Questions For A Sunday Afternoon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this collection of clutter and mass breathing?

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

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

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

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

Dig In

Dig in with my feet. Dig in with those callused hands cracking and smelling of blood and iron.
Those hands of yours with the roses sprouting from below the white nails are leading to my bed where the sockets sizzle and burn, sometimes exploding like certain moments in a hot jungle with a stove nearby and a woman in a blue uniform caressing the colored light between us. Ouch, the fire of electricity snaps me up. Eyes, open. We know where we are.
Eyes open, we look out the window together and regard the little bird at the top of the tree. Ouch.  Another slap and yes, I am listening.  There is nothing that hurts more than a blind ear.  A deaf eye.  A mute look.
We stare out the window.  Stare.  Stare and state the purpose. Bird out on the tree, sitting on the tippy top, bending the last of that cypress flare.
What hurts more?  Out the window, looking in this bed and discovering the world beneath the covers.  Covers are for the modest and asses out- the narrow light coming through the window catches us, immodest and glaring white and covered with hair. 
The savages have come with urine scented hair and teeth, the shamans rarely stand on hilltops with white robes. No- the tribe has arrived, beautifully described with yellow teeth hanging from rope necklaces made of human hair- skulls used easily as drinking cups. All manner of earthly remains used for decorations and I was hoping to get one for the small altar.
Pain is my friend, without it I forget.  Without it I would forget myself in this warm house covered in sugar and red and white candies and the fluff of terrycloth and inertia. Pain is nothing my friend. Pain is everything.
I look into your eyes, share that spark once again.  The sockets will be jealous as will the memory of a story in my mind.
Can they see us now? Our colors pouring out the small shaft not always meant for light- grunting and brutal- the light hits us from behind, illuminating our forms on the white walls, casting a shadow that travels out and up- beating against the wall of the room, radiating out out out and up up up until we no longer recognize it, have forgotten what was done on the bed in the name of pain and practice and exchange. 
But the clouds are there and have been since we began, and they seize it all up and turn it into seed and send it back.

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 Moment

She wiggled in bed. At some points she was purely wiggling, her body moving huge blasts of energy in unpredictable bursts from toes to fingertips and then back again. Other times she convulsed, her torso lunging forward with wild power that rivaled thunderstorms and bursts of natural fury. Her arms, legs and torso moved without her consent, buckling on their own, reacting to energy that had reached a peak. Her mouth opened, letting out sounds that broke the boundary between moan, pain and pleasure.
She had reached the mountaintop, a place that had once burst with rainbow colored hand gliders and parachutes. She used to sail down the rocky cliff-side on gusts of earth-scented wings, content to fall once again to the place she had come from. Now, it was the same mountain and the same breeze with its salty smell. It was the same place, but she was not jumping. She stayed at the top, holding hands with the man that had brought her there, holding onto him as the wind tried to push them over the edge and back towards the waiting ground.
And now she held back, holding onto the strings, breathing in spite of the breeze and the cries of energy that desperately wanted to move up and over, falling back to where she had once been when her clothes were on and the bed was still uncrumpled and her mouth unkissed. But she was here now, pulling tighter on the strings as the roar began and the convulsions started.
‘uuuuahhhh’ she let out a sound into his bearded cheek.
He lay still as her body twitched beside his, breathing gently, showing her how to relax.
She took in big gulps of air, holding them, forcing her body to breathe slowly, to do what she could feel was happening beside her.
Another convulsion.
Time passed, ones turned into fives, fives turned the clock until the birds sang outside his barred window and her breathing returned to normal. The hand gliders and parachutes melted back into her bloodstream, sitting eagerly on the edge awaiting another opportunity.
Soon she was getting dressed. Pulling on her jeans, her socks, stuffing her bra into her sweater pocket. It was probably cold out, as it had been when she arrived. She put on her jacket, her scarf and gave him a kiss goodbye.
She started her car on the street beside his house and began the short drive to her house which was just a few blocks away. The streets were empty and she began to think, going back to just a few moments before, back to the bed, back to the warm skin that was not her own, yet was. A part of her leapt away, once again wishing to be there, to be with him, not just kissing, not just touching, it was the mountain, the fall over the edge, the sinking into the abyss. She craved that, though they did not jump.
She spoke, ‘you cannot be in a constant state of orgasm, not like the kind you are wishing for.’
She guided her car down the small ramp beneath the subway platform. She remembered she could be happy. ‘Be here. You can be happy with him in bed, but when you are here, driving, you can be happy too.’
She looked at the road, at the subtle curve ahead. She sunk into the curve, putting her full attention on the shift of the yellow line. She turned the wheel of the car with her whole body, feeling pleasure as the car moved. Feeling the dark night coming through all the car’s windows. She smiled.
She thought about all the things she did, all the places she went, all the times she could just be happy if she just remembered to enjoy it. It was hoping for other things, longing for the bed, for his skin, ultimately for the mountaintop, it was the longing for something else. It was the torturous road she liked to walk.
She drove along the dark road, through the two lanes of parked cars. She could be there, in the car, driving, not wishing for someone else, something else.
Not needing anything to happen differently.
She felt that truth wash over her, she understood the source of her daily pain. Her body vibrated with the kisses from the mountain top while her body relaxed into the night around her and the slow drive towards home.

The Apple

I walk through the garden. Light steps. Walking gently on a narrow path of crushed rocks. Fine as gold dust. One clear objective shines like a blue jewel between my eyes, lightly beaming from my smooth pale forehead. To the left, my eyes wander. To the right I look, searching for that one piece of fruit. That one bright and shinning red apple, aglow and pregnant below the bright eyes of the sun. I hold it in my mind, a perfect image, a treasure waiting for my hands and kisses. Calling out for adoration. Red. Alive as all things are. Red like the rivers of blood moving through thin arms. Red like this throbbing pussy that awaits its sword.

