Questions For A Sunday Afternoon

There is a simple choice
one of gray, with fingers of red and black.

There is a simple choice
which I ponder, which I let roll over my tongue like goo and
the delicate noise of percussive vocalization.

There is a simple choice,
but it is no choice
simply because I cannot understand the alternatives
not with the parts of me that wander out windows
and stare at the bright lights of coming trains.

What can a choice be
when I do not see it laid before me
on a platter of shiny silver edged in delicate floral patterns?

Here there are vultures.
Here there are laws where the civilized go to worship
where the chant echoes hollow on stone walls
where books are torn and stomped under an army of bare feet outlined in black ash.

Worship comes in all forms
All contortions.
I have thought it is for the faint of thought
for the weak of body
for the stubborn of mind.
I am no longer sure of it
as I sit on the edge of a plump bed,
words dripping off the edge of my tongue,
the sticky semen of civilization.

Thought is not without consequence.
This we have known for far too long.
There are places with cages,
rooms without windows and touch,
procedures with complicated names
that kill the part of flesh still seeking
the colored fractals of knowledge.

There are the rooms in which I have hidden.
Rivers crossed which cannot be undone.
I have made the choice,
There is only one.

Stars are out there
deep in the black of beyond,
I can feel them through the walls,
can sense their death long before I came to be here.
The moon pushes parts of me onward,
how can I say no?
Such a pretty light cannot be ignored,
not by one as romantic as I.
I will follow the waves,
waters need no words,
each crash is a sentence,
a communication beyond symbols and fixed meaning.
It is sometimes sex,
a thunderous pounding.
It is sometimes red
And soft like petals.
Sometimes roaring or delicate in its nuanced fragrance.
We can never tell,
and I do not try and understand.

Can it happen here?
In this place
under this lamp
in
this
book

In this collection of clutter and mass breathing?

For now, the questions await unanswered, wavering in the darkness like flags forgotten.
What can words communicate more than a slippery tongue?
I will take my chances on the pile of stones.

I have arrived at the place for mindless wandering,
I have come often.
Naked, alone, scared beyond comprehension.
I return.

There is but one simple choice,
though I laugh, sitting here on this plump end of a bed.
Laugh, knowing it is not without its temptations.

This is for all of the moons that have passed
in this country of falsities,
of missed turns and rounded corners
the devil hides among the faithful
the heathens rarely bury their young.

If It Feels Wrong

The night was cold.  The moment she stepped from the crowded dance floor and walked down the carpeted hall of dark and worn maroon carpet, the moist chill from outside hit her square in the face. The winter cold slithered quickly down her neck and spiraled counterclockwise around her unbound nipples and then traveled further, circling her hips and thighs covered only in pink and black stockings. 
She stepped into the white neon light of the women’s bathroom and was met by an open window, the night air smiling hello as she closed to door to the stall. Separated only by a metal barrier, she could hear the woman next to her on the phone- her voice was patient, slow, as she tried to explain driving directions to someone on the other end.
“You drive east on Harrison, you’ll see a light ahead of you as you approach Whole Foods. Right before the light there is a driveway on your left.  It’s a one-way driveway, but that’s ok, turn into it anyway.”
There was a pause as she listened.
“Yeah, turn into the one-way driveway.  It will feel wrong, but just do it, it’s ok. You just turn into it and continue on and turn left as soon as you can. I am just going to say goodbye to a few people and I will meet you out there. Just make sure to turn into the one-way driveway. It will feel wrong. If it feels wrong, then you are going the right way.”
The woman was silent again as she listened to the voice on the other end. Then she said goodbye, flushed the toilet and left. 
The words rung clear and true against the white walls and fluorescent lights of the bathroom. The night air rang and cried out. 
If it feels wrong, you’re going the right way. Mechanical feels right, something so smooth, without friction, without the uncomfortable anxiety pounding against muscle and bone and the very rules taught since birth.
Try walking uphill as the crowd goes down.  Try swimming against the current.  Try going against every institution perpetuated by family and state, it will feel wrong. 
It was late, well past midnight. As waves of weariness and sleep started to massage her eyes and shoulders she smiled, knowing for the moment that she was going against the signs.

Christmas Transgression

For several years I walked past the little tabletop rosemary trees at Trader Joe's. I drove past the Christmas tree lots donned with white lights and rows of fragrant fir and each time I thought of getting a small tree for my room. 
For years, every December I would think of buying a living tree from some nursery, or just a tinny-tiny little one that could fit on my kitchen table.  I remembered the History Channel special that described the winter tree as a pagan ritual, but I also remembered my mother’s threat to me and my sister:
“I hope you know that when I die I’ll be looking down at you from heaven and if you ever have a Christmas tree, I’ll be very disappointed.” 
My sister was so small standing behind me. We seemed, the three of us, illuminated by a bright stage lamp used in theater productions.
And each time I thought of getting a tree, as I drove past the lots, I would caution myself. After all, did I really need to spend $20 on a tree?

