Trace The Lines

I try to trace the lines back

The night was dark

Purple

Without stars

Do you know what I mean?

My body was twisted

and formed of clay and pale powder.

Thrown into the air

and endless rolling hillsides.

I try to trace the lines back

Red and white lights

streaked below the bridge.

Veins that carry flesh, soul, meaning.

I peek out from a blanket of forgetfulness,

stretching from California to Arizona.

Catch the road, straight and black.

Look for a star.

I try to trace the lines back

Somebody was there

a mirror

just past the shabby brick building.

I dismissed the thought

Curious, slashing in the wind,

those elements tangled me in color,

leading me to desolate places

surrounded by water

and black carrion birds.

I try to trace the lines back

There was a fluttering hand

the ropes of my bondage cut into me

the sound of an animal.

I am carried home unto awakening

can see forever in every direction

I try to trace the lines back

I cannot remember

I cannot remember what I was

I cannot remember

Center

The words came out of the girl.
Big pink lips and lusciousness that could only be described by words like liquid and voluptuous and moist.
We looked at her and flipped the pages, there were a thousand more with eyes like feathers.
The words came out of the girl and she knew- there actually could be no asking- it was the center and the center casts no shadows and there just must be a moment when she can let herself feel what it would be like without questions.  No answers either, just a place where the Real could come through the window like moonlight and stroke her with the softness of blue wings.

Center.
We try to maintain the center.
Center.
Center.

The windows were open and the bright daylight revealed all their flaws and they glazed over them like pink lip gloss or sticky donuts and their love coated them in candy without hard shells and turned everything pink and wet and ready for something more. 
More?  Yes, but not then. More?  YES.

They sat in the car, sunlight pouring in. She asking the question. The words again.
The center.
Snuggled against a wiry beard of black feathers, she breathed in the darkness of a scented garage and oils.
We find the center.  Look for it.  Walk towards it.

The sunlight came in and she closed her eyes, letting the struggle inside settle. The moon could be there with its jagged edges.  The silver light could be there with its calm.  It could all happen in that tiny space where his legs could barely fit and she rustled up against him like a pillow.  There were rooms with closed doors that she did not need to peer inside, places with more questions that spiraled like carousel wheels. 
She let the ruffling wings settle.
Those words, once spoken, fly from the open wind and beat out the story of a new memory.

The Mysterious

I see a thousand mirrors in all directions, all obscured by a thick fog that emerges from my own eyes.

The mysterious engulfs me. There are no final answers, or maybe any answer at all will do. (I know this.) (I don't know this.) There are no reasons that can't succumb to cruel twisting by my restless mind. I can stop myself from doing or speaking occasionally, but my thoughts run through me unbidden, like a horde of unruly children. They make reality in their image. They create the dark funhouse through which I now roam, eyes peeled open, hesitant, unsure of the next step.

There is so much that is completely out of my hands. (I know this.) (I don't know this.)



I hear the sound of a chainsaw up on the hill that overlooks my home. I hear it come and I hear it go, then I hear it come again. I picture the man using it, I picture a thick piece of wood breaking in two. I feel the deadly vibration of the metal blades. Lethal danger and usefulness in a single vibrant machine.

These things I do, these things that I leave nameless, they never had a safety seal. To truly live- to be truly alive is to awaken to that which is uncomfortable, scary, and dangerous. (I know this.) (I don't know this.)

The outside world, the concentric circles of wonder and danger, it is all ruled by that same incessant clamor that dominates and defiles the fragile sanctuary under the dome of my skull. The twisting habits of my mind call things to me in secret, without my consent, making of me a sleeping witch, a conjurer of illusions which can only fool me in the end. The unspoken things die away in the world of endless electronic babble.

The universe outside is still wild, uncontrollable, and unpredictable. Stars are created and burst open into cauldrons of silent destruction, earthquakes ejaculate fire from the depths of the earth, humans continue to die despite modern technology and all the disposable prayers of all the corrupt religions that cover the planet.



Through the wall, I hear the neighbors bickering for the remote. I hear them often.

There is danger as the machine perceives a threat, there is danger while moving against the current, there is implied danger whenever something happens, almost anything at all. The perception may be very subtle, as subtle as the touch of a single current of wind slipping through the cracks on a window, a voice through a thin wall.

