Entrance of the Myth

A single cell took what was there, what was let in through the wet portal that led in and out of the world.  And we could not know which was which, what was where, who was what. The world, the very concept implied a particular destination and place we had formed with fixed lines and edges. And here the signifier broke down and assumed its nebulous shape.
The boundaries could be defined by skin, but that was much too simple, too primitive a barrier when we could so easily see the flowing channels of neon green and pink, and then deeper still to the level of molecules and atoms so we could know, for just a moment, so we could see, just for a moment, that the shape and skin and thing itself did not exist, that our perception of it, of phenomena itself, was an illusion to which we all passively subscribed.
As that single cell accepted what was taken, as the message was sent, the myth penetrated that great boundary separating blood from air. It spread quickly, though time no longer seemed to be passing. God was here now, flowing through and around us, sprinkling seeds. And we flowered. I journeyed down the tunnel, petals and petals unfolding before me so that I could reach out and see the lines in their electric state.
Spain and the hot plazas spewing yellow and gold lights, blood red roses and softness, black shiny hair and pale skin and polka dots. Shiny blue cars riding low to the ground, graffiti and rainbow colors on the forgotten cement walls of our urban systems. Dark forests and hairy creeping creatures, dancing, moving, fucking. Deep and dark, raw sex without restraint.
The myth was a secret where we teetered on the edge with neon shapes and candlelight, marking the boundaries where the gods came and entered.

The World

The world is not infinite.  And that is what I have been saying, but you never listen.  
The clouds stomp their feet in prayer and I hold my hands up to them so I can taste those sweet drops of milk.  It was like the poem I once read, “her milk created the stars.” The drawing it once inspired.  A pink and white breast against a sky of black, a waterfall of white and a sprinkling of twinkling lights. Open up your arms so you may taste the sweet drops of life. 
The clouds are there, ready to give and yet we long for the sun, to feel the warmth and hide from the gray rain clouds.  We resort to what feels good rather than what is helpful, what will keep these plants alive, what will finally help me to push open the door.  We need the rain they shout!  Those little tender sprouts looking up, drying to ash under the blanket of blue. Heat drying the land, turning my skin into parchment. But it feels good doesn’t it?
I let that skin go as I crawl over the rocks, I turn red and then black, as devilish as they fear, as conniving as the books and old tales warned. I have a tail and it will sting.  It will cover you with bruises and I hope that we do meet, for I need exercise. I crawl, as evil as the men saw, turning from red and blue into clear water, covering the land that refuses to let me go. I will not die. 
The world is not infinite, and yet the numbers do not lie.  There are a billion micro spaces and I have known almost all. Each story is another chapter, each life another variation of the same old tale. The castles and the caves, the donkeys and their pet mice.
I have known almost all, and still, I am surprised by their little changes. The red flower instead of the blue.  The upturned smile instead of the light as I remember, catching her eyes in a moment of thought. Let the thoughts flow out, but stay here, not in the tiny worlds of the market and their petty transactions, let it stay here, on this world. 
The micro state of soothing electronic pulses playing a few feet from my head, where the fan whirls continuously, a drone among drones. The plush bed covered in Nordic flannel sheets of red and white, somehow making me feel warm by design, the veined fingers moving fast.
The world. Will I one day know its entirety? How many micro states are there?  How many people could be in this room right now with me? 
Johnny on the desk, Johnny rubbing my feet, Johnny slapping my precious cheek. The tear can fall by the window, on the sheet and quickly vanish, over my arm leaving a trail of salt.  I can see each one and am gladdened by their multitude. 
Too soon, this could end. But this will all be back.  It will come again slightly different than before.  More complex in shape. Unknowable.

*   *   *

It escapes from you.  Or you escape it.  For you hide your eyes and go under the covers like a young girl hiding from a dream. 
She saw those woods, the coming light of day her only reassurance. But soon it turned to night again and she was scared of the dark branches and the thick trunks and the man who walked up ahead telling stories that terrified her flesh and made her think of death and the iron smell of fear. 
Do you hide like that, from the dreams of this world; or does it escape you- running. Does it dance in the corners waiting for a moment of attention, one that almost never comes? How can little girls hopped up on sugar and chocolate cupcakes look into the corners of the room, where the sparking light takes on a multitude of colors, where chairs become vehicles of transportation, not just a resting point for a fat ass.  Who escapes whom?