Today I walked into the lot. Something had come over me, some type of determination that could not be swayed by price, or dire warnings, or the guilt of a thousand generations. 
The small lot was rich with the sweet-sour smell of northern fir.  Children ran between the rows of towering trees and young couples holding each other close for warmth stood by while their chosen tree was assembled with base and stand. 
Looking around I knew that these were common memories for them all- people who had picked and decorated their trees every year, memories that began before they could form words. For the children, they would perpetuate the tradition. One day these children would bring their own children to these lots, and they would watch as they ran and played and hid behind the cut, fragrant giants. 
I stood virgin to them all, wondering if they could perhaps sense my alien nature, my shinning brightness that had no precedent.

A big black man with an African accent stood beside me as I pointed to the two foot tree. 
“I’ll take that one.” 
The narrow trunk ended at a wooden “x” which was nailed into the bottom, allowing the tree to stand upright. 
“So I just put this whole thing in a bowl of water?’
He looked at me with a perplexed look.  “How are you going to do that?”
I imagined a very large bowl but was unable to bring it out into the open. 
“I don’t know,” I said smiling a little nervously, “I’ve never done this before.”
“You never had a Christmas tree before?”
“No,” I said smiling, shaking my head.
“I don believe it.  You need a bowl,” he said authoritatively.
He took the tree from my hands and used a hammer to knock off the wooden cross it stood on, then attached a plastic bowl and another wooden “x” below it held together by a single nail.

As I walked out of the lot holding the tree in front of me like a giant gift finally attained, a wide, somewhat guilty smile on my face, a feeling of happiness and a rush of energy overtook me.
I felt as if people could tell. Did they see the obvious clash of symbols with my Semitic nose?  I was not supposed to be holding one of these.  No matter how much Brandon Tulley tried to persuade our Hebrew school teacher twenty-five years ago, there was no such thing as a Hanukkah bush.  I could hear my mother’s warning through the day: "not even dead."

I spent the next few days decorating the tree with small shells and pearls and beads from my collection.  A ribbon of bright green sequins wrapped around its trunk.  This was the tree I was not born to have, yet it was here, atop my small fridge.

The Unreasonable

The heart moves like a winged bird- white fluff that dances on the water of the lake.  A smooth wind takes it, transforming it into the magic of light and moistened clouds ready to spurt their seed. 
There is a man in the clouds, tall and dark and outlined in the golden rays of the sun nearing dusk. A bright burst moves across the sky, fervent in its need to explode outward.
End and beginning are the same. It goes without thought, without any implied intent. It is movement without rationality. Words without meaning. 
Their beauty is easy to read, the light easy to spot and wish upon, but there is no reason. No man in the clouds that makes the stars twinkle. 
The sand is a bad place for a head- take it out and behold the blackness of space, the limitless that cannot be understood. 
It is not for you to comprehend, it may not be for you to know. 
Shopping carts and diapers, packed stadiums of hungry onlookers, waiting for a preacher to deliver the message of god.  We are a pack of wolves and the body wants the taste of flesh. 
Each prayer is an invitation to death, open the book and begin to sing. 
What is it that you desire? Maybe the clouds will give it to you, maybe the idol of stone will speak, maybe the invisible which cannot be proven by any measure will dance. 
Is the stain on the tortilla enough?  The bush that burns?  The fluttering heart that can only be described as a whisper? 
Sit in the temples, rise and fall at the command of the man dressed in white. Do it because you are told, do it for the children.  Do it because everyone else does. 
They will mark your house with stones, the windows will be broken, the lawn dug for your grave.  There is no choice here, not in this country of laws, not in these places of worship. 
Thought is for the heathens, questions are for the devil. 
There is only one path and it has already been decided- not by you, but the people before you.  The way is cleared, swept by slaves and those already condemned to death, they wait in cages until the flames rise with the call of the chosen. 
Your dress will be torn when we arrive, your lips will be chapped, you will be thirsty, prepare for the voyage and bring the book.

Judgement

They stand with their arms open, their bodies springing from freshly unearthed graves. At their feet is the earth, once their womb, but something has changed. They are dirty with soot and trails of fallen dew. They stand, the small group of men and women; beside them, three young children. All are pale, as though their time in the ground had been long, so long without sun and air. Now they stand, open, their chests exposed to the sky, their arms open as much as their bodies will allow.

