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. 

Far Off Songs

I could hear them fighting in the other room.  Every few seconds Jonas’ high pitch scream would pierce through the music I was listening to, it would crawl under my skin and make me shiver. 
I could hear them fighting over the tablet playing cartoons. As I listened to the vocal coaching on my computer and tried to sing along and practice, their constant bickering moved through the glass door and found me and pushed me away from my concentration. 
I could imagine Noah trying pull the computer more towards him and Jonas pulling back, finally strong enough now to defend himself against his older brother.
It was the endless struggle for property that would stay with them until death.  Territory and desire and anger, they were fully present even at three years old. They were even more evident than in adults, due to the lack of social flitters and niceties and the many disguises the adult world has devised to cloak those inner urges.  When those little boys wanted the computer, the cookie, the train they took it. Available responses of the other was tears, or a scream or to hit back.
I could not hear any response from Noah, so I assumed he was the perpetrator.  I had stopped trying to intervene.  I had grown tired of trying to make them share, or warning them, threatening to take it away, now I had just grown silent. I had other things to do.  I sunk back into the music and left them alone, it would be survival of the strongest.
Occasionally I heard Jonas’ weapon of choice: that scream. The high pitched wail irked me from the inside, one of those sounds which physically chilled me and made me shake and try and shrug off the noise.  I closed the door to the living room.  They were going to do what they were going to do.  There could be no reasoning, they were too young, they were little machines. 
The boys used to sit with me as I did my vocal work. When Jonas had just learned to sit up by himself I would put him on a chair next to me and he would look at me with huge, smiling eyes and laugh at some of the sounds.  Noah would sometimes sing along and then we would dance.
Just a few years later and fully human, they were more interested in Dora and Umizumi and their computers and ignored me as much as I tried to look past their fighting. The babies had recognized the work, they could sit with me, patiently waiting sometimes as I went through the things I wanted to do; these little people did not.
They had fallen.  It was only a matter of time, all beings must descend, become human, become mere machines.
Maybe one day they would stop fighting and hear me singing from the other room. Maybe they would remember some of our early nights together when we sat in three chairs in the living room and they would come out to join me once again: singing, dancing, laughing.

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.

Certainty

The house was shining with the bright light of a brand new day. The cream colored curtains floated like sails beneath the golden light of the incoming sun and yet the room was ringing with crisp cold air. The thick Persian rugs did little to deflect the chill of polished wooden floors and pale-green walls. A TV was on. A young girl sat on an overstuffed couch, absorbing the sounds of barnyard cartoon characters while she slowly ate her breakfast of fried rice and a single peeled banana.

“What!!??”

I looked at the girl on the couch. I saw her little white hands with palms facing upwards, the same way my grandmother held her hands when she just couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her young body was already formed and aged, all in secret. It had acquired the same basic shape it would have years from now, when this would all be a memory to be replicated and reorganized.
The world of her parents, the clear delineation between right and wrong, black and white, it all lived in her young face. She already thought she knew it all. The world had already been clearly defined and she already knew her place within it.

“How can they say that??!!”
She suddenly looked at me with a smile of disbelief on her face, with a shade of mockery. She shouldn't have looked at me. She wasn't supposed to. I was the one doing the looking.

I used to know it all. I used to know it all before I lost my certainty.

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 me looking down at the collection of me that is the bottom.
I am the little girl. I am the woman at the edge of the cliff.
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.

This 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.

A girl so young and already she knows everything. She lies that she knows. I know now that she lies.

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.”

A couple seconds of silence. The sort of time that stops and quiets down 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. I had imagined myself walking to the bathroom. 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.

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 the same habit, another manifestation of the same impulse, 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 held still in the well of time.
I could think of at least three tattoos that were spawned from a feeling of anxiety that rattled inside me like a soot covered wind I could not shake.
The time my old boyfriend was in jail and I was lonely and scared and felt like the entire world was just too strong and corrupt. That brought 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 my boyfriend went out to score some heroin, me that had picked up the tattoo gun on the coffee table and plunged the needle into my own 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.
The word “warrior” on my left thigh, the permanent black letters that appeared only a few hours after discovering that another girl was visiting my boyfriend in jail, another layer of his lies revealed. I drove straight to a tattoo shop singing and crying.
The tattoo artist 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, 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. Maybe he was already used to this, maybe he had seen it a thousand times, maybe he could have told me so much, maybe I could have heard him. But he didn't say anything. Instead, he nodded and kept working.
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.

I had painted large artistic circles around the reasons for a body covered in mermaids and foliage, explanations to justify the act, lies to hide the utter lack of certainty.

