Drink Of Life

Drink of life- like my mother did once.
Not alone in the bedroom, she opened and took and the pungent seeds of time spilled into the darkness of space alight with imagination and moans and shrieks and luminous suns.
Let the blackness talk and whisper the secrets of life eternal, but do not mistake the body as its only source.  The sky is full and traveling is not done only in carbon and flesh.
Drink of life like my mother did once.
Then drink again.
Water like my father did once.
Again drink.
Like my father.
Forever is not the end.
End. 
There is only eternal
Return. Again.
Eternal return.
Again.
Eternal return.
Again.

An endless loop of purple and black, we sit in this circle and live out the revolution.
Time shifts as this carpet accepts our weight. As the walls hold us in and the black curtains postpone the sunlight from our eyes. 
We go back into the dream state and journey through darkness and quiet spaces while the walls melt like jelly. We walk through them, licking the paint until our tongues taste like ocean water. 
We circle back and flow in and out of the speckled windows, hearing the squeaks and moans of cars rounding the corner and delivery trucks halting by the door. The walls hold us in, ever intent on their quiet role, their shelter against the demanding brightness of day.  
Grinding and sliding through the maze of our consciousness- like a serpent, the circle comes back once again. It is my turn to speak. 
Cycle.
The ends are woven perfectly together and for once the ends of our fingertips flow out and back in like wisteria branches. Perfectly pungent and delicate- we glow imperceptibly in the darkness behind the curtains. Eventually the walls take in our vibration and the light between you and I starts to move like heat off a desert floor. Though my eyes are closed, I dance and dance, hoping over sand and the scent of old gun smoke and greased leather.
What is this space? I hear my mind ask. Never content to let the eyes talk for us, to let time shift and strain and begin to rewind and then leap forward in a spiraling dance around the circle of our words. And back again, receding into the darkness between the black curtains.
Endless circles as our fingers and toes merge back into roots and trees.

Eternal return.
Again.
Eternal return.
Again.

Stinging Bits Of Doubt

Work through the stinging bits of doubt.
They nip at the beautiful sphere we create, puncturing it slowly until it collapses under its own weight. I stare at it, deflated and crumbled as candlelight still flickers- the glow reminding me of what we could have made. I see my reflection on its distorted shiny surface. 
Work through the stinging bit of doubt.
They come up like weeds and sometimes I confuse them for tiny flowers and I let them open. Only when their faces shine up at me do I realize my mistake and see the death skulls laughing. But by that time I am far away and lost, floating on my wooden canoe. 
Out to sea I remember shore. Far away there is a house and a garden. Far away a sage bush goes to seed. Far away is a protector, but I can no longer see him beyond the horizon.
My habits have carried me out here and water spills in over the side. Salt oozes up my leg and I begin to crack. 
But there you are, holding the door open once again. The pathways are slightly more narrow now and the flowers have lost their scent, but here we are again in the dim afternoon light. The present is open and wide and we look into it with wide glittering eyes.
Once again we had stood on the edge, once again we clawed our way back from the crashing waves. Here we are again, a circuit of energy between us tasting of love.
Try to remember to breathe you caution. Next time breathe into the stinging bits of doubt, send some air into the caves. 

The Birth of Myth

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

The Dead Weight Of The Past

What is it that he said so many years ago? Those words that went into her, dug into the muscles of her being like they were made for her cavernous places. Fitted just right, sculpted to stay there for decades, to resist change in all its forms and call to her like a siren’s deadly song. When the moon was ripe and the waters within her rattled with the call of wolves, the little steel sinkers would brush up against a few spiral shells and other lines and hooks left by other people, and though they swayed slightly in the current, they remained firmly planted.
“You’re dead weight,” he said, putting her down.
Exasperated, he continued, “there’s no way I can carry you.”
She looked to the ground, saddened by how her piggy-back ride had turned sour; all the joy she had initially felt gutted by one knife-shaped sentence.
“You don’t know how to use your body,” he said, “you just hang there like dead weight.”
She kept her eyes low, ashamed, but not sure what she had done wrong or how she could change. No matter what he said, he somehow, within the unspoken space between his words and the way his tone hinted at a past she was still unclear of, he always seemed to make a comparison between her and the other girls he had been with, girls who had not been dead weight. Others he had been able to carry and hold against a wall and fuck, but not her. His words, like a stone wrapped in white cloth, sunk to the bottom and settled in. He would send others soon.

Later, when his tattooed arms were gone and the smell of his cigarettes had been washed from her hair, she knew someone, just for one night, that did hold her against the wall of the white tiled shower with his grip. But the stone was still there.
Those things that he said so many years ago. Did he throw those words to hurt her, for pleasure, to get the many things he desired? His gallons of milk required with every meal. Orange soda, the only other liquid he would drink. The unfiltered cigarettes, the potatoes and pork chops and marijuana so he could pretend to desire her. All the things he wanted, that he said he needed, they all required a sacrifice and with each demand, she left a part of herself in the supermarket aisle, left it there to be swept up by the nighttime staff. When they went back home, all she wanted was an orgasm, but he blamed her for his inability to stay hard. She was too wet. Too wide. Too desperate, too loud. He told her each reason, sending more stones to the bottom.

In all the years they were together, she never saw him completely naked. He walked out of rooms backwards, unwilling to let her see every part of him. Did he believe himself to be dead weight? Not his body or his size or the way he held his body, but the pain with which he came. The heroin he took, the cigarettes he smoked, the marijuana he inhaled, were they the worldly manifestations of the hooks that had been thrown into him so long ago?

The other night, laying in a warm lap with the black curtains drawn and candles flickering across the white, naked wall, in a room that he had not known and would never know, she said, “make sure to tell me if I’m like dead weight.” It took her many days to remember were the words had come from, for they did not originate in her. They came up, out of her mouth, unearthed in the calm, clear waters of that long night. Those words, left by someone else, now they were her own fears, her own worry, her own weighted anchors.

In The Garden

The garden is beautiful, full of orange nasturtiums, pungent sage and unforgiving cactus. It is a garden of complexity, with pathways and mountains ranges. It is possible to scale Mount Kilimanjaro and the Pyrenees in a day. It is a resting spot for birds and a love den for cats. Soldiers are constantly on guard, magicians line the walls and the four elements are worshipped.
The caretakers work when the weather permits, although the garden is never far from thought even in the rain. It is a sacred space in constant need of tending. Weeds are constantly sprouting, apples from neighboring trees need to be picked, and fallen men need straightening. It is a work in progress. At the height of summer, when all the weeds are plucked and the birdbaths are sparkling, everything seems finished. And then, five days later, the weeds come back. The bird food needed replenishing. What is completed one day must be done once again. It is a working garden, and the work is never finished.
Just as soon as one clover patch is plucked, a dandelion sprouts inches away. It is not something to fight, it simply is. The ways of nature continue to progress, unencumbered by human desires. The human machine moves with the same logic. Despite all hopes of peace or rest, the machine is in constant need of tending. Left on its own, invasive species will flourish, well defined pathways will crumble and flowers will be strangled by persistent weeds.
Human habits are as persistent as weeds. As soon as one appears to be under control, another deeper habit comes to the surface. And when that one is contained, another rises. It is nothing to rage at, it’s simply the nature of the machine. In need of constant attention, from minute to minute, it cannot be left alone. It is the work. Continuous, morphing and ever sprouting.