There are things without name or face. Lacking these qualities, they borrow names and faces from the storehouses of my mind, long corridors of dusty boxes and broken toys. When the borrowed guise no longer suits their purpose they vacate the shapes and sounds that once clothed them, and I am left with their empty shells, shells that refer not to their nature, but to my own, as it is from my nature that these shapes were borrowed.

The mysterious is forgotten, denied, wrapped in linguistic structures. When it shows its face I will call it an exception and the enduring rules will be maintained. Maybe it is the other way around. It is the bugs, the quarks, the exceptions that are the rule and my desperate attempts at order are the exception. (I know this.) (I don't know this.)

Maybe I was once a tribe. Now I have been broken into small nuclear units in a larger world, units weakly held together by national borders, language, government.

Instead of embracing beauty in an existence of chaos and moving artfully with the flow of energy- I struggle, I crave safety. I let others decide what is good and bad for me. Laws are crafted in far away rooms- old dying men determine what is legal and illegal, moral and immoral, good and evil. I take it in and abide, sometimes shaking my head, something nodding as I slide back into sleep.



There is a flock of birds outside my window competing for scraps of bread. Their cries are shrill and pregnant with desperation. Not unlike my own cries of need when a wave of energy has become too much and I find an urgent need to release.

My brittle fortresses of order will eventually crumble. (I know this.) (I don't know this.) The hot breathed broken faced Real will lumber and slither and dance in, wreaking havoc over my bones and rambling thoughts, thoughts now bodiless, flowing out free as they once were, broken up, discarded, bits and pieces of moments that will never be together again, not in quite the same way, raw matter to be absorbed into the icy turbulent endlessness of the Real. I am always grasping for answers and peddling them and buying them and clinging to them, but they are only words clung to in desperation. (I know this.) (I don't know this.)

Maybe when I look I can’t see the contour of my face or the glint in my eye, but as I hear that bird chirping like a metronome at 5 in the morning, as I see school children running to the white ice cream truck, the mirror reflects more than the skin over my cheekbones, more than the black sphere at the center of my eyes.

I am hiding from the true answer, I am always hiding from the mysterious abyss that looms beyond the constructs of the tongue. (The tongued mind wagging furiously as though it could fan off the eternal with its chatter.)

I have never been free of the mysterious, it was always clinging to me like a skin. But some part of my self, some part of me, recoiled from it and began to spin the great con to hold it at bay.

Deeper even than the body, reflected back are the habits I carry from form to form. Quick moving bursts of energy that move in cyclical patterns, shapes that are hard to grasp, but I can see their trail. Fallen timber, cyclones of anger, streams of tears. If I look, I can see the path of each invisible impulse, like subatomic particles in a cloud chamber flying towards unknown destinations, leaving behind a record of their passing.

Safe, protected, secure, assurance, solid, invulnerability…
these words have cloaked me in artificial meaning and false structured reality.

If I claim to have answers, I am once again a liar, an artisan of the con. Always. There are no exceptions. There are no answers. No words that can hold the Real absolutely. (I know this.) (I don't know this.)
All that I have experienced has been a play of consciousness. There are no reasons but mind, there are no words but sound, there is no band but only silence.

