The King

What is the king like?

The chorus rumbled, loosening the answer from their stomachs, letting the deep sounds and grumbles manifest into words they knew the crowd would recognize. Things formed. Small things turned into larger shapes that had tails and wagons and little bits of paper that drifted after their tails like sparklers on a warm summer’s night. The room cleared of other thoughts, waiting expectantly, patiently. Silence rumbled from the stone floors and the mosaic tiles along the walls, waiting. And as they waited the things edged forward, the sounds moved into formation, and then the tongues sprang to life, knowing where to go, how to move.

What is the king like?

The answer came.
He’s arrogant and proud and likes the best things of everything. Deep red wines looking like fresh blood swirling in a crystal goblet. Satin sheets for him and his room of full-hipped lovers in little more than colorful scarves. He takes milk baths and freshly made goat cheese served on bejeweled platters. His world is that of comfort and opulence, pride that manifests only from his material power and earthly wealth.

The king? He cannot see that death comes to all, then beneath all spun, golden robes, beneath all skin are bones and flesh that eventually, sooner or later, turn to dust. Blinded by his gilded palace and bountiful gardens, his earthly finery and servants responding to his every desire, he has forgotten that death comes for all things.
One day he will take his last breath. He is not prepared. The core-shattering moment will come, it will come like a new dream and he will look out over the abyss and see that his life was full of things and pleasure and matter, but it was devoid of help.
Help would not come from slaves and servants and the maids of his palace. Help would be uncomfortable, it would pull at the self he had created, it would twist him in all directions, leaving him panting, looking for the window. But he has no help and he takes his luxury for immunity, but death does come.

He cannot see the moment, but the banished witch in her hut watches the events in the smoke of her fire. She can see his gasping last breath, the moment of transition when he truly realizes the time he has wasted, that he has done nothing that will take him towards the clear light of awakening. She watches the curling twists of smoke, knowing she cannot help him, for one must seek help.

What is the king like?
The chorus takes a breath of air, preparing for the next stanza. Again, inside, their answers release themselves from the inner walls of their bodies. They merge deep inside, then find their way out into the air in recognizable form.

Miles away from the thick woods and icy river and old witch, far down the path that turns to gold by the wrought iron gate of the castle, lives a king who is blind to the clear light. In the middle of spring, two days before the new moon, two lankly and well dressed men arrive at the palace gates. Seeking an audience with the king, they claim to be tailors of the highest order. Their credits include royalty throughout the old world as well as the new. Across the deep oceans of the globe, the most important men wear clothes made by their hands. Their secret is the magical cloth, they tell him. Cloth that can only be seen by the most deserving, royal, important men, all others are blind to its magic and colorful wonders. The king, knowing himself to be a man of the highest order, has the tailors make him a new set of clothes for the upcoming spring parade.

What is the king like?
He is dying, not from disease or old age, but atrophy. He breathes, but he dies. He lives, but he does not work, there is no world for him beyond matter. The skeleton behind his meaty cheeks has turned into vague promises he does not intend to keep, promises of the real, promises of a day that will be beyond his control. He cannot imagine such a time. His coffin is empty, for he does not believe in death for the glorious.

After many weeks of working in the stone room on the bottom floor of the castle, the tailors finish the king’s new clothes. In a room full of mirrors, they help him step into his beautiful new pants, his fabulous new shirt and electric robe. The tailors smile and nod, congratulating themselves on a job well done. But as the king looks into the mirror, he sees only thick bare flesh.
“Now you are dressed as all important men should be! And remember, only the truly deserving will be able to see your clothes, this magical cloth reveal true virtue.”
As he looks at himself, naked and covered in patches of thick hair, he nods, remembering his position, his stature, his glory. He begins to nod. “Yes! What fine work you have done! Amazing! Truly a work of art.”

What is the king like?
He is covered in the veil of his habits. A thin, silky veil that blocks out light. It covers him in worn patterns, making his sticky flesh turn to stone with each repeated thought and gesture.