*   *   *

It is a place that sinks into the ground by the weight, the world on our rounded shoulders. I try to wash it down the drain at night. 
I try and let those hands and the dollar bills and the forced laughter go washing down the sides of my wide hips and pass the obstacle of the clogged drain and down into the pipes, flowing to the ocean of salt and silt and all those other nasty things we have tried to bury and hide.
It goes to a land of layered memories and all we need to do is watch the tide come in and look out for its hands. It is never fully buried.

In the middle of the world lies the dusty valley of wheat, rags, boots, brown skin, red faces and dirty blue trucks. A little graffiti done in a rough style, like the young boys still did not know how to hold the canisters the right way, like they had yet to lose that feeling of fear that the cops would show up at any moment-  we all know the older boys would go down swinging, even longed for those red and blue lights to turn ‘round the corner, to catch them with blackened fingers and bandanas over their mouths. 
And though I imagine you, dust still finds its way into my mouth. The town is covered in it and I choke slightly as the scene passes. 
Everything is yellow and tan- a lone young woman sits on a fallen rock by the only mini-mart for hundreds of flat miles.  She’s wearing a long dress held up by worn spaghetti straps- her shoulders covered in freckles and dust. My tires kick up dingy clouds as I make a wide left turn and pull into the gas station- a bell rings and she turns her head towards me. 
Did I come for the rocks and sausage?  Does she wait for the one truck that will come and take her away?  Or is she a fixture in this town, like a lamppost or a flag sticking out of the eaves from an old house.  Eternity in a body by the side of the road.

*   *   *

Forests, rivers, tears and glimpses of laughter, overheard from a distance.   This is what I see in her eyes.  They are blue, I can tell from here.  Shaded by the light green awning at the gas station- the girl continues to look at me and I at her.
Soon I will go on and she will stay, warmed and browned by the sun. We will trade places for a moment and I will sit on that rock, letting the world pass by on the two-lane highway not five steps from where I sit.
The days pass slow, the afternoon marked by birds overhead, the cars that I count, the colors that add a moment of excitement to the yellow and tan landscape.  The hills behind me whisper to the sun, they match, the colors blending and punctuated only by the sky.
She goes on, taking my car, using the wheels, moving on. The world is shaped like a tilted rectangle if you watch it from above where there is safety.  Here there is none. 
A part of me longs for what I left, she flies like a bird in a windstorm. There is no end.

Him And Dogs Like Him

Supreme transit, it’s the nearly invisible vehicle in which opposing thoughts share the same metal lines, they move on a whim, crisscrossing the country, converging in neural networks with hyperbolic speed. In white and black robes, with little red books tinged with gold leafing and yard sticks that poke out from their underwear, they move through time, piggy-backing on waves of political enthusiasm and newly-sprung militia groups.

It was happening now. He could smell it in the air. They whispered ‘constitution’ under their breath, the letters reeking of coffee as they spat out the word with religious zeal. They coughed up those letters, spilling the 2nd as if it was word inherited directly from an ancient bearded god.
Francisco was covered in the pulsing blue light of the nightly news, he watched every station, clicking through them in random order until he fell asleep just after10. As he fell into dreams that bulged in their shape and color, he wondered why those men in the news always waved the 2nd Amendment around like a flag.
What about him?
He saw those same people aiming, shooting, trying to take down his children’s right to citizenship, his grandmother’s right to drive to the mercado. They pulled the trigger, firing at sympathetic senators and congressmen, the black suits had jumped ship, leaving him and his family in the sun.