Now I had glimpsed the energetic contortion, the habit and reaction I could no longer hide. And now here it was, 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 seemed strange around me, but it was me, not the dwelling that reeked of strangeness. This raw truth, this evidence had 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 went deeper than skin, deeper than bone, 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 so deep that I can't touch it, I can't wrap my fingers around its shape. The nature of self delusion goes even 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.

I see a girl dancing. There are two walls made of bricks. They are miles apart, but they are so tall that their sheer height makes them always known. The pretty girl is in the field, among the gently sloping grass of yellow and green. Her skirt of layered gray chiffon moves like clouds tethered to her waist. She moves around trees and skips over sleeping foxes. She can't know anything. There is nothing to be known.

“How can they say that??!!”

I just shrugged my shoulders and she looked away. She knew too much for me to say anything. She knew too much to wonder who I was or why I was there.

Walking Backwards

She was sitting in her room. The overhead light was off and just a tall floor lamp provided a slight glow to the quiet chamber. Soft light illuminated her white naked legs, her black and green tattoos that coiled around her thigh and calve. Her thin fingers held the pages of a red-covered book open, its pages a pale yellow, its words in deep black.

“I will stop making efforts to remain asleep.”

The words went through her like waves of truth. They wrapped themselves around her, plunging deep into areas she left dry and untouched.

She sat still on the soft bed, letting the sentence roll through her, letting it resonate wherever there was space. She held on, letting the next sentence wait.

She actually made efforts to remain sleep. She took steps in the opposite direction. She turned her back on the path every day, walking backwards, throwing stones, doing all she could to remain asleep, to remain where she was.

Every argument.

Every eye roll.

Every long tangent of jealousy that held her down like a drowning girl in a shallow pool.

Every reaction of jolting anger.

She sat with the book open, her hands still, her eyes soft and unfocused while the words traveled deep, coiling around the sinews of habits and pride.

“I will stop making efforts to remain asleep.”

This is what she did, everyday, perhaps every hour, as rage poured through her heart, dropping her far from the mountain she was climbing. She remembered sitting on the same bed earlier in the morning, staring up into the aluminum covered piping that ran through a part of her room. She sat there for nearly five minutes, staring into the foil, finding shapes and faces and reliving the comment she heard the day before. The four words that pierced her, the four words that she holds onto for hours, holding on o them, letting them form more bubbles of anger and reaction.

It was what she did, she found ways to remain asleep. It didn’t just come naturally. She made an effort. She actively put her attention on things she could not control. She didn’t focus on herself, which would have been the one place it would have made a difference and instead focused on every misstep of those around her.

“I will stop making efforts to remain asleep.”

Could she actively relax and let go of those efforts? Could the anger just fall away like old skin? She imagined herself on the same bed, still and calm, a slight smile on her face while rage just dripped off, falling to the earth and turning into green sprouts and vapor.

Her machine was trying, actually making an effort to remain in the dirt, to keep as far away from the mountaintop as it could. It tried everyday, reminding her of pain, of pride, of the way it all should be, but was not.

As she held the book open, her eyes softened and she took a deep breath, allowing the exhalation to cleanse her. Moving her eyes slowly onto the next sentence.

You Are Dying

Do you know that you’re dying? Don’t stare at me with big wide eyes, You Are Dying.

Through the tunnel from the womb, into the cold air, breathing, gasping, a moment from death.
Our birth is an immediate tolling bell of what’s to come.
Our only disease is life itself.

We are dying.

Each breath,
another step
Each day,
a moment closer

There is no need for doctors or prognosis. Skip the tests, the transfusion, the trips to a place of many rooms and fluorescent lights. No man in a white coat can say it any different than I can… you are dying.

Let it sink it.
Let it go to the core.
And if your heart doesn’t start to beat just a little faster,
Then let the words go a bit deeper, for you still haven’t heard:
YOU ARE DYING

Look around, it’s time to pay attention.
There’s no time for anything else, no time for watching the spilled milk or crying for the crimes of the past. We’ve all been fucked, screwed and spit on. It’s part of the experience, like strobe lights at a rock show, it’s just part of the deal. As was once said by a great band, there’s no time for fussing and fighting my friend.

You’re dying, the light at the end of the tunnel is clear, the end is inevitable, you are standing on the tracks, you will be food for the birds.
And so now, take a breath. It is coming. YOU.

If only we could stop the little bits of swirling sand and dust clouding our vision. They are sentences from the past, nuggets of resentment hidden in clenched fists, your father’s wrinkled brow. They whirl so fast, blinding even focused eyes. Clouding the path, making enemies of friends, pointing towards the cliffs.