With his new clothes he walks proudly into the square just beyond the iron gates to the castle. Nearly all loyal subjects of the kingdom are gathered on each side of the golden road that leads eventually to the river. Man, woman and child crowd to take a look at the king.
They all hide their surprise as they see him stride confidently down the road without any clothes. By the tallest black walnut tree one small child, no more than five years old, cannot hide his surprise as his parents do:
“The king is naked!”
The witch can see the child is not dead. The child is not stuck in patterns made of stone.

Essence

The question was asked, and I skirted it like a child running from a wave moving quickly across wet sand.
What is my nature? Too many things cloud my mind, opposing thoughts, statements made and then refuted. I search through the mess, looking for a simple answer. But even that word hurts to look at, like a glare from the sun that could burn to the core of me, making me blind and sweaty and full of hardened thoughts. And so I run skeptically, chasing foam and seawater though staying clear of its chilly touch. Every answer is a guess. But maybe that’s fine, just a tiny lap of water on my calves won’t hurt.
And so what am I?
Am I the moving arrow? The thing moving through time, the constant motion of work.
Eternal.
And this thing, this essence... I truly search for some word, anything to describe it, but it slips through even the most outstretched part of my mind. This thing invisible yet tangible. This thing, quiet and eternal. Energy. A lost sentence made of color, shape and turns.
My function? I am the vessel, the thing through which creation moves.
I am the open door, the portal to the other sides, the other places, the realms where there is different knowledge, knowledge without facts and dates.
On earth, am I the Other way? An example of something else, one of the many paths.
I am another option.
Am I the fish in the river, a creator on earth, choosing time over money?
Colorful, lazy, moving, working through tears, watching sunsets and computer screens.
Am I the future teacher, now the student?
I am a link in the chain, a pink tile in the mosaic of our lineage, another vessel that leads forwards and back. There are truths that cannot be explained, and with each small remembering, I become a stronger link into the past, connecting to the future that waits for my return.
I am the door.
I am the dreamer alone in my bed. I am the dream of another playing with fire and paint while eating donuts. I am the being that struggles under a cloak of confusion and learned rubbish.
I am the vessel, the fleshy pot holding something precious inside, the thing I have glimpsed rarely. This thing that I cannot describe, the essence I search to understand. I am the hidden, the cracked door. The flickering light.

And so I play with the thoughts, searching slightly for something, something, anything.
There are a dozen question marks behind my thoughts and each answer depends on the day, on the rain, on the mood in which I sit and listen.
A thousand changes and the questions turn in on themselves, becoming laughter blowing in the wind, a hint of jasmine as we tilt closer to the sun once again.
My essence is the shifting of time.
Constant.
In motion.
So close.
Yet somewhere beyond the stars.

Recognition

I walk the edge of understanding. A thin line with nothing below but life itself. I see it like a bird. The world we make with bits of mail scattered on the floor, string in the kitchen, cobwebs on the front stoop. It is where we breath and laugh, cry and scream. A life we are used to, one we know, one that stays. Earthly life with its marked streets and simple maps and clear colored markings. I walk the edge, balancing even as I sit cross-legged on my tan carpet, teetering. I look forward, into the speckled world of dominating blue and light washed hues.
When you sit in front of me, our eyes on each other, the room palpitating with yellow and whispers of bright explosion, my mouth on the verge of laughter, I look into you, into the you that is beyond me. I know then, for a simple true moment, you are the Other. You are Other. The word, making more sense than it can, than it should. The word, with all its explanations and discussion finally culminating in one moment, coming like a surprise wave out of the darkness, still focused for all its strangeness. It is recognition, taking me beyond the word, into gnosis.
Now as I write, so long since our last exchange, I sit in an empty auditorium. The chairs without people, the room full of judges. The many eyes of myself, staring into the empty stage, finding only me staring back.
I walk the edge, a clown balancing the egg of simple truth. I see you, your eyes, opening wide in the late morning sun. While what we know as life continues beyond the walls of our chamber, there is recognition. You are the Other. The boundary of my solitary stage is broken, for a moment, I am not in this room alone. I see you for what you are. I see the word, alive in experience. The light begins to shift once again, darkening the area around your face. My eyes are fixed, locked softly, somehow, on yours. There are no lines to define your shape, no word to describe your presence. There are only colors, vibrations dancing on a spectrum of perception.
One pure bit of experience, a simple understanding that we have tried to allude to with words and music and images that flicker across a screen. For one second, sometimes, bright in the morning, all of it, the explanations, the text, the examples, they all fade away and I see that the Other is right here, sitting in front of me, looking into my eyes.

