It Was Like A Door

This is the word.
Wow- yeah,
It was like a door.
The word.
I was born.
And on the other side, where I exit,
It’s about being a good girl or a bad girl.
I felt like I could not go back.
It is this sharp light,
like when the sky is very clear and blue and it's noon.
There is so much beauty.
And bliss, bliss and fear, both. 
It was impossible to go back.
It’s the in-between, between ocean and land.
Now this time seems to be a time where things appear in a clear light.
I like to walk there.
Like a door,
she said: ‘you are most welcome to stay and be with us.’
At noon the shadows are very small
On the firm earth, feeling the water touching my feet.
There is wind, birds, and the sun.
Wow- yeah,
this ritual had been made for me.
It is land and it is water.
It is wind and it is fire,
come together right at my feet,
and it is possible.
It is good to walk there.
A door.
This is the word
Very light and very dark.
There are many possibilities.
I had been born
And I am still feeling very much alive now.

Worlds

The body is alive.
How many moons have I in this skin?
Looking out, the night sky is littered with light.
Other stars, other worlds. 
The celestial is within, flowing through each limb. 

The body is alive.
The dark pattern of galaxies, the rings of Saturn illuminated by the sun.

The body is alive. 
A young girl in a bed, naked and reading. 
For the moment of one inhalation she can feel the enormity of the cosmos. 
Space stretching further than the mind could touch.
Endless endlessness
dark and speckled with light and solar flares. 

She looks out the window and sees a palette of greens and shifting leaves. 
Blue skies and the faint wisps of clouds.
Beyond the atmosphere, it is all there, as ephemeral as her own body. 
We shift together.  The body on earth, the earth around the sun, the sun around the galaxy. 
Shifting together as one massive entity.

How blind!
Caught up in shopping trips and career plans and the dinner menu. 
The furthest stars shine, exposing themselves as worlds unto themselves. 

I know them. 
The wormhole is here taking me from one state to the other. 
The mind opens with many doors,
I step through the threshold over and over,
finding myself a little ahead,
sometimes many steps behind.

The body is alive. 
The leaves shine, letting in speckles of light and creating layers of shade and shape. 
I am a universe unto myself, a uterus of creation eating the blood that lines me. 
The stars are fed, they cannibalize the glory.

Wild Darkness

There is a wild darkness deep inside the crevices of my heart. It shines like obsidian when I turn and face the sun, though no one, not even I, can see its sheen. It is like a forgotten forest, left long ago when I was just a child wearing little pink dresses. I used to know this place, I could visit and sleep in the world of trees and fallen leaves, it was a place just as pretty as the land of rainbows and laughter. Both were equally inviting and I could walk towards them on well-marked paths, eager to discover the messages they offered.
When I ran there with pig-tails and bare feet, I saw pine boughs grow heavy with pale aged moss and green leaves that held in their color a thousand other hues I could not see. This place used to be another chamber in which to play, a place slightly darker than home, a little less bright, but full of dark open-ended mystery. There I could explore, I turned over heavy gray stones and looked into the holes of knotted trees, asking for their stories. But when I left this place in a slow fit that covered my body in bruises and fear, the path faded in seconds. Cobwebs clouded the canopy and blocked out the weak sun. I left this place and did not go back, abandoning all the crickets and wolves that still take up the call each night, beginning the chanting until the ghosts join in chorus.
The wild darkness can no longer be reached by foot. The paths have disappeared and are covered with poison mushrooms and miner’s lettuce. The map I once sketched and vowed to keep is buried so deep I cannot reach it. I glimpse it in dreams and forget about it upon waking. The darkness cannot be touched by my hands anymore, but I know it’s there. It is waiting for me, and the night animals sing to me when I breathe deeper. It is there, and I look to the left and the right, I look under the covers and behind closed closet doors for a way to enter. But when I sniff the dank air of rotting earth, when the thick strands of a cobweb catches my hand, I run and hide in the bath, submerging my head in the safety of warm water and a mother’s sheltering womb.
The darkness is buried inside, and while one side of me hides, another part searches. The wild darkness swirls with all of my rage and clouds of anger. It dwells there. It grows among the chaotic spider webs and fallen logs and the knotted trees that always resemble distorted human shapes with humps and missing faces. My exiled pain feeds off of the moist low-hanging clouds and the damp fallen needles.
I have banished all my demons to that dark land. Ghosts walk the forest floor, feasting on other new arrivals and the echoes of tears. I have pushed everything in there all of these years, all the things this body living in the sun cannot face.
I see my mother, my daughter, my husband, my lover. Parts of them walk through my darkness. Shadows of me walk there too, dancing with old memories and biting their fingers. Shadows of me flicker, some are missing limbs or just a hand. Some hobble, and some are bleeding from the chest. They are everything I cannot face and they hang suspended in this place, wandering the grounds, dodging trees and poisonous beasts and sucking on mushroom caps. It is a forest of hidden emptiness, though it fills itself with sorrow. I hear it going thump, thump, thump, thump.
The part of me that still looks under rocks, she looks for the place without a map, but she cannot find the door. She slams into walls and gets lost in the closet. She knows she must go back. She must visit the place that was always there, the land where everything exists at once, the past, present, and future. It is all hidden, yet repeating the same well-worn cycle. It is waiting for my return.
I can smell it now, dank and moldy, smelling of earth, tasting like rusty blood. I turn to the left, looking for a new path to carry me back.