You are dying.

There’s no time for the complaining.
For the excuses, no time.
The habit of anger, resentment, comparison, there’s just no time. We all end up as dust.
Shall you spend your last few minutes squawking? Complaining about the tart strawberry, the irritating glare of the sun? The child laughing loudly?

There is just too much to do. So much to write, circles to build, songs to hear, careful steps to take. Don’t let it all evaporate below the sun, growing lighter and lighter by the minute, fading into nothingness.

It is all here, every laugh and cry, every person in your path, every sound floating in through your walls. It is all here for you to use, coming to you free and untainted. It is the raw matter for you to bend and shape, bursts of energy to wrangle and harness, converting into fuel and long sticks of light.

It is all here, take it before you’re gone. Before they mourn the bit of dust you were. Before your steps are silenced and forgotten. The path can use another set of hands. There are weeds and misplaced rocks, there are stories to write and gnomes to meet.

Did you know that you are dying?

YOU
YOU who read these words.
YOU ARE DYING.

Look around and breath it in. Then start to work.

Facing The Beast

How can I write about something if I myself cannot even do it? If I let my red dragon tail twist and bend, knocking over buildings and my prized statues and half built friendships? How can I even begin to instruct? To write?
I hold it in my mind for less than a second. Its concept a small flickering flame in the tidal wave of oily black liquid and molten rage. I know what to do, I have heard about it so many times, I have practiced it in the quiet of my bedroom for months every morning, but when I see the tip of reality, when I encounter the real-life moment begin to blow and the filaments inside that hold me up begin to burn, then I run.
Running takes many forms. There are the tears, the ones that lately have become giant orbs of rage seeking to destroy myself and others. The visions of metal flying, sirens wailing, crushed bones and rivers of blood.
There is the hiding. The rage that wafts like air through wall and carpet, the absence of words the only mark of strangeness. The seed of resentment I hold on to for days, years.
Holding and holding, stroking, watering, kissing. I keep it mine, reminding myself of it when all is well, and then I remember, and then I’m mad once again. Cold with fear and rage. Closed as a cement box.
I see it all. It is not right. I am under no delusion of pureness, authority. I see the error in my words, in my steps, in my gestures that signify more than my tongue could ever spit, but they keep coming, for this beast is wild. It lacks a master. I am the beast.
So how can I write about it? What can I say if I watch the city burn, the statues crumbles, the houses cave? I watch, hating the terror, but doing nothing to stop the flames.
I feel three threads, tugging. Around one nipple is the Voyeur, watching it all melt. Around the other is the Mender, seeing it as pettiness, knowing it should end.
But around my heart is the braided rope, holding on to the pain. It holds its indignant head high, feeling righteous, waving its colored flag.
I feel them all, yet I sit paralyzed; not acting, not changing, letting the center rope pull me to the grave.

Anxious Clash With The Other

I feel the pain. I feel it often. So often now that I don’t run, yet I do not smile. I hear her laughing and I cannot stop my heart from beating a little louder. Thump, THUMP. It hurts. I hear her walking down the wooden stairs and my chest begins to pound, each footfall is another kick in the gut. She is coming with a story. She is coming to suck a little more attention in her direction. And as I feel a vortex of energy coming, I feel a little vacuum grow. I feel the pull of a star-less space. There is a tug on my toes. My attention is going elsewhere, like waves on a shore that only recede, its going to a place where little spindles fly in circles and dive into my joints. They join together, tight as a brick in my jaw and I cannot talk. I cannot laugh or smile. I am stuck. It’s hard to move, it’s even hard to breath. And it would seem like it’s coming because she has walked in. She has come down the stairs, she has started to spin the tale of her day. That’s what I tell myself. It is because of her. Her voice, her laugh, her story, her sucking in all the energy of the space, pulling me out and robbing me of my smiles and my air. Anxiety swirls around me like a conscious whirlwind, moving to the right, to the left, wherever I step like a fast-footed athlete. She is the reason, the source, the pain. That’s what I tell myself.
And that could be the story forever. The little explanation that lasts until the carousel breaks in a puff of smoke and all the plastic animals tumble out. It is so easy to blame. Just so easy. Wrongness comes from the outside, from people who do not have it right. From people who just haven’t learned or understood or developed the right brain cells. The Other. But it is that which is the source of the problem. The belief in right or wrong. There are only habits. The habit of politics and speech and body movement. The habits of the machine, transmitted and programmed since birth by parents and school and friends and church and society. The learned habits of an entire culture run amok through this body. The habits of a western man, the habits of an Indian woman. They are different. But neither is right, neither wrong. Two sets of habits. Each person has some. Each is convinced of their rightness.
And as I hear her coming with the force of a train, my habits begin to creak. The pain begins. She brings her habits, she exhibits them. Her hands move wildly. Her voice rattles the walls. But it is the clash of habits which hurts, not her. It is the reaction of one machine to another. The Other has a different set of habits. There is no fault. There is only learned mechanicality. The differences are what cause the pain. The clash between what I want and what they are. The clash between how I want things to be and what Is at the moment. It is the clash that causes the pain. Not the Other. The Other is just me in a different form.