They welcome it. “Judge me,” they say with their hands.

“Judge me,” they call to the heavens, their heads bent back, letting the Real wash over them.

Rolling clouds bubble overhead. The grass beside the open graves quivers.

And what is Judgement? That look, a bit of opinion as I shower you with a stare.
What is Judgement? That bit of presumed knowledge of morality in the symbolic order?
To throw words upon your shrouded body, covering you with a set of expectations I have known almost since birth.

I look at them and see the world through the narrow lens I have chosen to understand it. I watch everything through this porthole. Afloat on a sea of dark mystery, I watch it, a tiny point without reference.

“Bad people are people who do bad things.” I look at that tiny pale body sitting in the car next to me. A little boy so convinced of himself. He is the eye of judgement, a tiny being, clueless, yet so sure of his place.

“Judge me,” the white bodies call.

The angel comes, bringing with it the Real. It is death. The void has no symbolic order, for it is nothing. It is without words, without definable shapes and morality. Step into it like a bath, for the real has come. Open you arms if you can, throw your head back and relish the ecstasy of a new set of eyes. They are doorways, not merely windows. Step up, step inside.

Though their eyes are closed, they see the angel and his red cross. North, south, east, west. The sound comes from the horn at his lips. And it is music, shape without context. Sound without attachment. It has all fallen like a cleansing rain and they welcome him, opening their bodies to a new type of noise.

How many do I judge? I see all of them through the lens of my language. I either assume an understanding, or cross their names from my book, calling them evil and rich. They find a home within the boxes of my aesthetic or I call them ugly and laugh at their pants. I laugh with them if we share the same language, or I squint my eyes and stare, waiting for the sentence to end.

Judgement comes with my language and I throw it out like dice on a filthy street.

Their bodies rise from the earth, covered in soil.
“Judge me,” they say.
No words are necessary. They bask in the void, holding themselves open for a new page to turn.

The Cord

The typewriter clicked under his quick-moving fingers. Chik-chik-chik…the pace hardly ever stopped. Light would be streaming in from the window and typed pages would form a stack next to the typewriter. He would lose the sun and then be accompanied by a few of the strongest stars, and the manuscript grew taller and taller. He was unaffected by the hours of man, by the hands of the clock or the tilt of the earth. The sounds of the neighborhood did not disturb him, nor the snoring of his neighbor, Levi, that he could hear through the wall.
He would only break the rhythm of the writing when his body required tending, or when Mrs. Johnson from upstairs would come over to prepare him some lunch. She told him she could not stand to know a man was not eating and wasting away, so she made it her business to prepare him simple meals three times a day. Besides those necessary interruptions and an occasional walk to the living room window, his place was at the desk, before the typewriter and the clean white pages that he would fill with other worlds.
He preferred living in those other places, the realities he created. They were so much more interesting than the city that was just outside his 16th floor window. In his mind, there were no rules, no conventions, no limits as to what could happen. It was total freedom, and he dove into it everyday, as if finally, he was home.
The typewriter clicked.
“…Cintra held onto the helm. She could see the star system fast approaching. It was a cluster of white lights that sparkled brighter than anything she had ever seen. Moving in and out of the clusters were other space craft, smaller than the one she now maneuvered, smaller and more round, like shooting spheres that had the light-willed movement of bubbles. She was not quite sure which direction to turn. Would the smaller ship carrying her crew and supplies follow her into the cluster of light? Perhaps she should circumvent the stars and arc over them…She heard the phone next to her ring. She picked up the receiver, pulling the cord as far as it would go so she could walk towards the wide glass that was the front windshield of the spacecraft. Before waiting for a voice, she said, ‘Let’s go for it Kurt. Let’s see what lives out here.’ ‘OK Captain.’ She walked towards her seat and hung up the phone, resting it gently in its plastic cradle. She got into the chair and gripped the steering device.”
He pushed hard on the key for “period.” He did it more sharply, more exaggerated than the rest of the paragraph. This was getting good. He nodded to himself, enjoying where the story was taking him. He nodded softly, over and over, a small trance coming over him.
It was how he rested. Images of space craft took the place of words. He saw the dark sky of space, imagined what it would be like to approach a thick cluster of stars that seemed to vibrate a thousand times greater than the most populated city. He let himself feel the tension of the space travelers, the anticipation, the curiosity building as they quickly approached the lights.
His body jerked slightly as he heard the rattle of a key in the door. Without even looking up, he could see the round shape of Mrs. Johnson emerging through the doorway, her thick arm pulling the key from the metal hole. Her pudgy pink hand closed the door, locking the deadbolt, she took just a few steps to the small kitchen left of the door, then reached for the apron she left on a single metal hook. He could hear her humming.
He pulled the paper out of the typewriter, tugging gently on it from both corners so as not to bend it. He re-read the paragraph and found it pleasing, though he thought there would be more details he could add later. He liked the world. He read it again, still missing the one thing that would act like a siren to a reader far in the future.
The cord, the phone. In a world of easy space travel, he had inserted an object bound by the world around him. An object he knew, a thing he recognized. His publisher would glaze over it too, both unable to recognize an object from his unconscious daily assumptions.
He walked over to the window, looking out at the constant traffic of a New York street, where cars remained long and bound by the laws of physics. Technology moved so fast, soon engineers would realize that small, round, bubble cars made more sense. He heard the telephone ring and walked to the small wooden end table. He picked up the receiver, trying to untangle the gray cord as he brought the plastic piece to his ear.