A Scream In The Night

A scream pierces through the night. Was it from out there in the world...or in here, under the covers of this full bed? I see a lonely woman in the night, hiding under a thick blue sleeping bag, winking away mosquitoes and night time animals and dreams that come with sweat, panting like they have only heavy love to spread. Did it come from me, that full octave resonance with bells of fear and pain and the things that have fallen through therapy cracks and tender kisses. From me? This sleepy body alone in a square room, the moon coming through barred windows while little girls sleep upstairs.

I hear it again, a long extended piercing note, high and shrill, a raven’s bell topping it off.. My eyes are open in the dark, seeing the shapes that wait silently for the sun to rise. For do they exist without sight? I walk towards them, yes, pulling the blankets back and all the barriers of many fabrics and weights. These are the walls, made of skin and plaster.I hold tight to the edges of the desk. It exists without sight, for I touch its smooth edges. A caress so euphoric that I feel the shelves start to shake. This surface that I touch, it is the night in its shapes. Long and dark. Thick and flat. Cylinders that wait for a hand. It is the light of the moon that streams in through the window. It is the world, shaped and compressed, formatted for use.

It is all so sharp, so perfectly clear, carrying with it all the world and all its people. I strip, letting the white panties I wear drop to the carpet. There is nothing between me and it...you...all that is there. Opening the door to my bedroom, I step onto the icy cold tile floor of the kitchen. To the right is the doorway to the garden and its impotent gold lock. I move slowly though the kitchen of obstacles. Boots left and forgotten, tripods and old computer parts. I move slowly though the minefield, my body tense with the expectation of pain.

The potted house plant senses the movement, somewhat irregular in the night. It calls to me, asking my plans. “Don’t worry,” I think to it, “I’m moving towards the moon, it has a secret to share.” The naked animal moves, a siren has gone off in the world of foliage and earth and they talk so loudly between themselves I think I might have broken some firm rule, but I keep moving, letting their chatter cover me like silken blankets from another world.

The door opens, almost without a touch. I have arrived. The moon begins to shine brighter, pulsing to a beat the flowers begin to hear. A gentle swaying begins. Grass, the hydrandrea bush, the deep purple succulents that open like a woman to the night’s light, the growing catnip shrub, still an infant. They all bop up and down, grooving to the ecstatic bass of the moon, the light at the center, the DJ for the garden, grown from the stars and the waves miles in the distance. I move by impulse, my head moving up and down, my chest pumping up, down, up, down, up down... to the rhythm my ears cannot hear. The sounds bypass my ears, going deeper in like a straight line, going through organs and bones, finding other spaces and doorways, moving for miles, beyond measurement into the world of the time-less where sound is just another kiss from the clouds, where rain come in like ecstatic bursts of strawberry flavor and piercing screams.