I Built A Wall Around My Self

A thick wall of mortar and stone and cement and glue, an amalgam of parts and substance, encrusted ideas and fossilized bones. Part wood, part stone, part metal…affixed with barbed wire along the steep edges and stuffed with body parts and memories and the collected refuse of so many lifetimes. Like the builders of the great wall of china, this wall is composed of forgotten flesh and metal hammers and the silenced stories that were swallowed and with a single final breath.
And the wall, it was constructed without plans, without consent or even a crude brainstorm sketched on a crumpled napkin. Its ongoing construction has lasted more than twenty years, the ongoing project that never comes to a close…the workers in orange vests continue to show up, rain or shine, as they have for years, each bearing my face and my dirty hands, yet I have no memory of digging the foundation. There are no pictures that shed light on its beginning, no memories that flutter in my fragmented mind, reminding me why there are piled bricks and shovel handles and femur bones protruding from the great walls.
Its erection must have begun before my first memory congealed, perhaps watching helplessly from my crib as my mother left the room, perhaps when I cried unattended in the shadow of the forgotten moon. This wall began without my direct knowledge, and yet, it was I who built it. These hands who I look at with a stranger’s eye, these rough hands put each piece in place, each stone dug from the ground, each row of brick, each scoop of cement in place, this work was done by me, me alone.
Perhaps each smooth stone was inspired by an event, an interpreted stare, a defeat, an imposed darkness…inspired and then, because I remained asleep at the wheel of this four limbed vehicle, I gathered my stones and I mixed my cement, like a one eyed witch stirring a pot of some foul smelling potion, and I placed those hard rocks firmly in place. With thick resolve, with renewed wrath, with victory playing in my ears, I watched the substance harden by the second, gray mush to thick glue to unconquerable solid strength and, surrounded by stone and brick and metal, I basked in the solitude of my defense, my fortress, my singular city.
I awake for a second from this chamber, and clearing the sleep from my eyes, I see the walls have spawned another life topped with sparkling horns of fire, and a beating heart and they have grown beyond my control, beyond the thickness of my desire, beyond my understanding…I put them here, but I cannot get them down. The walls are so thick, covered in spikes and razor blades and blood-covered thorns and I want them gone, I want to step outside these walls and taste the air of freedom, true freedom from self imposed exile, but I cannot climb them, I cannot scale them, no ladder is tall enough and the helicopters do not come this close.
And then, as I sleep, I retreat into the cave.
Sometimes I am in the middle, wishing for a door, yet finding the bed is all too warm and comfortable. All too familiar in its smell. Which way is right? Is there a wrong way? Is there black or white or red? Or are all these colors merely shades in an illusion of rainbows that peak in the height of my delusion. The walls are thick, and the sounds of music flows through me like a ghost, the heart within me accepts its message and I search for the door once again.

