Judgement

They stand with their arms open, their bodies springing from freshly unearthed graves. At their feet is the earth, once their womb, but something has changed. They are dirty with soot and trails of fallen dew. They stand, the small group of men and women; beside them, three young children. All are pale, as though their time in the ground had been long, so long without sun and air. Now they stand, open, their chests exposed to the sky, their arms open as much as their bodies will allow.

They welcome it. “Judge me,” they say with their hands.

“Judge me,” they call to the heavens, their heads bent back, letting the Real wash over them.

Rolling clouds bubble overhead. The grass beside the open graves quivers.

And what is Judgement? That look, a bit of opinion as I shower you with a stare.
What is Judgement? That bit of presumed knowledge of morality in the symbolic order?
To throw words upon your shrouded body, covering you with a set of expectations I have known almost since birth.

I look at them and see the world through the narrow lens I have chosen to understand it. I watch everything through this porthole. Afloat on a sea of dark mystery, I watch it, a tiny point without reference.

“Bad people are people who do bad things.” I look at that tiny pale body sitting in the car next to me. A little boy so convinced of himself. He is the eye of judgement, a tiny being, clueless, yet so sure of his place.

“Judge me,” the white bodies call.

The angel comes, bringing with it the Real. It is death. The void has no symbolic order, for it is nothing. It is without words, without definable shapes and morality. Step into it like a bath, for the real has come. Open you arms if you can, throw your head back and relish the ecstasy of a new set of eyes. They are doorways, not merely windows. Step up, step inside.

Though their eyes are closed, they see the angel and his red cross. North, south, east, west. The sound comes from the horn at his lips. And it is music, shape without context. Sound without attachment. It has all fallen like a cleansing rain and they welcome him, opening their bodies to a new type of noise.

How many do I judge? I see all of them through the lens of my language. I either assume an understanding, or cross their names from my book, calling them evil and rich. They find a home within the boxes of my aesthetic or I call them ugly and laugh at their pants. I laugh with them if we share the same language, or I squint my eyes and stare, waiting for the sentence to end.

Judgement comes with my language and I throw it out like dice on a filthy street.

Their bodies rise from the earth, covered in soil.
“Judge me,” they say.
No words are necessary. They bask in the void, holding themselves open for a new page to turn.

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.

Fading Light

I lay on my bed as the last of the sunlight fades, giving us, this small little planet, its final heroic effort of the day. In a dim room, bright orange light streams in through the window, hitting just three different spots on the walls. I lay on the bed, just minutes out of the shower, my hair now wet and cold. My pale legs are covered in oversized black sweats with jaggedly cut ends and a man’s thin striped pajama top.

I look at the last bits of light, feeling suddenly aware of the calm chamber.

My hands rest on my stomach, my feet are extended, supported by a jumble of three blankets that cradle them. Tiny gurgles call to my fingers below my pillowy stomach skin.

“Just be here,” I think to myself.

My chest fills with air, then deflates slowly.

I look to the wall on my left, the wall my bed presses against. There is a rectangular orange-gold piece of light, like a bright framed piece of sunlight on the wall. Cutting through the center of the light is the dark shadow of a cross. I stare.

“So pretty, I should get my camera…” But I don’t move. My hands stay on my stomach, my legs remain in the folds of soft blankets.

The cross, such an intense symbol; a torso and head, two arms extended, two feet pressed together as one. I see Jesus on a hill, I see myself in the morning, just after 7. How long did it take for people to realize the shape could be used for killing? For the structure of torture?

Perpendicular to the wall is the French glass door that leads to my kitchen. The top half of the door is bathed in soft yellow light, though the top-center of the door is glowing orange in the sun’s last rays. I realize the light is coming through my small window (parallel to the wall with the cross), hitting the doorway, then the glass is reflecting the image on the wall.

I look back and forth between the wall and the door, not needing to turn my head.

To the right of the door, directly in front of my body, on another small section of wall, are a few fragmented pieces of light, long jagged rectangles and bent circles and little speckles.

I think about the photographer I used to work for, Emily Payne. “It’s called the sweet light.” I can hear her say it, holding her big black camera in her hands. I imagine photographers around the world waiting for this time of day, waiting till they have the ‘right light.’ Do they stay indoors like inverted vampires, waiting only for a special hour? How many moments do they let pass? Is everything overlooked until the sweet light emerges?