A Place in The Symbolic Order

She read the email on her small laptop with a slight sense of curiosity. It was a small update from her mom.
“Erin’s doing fine, she lives in Massachusetts, Tess lives in Germany with her boyfriend and she teaches English, Shelly lives in London.”
She nodded to herself. They were all short one-liners about friends she had lost contact with years before, but she felt satisfied and reasonably caught up. Then her brain did a little twist and she smiled when she realized she didn’t know anything. She had no idea what Tess saw every morning on her way to work or what her boyfriend looked like or how she felt close to midnight when she looked out a window. She knew nothing about her old friends, just a few simple words. Germany, boyfriend, teaching. Three simple words that helped her place Tess within the world. She had never even been to Germany, but she imagined Tess walking on a cobblestone street eating a sausage. It was her own imagination that made her feel like she knew how Tess was doing. Those three words gave her images, they gave her pictures and implications that had nothing to do with the Real, or with what was really true, but the three simple words satisfied her curiosity for a moment. Now she knew.

She wondered what her own mother had said about her. Did she make up a few lies or did she simply give them her location on the planet and another word about her job. They probably nodded and were satisfied, just as uncurious about the details as she had been. They would be able to imagine her somewhere within San Francisco and that would be enough. Everyone would nod while taking another bite of dinner, imagining her somewhere next to a red Golden Gate...yes, that was San Francisco She was placed, comfortable within the symbolic order. They would have no idea that she lived in a large studio with a backyard full of trees and flowering shrubs. They would not know that she woke up every Sunday morning and sold bread at the farmer’s market and felt tired afterwards and then would go home and start working and soon someone with a friendly voice would call her and she would smile and feel her chest lift and lift and a smile within her would burst and appear on her lips. They would know none of that, just as she knew nothing about them. She lived in San Francisco. Erin lived in Massachusetts. That was enough to know.

Because a simple word will easily place us within the symbolic order, what we do can easily be explained with a sentence.
“I’m a saleswoman…”
“I’m a musician…”
“I’m writing a story….”
“I live in London…”
You will see a head nod, the chin rising up and down slowly, yes… it is understood. They can picture someone behind a counter and a cash register. They can picture someone with a guitar and hear some music in their head, they can picture a book and a pen…it is all easily understood, you are now known. There will be no further questions, you have been placed within the symbolic order.

Because it can all be so easily explained, we can hide what we do. Never mind that the dark mystery envelops you in a crystal sheath and takes you beyond the realm of words, somewhere that cannot be explained. It is not for the world to know.
People are satisfied with a one-liner. Your emotions, the way the light fades slowly out the bedroom window and makes you feel like the twilight holds every secret in the world, it cannot be explained with a word and it can never be known. They think they know you with a word, let them. The things which cannot be explained with words will always remain invisible. If it cannot be explained, it will not be seen.
We can hide what we need from the world even when we live among the crowds in the city. We can even show ourselves to them, we can show our books and art, and as long as there is a word to describe it (colors on a piece of paper is called “art”) then they will feel like they understand. If what is true is spoken, then it will be changed. It cannot be otherwise.

A woman is working undercover for the CIA. She pretends to be the girlfriend of a gangster and follows him around the world, reporting his whereabouts whenever she can to the authorities. In her role as the gangster’s girlfriend, she pretends to be sexually interested in another man in order to lure him into her bedroom to gain his trust. It will be his trust in her which makes him go to a secluded field and wait for a man which will never show up, which is what the gangsters want. But after sleeping with him, she develops true feelings for him. What she had once pretended, what had once been a cloud of dust and lies has become real.