I walk with one objective, one bit of reality taking over my mind. That round and sweet fruit. Red. Nothing stops me. Not a warm breeze smelling of jasmine, not a curious flower with twelve soft pink petals and a perfume that smells of the moon and death.

I walk with an ever-present determination, my eyes scanning the sandy ground constantly, looking past the ground up sparkles, searching for the color of deep life. Breathing. A mouth to be kissed. Each step is a new lifetime, another chance. A glance down another path that leads to the sea. Tendrils escape me. I let them go, flying like a curling explosion of laughter and song. They extend to the clouds, sweeping in armfuls of mist and the hopes of air.

I let them go, my eyes searching the dark secrets of trees. Their caves, their shadows. I look, hoping for contact, a gasp escaping its leaves. Will its gift be mine? Will I bite into pale flesh, dripping with desire and sugar, both of us, wanting to be planted. Consumed and turned into something beyond imagination. We will leap past the stagnant shapes of squares and circle, journeying to a place of layered dimension, places undescribed. We are the same. Red and round, ripe and waiting for knowing hands, rough and dirty, full of rain.

I sense that the sun has shifted, that my brother calls my name from a far off field. I can see the white fluffy sheep beside him, herds of cotton and simple stares. The softness of those blades of green, the electric blue of the sky, burning above him like fire. But this shifting, I sense that the air has turned sour, that my brother calls me with a different voice, sounding more like drums than bells. I search the sky for clues, looking, pulling apart clouds with the precision of a hungry animal, pulling limb by limb, bit by bit and muscles tear and bones crumble beneath the force of my hands. I search, hearing my body move like the clocks I left in an old shop. Left and let the door shut quietly as I walked away into the bright daylight.
I hear it once more. This reality is nothing if not the senses, my beating heart, the thump of its call, the sound of its opening and closing valves. What am I if not a beat? A tone in the drummer’s wail…a sound in the dark countryside. What am I if not a blip on the manuscript sheet, just one tiny note, one life.

I am having the clouds for dinner, they melt on me, my tongue and lips turning them into bright colors and words of nourishment. I suck the marrow out from them, sucking like a dog that claims no owner. I am the master. I am the leash. My choking is the grasp of my own hand pulling me in a thousand directions. I am the fire and the pull of the leash, my own master, the dominator of all that is fur and flesh and love. Undying love whose call covers the hills like a thick blanket. Can you hear me brother? Do the sheep flick their ears with my bright call? My message of love which surpasses human ears. It is us, those of fur, those of the earth and dirt, those of the whispy clouds that move like brushstrokes. The night is clear and I am no god. I am the footprint, stamping the earth with my laugh, walking as though there will never be another. I am the trees, the fruit which I seek. The red that covers us in life and sparkle… there is no other. No ground. Perhaps no brother. No fruit. These are my fears. And am I right? I look into the garden and see nothingness. Where is the sheep? The eye that stares without feeling. The eternal colors of green and white, covering me, denying me pleasure, denying me pain. Where is the needle, the cock that sends its message in rhythm… am neither here nor there, a thousand years have passed and I claim no knowledge. Another turn of the path and I wander past the same footsteps, yearning for my brother and his soft sheep, the call that has turned from bells to questions.

They have all shifted with the search. The dogs have turned to mice. The cats above claim the sun as god. Clear minded once, now I dream about other things.
The play has ended and a pile of red roses are at my feet. I search the dark crows, seeing only halos of lights and a roaring of hands. Who are all these people who stare? Light covers them in a fine sheen, but they are only shapes, circles and lines and rivers of blood. There must be blood, an army of robots could not shine like them. But I wonder.

A single clap rattles my spine and I see the apple. That skin for which I have searched. I have walked on soft grains of sand and compact earth. I have walked for so long, finding only more light. Finding clouds that have turned to night and brothers that have faded into memory. I have left all that have walked before me, left them to die in their tatters and murmurs. I took their thoughts, turning them into me, moving them through every part I move. Throbbing, I feel them all. Each dagger of pain, the thrill of ecstasy.

The endless road moves forever forward, I feel the grains of earth below each toe, calling me by every name. And I know theirs. I know each one. This path is mostly the same, though slightly different. But mostly the same. One different shrub, a flower out of place from the last time I licked its pink. It is endless, beyond words, though I continue to try. I grasp at the edges, looking for more. Finding books and poetry and readings by men in white beards. I stroke each tiny strand, loving the feel on my fingers.

Beyond the rim of my eyes I find the desert left for dead. Without rain, without one orgasm to wake it from sleep. This is the reality of dreams and nightmares. The path from which I have stepped forth, naked, covered in tattoos and a few wrinkles and spots of blood that decorate me like a birthday cake. I am clear, a walking mirage, still searching for the fruit of life. The thing that will spring forth like a pool, the burst of life that will live inside me like an eternal fetus, forever sucking and feeding, forever giving of its dreams. It will not be born, not into the air, not to the trees and the men who would create a god. It will be here, a change without eyes, without language. I will know it, it will be my nature.

I Could Have Been Any Woman

I could have been any woman.

Wrapped in a head scarf, armed with a semi-automatic. I could have been hiding in caves, listening to the vanishing drone of a plane. I could have been a pious woman, mountains of cloth covering my breasts, staring into a bubbling pan of oil and chicken. I could have watched as verbal slurs vanished into the air, forever marking the children they touched.

I might have been anyone.