Everything Is Nature

The room is lit with a bright artificial white glow. The space is wide and long and the powerful light bulbs hide high overhead, their distance is like the sun, far away but felt by everything beneath it. A long stretch of black and white ads run across the back wall of the bowling alley. The smooth wooden floors of the lanes gleam with thick varnish and a weekly dousing of wax. Echoing through the space is the low rumble of heavy bowling balls. They hit the wood of the lanes. They hit the white pins waiting at the end. The temperature is a perfect 69 degrees. Everything about the room is artificial. Without a word, it manifests its aim, the geometric perfection of clean lines. There is no wave, no tilt, just constant even shape. There is nothing natural about it. Not the wood floors, long cut from the old growth forest. Not the paper used to create the ad campaign along the back wall. The bowling balls and white pins are smooth and nearly perfect. Nothing about this chamber is found in nature. There are no rocks so round, no trees so straight. It is a created room, a created game. But this is nature. It is here, on earth. On a flattened piece of land, in a city shrouded in mist and lit by a distant sun, it is “natural,” mutated and rearranged, but “natural.” The sun, a million times removed, is still present here. The nearly flawless shapes and lines, they exist because of the gleaming orb a million miles away. The wood of the floors grew with heat. The metal foundations were forged with tools from the earth and fire. The artificial composition of the pins and bowling balls are a conglomeration of substances transformed through human hands and ideas. And the humans playing the game, walking in mismatched shoes, smiling after rolling a gutter ball. They exist only because of the sun. Light brings them food, it nourishes plants and animals. Light gives them the ability to build and create artificial worlds with bright lights and wide lanes. The room does not smell of dirt and pine. It houses all the strange creations of the world, but the elements of the earth are still present. The life blood, the moving red vein, is here as well. The flowing red vein moves through the people, moving and walking and rolling. It moves through the filament of the lights overhead. What was once a living, breathing tree is the ground at their feet. What were once buried elements in the soil are now bowling balls. Everything has been transformed, but it has come from the one source. The source of it all. The sun. And while they play indoors, while they try over and over to hit straight rows of white pins, the sun shines outside. Far away, perhaps covered by clouds, but it shines. There is nothing unnatural, not in the cleanest white room, not in the grocery store or chemist’s laboratory. This is nature. Every thought, gust of wind, packaged food, water bottle. Each object is affixed with a million invisible tendrils, tied one to the other, eventually finding its way back, winding and curving through machine and heat, finding its way to the brightest star.

Red Moon

I drove in the early morning hours, while the sky still held on tightly to its black and the stars were sparkling, beaming in their true nature as suns. Both hands were on the wheel as my body tilted slightly to the left as I became one with the curve in the road. I stopped as the headlights illuminated a red and white sign. A moment of rest. There were no cops, I was completely alone in the darkness, and I paused. In front of me was the city. Far down the hill, miles into the distance, it was laid out like a softly slumbering child. The street lamps flickered, soothing vibrations of light drifted towards me, like the stars high above that I could never reach, even if I drove for a thousand years. The houses were just faint ghosts in the darkness, un-aided by the bits of light from the street or heavens. I could vaguely distinguish the soft rolling hills that made the floor of the city. I could sense the whispers of houses, condensed together, side by side, it was just the gentle rise and fall of little boxes that revealed the quiet hills. Even from my height, the freeway was an obvious snake of electric lights. I could not hear the mechanical river, but headlights appeared sporadically every couple of seconds, unimpeded in their journey forward. The train station paralleled the freeway, cutting through the city with its silenced roar of regular intervals. I could see the linear track, outlined and quietly resting in the glow of its bright bluish lights. Beyond the city lights, far ahead, was blackness. The dark was the great mouth of the ocean, and it was not silent, it roared with life in the dark and in the light. There was no distinction for its sound and movements, it came and went continuously, beyond the seasons, beyond the clock. And although I knew it was there, its sound did not carry to the height of the small mountain; but it was there, like an abyss just lingering, filled with life beyond measurement, patient and never gone. For centuries it lapped the shores, the empty hillsides, the horse and carriages, the electric cars. Wave after wave came, rocking the shore in endless cycles. Above the water, hanging low in the sky, was a crescent moon. Its open chalice reclined as if providing a bathtub for fairies, and it hung beautifully against the blackness. But unlike any other night, any other night in my memory, the crescent that hung was red. A burnt red-orange. I gasped, my mind flipped through the possibilities for this wonder. A layer of fog? No. Eclipse? No. The moon is red! What celestial occurrence could make the silvery slice red? I had seen yellow moons, big and nearly taking up the night sky, but nothing close to this color. And would the explanation change its beauty or magic? The moment, a little girl in a little black car, perched on a hill in the darkness, upon a rotating earth suspended in a universe of planets and suns and comets and gas. The moon, a constant, the constant companion to this planet. Alone at night, I reach to it as my friend. You, who are so strange. I, upon, the crust of this planet, among the city lights and construction that cover the crust of soil like a metal rash. Beyond the surface, there is moisture and gas and small particles. Beyond the surface, there are icy bits of rock and planets of fire- atoms that combust and implode, there are rings of rocks and holes and billions of suns surrounded by their own solar systems. Beyond that, it’s incomprehensible. I ask "what?" I ask "why?" I shake my head- answers are impossible, I don’t even really know the questions.