A young boy wants to be a doctor. He sees his father dressed in a white lab coat, grabbing a thermos cup of coffee before heading out the front door to perform a few surgeries, and that is what he envisions for himself. He wants to be in that lab coat, kissing his wife goodbye before he goes off to save a couple of lives. The boy spends his evenings studying a mountain of books and because of his intense effort, he gets into college and then becomes an intern in a hospital a few miles from a choppy ocean. After a few years of intense memorization and fourteen hour days and many tests, his internship is complete and he is now a doctor. He now wears a spotless lab coat and walks on the shiny linoleum floors with shined shoes. Patients call him “doctor” and he interacts with them using a tone of authority. As a sign if status, he buys an expensive watch, which is what every doctor on his ward wears.
The only thing Real is the watch. It can be seen and felt. The symbolic order creates the “doctor.” There are extensive ideas of what doctors should do and wear. How they should act, what they should drive. None of these are inherently real. These things do not make a doctor, they do not determine if someone has the know how to set bones or perform surgery. A lab coat does not make a doctor, but within the symbolic order, it does. The role of doctor is adopted and acted out.

In the symbolic order, little girls are given dolls and tea sets and pink clothes. The babies do not come out of the womb asking for these particular things, but they are given them by adults because within the symbolic order, that is what girls play with, that is what they like. Little boys like sports because they are told they do. They prefer blue because they are given clothes in that particular color. Eventually, after enough time, little boys do actually like basketball and little girls really do like to play with their dolls. What was not real to begin with has become real. The girl is placed in the symbolic order as a girl, she acts like a girl and is given “girl” things and then, she becomes a girl. Pink clothes are not an inherent part of having a vagina, but within the symbolic order, at least in the United States, it is.

If a little boy is only given pink clothes and tea sets and baby dolls, he will probably grow up liking them and playing with them. It will be all he has ever known. But when he steps into the broader symbolic order, where most boys play with trucks and wear blue, there will be a serious clash. To the boys in his school, he will be seen as “other.” They will not understand why he is not like them, and they will search for a way to explain it and place him within their symbolic order.
Placing someone or something within the symbolic order is a quest for Order. To make sense of chaos. The boy who likes pink because he was given pink (just like the other boys like blue because they were given blue) will be called gay or sissy or whatever word can be used to place him in the symbolic order. It will be the word used to understand him. One word will be enough to provide the explanation.

Our purpose is to be awake within the symbolic order. It existed long before us, it will continue after the last breath of our body. Our purpose is to be free to fit in or not. Our purpose is to be awake enough to have a choice. The left hand path is the path of breaking the rules of the symbolic order.
The symbolic order has been given to us, it has been placed on us since birth. It was imposed upon us by parents and teachers, just as it was imposed upon them as infants. No one chose it, we stepped into the role that was placed before us and pretended to “be” until we “became.” The left hand path breaks the rules of the symbolic order. That is one of the choice at our disposal. We can also choose to fit into the symbolic order without becoming identified with it.

A little boy is dressed in a fancy suit every Sunday and brought to a small church with a white steeple. He copies what his parents do. He kneels and clasps his hands in front of his heart, he bends his head forward slightly and closes his eyes. He asks for things he wants while his eyes are closed and he imagines something, somewhere, fulfilling his wishes. Soon, after enough imitation, the boy comes to church thinking that he has made the decision, he has chosen this path for himself. He is now a full grown believer. He is too identified to see that the people around him on the wooden pews have all been taught this just like he was. They simply imitated the others around them, just like monkeys learn to ride bicycles and wash their socks or bang shellfish until the shell cracks.
We do as we were shown and religion is no exception. Our choice can be to come into the small church, to feel the pressure of the floor as we kneel, to drink in the scent of the candles, to close our eyes and act out the part without becoming identified, without being absorbed into the act, without letting the imposed symbolic determine the real.