I look up to the cross and the door. Has the light changed? It must have, the sun is fading by the minute. I search the color of the door. It’s just a bit paler. Still bright, but lacking intensity. It’s fading in front of my eyes and I can’t even watch it, I can’t see its fading unless I look away and then look back.

I turn to the wall. The cross has lost an arm. It looks like a T on its side. I should have gotten my camera. I could have written something about this and I would have had the perfect pictures to go along with it. I stay in bed. It’s too late now. “Just watch it, it’s fading away.”

How often had I missed this light? Maybe it would be the same tomorrow. Or nearly the same. The earth would not tilt too much in one day. What if I had not laid down? Would I have just sat at the desk, doing something, oblivious to the light around me? How many times have I done that?

I look up again, the light is dull.

“Just be still and watch…” I keep wandering away, I can’t even watch the light change for a few minutes without drifting.

The cross has become a single vertical line. The French door creaks open, pulled by the crack of the open window 15 feet away. As the door comes forward, the cross shifts, creating one solid black line, then another slightly lighter shadow line behind it.

Then the door creaks closed, and a single line emerges on the cross once again. The door’s bright orange light has faded almost entirely. I know that soon it will be completely gone, maybe then I’ll wonder what happened, how it left so fast.

I look over at the speckles of light on the wall perpendicular to the cross. The light there has faded too. Watch it. “Don’t take your eyes off it, watch what’s left.” I hold my eyes. Its fading…but a part of me cannot believe it. I realize I can barely watch it straight on. It’s almost painful. Why can I only see something changing if I look away?

The door is now dark. The cross is gone, and just a few sprinkles of light remain on the wall next to the door. I watch them, intent, finally holding my attention fixed as they fade. Dark, darker, then they are gone.

The phone rings.

The Guess

What I almost certainly do not know is that I am blind. BLIND. My sight is an illusion, a minor hope of a machine caught up in kaleidoscopic movies that repeat endlessly. I cannot see. Not you, the dog, a tree, a new facet of thought. Every contour is clouded in a haze of fog and thick assumptions. You are what is past my nose. You are beyond the thin skin that contains my brain. Because you are not me, I cannot see you. You are a cloud of pale skin. A sound that echoes from a distant hillside. A fleeting movement that jumps through a tiny hoop.

You are equally as blind, caught up in the illusion that wraps us both in a tight jacket. Two people, perceiving themselves as right and correct. Two people, seeing only fuzz and gray clouds, hearing selected words from long sentences, getting lost in the white spaces between. The other is beyond. The tiny shape of a walking woman, the tropical tree, the fresh picked banana. They all exist in a world of color and form that I watch as though through a television screen. You are not real. The metal jug, the dirt road. Not real and foreign, past what I can ever understand.

I watch from an overstuffed couch, watching the lights move, watching it as complete fiction, for it is. Though I cannot tell I am on the other end of a screen, another light that moves vaguely in the distance.

I am blind, though so are you.

Both of us trapped in the skin that contains a sense of self. There is me, there is you, the Other. I am blind and cannot know, and the guesses begin. All the assumptions, all the conjecture that rolls like a snowball in a cartoon of pigs and rabbits.

It catches speed and I grasp at words. “woman, poor, fertile, bound…”

They are words and I attach them to you, to her, to all those that move on the horizon.

But another one comes, “young, marriage, style…”

More words. More assumptions. I will never know. You are the shape beyond my skin, you are the Other, and I can only make a guess. How can I talk to the past? How can I talk to a shape without blood? The past and future blend together, I grab with dirty fingers, searching for another word, something to hold, something that will make sense and fit easily in this small wooden box. You are the captured cloud, the note hidden below my pillow in a place I will forget to look. You are the shape that will never be known, you are the Other.

First Look

There is me.
I see my hand, my eye, my skin.
I look through these brown eyes.

I look at you.
The other.
You.

You who are not me.
Beyond me skin,
past my eyes,
beyond my hand

You, that I can touch.
You that I can see.
You.

The other.
You, who are not me.
You are the Other.
You, who are not me.
Not my skin, not my hair, my ears.

And because you are not me, I am not you.
Through your eyes, I am the Other.

I am not you.
Not of your hands and skin, not of your body.

No matter how much I may long to merge, no matter the hours I spend staring into your eyes.
I am the Other. Just as you are the Other.