“Wait!” something seems to say. I stop, listening for the threat of an explosion. “Wait!” I look around, searching for a mouth and body, looking for something. Is it me? My voice? Another part of me that runs always behind, desperately running down the street in flip-flops and a tattered robe, waving my arms and reaching for the endless rope of tug-of-war.

I remember this night. This game, no, not really a game, but something like it resembling life. I remember now, doing this once before, dancing and swaying, bopping until I heard the call, and then I stepped away. I walked back into through the door, finding the kitchen tiles cold as ice, finding the abandoned panties and the luke-warm bed waiting for something to snuggle.

I remember, it was the sound of an explosion. A scream at the center that awoke me. The moon at the center. Those little pink dancing flowers that call for a partner. I had arrived in the garden, an active participant at the party, the orgy lacking tangible kisses, but reeking of sex fragrant earth. It was all skin and matter, so much so that I thought I might cry, but the thoughts absorbed into me and became new blood. The new rivers burned so bright and long, so sharp in their stinging life that I just had to swing my arms through the blackened night. Those fingers, stuck to this naked white body leaped as much as they could, screaming, so euphoric in their cries that I just had to let out a scream.

The Wish

It was a perfect dandelion, set under a crisp plain of bright blue sky. It was straight and tall, a white puff of individual seeds that almost begged the wind to scatter it, each one holding on with the most gentle touch of strength. The dandelion was ripe and ready, finding itself alone in a wide open green field of grass, where bare-boughed oaks stayed in the distance, on the soft sloping hillsides that rimmed the field like the jewels on a crown. A gentle wind began to blow, rattling the long stem in its place. Bending from side to side, but not a seed ventured out. The time had not come, the world was not yet ready. They could all wait, holding onto the stem just a little longer.

She gathered what they needed for a picnic, looking with discerning eyes through her small pantry. There was already a thin pink tablecloth in her black canvas backpack, two ham and cheese sandwiches she had made in the morning while her heart raced with bursts of excitement. There were a couple room temperature bottles of water and a handful of paper napkins. She grabbed a handful of chocolate kisses from a half-full plastic bag and dropped them into the side pocket. She zipped up the backpack and headed out the door, warm golden sunlight greeting her. It was time to play.
The day outside was so fresh. It had rained for several weeks, nearly non-stop, and now it was time to reap the rewards of endurance. In every garden were daffodils and the buds of Icelandic poppies just about to burst. Something about the air was so different, it almost had a sweetness, like the rain had washed away every sad thought and tear. There was something so clean, she couldn’t quite place what it reminded her of, but she felt like she had lived it before.
She drank in the air, the day, enjoying every lick of the cool breeze that slid past her round red cheeks. She walked five block to the park, passing single story houses with large front yards and no gates. Everyone seemed to be gone. No cars in the driveway, no human sounds. It was just her and the quiet dance of leaves, the sun and its returning loyalty, the color of soft petals. The park was more of an open green field, not a place new mothers would bring their children to. There were no play structures or a basketball court. Just a large stretch of grass and oaks along the edges. She liked it, it was a place she came to often, perhaps the last wild, undeveloped place in the city. A breath of fresh, green air.

She saw him in the distance and her heart both jumped out of and fell into her stomach. He was a small shape amid green covered earth and blue sky. Knowing he was there, she walked slightly faster, her heart beating, her palms beginning to sweat. His broad shoulders looked wide in the uncompromising light. He stood now, watching her approach, and with each step closer, she felt ever more shy in his steady gaze. She could not stop smiling. Wind whipped across her teeth, drying them completely. Another step across soft earth, then another. Where he stood was home, within his body was everything she dreamed of. The space between them grew smaller and smaller, until there was no space, their bodies pressing tightly.

“Hi,” he said, taking a small step back. “right here, this is the perfect spot, look,” he pointed to the ground, “I thought you might want to make a wish.”