Driving a convertible down a street of palm trees and purses more expensive than houses. I could have been her- she who detonated explosives in a tent full of young pilgrims. She is in me, the girl with nothing left to loose. The self righteous woman. The zealot. The victim fearing her own family. The opportunist. The lover. The mother. The solider. The guerilla. The addict. The farmer. Them and a thousand others, they are all in me. It would have only taken the right man. It would have just taken a spark and a quick glance and a moment of elation. Not much. A hard cock, an orgasm. The rest of me would follow- blindly, lovingly, would follow to the farthest jungle to the tallest building and their leather swivel chairs.

She could have been me.

I might have been her.

It would have just taken a kiss, a passionate kiss that would have ignited every cell- every bit of longing- it would have just taken a firm cock and a tender stroke of my hip and I would have been gone. Following. Moving like an animal on a leash, learning from what I saw.

Just give me a kiss.

But I met him, and I saw a blue shape moving down a sunny street and I heard his call and I touched my window and looked back, staring backwards as the car moved on. I found him later on the beach, and later his lips, and soon his cock and then I felt his tongue and much later, cementing me to him, the orgasm. Days later I slept with him in a vacant house and soon I watched him ask strangers for change and we bought malt liquor and hid from the police.

It was me.

Then he asked and I gave. There was money. Tears. There was time. I inhaled his cigarettes. Another flash… tongue, an orgasm. I would stay for anything. Just another orgasm. Then I watched him cook his dope and one day I felt it going through me and then I watched as he crumbled. I held on, trying to preserve what I remembered, that one day I touched my window. The flash of blue and his shape, the certain-ness of my hand hitting glass. It was what he was, he was what I became. I could have been anyone, but I chose him. He chose me. I followed his tongue, his body. I followed him, but I could have become anyone.

I could have been any woman.

The Game

They played the game as honorably as they could, as honorably as they could being men. Being men began with long organs that dangled between their legs that caused them to belch with ferocity and cry in the middle of the night while swimming in a small pool of white liquid. They played as they knew how. As men. They were beings that charged forward into the fog, with pistols at their sides and laughter from behind and ferocity that burned deep. They played as they were taught. As little boys they were divided into teams and shown how to tackle and dodge and score. They did as they knew, as they were instructed, as they were shown. They followed the long trail. The pants. The mustaches. The beards. The guns. The ferocity. The analytic. The cold. Other men had come before, and the road was well marked. It was colored in blue and black and brown. Colored with little helmets and little plastic bats and science kits. These were the things of boys. The clear indicators. They went well beyond the name and hair style. It was the rearing. The leaning through imitation. They were boys because they were raised as such. Before the plastic pistols was the suppression of tears. Sensuality hid in the closet, constantly tormented by the ape in the room. Father was watching. There was no room for softness. The moon hid because there was only room for strategy. The rules were written on the blackboard. The locker room smelled of damp clothes and fear and sweat. It was each man for himself. Attack or die. In the whirlwind of manhood, she was lost. Hidden behind the glare of the sun, she sat back watching silently, absolutely hidden. The trees held just the faintest whisper of her presence. The cloudy sky was as soft as her bosom, gentle and pillowy and smelling of wildflowers. But they were blind. All those boys were so utterly blind in their hard helmets and shoulder pads and uniforms, so blind in their hard muscular bodies and sense of importance. She was their ruler, the silent empress present in the air that they sucked, present in the woods surrounding their field, on the grass below their spiked shoes. They were the players in her kingdom, only the blind could never tell which way was up or down. Her markings covered their bodies with moles and hair and sinewy muscles. They were birthed from the folds in her great round body, suckled on her milk. But they might never remember. Theirs was the game for the moment. They were in the game of men. They played their parts to perfection, each move and line delivered flawlessly. Like blind actors on a stage, they were the men. The athletes, the boys successfully reared into manhood, so deeply enmeshed within the game that they could not see the empress on the dew, or the tip of the blackbird’s beak. They could only see the importance of their game, the game of skill and force and ferocity. She held back, silent, cloaking everything with her breath. She was just an inch away, but lost forever in the shadow of their game.

The Power of the Secret

He woke up frightened. His chest was a rock of fear and his arms were covered in a glossy sweat. Someone knew what he had done. It had been many years, but now someone knew. The deed was out in the world. It swirled in the light of the sun and then found him in his dark apartment in the layers of night and dreams. How the rock had been turned, he had no idea. But the worms were exposed and a wind had drifted towards him and disturbed his still body.
The note had been left on his car. Such a small innocent piece of paper, no different from any of the other pieces of abandoned trash that coasted down the street until finally drifting to the sea. Only this one was not lost. It had not fallen out of a blue trash can on an early Tuesday morning. It had been folded with care and written with a precise hand that revealed black block letters. It was for him. And it found him. It began with his name and was attached perfectly to the side of his car. How he wished that a strong wind had shaken it loose and sent it running through grass and cityscapes, but it didn’t.
He grabbed it with curious eyes and slightly shaking hands. It was on his nightstand now. A small white innocent piece of paper, only its message was a demand.
“I know what you did. I want two million.”
He was over forty. He had done many, many things he was not proud of. Things he would never tell his mother. He had lived a wild life for many years. It was the consequence of money and fame. It was the consequence of being a male. It was the consequence of abundant energy and the pursuit of the unknown and the love of a female body. He had been ripe and he had stepped into the world wanting to lick it all.
As he sat in bed in the early morning light, the smell of coffee coming from the kitchen, he knew there were some things he would not repeat if given the chance. They seemed fun, they seemed okay at the time, at least some of them for a few minuets before rationality and consequences caught up to him, and although he tried not to live with any regrets, still there were some things he would not repeat. There were some things he didn’t want exposed. He was a public figure, he needed to fit, at least partially, into what the majority of his audience viewed as “appropriate.”
What did they know? Was it that one time on Christmas Eve? Or that one comment he said while intoxicated. What did they know? Which secret? There were a handful, some he didn’t want to think about.
His mind went to his family. He thought of their faces bunched in disappointment. He winced, his chest hurt. The walls began to push against their wooden supports, it felt like they could crumble. His skin glistened.
He looked within and suddenly he knew what they knew. His body was still wet, his heart still raced, but he knew. And now, he had to reduce its power. The secret, the deep, deep hole in his chest that spun like a wild storm would have to be revealed. His mouth would bring it forward. His words would expose it and turn it over and over until there was light. Until the eyes of the world judged him. He would tell them all, and he would drain the secret of its power. With each sentence, spoken live and slowly, he would let the flashlight of a million eyes do their work.
It was only a secret if no one knew. It only held strength as long as he locked it up in fear. Blackmail could work only if he held tightly to the moment, if he clenched and gritted his teeth and pushed the rock further into the moist dank earth. It was only a source of power if he kept it hidden in the closet of memories.
There would be no money. There would be no dark well within his chest anymore. Tonight he would expose himself, he would reveal his secret, he would tell them all and they would reject him or laugh, but the secret would be drained. The power of that little folded note would be worthless, because they would all know. And the secret would die under the sunlight. Such is the nature of secrets.

