Open Up

Open up and smell the rain. It is coming. 
Soon the clouds will topple over with accumulated sweet tears and I will be there to drink it in. I will have my pearl goblet embellished in skulls and teeth and the sweetness of sky will move through me, turning me from flesh to air. 
Open up and smell the coming rain. Open up and let the walls of your chest creak, they will make a joyful noise and sing with mine as we stumble into awakening.
Like rusty doors in long forgotten castles, the sound is wild and out of place. Now is the moment to take the scuffed up brass skeleton key from the old woolen pocket. It is time to twist, yes, with a shaky hand, and let the gates crack. 
Open up and smell the rain.  It comes as a gift without words and explanation. The scent of night moves towards us in lustful abandon, coming with its sweet tears. Clouds full of wetness sweep in covering us in newness.
Now take this knife, make perfect slits along the length of our single piece of okra. The glue on our fingers will bind us to the walls and from time to time we can hang from the ceiling and look at the world like geckos.
Or you can take the form of a purple goddess and travel among the trees like the wind. There are no obstructions as purple scented air. You move wildly through thickets of oak leaves, sending a torrent of them to the ground.  You bash against the boughs, bouncing and twisting over shapes and continue forward.  Perhaps these things will eventually slow you down, all these rocks and faces of matter, but for now you roll over them as purple scented air. 
Or you can dance ecstatically without form, picking up pollen and dispersing it over fields and houses.  Twisting, twisting, you bend the clouds into mermaids and smiling paintbrushes, an entire canvas of sky all orange and red and glowing. 
Or you can lie down and become gold grass.  Feel the skinny white roots slowly digging into the soil, pushing so softly past the tiny bugs dwelling in the folds of pungent earth.  Feel the sun turning to food on your delicate upturned blades.  Can you feel the green of your flesh? 
Open up and smell the rain.  The clouds are colliding and soon we will be droplets once again.   Gold is the sky as we take the form of clouds, there are no obstructions as we take new shape.

A Death of Scattered Signifiers

The truth could never be given with a word. It could never be understood with a sentence or on the pages of this text. And maybe you wouldn’t understand, but maybe you would, and if you do, then take my hand as I reach from the grave. I started writing months ago, and what began as a rant became more, and what began as therapy became even more until I saw the dark cloud that loomed on the horizon. It wouldn’t go away when I blinked; even when I cried and cut my fists, it was always there, steady and silent, waiting for me to truly understand. It was black and hard and I knew therapy could not fix it, words could not fix it, but I tried anyway, because I had to.

They just don’t get it. You can spell it out in big words,
And little words
And black and white
And you can make it as simple as possible
And they just don’t get it.
Now they call you demented
And your wife apologizes for you
And someone wonders if you were having marital problems.
But you told them, and you used a few cuss words and your rage was palpable,
But that’s life, that’s anger at injustice, that’s red blood pumping and pumping and pumping.
And they’re calling you demented and crazed,
They’re as blind as you thought, and even spelling it out did not help.
Their eyes are gone and they just cannot see the dots and lines,
but you tried.
You wrote it.
You told them.
Your wife does not get it.
Years and years, hidden under sheets. Years of sweat and tongue and she still doesn’t understand.
And that’s what makes me sad.
You left behind a black charred body, you tried to scream, a final exclamation point in your crash,
But they just shake their heads…another lunatic.
Your sacrifice was for a point the sheep cannot see.
There will be no legions behind you,
No revolution
No violence.
Tax day is coming and the post office will be full and the stamps will carry our money away on wings,
And little will change.
Your sacrificed life will mean so little.
Your death will be a ripple in the ocean, so faint and distant it could be nothing at all.
And that’s what’s makes my heart want to bleed.
The malls are full.
The battles wage on.
The machine grinds steady.
The freeways are crowded.
The money keeps flowing.
You could not change it.
Can it be changed?