She followed the invisible trail from his finger to the grass, and there, was a dandelion. Ripe with seed and wishes, ready for her hopes, for all she wanted to tell the sky. She looked up, smiling at him, giving him a kiss on his wide lips. She looked at him for a moment, then bent over, plucking the dandelion gently from its base. She stood up straight again, looked at him once and then closed her eyes. She made a wish...and blew, sending her dreams towards the moon.

The Ritual

I looked in my rear view mirror and saw the blue edge of the continent in the reflection. It was a thick line of deep blue. Up the hill I went, further and further from the breaking waves and clans of surfers and screams of the dingy boardwalk. "The city on a hill,” what they called the university of Santa Cruz. I passed the west entrance and kept going. The road began to curve and twist through the incoming forest that seemed to emerge in an instant. Green and black and holding secret promises. In the thicket were animals that refused to show themselves and caves that I had only heard about. I drove on.
I was looking for the right place. I wasn’t sure exactly where it was, but I kept driving, passing plenty of pull-outs on the road. Sometimes, as I approached one of these flat dirt spots, I would press on the break slowly and look to the right, surveying the land and trees, but then I wouldn’t move, I wouldn’t turn the wheel to the right and the car would keep on going.
The sky was a bright blue and through the open driver’s window I felt the crisp air of an approaching fall. The day held the promise of cool wind and yellow leaves, but for a moment, perhaps just for this one day, we could all pretend that summer still lingered and the sun would be ever-present. I saw a black car parked on the long pull-out ahead. The road had straightened momentarily. The “parking lot” was a three hundred foot long space, just wide enough for a single car. The earth was a bright tan dust. On the right was a metal fence that was held between thick dark wooden posts. I saw the aerodynamic car empty and waiting.
Usually the sight of another car or person would have made me keep driving, I wanted privacy. But something about the sight of it pulled me in. I found myself turning the wheel to the right and pressing on the brake pad. The car came to a stop under my command and I pulled the keys from the ignition.
I sat. It was very quiet. The left side of the road was lined by thick pine trees that grew out of an elevated conglomeration of rocks and earth. The right was a narrow field of dried grass and weeds. They were nearly four feet tall. Behind them was a wall of tall pine trees that stretched into the mountains. There were a couple of narrow paths that began at the edge of the road and disappeared into the trees. I picked the one closest to me and headed in carrying a large gray sweatshirt and a woven purse.

I walked, deviating from the trail once I was beneath a ceiling of green pine needles. I let my body lead the way until I saw a thick trunk that called to me. The earth was slightly elevated at its base, but yet flat enough for me to sit upon. I leaned against the bark, on a thick pad of leaves and very thin twigs. There was sap and decomposing yellow needles. It was the smell of earth. The smell of the cycle. I let it fill me. I nearly cried with the warmth of it, with the calmness of the elements. The earth and tree were like the loving arms of a mother I might never have had. Without thought or judgment, I felt them holding me.
“Will you help me?” I asked the tree. “Will you please take all the sadness and fear that I have? Can you take it out of me and transform it into oxygen?”
I leaned into the giant beauty. The old man. The calm wonder. I imaged a backwards flow, a multi-channeled river that escaped through my back and head, taking with it all the sadness and anxiety my muscles had held for a week. The bark was solid and strong, I heard thoughts inside, “how come you don’t do this more often? It feel so nice.” The bark was scratchy and soothing. I let a tear roll down my cheek.
“Please take what I don’t need.”
I imagined the flow of tension move into the tree, up the trunk, into the branches and needles and disperse into clean oxygen. There were birds somewhere in the thick canopy of pine needles above my head, but my eyes were closed and I could not see them. Their sounds were pretty and trebly and short, I imaged little birds with thick breasts.
I leaned against the tree for a while until I felt the moment was right. I opened my eyes. The day was bright, the sky was a bright blue. I could feel the cold wind coming, but we still had a little more time. Rays of light shone though the branches and warmed my thighs.
On my lap was a gray hooded sweatshirt with the word INDEPENDENT across the front in a thick red font. I picked it up and held it to my nose. It smelled of him. The faintness of his Tommy cologne I liked so much, vaguely smelling of grapefruit. I inhaled again, there was sweat and fabric softener. Its softness soothed my face. I imagined his eyes and lips. I let another tear run across my cheek.
I put it back in my lap and cleared the blanket of needles and twigs from a small space in front of my crossed legs. I found the deep brown earth, then I dug my fingers into it, making a small shallow hole. I pulled out the knife from my pocket. I held the silver blade to my finger. I tried a couple of times to force it through my skin, but it only left a faint indent on my flesh without the gash of red that I needed.
I unfastened the safety pin that I always wore on my pant’s pocket. It was small and not created for this purpose, but it did the job. I just needed a little bit of blood. I pushed the tip into the pad of my pink index finger. A small red bead formed. I watched it drop into the small hole within the earth. It disappeared into the soil.
I thought of his face. I tried to feel him in his cage. I remembered his smile. I pulled the sweater over my shoulders and wore it. I imagined his skin. I imagined the shape of his shoulders in the sweatshirt and the way he would wear the hood when he was cold. I took a deep breath again and smelled the remains of him.
My back fell into the tree once more and I asked it again to take what I didn’t need and transform it. I imagined his DNA within my blood. I imagined a small part of him fusing with the earth. I pulled out a small piece of paper and a pen from my purse. I wrote a few lines about him and us and what I wanted and hoped for. I wrote it quickly, letting my hand move nearly as fast as my thoughts. I folded it and held the flame of a lighter to it. The ashes fell into the hole with the fallen drop of blood.
I sat for a while longer, feeling the steadiness of the tree holding me close to the earth. I covered up the hole and placed some stones over it. Then I stood and began to walk back to my car.