Brian David Mitchell

In this realm of the human. In this society we understand filled with cars, TV, politicians, ads, churches, movies, restaurants, laws…in this realm, in this American culture, there are shared symbols. Each single person will look at the same advertisement (or a thousand other things) in a different way based on their own upbringing, knowledge, memories, etc., but there is a basic shared language that exists between the bulk of the population. The shared collective symbols of right and wrong and beauty and ugly and funny and colors and laws is what allows millions of people to interact with each other through language and action. We can look around and see people behaving in generally the same way as we do, this we consider “sane.” Millions of people in America share the same “symbolic order.” The symbolic order are the words we use to explain our human experience. Words to describe our emotions, to describe our experience, words to describe our actions and understanding of events. Because of a general consensus that there is a God in the sky that created life on earth, because a majority of people share this “symbolic order,” (they use words like god, heaven, hell, creation, bible, etc) they all consider themselves normal and sane.

When there is a disconnect, when a minority of people (or perhaps one person) has a symbolic order (a collection of words used to explain their experience, etc) that does not fit within the larger symbolic order, there is conflict. These people are considered “insane.” They understand and explain the world with different words.

Brian David Mitchell believes he is a man of god. He was a street preacher in Utah in early 2000. Many people would have regarded him as a semi-delusional zealot who believes he can hear God. Many people pray to god. They talk to him, some think they hear answers, all of this is considered sane by the majority of the American public. But when a man does nothing but stand on the street and preach and shout and lecture to the passers-by about the word of God and Jesus, the majority, even the church going people, think that the mind has slipped.

Brian David Mitchell had constructed a world around himself, as we all do, to explain his existence. In his world, God speaks to him, God commands him. In his world, his symbolic system, men may have more than one wife. Men may do what they want with their women as long as they are married. Within his symbolic order, he believed that people must be humbled. They must experience the low-human state so they can one day experience a higher one.

There was one family that did not believe he was completely insane. The Smart family of Utah hired him to help repair their roof. He worked at their house for five hours one day. One night, he cut a hole in their screen, broke into their home and kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, the 14 year old from her bed in the middle of the night. He took her to the woods. His wife gave Elizabeth a robe and told her change to change into it. A small ceremony was performed and Brian David Mitchell proclaimed Elizabeth as his wife, he raped her afterwards, as he would many times afterwards. When his first wife complained that he was having sex with Elizabeth too often, he began to rotate between them. Elizabeth was found nearly a year later. "Anything I showed resistance or hesitation to, he would turn to me and say, 'The Lord has commanded you to do this. You have to experience the lowest form of humanity to experience the highest.”

Brian David Mitchell and his first wife are in police custody. They are both declared mentally unfit to stand trial. It is Mitchell’s explanation that the court sees as unstable. Although many people in this country pray, when God is used as a reason to commit a crime (actions the collective accepts as “wrong”) the general consensus of the explanation is “insanity.” This explanation is not shared in the symbolic order of the larger society.

The writer of a particular article about the Elizabeth Smart case used words like “horrific and sick” to describe Brian David Mitchell. This is the conflict. One man believes he is doing what God wants him to do. He is humbling a young woman so that one day she can reach a higher state. This is what he actually believes. This is how he actually understands the world. The police, the criminal justice system, her parents, neighbors, journalists, the Americana public see this act as the raping of a young girl by a crazy zealot. One deed is thought of as righteous, the same deed is seen by others as evil. Both are words used to describe an action.

Even in custody and in court, Brian David Mitchell continuously sang hymns to himself until he was removed from the courtroom. Perhaps the world around him seemed crazy, full of evil men who had no contact with god. Perhaps he sang to remind himself that he was the one with the truth. He was the one with God on his side. He had to sing to protect his world. He sang to protect his symbolic order, the world he had built for himself, the only world that still had a place for him.