In Bondage

And yet, in another form it dwells. There are so many rocks on the shore, all from the same massive cliffs. It is gray and hard with some dark caves that hide the whispers. And he stands at the podium, a well dressed man. Lights all around. Reporters and cameras. The talk, the strings of words and punctuation that wrap around and form a concept. The pack of brilliant speech writers who so blindly follow a man. Or they follow the money, or the ideology, or the power. Those sentences, they convince the majority of young boys to pick up a pen, then hold a gun. Then run and follow and sleep and yell and smoke. And maybe they’ll come back. Maybe they won’t. Maybe just a part of them will make it back, just a small part of their brain or body. They are so young, so eager to make their claim on the world. So eager for adventure, so eager to die, to spill over and into the unknown that waits with white and yellow and red explosions. But they are slaves to the machine of bondage and slaves to the force of war and corporate power. They have been convinced. With simple words, simple phrases that reach out to them with purple tentacles that clasp onto the things they know as ideals. Those words attach themselves, they bite with venom and they stay, they linger and they pull the strings. These are the boys that will give their lives. Give their lives for a carefully devised speech, for a carefully devised strategy that requires force and brute strength. What this country wants requires taking. They need guns, steel, ammo. They must be a sacrifice, and there is a willing martyr. An army in fatigues will lay down and die so that American corporations can gain access to new markets. They will die so that America can gain more power. They will die all so that a very few, so very few, can control more. And they are the pawns, the fatigues in bondage. The young eager men who moved without choice, without freedom. They give their breath for a machine that knows no limits, love, reason. They sit and listen and march. They move in tandem with a larger force. Men behind closed doors design their fate. It was never for freedom, never for democracy. Those words are meaningless, meaningless for the men in the suites that sit behind locked doors, men who are always safe. It is others that give their lives for their simulated ideals, others that die for an idea of something, perhaps never really knowing what it is. They are in bondage. Boys who move for the strength of American power. The ones who thought, perhaps ever so faintly, that they were doing something great. But they were the bodies. Simply bodies. Bodies moving for a larger force, a larger cause that knows no human interest. It is the pursuit of power. Always more power. And power, that elusive word that seems to have no real definition. Only the traces of its movement can be seen, like a streaking cloud. Is it tangible? Can it be seen or touched or felt by those who do not have it? America, the great brutalizer. America, the great bully. America, the great weapon maker. They are asked to give their lives, to die for the accumulation of another man’s power. And they say yes, as they have nothing else left to say.

The Time Has Come

The mind is the most underused tool, the thing lost in the bottom of a cluttered drawer. We might hold hammers and pencils and drive small cars on smooth streets, but the organ guiding the movements, instructing the nervous system, sending the signals, is just another bit of trash on an already crumpled body. Locked in a skull is the open receptacle, filled since birth with words, concepts, mores, judgement, experience, desire and complete identification. Thoughts are not our own. They come from carefully constructed wants that have been created in skyscrapers, pushed by clever campaigns. We carry the thoughts of parents, grandparents, teachers, priests, friends, TV characters, imaginary situations and claim them as our own. The mind believes that it is real… the mind believes this body is its own…complete and right and unique. This mind has twisted and crumbled into itself, believing that it acts on its own thoughts and impulses, but the mind is a slave. A slave to thoughtfully programmed desires, a servant to the machine self, a slave to the belief of “me” and “them.” The coils are passed from one generation to another. Chains pass through rivers, through centuries and cultures. We are slaves with the illusion of power. Empty vessels with the illusion of individuality and choice. These thoughts transcend all matter, they seep into everything until at last, it is time. For very few, it might be time, for the masters control the locks and keys. They have manipulated the politics of society and corrupted the laws and legislated against colored vision. But if it is time, you may shed the brain you know. The bars of skin and heavy gifts of the ancestors may drop just for a little while. The fear of the Other may evaporate like warm rain and you may feel a tug that pulls you closer to the earth. An indescribable sensation may hold you deeper and firmer than you have ever experienced. The candle may flicker long enough for the purest light to burn itself in the dark center of your chest. Step out of reality, step beyond the thick black lines and into the realm of the Real.
It is time.
It is time to understand that there is much more than you have ever seen, much more than you have ever understood, much more than you have ever been taught.
It is time.
The mirror stands waiting.

Proper Place

This is where she learned to hide fairies under her pillow, at least for a little while. These are the piles of bricks that held a new knowledge, rather, a new way to see the world stripped of its color and magic, replaced by distrust and competition and the overarching sentiment of individuality. These are the fumes of antiseptic halls, where creativity is buried beneath layers of fuzzy facts. These are the mandatory rooms of societal instruction. Clear. Purposeful. Unyielding in dominance. The rainbow end here. The leprechauns are bludgeoned by bureaucrats and textbooks of misinformation. Lies they told her. Lies and more lies. Taught by those who lacked the curiosity to move beyond the glass doors. White men with their tests and bubbles. The deadening lines of little desks. Hard plastic chairs.
The windows call her attention. She watches the little songbirds that find freedom on the branches of a maple tree. The drawings are in her lunchbox. The dreams, stashed in her pockets, but it will not go on much longer. She is too young, too supple. This is the base of an army, the training ground of a square group that will work in offices, that will obey traffic lights, that will stay within the thick black lines of the coloring book.
“Here, you will learn to hold a pencil. You will learn to read. You will learn that Christopher Columbus discovered America. You will learn that this country is the greatest country on earth.”
Can this be called learning? Is this not simply the washing of a belief onto the putty minds of the young? This is indoctrination. This is training. These are the soon-to-be bureaucrats, the soccer moms, the office workers, the bulk of the voting public, the sleeping machines consumed with the illusion of choice and individuality. They will be the little dominated pegs in a chaotic world that is handed to them through a serialized tube of color and lights and fast-changing images.
This is a world they do not know, cannot understand, yet they will proclaim truth with certainty. This is the training ground for the ignorant army of America, for any country that requires servants, subjects, and rulers.
They take her rainbows and they instill a new self-regulating machine. This is the institution in its most gray form. Lifeless, a machinery that trains the next generation to replace the dead with stunning accuracy. These are the machines of tomorrow. With little pig-tails and white dresses and ruffled socks. These are the square-thinking machines of tomorrow, the pegs that will do as told. They will think as instructed by code words and marketing executives. They will move on cue, masses of them will bow when told, shout when the lights blink. This place is the training ground for the white-washed army. This place is the final doorway into the world of the symbol. This is the place where the locks are set in place, never to be released again until the moment of death.