Sisters

There it was. A liquid dust settled between us, the presence of another, the presence of many others whose varnish had rubbed off upon us and caused our own surfaces to become tarnished and murky. But beneath all that, there was still a glimmer, a glow actually, warm like candle light in an autumn cottage. Dance, damn it, dance, I said! Move. Do SOMETHING!
Don’t just sit there. That thing inside of you has to MOVE! Don’t let it be still. Keeeeeep it moving. Keep it alive. Rhythmic motion ingrained deep inside us all. Waiting to come out. Waiting to be seen and heard and felt.
The mysteries that lay between us and all things were unfathomably deep, but treading through these dark gaps is the secret way of the sisters of the moon, and so we traveled this way, not through what was clear and bright and knowable between us, but rather in the tangled darkness where we might not be women, but harpies, where our talons might be blood drenched or our faces hideous, our countenances dark and fierce or pale and diminutive.
We could find each other by the light that is no light, the nothing which is something and reaches back to a place and time that was before our births, before ever there was a world or word to utter about it.
Her hair swings back and forth with each grind of her hips. Rhythmic intensity as the orgasm flows. That whore that was dancing in the bar feeling tipsy from the cheap vodka, now she dances like a goddess. Moving, swaying. Life depending on her every move. Like Shiva’s dance of destruction and creation. The movements intensify with every sway of the hips. Grinding against eternity. Move. Move.
Answer the phone. It rings. Ringing again. Who is it? Who is calling? Who IS calling? What is it that calls to us from deep inside of us? Answer it.
To seek one another out in the clouds of storm and still swamp-like pools of the material plane and join our two forces and build the true temples of the Gods was ever our goal. To look eye to eye and stir to awakening and recognize one another and then delve deeper into the world, making it our stuff of creation, our clay, our multicolored strands of yarn to crochet into the shapes of our ever deepening dreams.
The warrior lifts his head to the sky. He needs his strength. He needs his guide. The hawk answers with a shrill cry. I am here for you. Let my strength become yours. Let us be one. Let us go together in the world. Let us take flight and soar above all. Let us jump from the cliff and ride upon the wind, high above. Looking down on the vast canyons and shrubs. Cactus. Small animals. Snakes. Let us glide high above the rocks and trees.
Then we shall come to the earth and walk. Walk upon the land and feel the gravity beneath us, sinking, pulling. The weight at times unbearable. Pulling us seemingly to the center. Different enough that we could stand back to back, similar enough that we could remain in the same sacred circle, bound in silence and eternity, a shadow to a shape and a shape to a shadow.
The six sisters. You picked the right sister. The one which can help you. The one which can guide you on your way. Make you laugh, make you cry. The strange sister. So many choices but you picked the right sister. You don’t know why or how it happened. It just did. Call it fate. Call it whatever you Will. Just call it.
So for a time we would build together and be together and for a time we would sleep drifting into dreams so different and far flung that we were strangers both to ourselves and to each other. This was the way it had be done by us for the years of our mortal lives and the way it had been done by other mortals before us. This was the way that we were in time and the way that we were out of time. Out of time together forever, a serpent with two heads, and in time separate lost fragments of a being falling apart in the cold throes of enthropic force.
There was a Now to work with. A Now to do something in, and a Now where nothing could be done or ever had been done. Our most delicate and important task was to knit these two Nows together so that some thing that had never occurred before could finally manifest. A unity of death and life that might soar in skies unpainted and swim in depths undreamed.