Intentions

The Rabbi looks down upon his followers and says:
“You must build a wall. With this wall that you build, you will separate your altruistic intentions from your selfish intentions, your selfless transcendent center that yearns for God will thus be separated from your ego based desires that only yearn for pleasure and fame and power and sex. By building this wall, you will begin on the path.”
I look around myself, at the wide desert that surrounds my little city of dreams, and I can plainly see that the construction of such a wall is impossible, such as it has been described. For the desert hides its depths, and in its depths there are caves through which the masked inhabitants travel, and there are deep secret rivers full of forgotten beasts, and there are great mythic birds that fly overhead in translucent silence, and there is a heavy burning rain that comes down from the skies every so often, and carries with it news from other lands, and there is an ever evolving sickness that travels through the open mouths of all of those that talk, and finds its way into all those that listen, and there are sounds that no wall can stop, screams from distant places and distant times, anguished screams that still yearn to be heard.
Far from the city, the ancient walled city within which the Rabbi speaks, there are people being killed, people being tortured, people being banished, people being thrown away like yesterday’s garbage, pushed away to find their misbegotten lives among the refuse of a thousand bloody wars. Can it then be said that the city is safe from this, as long as the pain and the screams and the tears and deep lakes of blood don’t touch the city walls? Does the Rabbi not know that the quest begins here, from the heart of the city, but it extends far beyond its gates? If the men that kill and torture come from the streets of this protected city, is the city then safe from their guilt? Are the city’s own intentions not corporealized in the sound wrenching missiles that tear through hot air and mud wall and fleshy membranes? Maybe the Rabbi does not know of this. Maybe he is simply quiet and blind, aloof from the madness around him, centered on the true God above. But if he is, then can he not be blamed for his own blindness? Is it not a self imposed exile that ultimately betrays his own stated intentions?
Why has he chosen to remain quiet in the face of so many atrocities? Why has he chosen to remain ignorant of the pain that travels in bits of dust through storms of pebbles and sand? Are these the altruistic intentions that remain hidden within the city walls? Or are these the other intentions, the ones that have managed to walk past the checkpoints, past the interrogations, past the security police, past the careful eye of the guards, and they have penetrated deep into the heart of the city, ready to unleash chaos with a single flicker of a switch?
I am that I am. I am One. There is no Other. I am the Rabbi. I am the soldier. I am the killer. I am the bomb. I am the baby blown to little red bits.
How can we then build this wall around our inner city, when we can’t truly distinguish the good from the bad, the true from the false, the right from the wrong, the image from the real?
Within each step of my strange robot, the fleshy machine that I currently ride into extinction, lie a million electrical accidents, free in their randomness, wild in their flight. They flash like little lost torch lights in the middle of the desert night. Some of them, in their wild run through my body that is a world, may in fact look up to heaven. Most of them still stare into the bloody heart of the Void, and, as they stare, they yearn for power, they cry for revenge. They are all enmeshed, like spider webs around other spider webs, like the pages that you may read on a network of light, pages like this one, that make no sense in themselves and don’t even have the intention of clear communication. They swirl and they crash, they come to bursting bubbles of orgasmic supernovas and then sink into themselves to become eternal black holes.
Above all, they don't reveal themselves easily. They may look friendly and hide a bomb beneath their coat. They may look righteous but pull out a boy’s fingernails when the lights are down, and the walls are thick.
As above, so below.
As below, so above.
And if they hide from me, these strange wild intentions that roam within the electrical network that makes my fingers move across this keyboard, they will certainly hide in the endless desert of deeply entrenched resentment and hatred. And if they manage to get past a hundred checkpoints, and a thousand vigilant eyes, they will surely get past mine, my single pair of eyes which fall asleep recurrently and only come to a clear place of attention but a few times per day.
To start by building this wall, then, is a path to certain disaster. Or maybe just a path to blindness. The blindness that is willful, the blindness of the eye that can see but can’t rise above the very wall which its own hands have built.
We start from where we are. As evil as our intentions may currently be, they are the only ones we have.

Rising Demons

The demons are playing in the pools again, the abandoned waters where many children have drowned. They are long neglected waters, growing algae and fungus, a heavenly breeding ground for tadpoles and mosquitoes that feast on dead skin and coagulated blood. And, unlike swimming pools that have boundaries defined by concrete and steps and diving boards, these waters are uncontained. They are endless, stretching north and south, starting at my feet and plunging beyond my imagination. Beyond the voyages of Jacques Cousteau, higher than the furthest solar system. They are depths beyond measurement. They are heights beyond calculation. The pools are all I see, and even more clear than the black waters are the open mouths that just barely peak over the water line. The waters they lurk in are as thick as molasses, made even thicker by the ink of my fear. Purple flowers dot the murk, their presence in the blackness is a lifeline between despair and the memories of work, a glimmer of the beauty that can emerge from death. But most of the time, I cannot see the blooms, they are hidden by other life forms that are not so forgiving. They are the demons who feed on my sweat. Their long, nimble tongues miss my clit and instead, gather the salty drops of my fear. Their feeding does not release me from the trembling or worry, they allow me to reel, allow me to cry; they play with my pain like maniacal children in a park of carcasses and chewed bones. They like the taste of my tears, like cheap wine mixed paranoia and salted with tears. These are winos of the highest order. Boozers and drunks. Pure addicts. They cannot live without my doubts. Without my anxiety, they shrivel like vampires in the sun, only unlike the undead, their death is not eternal. Their ashes may drift in the wind, sometimes for days, other times for a few fleeting seconds, but no matter where the current has taken them, they can smell me in the air. In Paris, blowing across the steps of the Louvre or perhaps in the middle of the sea, cavorting with whales and mermaids; no matter how far away, they are triggered by my stumble. They smell my salt and the sudden rush of darkness that wrestles anything else to the ground. My altered mind, my anxious heart…they come running. Within the time it takes to blink, their forms coalesce once again. Quick and hard, their dark mouths take shape. Like a flash of brilliant lighting, something moves within them, giving life to their ghastly forms. They wait silently at my heels for a time, within the first moments of my fall, they wait patiently like a puppy learning to beg, waiting for the scraps of its master. But then, as the seconds pass and I begin to fall further into the pit, they start to nibble at my heels. They lick my toes in small circular patterns. Sometimes there are just a few, other times, dozens, each vying for a feast of my despair. And as the first tear falls, they are climbing up my calves like skilled mountaineers, scratching the smooth skin of my toes with sharpened nails and small metal tools. There is plenty for all. Each angry beat of my heart moves into an open mouth, each salty drop slides across their tongues like delicious nectar from a flowing well. They are ravenous, but always patient. My blood is never enough, but when the waters within are still, they don’t cry out. They wait, silently, always alert, always ready to come to my heels, to come to my cries, and delight in the earthly splendor of my recurrent pain.