The Discovery Of Habit

The house is shining with the bright light of a new day. The cream colored curtains float like sails beneath the golden light of the incoming sun. The house is ringing in its coldness. The thick Persian rugs do little to deflect the chill of polished wooden floors and pale-green walls. Two rooms away, a TV is on and a little Korean boy sits on an overstuffed couch, absorbing the sounds of barnyard cartoon characters while he slowly eats his breakfast of fried rice and a single peeled banana. Two chambers away, past the kitchen, through the dining room, and beneath the ivory archway into the living room, is where I sit, on a mauve loveseat that’s parallel to the similarly styled couch.
I want to use the word hollow…I see a female standing at the edge of cliff while fluttering bats shake the night through her hair. I feel the coldness of the house, the artificial sounds of the TV…something is strange. It is my perception. It is me standing at the side of the slate rock cliff. It is I looking down at the collection of me that is the bottom. The thing that I fear, the thing that keeps me staring in wide-mouthed awe is the subconscious motivations I have just glimpsed. It is that, pulling back the blankets, opening the eyelids and discovering a naked creature that moves without thought, that moves as though pulled by levers and strings. The moment of discovery is truly shocking, like a zap to the core that laughs in my face as I discover the true intentions behind my own behavior. The behavior I have spent a lifetime justifying, spinning webs and circles around it with my mouth. It’s not that I lied. A lie requires some sort of consciousness. This is beyond a lie. These are the lies that I believe as truth. The things I call ideas, philosophies, thoughts, life choices. These are the things I call “me.” And I both want to laugh and cry as I look into the abyss of my machine and glimpse the habit behind the impulse.

We all sat in an artificially warmed room. From the shifting light of a glowing electronic box, we watched others like us self-destruct. Through this new form of entertainment, through the captured pain of another girl who walked and talked like Jennifer Lopez in a movie wrought with conflicting personalities and alcohol… through this, I saw myself.
“I started cutting myself when I was thirteen,” the girl admitted to the video camera. “That’s why I like tattoos, it’s a way of doing it without anyone knowing.”
There were a couple seconds of silence in the room. The sort of time that stops and quiets even a large TV and two speakers. There was something, something moving, shifting on the currents of artificial warm air, moving through the layers of my body and the soft fabric of the chamber. I felt my body, laying curled up between two pillows. I felt myself still, hardly breathing. A couple minutes before, I had just admitted that I had thought about cutting myself. I remembered laying in bed, in a heap of hysteria five nights ago. I had imagined myself walking to the bathroom and parallel to that vision, I had the thought that perhaps cutting myself would feel good. That night I didn’t get up, I didn’t walk into the bathroom, I drifted to sleep under a cloud of sadness and awoke nine hours later with anxiety ridden dreams grasping at my heels. And as we watched this girl on TV, I remembered that I had thought about it too. I had never done it, but I had thought about it. Now, as she admitted that her tattoos were part of her same habit, I realized that I too had a body covered in blue and green ink.
The show was paused. “Did she just say something about you?” I heard my friend ask. Another second that held still in the well of time.
And then I saw. I could think of at least three tattoos that were spawned from a feeling of anxiety that rattled inside like a soot covered wind I could not shake. There was the time Jay (my old boyfriend) was in jail and I was lonely and scared and felt like the entire world was just too strong and corrupt, it was then that I had the lute-playing mermaid tattooed to my belly. There was the unfinished doodle on my inner left ankle. It was me, that night alone in my apartment, while Jay went out to score some heroin, me that had picked up the tattoo gun on the coffee table and plunged the needle into my white flesh. I picked it up out of terror, terror he would not come back, terror that he would. That dark night, I was overwhelmed with his burden and disease, his recurrent need for money that weighed on my young shoulders. And then there was the word “warrior” on my left thigh, the permanent black letters that appeared only a few hours after discovering that another girl was visiting Jay in jail (at a different time), another layer of his lies revealed. I drove straight to a tattoo shop singing and crying to the lyrics of “I will survive,” or if I didn’t then, then I did many times later. The tattooist had looked up from his hunched position over my leg and asked me “what’s up with this word.” The explanation was crooked and an attempt at ego preservation and a self conscious attempt to hide my own addictive fixation on one diseased person. The man nodded while looking straight through my eyes, sensing the pain that my facial lines and puffy eyes had already outed. He nodded and kept working. And that night, as I walked through Bookshop Santa Cruz with a bandaged leg that stung with every step, I held my head higher and noticed that people seemed to be looking at me differently, as though they could see that the orgasmic pain had lifted a dark cloud. And there were more tattoos…stories and motivations even more murky and submerged in layers of hidden consciousness. I had painted large artistic circles around the reasons for a body covered in mermaids and foliage, explanations to justify the act. But now, I had glimpsed the energetic contortion, the habit and reaction I could no longer hide. And now here it was, here it is, explained in raw simplicity by a brown-skinned girl that still had a mark on her arm and streaks of tears across her cheeks.