A Brush With Real Contact

Nuuuutthhhhiiiinnnnggg eeeehhhhveeeerrrr haaaassssss haaapeeeened. I pronounced each word with extreme intent. Longer, more thorough syllables than I had ever spoken, never had I focused on the journey of sounds, so subtle and overlooked. Like the beautiful mountain I can see looming over me outside my bedroom window, yet I never really see it. I don’t notice it because its always there, there’s no novelty in its large, booming form and its shrub covered face never seems to change, so close every day, its enormity escapes me. And these words, the thousands of words I speak every day, I have never before paid attention to their short lives…from beginning to end. They are born, cease, and then are born again, every time I wiggle my tongue and shape my lips.
Even now, as I can hardly speak, my voice taken by germs, I move my mouth in the shape of their expected form. Barely a whisper, Nuuuutthhhhiiiinnnnggg eeeehhhhveeeerrrr wiiiilllllll haaapeeeen. My soft pink tongue, barely used in the past couple of days, presses against the wet roof of my mouth, in the space right behind my top teeth. A deep breath moves inside my lungs as the almost imagined sound of the "ugghh" mounts and then, the finale, my tongue finds itself between the space of my upper and lower jaw, right below my front teeth, disturbing the outward flow of air and producing a subtle hissing sound. It all ends in the back of my throat, as the thickest part of my tongue reaches up and makes soft contact with the space at the back of my mouth. I feel it all…as long as I keep noticing, as long as the tenuous thread of my attention moves seamlessly though the center of each word.
With each second of claimed attention, the light between us shifts. Sometimes, a slight haze creeps between us, in the tangible space that only my attention can bring forth in this small house. To my amazement, my absent voice is not missed. Because of its absence, I have become clearer in intent and with this, there is a space for him to come. Like a slow moving spiral, each inflection and shift of my tongue brings him closer. His two dimensional picture emanates light from behind his head. Radiant yellow lifts his image off the page and, slowly, ever so slowly, it appears that we are here, together, face to face, eye to eye, in clear contact. And then, sometimes, he retreats…then, comes forward, like a game of catch, where the ball is my attention, and maybe his. Then…waves of violet blue, mostly hazy, but distinct clouds that spring from his face. Last night, his face became a bumpy, pebbled surface, so strange, so strong, I felt myself recoil.
In my mind, I hear the words. I think them, I feel them, I imagine their shape and implications. In my mind’s eye, I see blackness…a circle of blackness like an enormous pool filled with even darker water. Is he but a drop? Is he all of them? One? Do I speak to them all now? Is it all of them that rush to my words and attention, ready to meet me as far as my body will allow? I vaguely see their forms, shapeless and as colorful as ghosts, manifest in a reality I cannot remember. With colors and light, he is not he, he is more than one. He is something else, a drop of water spat back into the eternal ocean. A breath inhaled, then exhaled, sent into the atmosphere, into a realm of colors that my eyes can see only sometimes.
I am sitting, my ass pressed into a hard wooden chair, yet I am floating, tethered, yet somewhere above this little white body. But perhaps I am here, in this garage, without a body, without this tongue that still rolls in its attempt at syllables, and as I feel the shift, I focus on the words more intently. They are my map, my guide and my ropes.
I look at this picture, at a man that is my grandfather, yet never was. A man of my DNA, a being set adrift. And within his body, within the grandfather I never knew as a man, is a being that is me. A being that is you. In the middle of the night, he told me he was leaving. In the deep hours of darkness, he woke me from sleep with a punch to my heart and I knew, in the calm certainty of the half conscious, that he had left his body. While his machine began to decompose under a thick pile of dirt, the Being hovered around us. The space above the coffin became blurry and misty and clouded my vision and swirled like heat rays off of black pavement. I traveled to be close.
And when my mind wanders, as I read the prayer…as I perpetually criticize my current life and plan my next meal, I feel him drift from me. The light between us is nothing but the florescent hue from my continuously buzzing lamp. I am talking to a photo, a photo of a man who looks slightly insane, with bulging eyes, one slightly larger than the other.
And the moment I realize my fall, the second I begin to concentrate on the movement of my tongue, on the sounds of the words, on the meaning of the sentences and his eyes staring at mine, then the being reemerges. It comes back with the force of a strong wind, like a burst of colored light that waited for me to receive its return. It is there, for me. It is here, for me. Here…yet needing my attention. Here…yet invisible until I really look. Here…yet waiting for my heart to open. Here…needing the life of my breath. Here…as a gift. You meet me where I am. You are here when I am here, absent when my mind is elsewhere. While my armor was down, weakened by coughing fits and diseased lungs, we met. We met here. The same as always. Here.