The Penis

They drive through the desert in their open green trucks. He stares into the yellow flat lands. Not a tree in sight, just the cracked earth and small gray bushes that have lost all their leaves in the drought, now they stand like skeletons naked in the sunlight. The hot air whips at his face. He squints, but he is used to it. The pain of dirt and pebbles and flying sand landing on his skin does not bother him anymore. When he was ten, he would cry when a rock scratched his skin as it flew through the air in a sandstorm, but now he just squints and tightens his jaw.
The caravan has thirty cars, each one with ten men. At fifty miles an hour, they send plumes of dry land spiraling behind them. He does not have to look, but he knows that each one of them is hard, that the bulge in their pants protrudes with eager anticipation.
They drive towards their village, the small collection of huts that is now theirs. Soon they will claim it. Each woman will soon know that she belongs to a new man. The village awaits helpless with no men, he knows, for they have slaughtered them all just ten miles away. The bodies lay dead and bloody in the sun. As their cars left the scene in no particular rush, he saw flies landing on their lips and wounds. Soon the vultures will come.
The defeated men had fought to defend their village, the men in the trucks had fought to take it, and they have emerged victorious. He shakes his head, “the fools had no chance,” he thinks.
Now they are going to take it. The women will be opened. Each one, multiple times. Their bulges are eager to take what is theirs. He looks on, expressionless.
“Those women, crouched in their tents are mine. The little girls are mine.”
He feels anger inside. He feels disgust.
“The old women are mine. The little boys are mine. They are my property, mine to use, mine to destroy.”
He wants them to understand this. He will show them. He will take them. He will put himself inside them until they all know that they are his. Each man in the caravan has won his prize. They have fought and seen spilled blood and lost comrades. They have lived for days without food and water and still they have fought, and now their new property awaits, perhaps unsuspecting, perhaps nearly dead with fear.
He will show them that they are his. With each thrust they will know. They will scream his name. And they will remember. It is his right. And tonight, he will do as he pleases.

Hidden Motives

She held her picket sign high into the afternoon breeze. It was as though the wind itself was against them. As though the force of nature had conspired with all those greedy corporations and corrupt white-haired politicians to keep the truth of their message hidden. What had those scheming men who knew no justice done to the wind? How had it, too, been manipulated? She held it up, battling visible forces and those that moved in more subtle ways.
She had made the sign herself. She had gone to the store and bought markers and white cardboard and a thin piece of wood from the hardware store. She rummaged though the drawers in the garage and found some thin nails and hit the little metal spikes into the white board. This was the first time she had made a weather-resistant sign. Others she had made with tape had fallen apart after a few hours and she didn’t want to make the same mistake again, she had been doing it for many years. And so, feeling proud of the effort she had invested in making her sign, she held it a little higher, just a little prouder than the rest of the people that crowded around her with their own signs.
She was on a large grass covered mound, one thousand feet from the governor’s office, the place where bad decision were made. The building where men in suits cut funding for free lunch programs and health care for the poor. This is the place they came to work, dressed like other citizens, with shoes and ties and combed hair. Yet here, they did things that knew no sympathy. Here, they gained power by villainizing single mothers. They rose while the rest of them drowned…and they still looked like other men. So she was here, among thousands of other like-minded individuals, demanding that the shenanigans end.
There had been speakers on the stage for an hour and a half. They were critics of the system, victims, professors…they all used the bullhorn and the crowd clapped enthusiastically throughout their speeches. She watched as a young woman with long brown dreadlocks approached the impromptu stage. She climbed the stairs, walked to the microphone and began to speak, only there was no sound. A couple of people on stage dashed to the speakers and wires and began to fiddle with the cords.
She lowered her sign for a moment and turned around. Smiling, she surveyed the crowd.
“So beautiful,” she thought. “So full of youth and vigor and anger.”
She remembered her first protest, it was at least twenty years ago, she had come with a boyfriend who had been a college student, a few years older than her. She hadn’t been too interested in going to a march through downtown Washington, she would have rather stayed in his dorm room and watched a movie and cuddled and maybe even make-out till her lips hurt and he would be hard and she would have to push him away with an embarrassed smile. But that day he had made it clear what he wanted to do, he was going. She could come or not, either way, he knew where he would be on Saturday. And of course she did go.
She went and was invigorated by the crowd. She saw her boyfriend as never before, chanting in unison with the crowd. Waving his arms in the air. She was swept away by the energy and she chanted too, sending her voice into the crisp morning air. More than anything, she remembered the way he smiled at her as they turned the corner of Lincoln and Harvard. The sun was sending rays of light down through the clouds and he smiled at her while his voice raised in angry unison with thousands of others. He smiled with all the energy he had and she felt him move inside like a beam of light.
In that moment, she felt loved. By him, by the crowd. They made love later that night for the first time, the only time they would ever do so.
More than the culmination of his sticky desire, he filled her that night with the seed of action. Politics would become her obsession. She went to rallies on poverty and forums on social justice. She had done tree-sits and humanitarian missions to Gaza. She had done it all, there were so many problems to solve, so much to do. She only wished she had more hands, more bodies, more time.
She remembered him again, that boyfriend with a scraggly goatee and hazel eyes. He had made her laugh. He had kissed her just right. She had had so many lovers since then, even a husband now, but she remembered her moment of political awakening. In his arms, with his loving eyes on hers. And her voice rose again, in angry unison with thousands of others.

Big Goverment

“Big” is the word that is used.

Big is shouted through microphones and heard on car radios

b….i….g
big is the word that is used
spit out like venom
absorbed like fodder
spewed again like a dollop of sperm
big
a word with no meaning
a word that carries your red and your black and the blindness of white

the echoes have reverberated through generations
man to boy
a gap, then
man to boy again
“big government,” they whisper the words in dreams
it explodes in their hands with another release
it feels so good to say
so… fucking…. good

they shout
they cry
their pale skin grows red in the sun
take the “ B” from a tv ad
take the “I” from a politician
take the “G” from a radio show

now chant
now scream
tell the boys
tell the men
understanding is an ocean away
a drifting cloud
a moon that never rises
the word moves through your fingers like piss down a drain
you call after it
“bbiiiiiggggggg!!!”