Machine Without A Master

Do you hear the bell toll? Listen to it ring; ding dong, deep and mournful. It began when there was a hand to pull its ropes, and it will stop when the hand is gone. You can read in the news today that 41 people were taken hostage in an immigrant service building in New York State. Some were shot and are critically wounded. You may also watch videos about a called received by 911 in which a woman shouted “Die, Die!” as she stabbed her toddler to death. In the pictures of the week, there is a photo of a man with a bloody mouth and naked baby dolls pinned all over his white dress shirt. At a glance you might assume that he is protesting abortion. A closer inspection of the caption below the image will reveal that he is in fact a performance artist that has positioned himself outside of a courthouse where a man is being tried for imprisoning his daughter in a windowless cell for 12 years and fathering eight children by her. The farmers in the Murray-Darling Basin of Australia are systematically being placed on suicide watch after a seven year drought has turned their ranches into desert wastelands. The frogs of the world are dying en mass. The economic fate of all the lands of this earth was discussed at the G 20 summit yesterday, the problems of a failing global economy were to be resolved in one day by clean learned white apes in designer suits. The president of Brazil has declared that those responsible for the economic collapse are all white with blue eyes; there is not a single black or brown man among them. You can read it all in little lines of text on the Internet if you are not afraid of the virus that was released on April 1st . You can watch video upon video, look in magazines, scan the headlines of newspapers, search every where for the equations whose final result can only be a fading civilization.
What are we really?
Animals that hold the fate of a world clutched in our greedy frightened paws. Because we shower and use chemical body products and shave the hair from our bodies, we forget what we are, we forget that we have risen from the mud of this earth and that it will swallow us again. If you listen in the hallways of public spaces, you will hear the frightened self centered conversations of these animals. Our prized linear intelligence, an abnormality that sets us apart from the rest of the creatures that cohabit this whirling globe with us, makes us fly in random confused patterns, like those lost bees we read about months ago, crashing and burning without direction, without a clear purpose, without a place to land.
Our personal disease is a secret sickness that infects this entire glass snow globe, but its very nature demands that we not take heed, that we blatantly ignore our left hand slowly bringing the revolver to our temple, finger poised over the trigger. We will not hear the bell, we will not hear the shot ring out as we gently squeeze it while holding our martini glass poised in the right hand. That line we began about God and his design will end abruptly and fall flat into the dead silence of that moment in which there is no longer a hand to pull the rope.
The endless void will yawn and swallow our collective dream back up into its eternal stillness, a moment of deep sleep between the cycles of dream. The lands that we have trod upon, and imagined were separate from us, will turn over inside of us as unborn children in the womb of an unsuspecting mother. God’s design will disintegrate with our tongues and will be replaced with the endless machinations of half formed equations that we will pour through the emptiness like water over the mill wheel, mere grease for the ceaseless clockwork of a mysterious hidden gauntlet. This fading dream touches upon the realm of nightmare just before we startle awake and find that the design called for death, but never for paradise. Evaporated mirages break upon an even more startling reality. Silence.