Divide

The candlelight

was weak,

about to fade away.

The winter had laid us bare,

but the trees

encircled us,

made for us an

unassuming home.

In his arms

there was a tenderness

something unusual.

I sensed a seeker

that had dropped

old attachments

and penetrated the

thousand-year divide

between lives.

In his words

were ancient whispers,

an electric promise

radiating through the ocean

and flowing to the stars.

The journey

was about to begin

fresh and new

ancient and arcane

ageless and eternal.

The Twelfth Hour

Void of stars. How can that be?
I search for a reason. I try to trace the lines back in my memory…
what could I have possibly done to turn the sky black?
The trouble is that I can’t remember.
It seems that I fell asleep.

When I was young and the sky was still littered with stars, the Sorcerer came to visit Yantel. He had been seeking a pupil for many years, and no doubt he visited many other villages and hamlets and perhaps even great cities, all to no avail. There were a handful of applicants for the job in my village and a crowd gathered to witness the trial.
The Sorcerer lined the prospective apprentices up. To each one he posed the same question:

“Who is the great magician who makes the sky blue and the grass green?”

“You are, oh great Askander!” one tried and the Sorcerer shook his head and moved on.

“It must be Philoneous the Second, council to the wise King in Arander.” Tried another. Again the sorcerer merely shook his head and continued down the line.

Various mythic Sorcerers and fairytale witches were named. One somber youth suggested it was the King of the Gods, but all were met with a shake of the head.

“No apprentice here.” The sorcerer announced and the crowd sighed with disappointment.

I laughed and the Sorcerer turned and caught my eyes with his. There were stars in his eyes too, if I remember rightly, or at least there was the fire that burns in stars.

“What is your answer?” he asked.

“Mine? I, I’m not an applicant.” I stammered.

“But you think you know the real answer. Tell me.”

I swallowed, slowly recovering myself.

“The answer is me. I am the magician who makes the sky blue and the grass green.”

“Tell me why you think that is the answer.” The magician demanded.

With a shrug I obliged.

“Well, have you ever had a dream? How do you know that this is not a dream? If life is a dream, if I am a dream, then I am also the dreamer, and if so then I am responsible for giving sky and the grass their color.”

“But life is life, it is not a dream.” One of the flustered applicants informed me.

“Then you have not dreamed as I have dreamed. Nor lived life as I have lived it.” I retorted.

The young man began to object again but the Sorcerer waived a dismissive hand at him and said to me,

“Get your things and come with me if you are ready to learn The Terrible Way and one day become a Sorcerer.”

I did not tell my parents I was leaving, they wouldn’t have let me go, and I did not gather my things. I left the village right then with Askander. I left my family’s land and the sheep it was my job to tend and the girl my parents would have wanted me to marry in a few years. I left my brothers and bread baking in the oven and warm sleepy afternoons watching clouds pass over the hillsides. I asked my younger brother to tell our parents goodbye for me.  With Askander leading the way I walked out of the village and along a lonely road and up the mountain path under millions of stars and a new white moon. There were most definitely stars then, and if the sky was a color, then it was indigo.

I spent 12 years in Askander’s tower doing as I was told each day. There were stars in all of that time. Most often I was told not to do this or that. Do not open that book. If a door appears in the west end of the tower, do not open it. If a maiden arrives and begs for help or sanctuary, do not let her in and do not go out. Do not eat garlic. Do not drink wine. Do not touch my hat.

There was so much that I did not do, but there were some things that I did. Mostly sweeping, mopping, cooking, washing, emptying chamber pots, feeding goats and chickens, weeding the garden. Sometimes, however, I was shown how to do something extraordinary, though I think I occasionally failed to notice precisely how extraordinary they were at the time.

I learned how to breathe as the dragons breathe and walk in the shadow land between worlds. The technique for turning lead into gold was revealed to me but I found it hard to master and was stuck in practice each day. I also learned the names of many stars and looked at them through a magickal glass studying their movement across the sky. Thus I know they were there then, for I was a careful observer of all of their habits and color.

I worked from dawn until midnight each day with time split between chores, basic education, and my more obvious magickal studies and practices. There were never enough hours in the day to complete the tasks given me, and I was always tired when it was time to lay my head upon my pillow of straw. Askander himself was tireless. He worked furiously at his alchemical practices all through the morning as I did my chores, saw to my education through the afternoon, resumed his own research in his vast library as I practiced my magickal work, checking in on me from time to time to critique and adjust my practice, and then when I lay down to sleep he continued his own work all through the night, never sleeping a wink.

In 12 years Askander never slept. I would, now and then, awake in the night and tip toeing from my chamber, observe him on the balcony in his study of the night sky with the magickal glass, or find him creating charts of the stars, or maps of the shadows. Some nights I dared not open a closed door, transfixed in terror of the frightful sounds and voices vibrating through the walls. Other nights I would go down to the garden in the walled courtyard to see the sparks of light showering out of the windows of Askander’s chambers at the top of the tower. Most nights I slept, too exhausted to entertain curiosity.