Cherry blossoms drift between us, their pink wings fly, and I know that they too, they are not me. Not my skin and flesh, having nothing to do with my bones and eyes. The are the Other. All that is not me. All that I can see and everything I cannot.
For everything is the Other. Everything past this wall of pale skin and this head of short dark curls. The hills and their stories, the trees and their years. They are all beyond me, by definition and purpose and being. They are all things with other lives and other hurts and laughs.
The wall containing me is my prison and my castle, the way I was birthed, the way I have known. Only now, perhaps now I get a glimmer of the Other. The fear of you, the fear of me.
We look at each other, two sets of eyes wide open and staring, each looking into the Other.
But what if we see?
And what if I only feel one heart beating?
What if I stare into the reality and not the illusion?
Is there me?
Is there really the thing with hair and teeth and skin?
Is there a Me?
Is there a You?
Is there an Other?

Is the great illusion the only way to live?
To survive beyond the white walls of an institution and small capsules three times a day. How long can this be explored before we fall into smelly pits and metal cuffs…I see you as the Other, except those times in which we join, when your eyes look like the golden pools that I remember from a dream, and your skin tastes like mine baked beneath the sun. Then the illusion fades, and I see the Other, wrapped in red threads and dark curls, looking like my image in a mirror, looking like it was never anything Other than me.

You Are Dying

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

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

We are dying.

Each breath,
another step
Each day,
a moment closer

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

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

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

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

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

You are dying.

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

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

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

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

Did you know that you are dying?

YOU
YOU who read these words.
YOU ARE DYING.

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

The Seed

The rain clouds had parted and the small patch of earth was damp, emitting a scent that only some knew how to enjoy. Those close to the soil, with orange leaves in their ruffled hair and thoughts of worms and horned beasts. It was a smell they both relished, unlike anything they could find in clear glass bottles. It was not the smell of elegant women, nothing like men in dark suits and slick hair. Nothing like glass buildings or sterilized hospitals. It was a forgotten odor, like the medicinal pollens and balms that had been burned and stuffed into floorboards that swelled with age. It was earth, birth, death. It was change, decay and rebirth. They knew the smell, they sucked it into themselves. It was time.

The two young sisters slept with their windows open. Sleeping with the moon, awaking with the sun’s first kisses. Winter or summer, they dreamt with the elements, living with the constant changes.

After months of wetness, the clouds had parted, like they always eventually did.

It was time. A new season had come, taking its first look at the new world. It was ripe.

The girls gathered the few tools they needed: a shovel, the small yellow watering can, and a basket full of seeds. They entered the narrow yard overgrown with weeds, their eyes shaded by the thin brim of their pink and yellow floral bonnets. The sun warmed their pink cheeks and lips, urging them forward, giving them a bit of encouragement with its heat. They inhaled deeply, at the same time, each one listening closely to the sound of the breath beside her.

Without words, they moved together. Clearing weeds into a tall pile, turning earth with the wide shovel mouth, carving out shallow trenches. When the trenches were prepared, they each took a handful of seeds, scattering the seeds every few inches and then covering them with dark soil.

They worked for hours, planting chamomile and foxgloves, lettuce and sage. The girls looked into the sky and began gathering their tools, they could smell rain.

Big, giant drops of water came, fertilizing the soil and each newly planted seed. It was the Father, the tidal force of dominant energy coming to give the little bits of information what they needed. The girls watched from their tiny second-story window, watching as the skies opened and water poured. It was essential, it was right, it was the way.

When the last bit of moisture disappeared into the soil, they ventured back into the garden, checking every day for the first sprouts. Wide eyes marveled at the birth process. The seed was information, the soil was the womb, the rain the sperm, the sun the food. Each one worked together, seamlessly, a merging of forces that would give birth to something new. A new life. A new plant. A little bit of information, a seed. It needed all the right tools, all the elements.

All the little seeds that had stayed dormant for so long, just waiting. Maybe the moment would never have come. Would they have known, could they just have sat for years on the wooden shelf, never moving, always in the same form, the same little bit of information contained in a thin shell, unused, unchanging. Did it know? Did it want to grow? Was there consciousness in that little seed, or something that could only become consciousness given the right conditions.

That was what they both had been. A little bit of DNA, a little bit of information. Each one of them had needed the right conditions. The right elements had combined, creating two little girls. Each thing that grew and died, that took a breath and pulsed, it had all begun from a tiny seed of information. Something that could be, manifested potential without a present or a past, eternal design waiting for time to come and press it into service.