The Work Relationship

The human experience is filled with varying qualities and degrees of relationships. There is the earliest contact between mother and child, between siblings and with pets, between friends, between lovers. All of these relationships make a dent in the pliable mold of skin and organs- although it is not the only thing that changes us, they certainly represent a large influence over our life. And once we are walking and talking and know how to bathe and feed ourselves, if we are so lucky, we will discover another kind of relationship. It is a working relationship. It begins with two people who consciously decide to go on a journey together. Since we begin blind and naïve to our habits and sleeping state, the relationship begins in a state of intuitive trust. A baby clings to its mother’s breast without asking for references, it just latches on, trusting it will be guided and cared for. A work relationship between adults begins in this way as well, with trust and an intuitive sense that this is the mysterious path to tread.
This is a delicate state, akin to the small sparks of twigs and crumpled newspapers which begin a great breathing fire. Each step along the path is taken slowly, with tenderness and strength. Piling too much thick pine wood on a slowly lighting fire could smoother the flames, too much lighter fluid could cause an explosion, while waiting too long to add the larger logs could also extinguish the mounting flames. It is a delicate balance, a fine razor’s edge.
A working relationship is maintained by constant devotion. Devotion to the constant work, devotion to the master who guides with all their ability, devotion to the objective of a waking state, devotion to honesty and keeping an open heart, devotion to transforming our negative habits into things of beauty that have the power to affect more than we normally understand.
It requires renewed trust when the moment feels bleak and the machine spins in turmoil. It requires renewed attention and focus each moment of the day when our thoughts drift into identified and distracted states. It requires self sacrifice: sacrifice of ego and image, sacrifice of personal glory and lifelong habits. These are not things we do once and then forget about it, like conquerors on deserted shores. These lessons and struggles continue throughout our lives, and each day we must sacrifice, sometimes more than once a day, for as long as breathe enters and retreats from our body.
A work relationship is the bond of people with a common objective. To reach the waking state is a test of endurance and practice and growing will. The people we work with are our partners in this practice. Together, as our energy mounts, we move higher in the labyrinth, holding hands and pushing higher still, we climb not knowing what comes. But we can only rise if the relationship works. If all partners are open, without barriers and machine masks. These artificial walls obstruct the flow of energy and love. They keep the relationship at its most base and human level, and at this level, we are asleep.
While some human relationships can continue to exist with lack of attention- like estranged parents and adult children- the working relationship cannot continue to function with neglect and unspoken aggression and distance. Negative emotions and manifestations, which are completely common and accepted in the world, like sarcasm and eye rolling, rudeness and harsh tones, all of these, while practically the norm at a typical family thanksgiving dinner, can destroy the working relationship. Machines will react to each other. Barriers will grow tough and impenetrable. A distracted moment, a careless sentence, a shrug of the shoulders; as small as they might seem, they can break a strong contact. It can shatter an elevated space. By constantly acting out our negative emotions, we can quickly forget what we are working towards and simply dwell in the sleeping state. The working relationship will always require more than what we are used to giving, it seems un-normal, and it is. It is absolutely special and tender, hold it with all the love you possess.