My heart has grown weary from the failures. All the fathers have crumbled. The lies are out and as I stare, I vomit and watch them grow. Children still recite the Pledge of Alliance out of synch and they still teach that Columbus discovered America even though it was refuted so long ago. They just cannot change ignorance. Young men still sign on the dotted line, believing in honor and the vision of Country. But I can see all those cracks, not one has escaped me and I cry for the innocence I once knew and I have turned hard while the lights of florescent bulbs flicker. It is all too much. They are all lies, each one of you in suits, each one of you beneath stripes and stars. How dare you speak? You white skinned, white haired, blue eyed liars. And while those men die in roadside bombs for corporations they will never know, profiting people they will never meet, I am prepared to die. The band plays behind me, and I am a patriot. I am a revolutionary in a forgotten country of words without substance. Add me to the pile if there is anything left. Follow if you can, and if you cannot, read my words.

(Text inspired by Joe Stack’s suicide note.)

Seeing

The waves crashed on the shore in quick succession and she sat within the divots of the sand, on the thousands of warm crushed rocks that were soft and harsh at the same time. She took to picking up little pinches of grains and rolling them between her thumb and index finger. These little things, these
almost-round things were what they called sand, what she called “sand.” What everyone understood as sand. These tiny pebbles that were once big rocks, now collectively known as sand.
She had been to more gentle beaches before, where the waves came in leisurely, as though they were in no hurry to find the shore and then melt into the larger form of water that had birthed their shape. But this was not a lazy sea. The waves came and came and came, causing a roar that was so loud it ended up fading into the background, a deep rumble that never settled down. It almost had a mechanical feel, like an industry that never shut off the lights and slowed the gears. It was constant. Churning. Relentless. It was slightly unsettling, but then like all things, its strangeness faded as she grew used to its ways.
The only thing she missed was the birds. The roar of the water drowned out their calls, if there were any flying in the sky above. But she would never know.
She could feel the sunlight, it warmed the exposed skin of her legs and arms and it warmed the grains of sand that her fingers rolled, but she could not see the light. The world was dark, or so others would say. The world was the only way she had ever known it and something can only be called “dark” if there is a comparison to “light.”
She did not know what light was, she had never seen colors or the shape of the waves. Everything for her was a collision of sound and texture and smell. She knew her way around the city because of the particular smells that lingered near certain intersections, by the constants that did not change, year after year. To get to the ocean from her house, she needed to make a left by the smell of the bakery and then another left were it always smelled like old meat. When she reached the bricks of the building on the corner, she knew she just needed to cross the street and soon she would hear the crashing waves.
“Jen!” her sister came running up, she could feel the coldness of the ocean radiating off her skin.
“Jen, you should really go out there and feel the water, it’s so refreshing. The waves are just so beautiful.”
“I will in a little bit, now I’m just feeling it all.”
“It’s just so pretty here.” She could feel her sister smiling and could hear the lightness in her voice.
It was something her sister said often. Places were “pretty and beautiful” and the description stopped there. After many years, Jen did not offer her thoughts, she knew it was part of the sight culture, things “were” something. Places and people were simple words: pretty, mean, ugly, vivid, beautiful. They were supposed to convey meaning but always lacked detail, and so they failed.
Her sister would look at the waves and declare them as “pretty.” But it meant nothing, not to the seeing or to the blind. It was a word that lacked emotion or description, for what was pretty? It was a judgement, an objective judgement that could not really be disputed or quantified, for it lacked anything real.
Jen had never seen a wave, but she felt it. It was not beautiful. For her, waves were the sound of a force she could not describe. They came over and over, relentless in their crawl towards land.
This place was more than a word, much more than a simple, flat word. It was her experience. It was the sun that felt warm on her skin. It was her longer breaths and the children shrieking in the distance. Places and people were never beautiful or ugly, they were described with a thousand words and scents and emotions, they were truly things that could not be seen.