Him And Dogs Like Him

Supreme transit, it’s the nearly invisible vehicle in which opposing thoughts share the same metal lines, they move on a whim, crisscrossing the country, converging in neural networks with hyperbolic speed. In white and black robes, with little red books tinged with gold leafing and yard sticks that poke out from their underwear, they move through time, piggy-backing on waves of political enthusiasm and newly-sprung militia groups.

It was happening now. He could smell it in the air. They whispered ‘constitution’ under their breath, the letters reeking of coffee as they spat out the word with religious zeal. They coughed up those letters, spilling the 2nd as if it was word inherited directly from an ancient bearded god.
Francisco was covered in the pulsing blue light of the nightly news, he watched every station, clicking through them in random order until he fell asleep just after10. As he fell into dreams that bulged in their shape and color, he wondered why those men in the news always waved the 2nd Amendment around like a flag.
What about him?
He saw those same people aiming, shooting, trying to take down his children’s right to citizenship, his grandmother’s right to drive to the mercado. They pulled the trigger, firing at sympathetic senators and congressmen, the black suits had jumped ship, leaving him and his family in the sun.

They all sweated, not just from the heat that had bleached even the heartiest saguaro cactus, but fear also dripped down their cheeks, glistening beads of worry dropped off their cracked chin.
Another gun went off, clack! in the night.
Everyone here owned a gun, all the white men that lived in the low foothills and the ranchers that wore red white and blue flag shirts. Yesterday he found his own American flag vandalized, the one that sat beside his Mexican flag.
No they didn’t sit, they waved in the breeze that seemed to come from the lowlands of hell. Pure heat to dry the beads of fear dripping down grandmother’s chin.
The dog lay on the ceramic tiles of the kitchen all day long, living in blissful agony, giving no thoughts to rights and amendments and the news stations. A dog was a dog was a dog. Mexican, American, Indian, dogs responded no matter what color skin delivered a bowl of water and a soft caress.
A dog was a dog was a dog. That’s how they thought of him, his family, the people with skin that looked like his.
A dog was a dog. Those men in their white shirts with guns at their waist, they thought all the browns were the same – Mexicans- a word that described fear instead of a country. A word that was just as ugly as the coffee-scented breath of its speaker.
No, they had come from farms in the valleys, from cities with museums and towns without plumbing, from mountains that touched snow and from the crashing Atlantic ocean. From the central umbilical cord of two continents and the southern hemisphere, from the highlands and the valleys and the places in between where women wore embroidered blouses and woolen skirts and carried babies and chickens alike. They were not the same, but they were linked by one essential quality in the eyes of those men with guns.

He saw the advertisements every night. He saw the guns in their holsters, the posters that could intimidate even the most hardened politician.
The men with the guns knew where to aim. The targets were set, they took down what every man in a suit wants most, pointed the barrel right at the pounding heart of power and squinted an eye. They aimed at those politicians sitting pretty on those shiny leather office chairs on perfectly clean plush carpet. They aimed, and- clack!
There were not enough shelters to hide the tears. The rivers flowed from Fernando, out past concrete dividers. When the insults came, causing the floods to mount, he lost it all, all the salt and all the water. It flowed from him a storm that dried on bleached sand, drying instantly in the land without rain.