Struggle in a Hole

I write with a vague sense of dread. I listen for a ringing bell, but there is a silence thicker than sludge which coats my ears. The telephone is silent, I wait for a presence on the other end. A familiar voice that often calls me back to the land of softness and kisses. But with each second that passes, I slip a little father into the deep hole. I recognize this dark pit like the smell of tortured death and sticky blood; my chamber of cobwebs and singular hatred, it’s windowless and cold. It is a space of hollowed dank earth and composting life, but I cherish this hole, despite the offending smell of urine and rot, I find my way back here in seconds, even when I’m miles away. After hours of soft lovemaking, despite drops of crystal bliss, one word can light the way to this hole. The fall is fast and the landing is even harder. From the bottom I look up, barely aware of life outside. Haven’t I always been here? Feasting on fat worms and drinking the piss of ghostly demons. As I wait for the phone, each typed word is an attempt to crawl out. When my fingers pause, I slip…so I try to move fast. Can I transform this lurid form? or will it take me over, transforming the pretty girl on top into the monster that hides in her caves. With a word she is blackened with pain. One misinterpreted silence sends her down, her home awaits. Puddles of mud are her mirrors, and she chokes on the mangled images. There is no room for love here, just a tender bed of pain, made of nails and her own lost flesh. In this place she makes yellowed curtains from joy, and cakes out of hope.
But I cannot make the phone ring, the man does not answer, he does not call. I worry about the labored breathing I heard twelve hours ago. The small black phone jiggles and lights up, but perhaps his eyes are closed, lost in the soft blue shades of his dreams. Answer my call. I put myself in your vision, a small girl holding a little yellow flower. I see you reach out with a long, slender, white arm; pushing the stem into your beard, you smile and say thank you. The flower moves in the wind like a pinwheel, harnessing the strength of the wind, you grow taller. Like a windmill stuck into a leafy black brush. Oh my love! Can you hear me calling? I try to grab the sides, try to grasp tiny bits of life on the edge of my favorite black hole. The landscape is vast and flat, an arid land of long-yellowed grasses and a red-black sky. Like the colors in a negative, nothing looks real. Matter is white, while the air becomes more heavy cloaked in colored blood. Moment by moment I drift. I am looking down into the deep hole. Now, I lay on my back, amazed how far I have fallen. Now, I am climbing out. I am falling in, I am climbing out. I am far away, I am moments from slipping once again. There is no constant, just the ongoing battle, the struggle to stay out and the desire to fall in. I hear the inner record that makes me lose my balance, I see the ground begin to sway… I take the deep breaths that help me stay above ground. The negative mantra plays, the careful steps dig me out. On and on, the tug of war continues.

The Elephant in the Well

In late August 2008, a baby elephant fell into a well in north central Sri Lanka. The concerned villagers knocked down a section of the cement well so the elephant could escape. After crawling out, the elephant began charging the very villagers who had rescued it.
I’ve fallen in…into the realm where words define all shapes. Where I truly believe I am Me. I’ve been in here for years, swimming in small circles within this cage. Between breaths I look up and see the sky, I see the people in rags that peer over the sides, throwing down bits of food and small orange flowers. I keep swimming, never quite dying, but never really living. The walls are high….cool and smooth stones form the walls of my circular home. I keep paddling, knowing no other way. There is nothing to grab onto, no crevasse in which to burrow. I’ve fallen into the largest of holes, the water is at my neck, and if it rains, I’ll be covered for sure. I look up from the bottom of a towering well, the light of day is bright and visible. Above, I can hear a few voices, faint and singing soft melodies. They have sent down an orange flower, cradled in the beak of a small song bird. The sky changes, I see blue, then clouds of red, then wisps of passing rainbows. But I am at the bottom, in the hole of water dug deep into the red earth.
My falling…it happened without thought. I cannot remember another way. Was it my first breath which began the fall? I am in deep murky water, and yet, those that offer me help, those that break the walls so I may run and breathe…it is those people I run to destroy. I do not run to the poachers or the politicians, I charge towards the ones closest to me, the ones that still clutch rocks and hammers they used to break me free. These are the ones near my feet, the ones I can kill with a breath. Within me I just cannot see the people that have sacrificed a part of themselves so that I might touch land once again. After their work, after their gifts, I run towards them with all my force, unable to control my habits of the wild.
Truly, I am unaware of my self. I run to kill the first threat. Just a baby, but I see danger everywhere. In the smiling man, in the song I cannot sing. In the fog as it rolls towards me, bringing disguised shadows and darker fears. I am drowning in the waters of my own creation, but I am unable to see the glittering plates stacked high with gifts and knowledge, held by the most beautiful of hands. Take your freedom and use it they chant. But the quest for water does not leave. Thirst deeper than my mouth, thirst deeper than the most water-less of deserts creeps, and I go looking for the watery filled wells. It is my habit to fall. Sometimes I wait for a willing hand, but will they come again? If they do, this time, will I remember their sacrifice?