I Never Knew

I rode slow moving buses and efficiently romantic trains. There were ticket stubs from planes and boats. Through long roads in the back of a pickup truck and down deserted dirt roads. I swam in warm blue watered beaches and jumped from torrential waterfalls. I searched. In the desert, beneath the blackened moon, I danced with the hope of something more. With every salty tear, I longed for the meaning. The questions? The answers? Someone? Something? I hoped, I knew, I looked. I wandered. I cut my heart to bits in the search from human to human. My little body was propelled by a restless urge. Little feet moved to the song of unheard lullabies. Almond eyes scoured for a glimmer of light amongst the vacant stares and drooling gestures. In the window reflections, with the philosophizing hobos and street urchins. I talked and read and cried. I hoped, I dreamed of the challenge, of the uncompromising, of the unordinary. Of true love. Of meaning.
And as I wandered and stumbled, as I flew and ran and skipped and crawled…I somehow found it. On a southbound train amidst the masses of machines and beneath the heavy burden of mortgages, 401k plans, suits and slumber. I found it. The knowledge. The gate. The signs were black, almost hidden in the night, just a smile and a long white finger pointing to the left.
And it is here, enveloping me. Smothering me, its arms, its tentacles, its heavy clutches are inside, poking at every hole and wound. I am here, I could never have imagined. This is what I desired. This was the meaning for the search. This was my hope and this is hard. Harder than I could have ever imagined.
I am hauling trees, carrying my wounded body. I am in battle. I am my constant enemy. I am my only hope. I am the worker and the builder of coffins and steel cages. Speak to me in the language of feathered friends and secretive cold winds. On the brink of many tears, I spill my energy like wine. En par with careless sorority girls and dirty men. I spill and blunder, staining the marbled floor. There are red footprints, fossils of breasts. In this clear cage, this brilliant cage. This darkened cell. This moment of lightness and love. This pit of self pity and red fear. The words of my parents, the lessons of school and movies. The glances from strangers, the energetic patterns of old lifetimes and meaningless collections of clutter.
I am in this maelstrom. These bits spiral around me in an endless dance. I stare, fear brimming from every hole, tears spilling like the rivers of Egypt. I never knew it would be like this. Never thought the secrets could be so hard. This is it. This is not the liberating paradise, the free-for-all love bash. This is not calm, this is not tranquility.
This is the edge. The place where every fear and sorrow exists, the place where love is easily forgotten, but it can also be Seen. On this edge, it is felt for the first time. This is the building of the Real. Solid and changing. Opalescent and invisible. Cluttered and shifting into nothing. The masks of image dance. They show off in their parades of spectacle and perversion. They feed on my channels of hate. These boats scour the coast side, waiting for a moment; they come often and quickly, biting in hard before I can scream. Huddled and shocked, I lay on the dirt path, just steps from the gate. I am here, filled with dread, filled with fear, riddled with tears.
And there is only one option. I must move forward. The knowledge is nowhere else. The secrets are ahead and about, but they are not free. Each step is a motion away from death, a thousand demons hold my legs. A thousand dirty hands grab the tendrils of my hair. Red marks cover my buttocks, lashings have severed parts of my heart. But there is no turning back. There is a cord, a golden chain that keeps me from running. Tethered somewhere in the distance, I can feel your heart urging me forward. I take another step and try to remember myself.

Perception

If I couldn’t touch or feel this keyboard with my fingertips, would this computer still exist?
If you were blind and could not read this text, would the sentences still be a reality?