He saw their guns, felt them pointed at him, at his family, at people with his same skin. Though nothing had really changed, he had become the villain. The constitution to which they always pointed, that 2nd point that they waved higher than flags, that constitution didn’t apply to him, not to him and the dogs like him.
Their policy was to shoot first. The targets were set, not one, or two, but the millions like him. How they loved their bullets, how they hated his music and food, the smell of his clean clothes, his daughter in pretty pink dresses, his tacos and beans, his lawnmower and round sweet wife, his son in school, his language and the rolling r’s of his tongue. How they hated him and his dogs, him and his enthusiastic use of English and the small home he painted every five years.

Them and those guns, them and the rights that they asserted. Them and those rights that they would deny him, the ones they would deny his children if they could. That Second Amendment they held tight to their heart, those words that they would spit forth, smelling like coffee and disfigured prostitutes, they shaped the world as they would like to imagine it, saw their chosen right as immovable while others were flawed. If his rights were not written in stone, then why did they scream for their guns?

Why did the men of highest power remain so quiet? Gently stroking their hands, rubbing their toes together, waiting to see what the tide of people would endorse before they walked to the microphone and made a statement.
They were always so scared to have an opinion. Only the men with those guns were solid in their statements, they were the ones that never changed, maybe they were getting harder, turning to stone, they were certainly never afraid to scream, their guns talked for them, clack!
Hitting his neighbor in the chest, taking away the breath of that young girl on the border, taking her father too. Their guns talked and not only did they have the right to have them, they thought they had the right to use them, declaring people like him the enemy. Turning his mother, that thick tree that bore a dozen lives, turning her into a villain, into a criminal deserving of a bullet. His children, turning them into aliens with only one signature.

He looked around with tear-stained eyes, unsure when it would stop, maybe now that the devil had sprouted naked from the ground. He wondered if it was ever gone, or had that dusting of sulfur merely hidden in the shadows, waiting for the perfect moment to come out the red door and find them.

He was now a criminal and the ones with the guns were free. The ones that murdered walked around and waved their striped flags and they would rest on the constitution like it was made for them alone, forgetting, perhaps never knowing, that this actually used to be his land, his and the dogs like him.
They didn’t knock on the door, they came in the night, that huge group with their guns and disease, their sickness that would spread, killing their enemy with only a coffee-scented breath discharged in their direction.

The movie had not changed, not a bit of dialogue had been altered. The policy, the billboards, the country and its actors. They smiled on those shiny posters, looking out at them, at that dried land and the browns and whites that dotted the landscape, those with power and bullets, those that lived like dogs under the sun, crying salty tears that ran down grandmother’s face, tasting not of salt, but of pepper.

The Wild Song

It came like a freak wave. Rising up from still blue waters until I was enveloped in its forceful arms. It circled me with fuzzy golden light, blotting out the details of room and life. Chair, computer, lunch, the garden outside beneath a happy blue sky, they all faded into a blur of colors that quickly merged into a hazy sun colored blur.
There was no room, no city. I was no longer me. I was a body without memory, free of everything before this moment. Swirling around me with abandon, particles entered without permission, moving through the barriers of skin and bone, dancing beyond the laws of physics. The eye, the strongest point of this thing that can only be described as a wave, hovered above my head. I felt it there, pulling slightly.
I opened my mouth, tilted my head back and I began singing.
I was lighter than usual. As it went into me, I reached up into it. Reached out with sound, higher and higher I sang, letting the notes roll out pure and free. Dancing on meadows, rolling in bed. They did what they wanted, went where it felt right.
They came from me, my children, I opened up and let them go without a worry clouding the air. My eyebrows lifted, my body arched as though in orgasm. I closed my eyes though I could still see the hazy golden light all around. I saw the notes, watched as they jumped up and out, finally free of their chains.
These were not the tentative sounds I usually choked out, a body gripping, somehow always scared of the inevitable fall. Timid, quiet sounds just barely louder than the refrigerator that struggled for equal attention. This was all different. Not just a new world, a new planet with nine sided stars and monkeys that spun sugar into gold.
This was a warm bath with a shout. Force mixed beyond the bounds of anger, for it was a gentle wave, an ocean storm meant to free every part of me. A gift that found me in a city of millions, picking up on my particular scent of sticky sex, woods and sweat.
I opened my eyes, but they were closed. I lay back, but I was floating. I sang, but as I sang I kissed every part of the wave. I reached up, my voice touching its swirling shape.
As I sang, any remnants of fear were a far off memory, buried somewhere without a marker. It was just openness that rose up to meet the elements, sound moving to air. Light to fire.
The human had finally fallen. This was song without death fear. This was love without the thought of betrayal.
This was something that came to me. Something that came from me, to me, away and up, into the golden colored wave that took me.

