adults do, though they could all be considered adults with driver’s licenses, bills, kids, cars, jobs- and yet they are not.

In another space she watches two young boys, both just a few feet off the ground.  She is supposed to be the adult there.  She feeds them noodles and bananas and makes sure they are warm and dry.  She comforts them after a fall and tucks them into bed with a lullaby.
And yet, she does not only do what the other adults do. Before bed she sits them next to her by the computer, she practices her singing while they watch and sometimes follow along, clapping as they sing along.  She imitates them in the hallway with her body, stomping her foot when they do, she jumps when they do, yells into the air when they do- they notice what she does and laugh- delighting in the exchange.
But that is not what adults do.  Not the adults they know.  She is their Other. She is like the graying man, a living signifier for another path.