The house seems strange around me, but it is me, not the dwelling that reeks of strangeness. This raw truth, this evidence has opened before me like a gutted pig. How strange to be fooled by myself. How strange to talk and ruminate and make complicated explanations for a behavior that goes deeper than skin and deeper than bone and deeper than the existence of this machine. I am ruled by these habits, these things that I cannot even see. The nature of lies goes deep. The nature of self delusion goes deeper. We have pulled a small layer back and looked inside, a small bit of the subconscious is revealed, naked in the light of day. It is shocking to get a glimpse. So shocking to realize the extent of circular lies and grand explanations.

Family

I stood before their open front door, my face illuminated by the porch light. I was staring at the couple with a smile on my face. I was present in the cool night, my attention upon them, nodding at their words, looking into their eyes. They talked of birth order, the predisposition to be either gentle or aggressive was determined by sibling placing. The eldest…the peacemaker. Too much of a generalization to have any meaning. I agreed with them, nodding my head. But then, I broke from them and journeyed inside, wasn’t I the eldest in a family? Yes, my brain confirmed the fact. “The peacemaker” they said, I continued nodding, responding as needed to their words. I am the eldest. But I have caused the most strain, the most worry. I am the lone wolf in a family of strangers. I grew up alone, alienated from each of them. I was the caretaker of the home after school. I was the nurse when bills had to be paid, I was the companion on a street without children. My earliest friends were not made of flesh, invisible to all but me, and then even they left me alone, both of them, Domba and Mitsy…they vanished, even the memory was stolen, taken to the eternal place where little children dream about fairies and tooth collectors that come with twenty dollar bills.
Their theories crumbled in my hands. Its generalizations that smear the colors of the world with a flat paint brush, coloring it all gray. The wet stones are as different as the swirling lines of jasper. Take the cover off your eyes, we are all the same mechanical operations that function out of fear and desire, but within this nest of wires and blinking lights, we can scrounge and find the rainbows sent off by electric fish, alive and glowing with the pulsations of a rhythmic heart.
I hold both extreme points of the spectrum in my hand. I watch them turn like stones. The blend of truth beats against a sky that speaks in the seven languages of light. I stand below the sky, with my mouth open and my tongue pointed up to the fast moving clouds. Grant me the wish, send a single drop of sweet dew, my tongue is waiting, the scepter that awaits its crowning. The clouds open, and inside, waiting, is darkness…waiting like an exposed queen, her legs wide and open, but the portal leads to more nothingness.
Does this painting fit into the small world were the eldest children are kind? Does the open mouth, the wet tongue, does this fit in a world of small controlled families that dine on each other’s failings? It is a feast that is always cold, but they gather just the same.
With set tables of linens and crystal, they gather to eat the tepid turkey and drink from their glass of sadness. My eyes are hollow as I watch the scene, an unwilling participant, but my body is there nonetheless. The con continues, you call me daughter, I call you my chain. The birth portal is closed and sealed. The wet tunnel long ago condemned. The silver cords that bound us were severed decades ago when the hugs stopped and the hair on my legs became an issue and my jiggling breasts caused you to stare in revulsion. The silver cords are not buried somewhere below the surface of earth, they have disappeared from memory, the bond is gone, vaporized like my old invisible friends, thoughts tempted into existence only by the photos that I carry with sadness and wonder.
Who were those people? I recognize the faces, but the moment is buried, far away, in a place where families hold their love like weapons and children sing out of tune while they wait for their secret midnight myths to come true.