Cutting The Cord

She takes one small breath, her first. The earth has opened up with light, long awaited through the long meaty tunnel. It is cold, her body feels a sensation without description, a pain without concept, just the raw brutal force of chill on still warm flesh. She takes another breath, her second.
A woman is crumpled against the backseat of a four-door car. Her open white thighs reveal streaks of pale blood that have yet to dry. She leans against the cold vinyl seat of the car, exhausted, sweaty and smiling. Beyond the window of the stopped car, there is night all around. A moon glows somewhere in the sky, only no one notices. The wind beats against the window of the round-edged car. And inside, in the yellow glow of an interior light, they can all see, something has come out.
Creation has turned along the wheel. For a moment, they all ride the second hand together, watching, breathing, crying as a new being emerges into the human realm. It has come, from a place that knows no buildings or cars or sympathy. This new thing, this new creature comes without language. Without concepts. From one realm into another, tonight, this thing has come
The night is cold. The young body feels the air with stark attention. This is the steady re-supply of nature. Whatever words and thoughts and explanations were used to create this little being, this is nature multiplying. This is creation. This is change. Replacement. One body spawns another. One gives as another takes. The night is so dark.
After the pains have left, the crickets take over the sounds in the darkness. They are in between towns. Like a piece of blood cut in the cord that must be tied. With this birth, they are bound.
The baby will learn, the baby will follow and imitate and the habits will be passed. From one generation to another. This new life will be stamped with all that has come before. It will turn into the human, it will live in this realm, in the world of language and thoughts and the mind. It will grow, until one day, it too will re-supply the earth with another young form, a new little body that will also come thoughtless and empty of language.
But now, the night is cold and the crickets sing. A little baby breathes. The force of creation moves.

Out There

"Welcome home"
"It’s good to be back..."
The shuttle has entered the atmosphere, cutting through a thick layer of gray clouds… they are home…on earth. Welcome back… to everything you understand as "human," as "home." Our cities of concrete and steel and glass, our domesticated dogs and our oxygen and our shopping malls and warm beds that have awaited you. Here is gravity, here are fish and continuous waves and continents full of talking people that can’t understand each other and green trees that exchange our waste for invisible gold. Out there, in the vast blackness of a space that has no sentimentality, among rocks that spin just like ours, amid air devoid of oxygen, our planet is one of many. Our sun is one of millions.
Floating in the darkness, looking back at what you know as home, does anything seem relevant?
A lone astronaut fixing the side of a satellite, a glimpse of earth, of swirling green and blue and white… "we are so small," she thinks to herself. On that globe, there are battles for water, a baby cries for its mother, a handful of people die in a car bombing in Iraq. Does any of it matter?
Our sun continues to burn, sending fiery explosions our way, our moon orbits faithfully, waxing and waning month after month...how long has it cast its silver light? A man dies in the street, hungry and crippled. A young child walks to school with her friends on a sunny day.
The astronaut sees the swirling white, she sees the orb. She cannot see the woman being raped in the Congo, she is not watching the flood waters rise on TV… floating, breathing through a tube, she sees the whole, the one sphere where we know people breath and fuck. Where people die with a gasp and are born with a push.
Does any of it matter at such a distance? At that distance, is any death a tragedy? Or is every single action a hiccup absorbed into the greater blend of green and blue? Looking out…past home, into the true vastness of a space that moves past the threshold of logic and comprehension, does our home, does this one planet even matter at all?
Somewhere on an oxygen filled planet, a young woman sits in a small apartment on the crust of a complex system, she types diligently on a device invented just a little while ago, a blink on the watch of time. None of them know her, the astronauts, the sun, the comets that streak across what she knows as the sky, does her life matter amid the chaos of floating rocks? Do her tears matter to the moon? She feels the tie that connects one thought to the other, the thread that connects one small life to the system that spins around it; she is the spinning, she is the wonder, the lifetime of rocks, the wars that continue without end. Century after century, there is another conflict and stars flicker out and new ones are born and some planets merely turn half a degree and the century passes like a blink, a mere flutter.
From out there, does any of this even exist at all?