The Order Of The Factors

I woke up this morning with a sense that it was too early to be up. It was a work day, but it wasn't time to work yet. I still had a couple of hours. I didn't want the night to end.
I had woken up at the wrong time but I was fully awake, all drowsiness had left me like water falling from a bucket, leaving it empty and ready for something new to come to fill it.
I looked at the clock and saw that it was an hour and half earlier than the time I usually woke up. A pain on the side of my hip had been bothering me for several weeks. It wouldn’t let me sleep for long no matter how hard I tried. I tossed and turned during the night, repeatedly pulled out of restless dreams by the recurring shocks of deep pain coursing through my body like tiny messengers wrapped in red flame.
I was wide awake but I didn't get up from the bed. Instead I lay there, vainly trying to understand what had just happened. My eyes were open but I just stared at the gray ceiling in a kind of dazed stupor. The questions that invaded my mind didn't have enough of a clear shape to require answers. Instead they just floated through my consciousness, mute witnesses to aftershocks of searing pain.
Without saying it to myself, I was making a last ditch effort to sleep some more, to find some remaining crumbs of restful peace before the day actually started. Maybe if I stared long enough, sleep would overtake me and I would recede into dreams for just a little longer, enough to let me flee the looming and unavoidable reality.
But my efforts were in vain. I was wrestled out of any remaining sleepiness by my insistent thoughts, by my shapeless questions, by my undefined images.
I looked out the window and saw that the sky was still dark, a dark blue fading into a lighter grayish color, a heavy night that was slowly but stubbornly changing into another ephemeral day. A touch of red was timidly showing up in the distance, over the roofs of the Victorian houses, all the way to where the very top of the Golden Gate Bridge could be glimpsed surrounded by white shining fog. A clear promise that the sun would be coming soon. Unusual for a city as foggy as this one.
I decided to get up and do something I hadn’t done in a very long time: I would watch the sun come out, I would watch it unfold its warm morning light over the city, a spectacle I once enjoyed in my youth but which had been nearly forgotten with the passing of time.
I stood up, went to the closet and picked some sweaters and shoes in case it was very cold. It's usually cold in this city where I live, very different from where I grew up. I'm still not quite used to it. Something inside of me still wishes it was different. As if the weather would follow my wishes, as if my wishes had a grain of objective truth hidden within their multiple subjective folds.
As I went through the choices in my closet, my memory went back to a particular day in the past. I couldn't remember the details of the day. I couldn't say what had happened or what I had been doing. I could only remember that I had been looking for something. It had been a day when, no matter how much effort I put into my search, I couldn’t bring myself to find that thing which I was looking for. I remembered that I eventually found a solution. The way I finally did find what I had been looking for was by sitting and contemplating the world around me for a long period of time. Quietly. Softly. Subtly. Without rush.
To contemplate in length seemed so easy, so simple. And yet I had not done anything like it in such a long time. Like waking up early, like looking at the rising sun. Things I had forgotten.
When I first moved into this apartment, I made sure I went out to the balcony early to sit and contemplate. I would do this for at least thirty minutes every day before engaging in my daily routine.