“big govement”

the fears are already here.
They are already chained
Can you not see the blood?
My life
If I swallow what I want to, it is in my life
And you are here, in it
If I fuck the way I want, they are already here
You say it’s wrong
If I strangle my lover, they come
They take me away
Another interference
They are here
Big is here

Big….massive….government….involvement…..everyday….lives

It is here
Warped and huge
It is here
It has been here
All along.

Cloven Foot

She looked at the painting for the first time. It rose from the wall, levitating in its massive form and monumental message, leaving its gold frame far behind on the white background. Small and open-mouthed next to its size, she gazed up at the man that was not a man, at the animal that was not quite an animal. The beast that was not on all fours, but wearing a tailored jacket and a small hat that had holes for his horns. His face was red and long and hairy beside the ears. He stood in the middle of two iron gates, held slightly ajar with the weight of his body. Behind him a city burned red and hot. His lips betrayed a small, sly smile. Half a dozen women with large round bellies were in various states of falling, some lay lifeless on the cobblestone streets. Babies lay in piles by closed wooden doors. Just behind the gate was a copulating couple on fire, streams of smoke rose from their flesh into the dark night. He stood at the gates of this mayhem. His kingdom or his punishment? His legs were long and hairy, with thin ankles and the strong thick thighs of a horse. His penis was long and engorged, sticking up like the black spikes of the metal gates. He leaned on one of the open gates, leaning just slightly on his right elbow in a gesture of satisfaction and contentment. A creature completely comfortable in the chaotic setting of smoke and dim, reddish lights and the smoking couple and fallen babies and women who would never be mothers. His left foot reached out to her, a cloven foot of gray with streaks of black. His other foot hung back in the shadows, five toes of a pale, reddish hue. The ground below him was a mixture of dirt and black ash, beyond was a barren landscape of dead trees and smoking bushes.
“This is us,” she thought. “Our lineage vilified and made shadowy and dark and full of horror. This is the full blooded fear of man. The fear of birth and death. The fear of sex and pussy and earth and the mushrooms which spawn beneath the visible surface. We have watched through centuries, as large skirts have given way to slips and then jeans. Watched as the fires burned flesh and the screams curled with the smoke. We have watched it all. The vilification. The quest turned to the dirty kiss. We watch still, knowing, just as the smile implies, that what we do will always remain in the realm of the mushroom and the roots. The fires will come and play with the land and play with our flesh and we will be of the darkened shadows and the red clouds. We are of one, of the other, of earth and air, stardust and bright light.”

Moon Water Heart

I was born of water. In its wet cave I sparkled to life. Within its slippery grasp I grew and formed a beating heart. On the full moon, I felt the pull and began to swim, towards land, towards a realm which distinguishes between day and night. The people of air greeted me with a slap and a gulp full of moist oxygen and I opened myself to their ways.
And here, on earth, the moon calls to me twice a month, calling me with relentless screams when the tides are at their peak. The arms of the cypresses point me to the waves, to the power that keeps coming and coming, stopping at nothing to reach shore. I stand ankle deep in the biting water, it tries to find its way in, searching for an orifice that will bring it to the center of my watery heart. “Try if you must, but know that we are the same, you needn’t yearn so much! I am here, brother, I am standing within you. Feel my beat, my lunar pull!”
The skies open and shower me with the semen of a bearded god. The sea rises in its nightly lust and coats me in its desire. The center of my chest pushes out, moving through every thin vein, reaching fingertips and tiny toes, trying just a little harder to extend beyond the barrier of flesh.
“We are here,” the tide murmurs, “you needn’t cry so hard! You stand amongst the waters of the womb, you rise tall above the hot liquid of earth and below the sweet tears of the sun. You are one among us!”
The night is without a moon and I run in circles around the boulder in the sand. I run til the water in my heart begins to boil and I run until my knees begin to drip. I run on all fours, chasing mountains of white foam and sheets of mist that tousle my unkempt mane. I orbit the rock like a satellite, speeding like a dying star, howling like a rabid dog.
I collapse in the arms of peaking waves. They hold me while the black sky kisses my eyelids and while the absent moon sends down crows with secret signals and while little bubbles tickle the sides of my cheek. The waters rise higher still, entering my mouth in salty rivers that carry news from the deep. Hold me my love, my brother, let me live just a little longer.

Genes

They walk as a small group down the barricaded street. They move as a tribe, three generations of faces that have mingled with sex to produce the new human painting. The eldest has white hair, but a piece of her face is reflected in her daughter, not overtly, but the resemblance moves like a soft whisper, landing like a delicate hand upon her flesh. The daughter is wearing a summer dress, her dark brown hair is swept up in a pony tail. Her youthful reflection trails after her own daughter, a three year old that is the perfect blend of genes. With one eye, I see her father, with the other, I see her mother. A completed fusion of male and female.
Three generations share their skin, share their genes, a slight dilution with every man that enters, painting what has been with his own new brush. The genes trail over generations, each copulation resulting in a new form, slightly different than the face that came before it, but still, harboring the same set of eyes.
I watch them walk past me, undeniably a family of blood. They have transported the face and ears for millennia. They are the carriers of a line. How long has their DNA been moving, slowly, winding its way through history like a patient snake, carrying everything it requires within its code.
My own face comes from an older generation. My grandmother’s eyes, I saw them in the old photo before it blew away in the wind. I remember her eyes. The eyes of me. Passed from my father, dominated in utero…I am the result. The blend that seems to have no visible trace. The photos look like strangers, I must have come only from her, from the power in her code.
And I watch them pass, the family of blood, of shared looks, of shared traits. They smile, they know me. I see their progression, the noses, the eyebrows. The miniature lineage of looks, walking before me like a strange sideshow.
Was I once a part of their line? Did we share a distant past, a distant source? I look at them now…can we trace our steps and find a beginning?
I watch them and my mind wanders. It moves to the seashore. It moves to a great ape. It watches the dilution of river water into an ocean. The source of what? Source…is this a word with any meaning?
I stand outside and ponder. The sun moves past a dark formation of clouds. The sundress does not look as inviting.
The child runs towards a small dog whose ears reach the asphalt. What quirk of nature designed an animal whose ears drag across the ground?
“Why are they so big?” I ask in childlike wonder.
“To fly,” the girl holding the leash responds.
I can accept that answer.
Nothing is beyond possibility.
Not when we have all the time in the world.