They all sweated, not just from the heat that had bleached even the heartiest saguaro cactus, but fear also dripped down their cheeks, glistening beads of worry dropped off their cracked chin.
Another gun went off, clack! in the night.
Everyone here owned a gun, all the white men that lived in the low foothills and the ranchers that wore red white and blue flag shirts. Yesterday he found his own American flag vandalized, the one that sat beside his Mexican flag.
No they didn’t sit, they waved in the breeze that seemed to come from the lowlands of hell. Pure heat to dry the beads of fear dripping down grandmother’s chin.
The dog lay on the ceramic tiles of the kitchen all day long, living in blissful agony, giving no thoughts to rights and amendments and the news stations. A dog was a dog was a dog. Mexican, American, Indian, dogs responded no matter what color skin delivered a bowl of water and a soft caress.
A dog was a dog was a dog. That’s how they thought of him, his family, the people with skin that looked like his.
A dog was a dog. Those men in their white shirts with guns at their waist, they thought all the browns were the same – Mexicans- a word that described fear instead of a country. A word that was just as ugly as the coffee-scented breath of its speaker.
No, they had come from farms in the valleys, from cities with museums and towns without plumbing, from mountains that touched snow and from the crashing Atlantic ocean. From the central umbilical cord of two continents and the southern hemisphere, from the highlands and the valleys and the places in between where women wore embroidered blouses and woolen skirts and carried babies and chickens alike. They were not the same, but they were linked by one essential quality in the eyes of those men with guns.

He saw the advertisements every night. He saw the guns in their holsters, the posters that could intimidate even the most hardened politician.
The men with the guns knew where to aim. The targets were set, they took down what every man in a suit wants most, pointed the barrel right at the pounding heart of power and squinted an eye. They aimed at those politicians sitting pretty on those shiny leather office chairs on perfectly clean plush carpet. They aimed, and- clack!
There were not enough shelters to hide the tears. The rivers flowed from Fernando, out past concrete dividers. When the insults came, causing the floods to mount, he lost it all, all the salt and all the water. It flowed from him a storm that dried on bleached sand, drying instantly in the land without rain.

He saw their guns, felt them pointed at him, at his family, at people with his same skin. Though nothing had really changed, he had become the villain. The constitution to which they always pointed, that 2nd point that they waved higher than flags, that constitution didn’t apply to him, not to him and the dogs like him.
Their policy was to shoot first. The targets were set, not one, or two, but the millions like him. How they loved their bullets, how they hated his music and food, the smell of his clean clothes, his daughter in pretty pink dresses, his tacos and beans, his lawnmower and round sweet wife, his son in school, his language and the rolling r’s of his tongue. How they hated him and his dogs, him and his enthusiastic use of English and the small home he painted every five years.

Them and those guns, them and the rights that they asserted. Them and those rights that they would deny him, the ones they would deny his children if they could. That Second Amendment they held tight to their heart, those words that they would spit forth, smelling like coffee and disfigured prostitutes, they shaped the world as they would like to imagine it, saw their chosen right as immovable while others were flawed. If his rights were not written in stone, then why did they scream for their guns?

Why did the men of highest power remain so quiet? Gently stroking their hands, rubbing their toes together, waiting to see what the tide of people would endorse before they walked to the microphone and made a statement.
They were always so scared to have an opinion. Only the men with those guns were solid in their statements, they were the ones that never changed, maybe they were getting harder, turning to stone, they were certainly never afraid to scream, their guns talked for them, clack!
Hitting his neighbor in the chest, taking away the breath of that young girl on the border, taking her father too. Their guns talked and not only did they have the right to have them, they thought they had the right to use them, declaring people like him the enemy. Turning his mother, that thick tree that bore a dozen lives, turning her into a villain, into a criminal deserving of a bullet. His children, turning them into aliens with only one signature.

He looked around with tear-stained eyes, unsure when it would stop, maybe now that the devil had sprouted naked from the ground. He wondered if it was ever gone, or had that dusting of sulfur merely hidden in the shadows, waiting for the perfect moment to come out the red door and find them.

He was now a criminal and the ones with the guns were free. The ones that murdered walked around and waved their striped flags and they would rest on the constitution like it was made for them alone, forgetting, perhaps never knowing, that this actually used to be his land, his and the dogs like him.
They didn’t knock on the door, they came in the night, that huge group with their guns and disease, their sickness that would spread, killing their enemy with only a coffee-scented breath discharged in their direction.

The movie had not changed, not a bit of dialogue had been altered. The policy, the billboards, the country and its actors. They smiled on those shiny posters, looking out at them, at that dried land and the browns and whites that dotted the landscape, those with power and bullets, those that lived like dogs under the sun, crying salty tears that ran down grandmother’s face, tasting not of salt, but of pepper.