I kept this up for a while, until one day I suddenly dropped it. I couldn't really say why. I can't even say for sure that I noticed when it happened. Suddenly it was gone. Like so many things, it just fell out of rhythm, out of step. Maybe I didn’t get that much sleep the night anymore, so it was harder to get up early. Maybe I was just too lazy one day and I preferred the warmth of the bed sheets. For whatever reason, one day I didn't do it. And then one day turned into two, and two into three, and soon my thirty minutes of contemplation were gone and forgotten. Like old shoes or lost memories.
Today I once again remembered. Why did I remember today? I was struggling with pain all night, pain that wouldn't let me sleep. I couldn’t go back to sleep even when I tried with every trick I was aware of, every trick I had been taught.
It then occurred to me that it would a good idea to do that thing I used to do. The pain didn't allow me the easiest route so I had to pick the next option in its place, a route not so easy but full of its own rewards. As simple as that. So unpredictable. So completely beyond my conscious control.
I geared up and went to the balcony like I used to do.
Now the sky had more pinks and oranges than earlier, the darkness had disappeared rather quickly and had left behind a glowing whitish blue that suffused everything with its freshness and light. I heard a bird singing in the distance, I heard the honking of a bus coming from a few blocks away, I heard the tinkling of a little boy's laughter, I heard the murmur of a large sprawling city that was slowly waking up, maybe lost in its own city thoughts, maybe struggling with its own kind of urban pain that forced it to awaken from its concrete slumber even if it would have rather stayed asleep a bit longer, even if it wasn't quite finished with its strange city dreams.
I stood there looking and listening. I noticed my mind getting distracted, a stream of thoughts trying to explain what was happening, what I was trying to do, why I was doing it, how it would happen.
"Focus your mind on what you are seeing, don't worry about your tasks for the day, don't worry about what happened yesterday, don't worry about what will happen tomorrow, just place your mind on this that is in front of you, I just have to remember that one project that is due, I have to remember, I can't allow myself to forget. I just don't have to remember right now, right now I just need to look, look at all of it, but I should make a note, a mental note, but I have to set aside the mental note in order to look, look openly, look without thinking, just remember to get the laundry later, remember later but forget it right now..."
I slowly slid into disappointment. I was disappointed with myself, very disappointed, disappointed because I still remembered, I could still remember what it had been like once. I remembered that I didn’t use to do this before, I remembered that my mind had once been quiet, I remembered that I didn't have this long train of thoughts invading my sacred moments of open perception.
This didn't happen before. I used to contemplate and feel…feel and absorb all the beauty I could take into me, without getting distracted by explanations, without being pulled by responsibilities, without being shaken by running thoughts about obligations and random tasks. I could just sit and look and absorb. I got very disappointed and the dark disappointment just added to my struggles, a speeding downward spiral, a sliding avalanche of negative emotion I couldn't stop or set aside.
I opened my mouth to take a long, deep breath. I went back to a particular memory from my childhood, something I always wished for, something that always made me long to go back, even if it was only to live that one little moment, a tiny scene from a not so pleasant past.
I was probably 10 or 11. My father had promised to take us to the beach the next day, but only if we finished our homework in time. I loved the beach, I was really excited to go, but I had a lot of homework to do and I wasn't sure that I could finish it in time.
I made sure that I got up very early to do my homework before the trip. I jumped out of bed as soon as my eyes opened and I picked up my school notes, ready to start working. The homework was to fill a sheet of paper with the following phrase:
‘The order of the factors doesn’t alter the result’
The teacher wanted us to memorize this by writing it many times on a piece of paper. This was the way we were taught back where I came from. Repetition and repetition and more repetition. Rhythmic cycles of linguistic instruction, calculated to drill thoughts into a young mind overpowered by constant change.
I was getting ready to sit at my desk to do the homework, when I noticed that outside the window there were some extremely beautiful colors, shifting and shining and sliding and twisting just outside the glass.
I got on top of the desk so I could look at them. I stood up on the desk right in front of the window, my eyes wide open, my mind wide open, my attention wide open.
I saw the sky turning from deep black to shining orange and then to bright blue and white… I saw flocks of birds flying by, I heard the noise of some of the people in my house waking up, my father walking to the bathroom and yawning, my mother turning on the stove while whispering to herself. I heard a car passing by with the radio on, I heard distant footsteps coming from a block away, the sound of high heels tapping on cement.
All of it fit in perfectly. Like an enormous jigsaw puzzle made of sound and light, a puzzle I had never before been able to decipher. Everything fit with everything else. Nothing was out of place. Nothing was to be discarded, nothing was to be occluded, nothing was to be set aside.
I saw some black birds flying in perfect formation over the roof of the house across the street, I heard roosters announcing the coming of the brand new day, a new day which I was a part of, a day which I was meant to live.
I was taken away by all this perfectly coordinated beauty for what seemed like forever. I must have stood there on the desk, looking out the window, for at least a couple of hours. And yet it felt like nothing. No struggle, no effort, no pain, no purpose. I had completely lost track of time while I looked out the window, time had ceased to run in the way that I was used to. I forgot where I was or why I was there. I forgot everything except for the beauty that was all around me, the extreme and perfect beauty that surrounded me from all directions, the vibrant breathing beauty that called to me, that made me feel welcome, that made me feel alive.
I found myself standing on the balcony now, trying to do the same thing I had once done so easily, that thing I had done which I never meant to do, that thing which just happened on a morning so long ago.
But I was running into serious difficulty now, I was stumbling and crashing into intangible obstacles. I was having problems with this thing which once had been so simple, problems with something that had once seemed to flow unimpeded, soft and smooth and natural. It was not so easy anymore, not as easy as it once was, not easy at all.
Maybe I thought about it a bit too much, maybe the thoughts of loss were like dark clouds that prevented me from seeing openly. Maybe I had lost the gift of simple observation somewhere along the way and now I couldn't say where or how it had happened.
‘I used to have the experience and not the explanation. Now that I have the explanation I am looking for the experience. I can only find it if I get rid of the explanation that I once worked so hard to find. The experience, the direct experience, just like a child, just like the child I once was…just like the day I was working on my homework and the morning went away in a maze of colors and sound and light… the order of the factors does not alter the results… the order of the factors does not alter the results… it doesn’t matter what comes first, the experience, the explanation…the order of the factors doesn’t alter the results…'
And the morning opened up before me, slowly but surely, while I quietly did my homework, the homework I was finally understanding for the first time, the homework that spoke in a rhythm of simplicity and recurring sonic beats, the homework I still had time to finish.