The Contradiction

The small little bug landed on my shoulder. It was red and black and looked like something from a nightmare that has yet to get to the darkest pit, yet to leave me tumbling through the air, tasting death as it comes, yet to shock me into wakefulness. It was the news, the stories of rape in the Congo and the dark-as-night-skinned women who adorn their bodies in the colors of rainbows, yet know, with full body awareness, of the brutalizers. It was the pack of seven men that took her down, that ripped into her after taking the breath from her husband, and as bad as it sounds, a part of it, even after several hours and countless other thoughts, it still filled me with the flush of sexual excitement. I had moved to turn down the radio, my brain had recognized her story as something bad, something I would never wish upon myself or another, yet the thought of it, the fantasy, the show of power and domination and the forced submission and the tears and the sexual release the men must have felt by pushing themselves into a woman who had no more tears left, it was that which started the ticking pulse and the search for other images just as brutal and those two realities, the inability to even hear her full story and the vibrational fantasy it invariably created, those two truths despised each other. They were magnets of the same charge. They were shame. They were contradiction.
Modern American women don’t think like that, they don’t like that, they don’t want that, they condemn that…and I do, yet I don’t, yet I do, but I don’t.
And the two colored moths flew around my shoulders, teasing the bare white of my skin with their buzzing and fanatical wing beating. And I wouldn’t want it to happen, but I like it. I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone, but I want to see it. To be held down, forced open, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much I want to run away. And when it does happen, the small, more harmless variety, I feel like I could follow him to the ends of the earth. I can see myself, wearing torn white rags, stepping across the red horizon as the even redder planets loom like hot air balloons just a short arms reach away. I can feel each step over rough edged gravel and those shiny swords that wait in the distance. I have not reached them yet, but I have seen their cousins in the smaller ponds and they have cut me deep, very deep, and somehow, with bloody feet and salty cheeks, I made it past them and over the barren hillsides. And at the ends of the earth, perhaps only an arms reach away, but necessitating a lifetime of travel, he waits in the crystal castle with a goblet full of foul tasting life and eyes that could warm the night sky if given a chance. The wings flap like a soft lullaby and their colors have become my coat of arms.

Black

I spin the paper color wheel. In the color spectrum, black is the culmination of all, black it at the center, black is all around. Red, white, yellow, green, violet, aqua, every shade in between the primaries, every subtle hue and variation, blended and pure, black contains them all. It is the ultimate mixture, the pure blend. The night sky, shining in darkness, it contains all our naked desires, all the brutal thoughts covered in polite conversation and gracious smiles, all the loving smiles that flow like a river without end, without a source, without an ocean a thousand miles south. The starless black covers me, seeping through my open bedroom window unabated, invading me like the man I love, coming in and conspiring with all the sparks I cannot name. Darkness is the universe I perceive, finite in my understanding, infinite in truth. The name given for hours without sun, it covers the blue of day, the light of nothing with the culmination of all. It is the immense dinner plate with everything heaped upon it, gravy mixing with peas and touching the virginal apple pie. Everything that ever was, every thought that burst shining with splendor from an idealistic youth, every hearty chuckle of laughter from a newborn just discovering their hands and feet, every groan from lovemaking at its peak, all this is mashed and mixed and spread across black. Next to the lumpy sauce and sparking water. Next to the shiny fork that wishes it could poke the voluptuous girl in fishnet stockings, while she hopes you peak into her uncrossed legs. The little candle burns softy upon the table, lapping gently as the waves of wind and hot air caress its flame. Beyond the lit kitchen, the night outside is dark, the wind is roaring and trash cans slide down the street in gusts of released tension. Misfit cans make their escape, rolling without a thought of destination. I hope to stay and avoid the wind. I hope to stay and hold the softness of your skin in the dark. I hope to kiss you in the all consuming darkness of your room and bury my face in the finality of your hair. Blackness is me and you, in the man who died a couple minutes ago in a burst of warm white cream and a final grunt. It is the girl walking hurriedly down the sidewalk with a cell phone in her hand. It is the gray tombstone in Germany and the Dodo bird. It is the amoebas that spawned life, it is the asteroids that tear through the atmosphere and dissolve into dust before they meet my upturned face. Black is the stew of eternity. The witch’s cauldron of peas and carrots, stones and hearts, swords and fingernails and dinosaur bones. Every sound that has been made, every emotion felt, every orgasm that escaped. Within it, within this color, is everything. Each shape, each equation and unsolved problem. The sweat of your passion, the tears of my pain. The screams of the dying as they struggle for their last gulp of air, the shouts of rebellion as fire lights the night. Each century with its layers of texture, each murmured prayer and taste of salt. Each myth recited and kernel of knowledge discovered. Blackness holds it all. We are in its arms and it rests like a lover in mine. We are here, the collectors, the deconstructionsts. The observers and creators. The destroyers. The writers, the ghosts that pick up lost pieces and make puzzles from mosaics. Foraging with blindfolds and baskets, we gather small sounds and memories to form our songs. My voice cracks as I wander half blind in the night, singing a soft melody while burning trees remind me of your flesh.