Time Slipping Away

The moon is up, and my body remembers it’s the time for sleep. With a gradual aching pull, my eyelids begin to close in, taking my sight with them. We want to shut down! my limbs scream. Still vertical, still typing, still thinking, "not at this hour!" they shout louder. And one by one, each muscle decides to give me another reminder, they dose out the pain. First the fingers, then the shoulders…it’s a mutiny. They want sleep. Its time to turn off the lights and let the factory doors slam behind me as I exit. But a piece of me lingers in the deserted hallway. Something has splintered from my shadow and it remains behind, slowly spinning in space.
The clock reads close to midnight. These were hours once devoted only to sleeping, but day has not passed and the people of air still move in and out, calling my lungs home for a mere second. And each task is a lifetime. A brief bit of time to throw everything within the cauldron. To sing and move with all the passion that begs to slip out through orgasm. Each 6 minute cycle is calculated. What do I choose to do with it? Sometimes I think about lunch, sometimes I worry, sometimes I decide to get angry and remember injustices perpetrated. And sometimes, I remember to work.
Amidst the superfluous thoughts that knaw at my attention, I remember to breathe deeply. And then, I’m gone, lost in a place where body and mind wander among two separate worlds. We appear together, an image of unity, but most of me is elsewhere. The land has no name, no distinguishing features or melodies…and it sucks like an ever hungry void. Insistent on consuming every tree and thought, every movement and sound. And my body moves without me. It dances, sings, performs…it seems so normal, a picture of unity…but the "me" that lives through attention, dwells in the land of other and then and yesterday.
And then, a jolt of awakening…here I am, in this room, in this body, at this hour. It is now, in this small lifetime. In the 80 years I may be lucky enough to achieve, in the six minute experiment that requires the whole of me. The question is…what shall I do with this time? Pretend to sing, pretend to work and dance and move while a large part of me spins along the human wheel of emotion and desire? The wheel only moves in one direction…it passes the same obstacles, the same thoughts, the repeating fears and jealousies. Over and over, I decide to relive them…and each time, my blood boils and tears flow with familiar pain. When the timer sounds, I realize the moments are over and I was absent for their escape. It was faded concerns that swept me up and spat me out. My small 6 minute lifetime, over before I decided to pay attention.
Each day, I repeat the same mini life-death, and each day, I realize when it’s too late that I’ve been lazy, I’ve been careless and inattentive and the moments have passed while my mind was busy focusing on imaginary sufferings. These little lives that I abuse. These little lives that I take for granted. They will not continue forever, they greet me with opportunities and I squander the time. It could end tonight and I wouldn’t have made an inch of progress. Each day I forget, but each day I must remember.

Treats

"You promised!" He yelled in his most whiny and angered tone, slamming down the phone and breaking contact with his mother. It was a petty outburst, an eruption of emotions based on his desire to eat dinner in a restaurant instead of home. His anger bubbled up from his sense of righteousness, he had been promised a night on the town, promised! True? Humans remember events and words that work in their favor, and everyone has a differently colored memory of the same conversation; but despite this, he acted badly towards his mother.
When she came home later that night, she was all smiles as they planned where to eat the following evening. Not a word was mentioned about his outburst, both of them had forgotten, and he was allowed to invite a friend to bring to the restaurant.
And with this cycle of events, his machine has learned a valuable lesson, one that will leave a lasting imprint. One that he will use and recreate for the rest of his natural life, and most likely, he will carry it along to the next. Outbursts will be rewarded. Harsh words and deeds will be cast out like rice at a wedding, falling on all those in his path. He has learned that he can do whatever he wants without consequences...he may lash out and still get what he wants. This is his habit, and with each passing circumstance of anger à outburst à desire…this habit will become more entrenched, etching itself further and further into this molecular memory.
His machine rules him, and each day, it holds him tighter within the claws of habit. All of us are embedded within our machines, but we can learn to be the master, not the slave. The first step is realizing when you have acted badly…what was your desire? Examine what you wanted and if you got it. If you lashed out or got sad or manifested any negative emotion to achieve your desire, then you helped your machine gain more strength. If you were able to push through an interval, pushing yourself and your machine past the boundary of what is normally comfortable, then your machine deserves a small reward, a cookie or twenty minutes of television. If you acted like a jerk to your friend because you needed sugar because you had a headache and then you ate a cookie, your machine was given a treat for the wrong reasons.