For the human machine, reality revolves completely around us, we are at the center of this labyrinth, therefore, anything unknown to us…music we’ve never heard of, people we’ve not met, dimensions beyond the third…all these things don’t exist, at least not in our world, not until we perceive them with our senses.
But the limited human, with its life span and prejudices, cannot begin to perceive everything. Therefore, there must be realities beyond our comprehension, far beyond the worlds I have experienced through the senses.
In India, where a young girl braids her hair before going to the market, I do not exist. She doesn’t perceive me, therefore I’m null in her labyrinth…but do I still exist? Is nonexistence the same as non perception?
Perception brings what already exists into reality. Everything is constant- what is always happening and what is always not happening- this maintains eternally. It is our mental and sensual perception that interprets and shifts.

Imagine Sonia, her workday began smoothly, breakfast was tasty ( a perception) and she felt rested (a perception), the weather was clear ( a perception) and a passersby on the street smiled at her ( a perception); then, she took a phone call from a loved one that ended in an argument. She continues to walk on the same street, but she notices the men staring at her ( a perception), the weather seems too hot (a perception) and all of a sudden, she feels claustrophobic.

Has anything really happened? Has anything in the immediate existence changed? Or is it her mind and its interpretations that have been altered?Are they what is causing her to sense that something has happened?
It is only our perceptions that lead us to believe that we, they, or the environment are shifting. Nothing ever has happened and nothing ever will happen.

The Branding of Chris Crocker

Crocker- the "leave Britney alone guy" wants to jump into the celebrity boat. His prospects include the starring role of a reality show or perhaps a program entitled "Complaining with Chris Crocker."
"Chris first got on our radar a year ago," Rasha Drachkovitch, president and co-founder of 44 Blue, said in a statement. 44 Blue considers Crocker "a rebel character that people will find interesting. He's going to be a TV star."

He has been branded by the industry; his personality, traits, beliefs, etc. reduced to a character. He will fill the artsy queer spot, he will be loved and hated, admired and smeared.

Our machines are at once easily defined and indefinable. Changing by the minute, morphing slowly through the years, none of the words we use to define ourselves can stick too long. Each one is a carefully constructed layer and mask, disguising the Being inside, mostly at the mercy of the sleeping machine.

A "rebel character," one that stirs controversy, possibly spurring conversation. Artist, gay, performer, weird…all of these are just words, their meanings transitory, their image distorting the Being. The true challenge is maintaining distance from the words- using them to convey a meaning, using the image they create, perhaps to jumpstart a career, without becoming attached or identified with them.

The Image of the Title

Please call me Chief Lydia, or if you prefer, Lydia who Brings the Moon to Daly City.
In Nigeria, I would be able to buy these titles, officially adding them to my name for the price of
$200,000 to $250,000, ultimately with the hope of renewed respect and esteem. It is a craze among the wealthy and Chiefdom has become common.
Financial manager Reginald Ibe, a chief of the Igbo people in the south-east, echoes this disquiet. "Chieftaincy titles have practically been bastardised these days," he says. "Everybody
wants to acquire one chieftaincy title or any other title. The number of honorary PhDs we have in this country is symptomatic of a people who have failed in so many aspects of life."
Originally, Chiefdom was not a title, it was a position earned through direct action. To be a chief was like becoming a small god- a man had proved himself worthy, by his actions.
Scarcity makes things special. Diamonds are considered precious, not just because of their beauty, but because of their rarity…for the time and labor required to dig them from the earth. It is not like picking up a piece of gravel, it requires patience and skill.
Likewise, the position of Chief was important, signifying to the people the man’s character. But many have become lazy, wanting the respect and prestige without earning the right for it. Money, it seems, is all that is required. In Nigeria and even here, in the US, $250,000 is an obscene amount of money to acquire a title, but this shows the eagerness for respect, the desire to standout from the general populace.
This is buying an image.
The image of a respectable man, the image of an intelligent, compassionate person.
These titles, now commonplace among those with bank accounts, have defiled ancient tradition, making the title no more important than a rotting banana.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6924870.stm
The title is an afterthought. The position is earned through action and Being. The title without foundation is merely a distorted ghost reflection of what once was. Ultimately everyone can see that, even if it is not spoken.