Wishing For Death

It all wants to spill forward. The tears have rushed to my eyes in a moment of panic. The tidal wave began in softness between my legs, and now, it has swelled, pushed forward by the long, strong movements of your rhythmic force. Up my spine it has traveled, passing cords and vertebrae, tabs and disks. Up and up, reaching my head, wrapping around the front of my hair. On its descent, it rushes to fill the space of my eyes, it sits, like a suicidal woman on the edge of a building, waiting, flirting, tasting the air, tempting the fall.
The journey, when done right, is a circle…I have much to learn. It traps itself in my head, a prisoner of my stillness, captive in the cave of non-movement. The cause of headaches, the seed of anger and frustration. But remember, the gentle movements in and out, the softness of love caresses me from the inside, the magic carpet of a ride taken together. Can I stay? when thousands of tiny hands scream for me to join them in the lower depths? In the pools and dark red rivers of discontent and frustration…the unused energy left to run its natural descending course. Fields of strawberries left unwatered, cactus beds and posies…all withering, perhaps never existing at all.
In those moments, I choose the ultimate defeat, I make the most selfish of choices. I wallow and dance with the black suitors I carry. Drinking wine and champagne while the rest of us wonder where Lydia has gone? When is she returning? A deep breath in and we send the energy up again, I watch it wrap around my head, drip down my tongue and return once again to the wet hole where it began. Up, and around. Then again, up and around. Like a thousand beams of a thousand currents, alive with electric colors and sparkling past minute matter. Push, push it down, along my tongue, above the torso and it descends, down, down again. Squeeze… back up.
Move it…or it will move you.
Push…or I will be carried away to the farthest reaches, where only sadness sings a warbly song. Where whales dance but find no mates. Inhale and up, exhale and down. It’s energy that wants an end.
We want a death.
We want a resting place.
And this small part, this almost silent life, hidden and quiet, yet all seeing…this is the force that caresses me into staying. It wants something more. Much more than what we are used to. Much more than we think we can handle. Much more than we ever imagined. Greater than any television, religion, society…bigger and more magnificent than I can remember.
Hold still. Feel. Move. Push. Use. Flow.
MOVE.
Up and down, back around. Relax and move.
There is no time for censuring, no time for second guessing and perfection. Do it, and do it well. With love and devotion. With care and attention. Caress each movement like a lover’s cheek, slow and attentive…carefully.
I watch these hands move, the vehicle for something that attempts to flow. The unnamable that wants to speak. Sticks in the river, blockages of thought and kernels of identification. Stones bulge from the icy water currents that trickle over packs of tiny sticks. We push to move.
The mermaids wait in the lagoon, far from the waterfalls and side passages where I often linger. The caves here are usually dark, illuminated only by the glowing whites of your eyes. Gold moves from you…towards me. The chamber you create is awaiting my return. Aglow with candles and soft light, warm as your embrace, I run towards your home, panting and screaming along the deserted streets that radiate beneath the yellow fire of street lamps and squawking crows.

S & M

It is not all just sweetness and kisses. It is a constant reminder that pain and pleasure are inextricably mixed, the small white dot in the black yin, the tiny black dot in the white yang. Each kiss, tempered by a brutal slap is a sharp awakening to the dualities that constantly exert themselves in each moment. Nothing comes alone, emotion, fear, smell…it all comes with its companions. We come from two, a male and female linked in chemical union. The forces of creation and death dance a careful ballad, each step balances upon the shining silver blade that gleams as it descends into folds of earthy musk. Dark matter and multiple layers of flesh obstruct it gently at first, but even they quietly give way.
Constantly gagged with fingers and warm flesh, the screams still find a way to escape, releasing with it the invisible movements of shock and love. These noises take on muted forms, bouncing off of each surface with a whirlwind of enthusiasm. Escaping from a red mouth, they descend upon the stereo, ricochet to the ceiling, crash into the southern wall, on and on…on a moving bounce that does not end, but merely decreases in perceptibility. Wrists are bound with metal and no matter what comes, whether the soft whisper of an open mouth or the careening velocity of a ruler, the body is bound, left to absorb the energy that forces itself inside.
There is nowhere to hide and because of this, only because of this, small pieces of light enter the deeper realms. Once covered in ivy and Polynesian masks, disguised as a goddess and multifaceted chameleons, the wooden gates have swung open, leading to oft forgotten pools of turquoise water.
And just as it feels as sweet as it ever could, at the moment of rainbow cliffs and tidal waves; a mouth grabs a piece of tender flesh, the skin right below the belly button, and latches on, teeth dig in harder and harder, puncturing the creamy smoothness of a torso with multiple bite marks and indentations. And the lesson is given again.
Schooled without linguistic instruction, bodily actions alone deliver the powerful message that nothing is constant, and more than that, we exist in a kaleidoscope of movement. We are not in control. Not of our bodies, our minds, our emotions. We adapt to the weather, are thrown by a misinterpreted comment, crying over a particularly good bite. There is no end, no sweet reward at the end of the tunnel…just a constant shift within and without. Each slap, each gag, each kiss is a reminder of the constant ebb and flow, the steady waves and constant change that moves about constantly.
That there is not one without the other- for true understanding must be grasped from all angles.