The Arms Of Sleep

It is what she longs for, that big white cat. She just wants to curl up, let the sunlight warm her up, and then drift. Let’s just drift. Forget it all.
I want to forget. Forget the project, the articles, the words to write, the things to create, the music to make, the work to do that seems to rip at every part of me, making me visualize ropes and running and knives and parking lots in far away places where the night is cool and calm and no one talks.
I want to do all that.
She wants to do all that too, that big lazy cat. So let's take the road of sleep, that big fat white bed with its comfy flatness and thick blanket arms. Let’s just go together because it would be so nice.
Only, they won’t let me. They know what will happen to the big fat cat. The masses await. Their perfectly creased uniforms, their lines, drills, repetitive movement and cat calls. The deadening regimen. They know just how to invade, one dream at a time.
One little nap and then all thoughts become one. Soon there will be no dreams, no drawings or songs. One thought, it is just a train away, as my mom would say.
I shower and pack and sit waiting in my silk jammies, just ready to go. I am tired and the night is dark and cold and there are too many collages to make, so many videos that await my hands and attention. The list is so long, stretching not just through and over this lifetime, but into the next and then the one after that.
On a cold night like this, it seems like too much. The bed looks good and the cat, that big cat is purring, waiting for me to join her.
The train is going, straight to dreamland as my mother would say. They are all calling my name, don’t I want to join them? Their hands urge me forward, the memory of the endless drift beneath a world of warm arms, soon I won’t have to think and struggle.
Just get into bed and let the engines start. Soon, we will be among the masses. The starch, the formation, the highly scripted existence laid out like a simple map. It is all there, just outside the window.
Bodies without life. Smiles without purpose. Breath without creation. It is all right outside.
My cat is there, waiting for me to slip into bed. Just for a moment, just one little nap.