The night came, I remember there were still stars, when Askander told me that he would sleep. I was now told that Askander would at last take his respite for a period of 24 hours. He unveiled for me a device for keeping track of the time. I was charged with remaining awake as he slept, and awakening him by ringing a bell after the 24^th hour.

He went into his room and lay down on his much unused mattress. I covered him with the blanket and watched him close his eyes and fall almost instantly asleep. Sitting with him for a while my eyes scanned over the titles upon the spines of the walls of books surrounding us. When I was sure that he was asleep I stood and removed one volume from the shelf and leafed gently through the pages before sliding it softly back into place. Askander was truly deeply asleep. It had certainly been a lonely 12 years, but now for the first time in so long I was actually alone.

I went out on his balcony and beheld the constellations blazing bright. I was struck then, by the certainty that each star was a Sorcerer just as Askander and I, and that we drew power and light from one another. In 12 years I had felt cut off from the world and alone with my teacher who was sometimes my beloved father and sometimes an unbearable tyrant as the situation demanded. Now I saw that I could never be alone, that we were multitude, that I was one of a school of stars populating the great abyss.

Lost in thought I nearly did not hear the soft weeping coming from below, but soon it distracted me from my reverie. Peering down I saw a young woman in a torn dress tapping on the tower door. It seemed clear that she had been through some ordeal, so tattered were her garments, so pale her tear streaked cheeks. I hurried down the spiral staircase. I opened the door.

“Please sir, we were attacked by bandits and my father was killed. I escaped but have been lost in these mountains for days. I am so hungry. Can you not help me?”

I invited her in. She was cold so I clothed her, and hungry so I fed her, or rather I showed her to the kitchen larder and she cooked for us both. I had not enjoyed a meal since beginning my apprenticeship as I was the cook, and not good at it. Full and content I sat next to the hearth with her and asked her name. I do not now recall it. She told me that she had seen a bottle of wine in the larder and went to retrieve it. At first I declined when she offered to fill my cup.

“One drink is not vice.” She said as she filled her own cup. I accepted.

 We sipped our wine and watched the flames dance for a while and she began to sing.

It was a beautiful song. One might say, enchanting. It reminded me first of my youth in Yantel, of being a boy watching the grass of the fields sway in the breeze and wondering about the world and the heavens and myself. Then it carried me away to Arander to the white city walls and blue and gold flags whipped by the wind. A princess stood on the wall looking out over the forest, waiting for her father’s return. Inside the forest a starving Cobbler’s son was hunting a golden stag but when the Cobbler’s son drew his arrow the stag saw him and said,

“Spare my life and I will grant you a wish.”

So the youth asked for the hand of the princess. He let the stag go, not really believing his wish could be fulfilled, and left the forest still hungry, but on the road he saw a man besieged by bandits and once more drew his bow. This time he shot true, killing one bandit so the others fled. The man on the road was the King returning from a pilgrimage to the fountain where he had been praying for a worthy husband for his daughter. He brought the Cobbler’s son back to the castle to wed the princess. At the wedding the princess played her lute and sang to her bridegroom with a voice like golden honey. Thereafter she sat the foot of the bed and played for him each night until he fell asleep. On the twelfth night as he was close to slumber, he opened his eyes and beheld an old woman sitting at the foot of the bed, strumming the loot and singing. She was not the fair beauty he thought he had wed, but a gnarled and bent creature with stringy, greasy grey hair hanging limp under her crown. She leered at him with hallow eyes and grinned with a cavernous mouth lacking many teeth.

That was when I realized that my own eyes had shut. Startled, I opened them and found that I sat alone in the darkness before a cold hearth. I searched clumsily in the darkness for a candle and a match. When it was lit I fumbled in my pocket for the time keeping device. Its many moving parts had stopped and the indicator had frozen upon the twelfth hour. How much time had really passed? Full of dread I raced up the stairs to Askander’s chamber at the top of the tower. He was gone. I called out his name. I found the bell and rang it and called for him before I came here to the balcony and beheld the sky. Void of stars.

How can that be?

Even now that I have remembered so much, I am unsure. When was it that I fell asleep? In the field as a child? Have I only dreamed that I was selected to be a sorcerer’s apprentice? Or am I truly the apprentice that failed his master and let all the stars die? My foolishness, my disobedience, my failure to keep my master’s way as it was taught me resulting in disaster. Perhaps I am the Sorcerer himself who is yet to reach the twelfth hour, quietly dreaming of being my own apprentice, letting the fear that he will fail me take sway.  

Or am I really a Cobbler’s son fallen prey to some plot and wed to a witch? Now she sits at the foot of my bed singing me a nightmare of fallen sorcerers and fallen stars. Are any of these dreams more or less dreams than any of the others? More or less real? I search for a reason. I try to trace the lines back in my memory.

What could I have possibly done to turn the sky black?
It seems that I fell asleep, but when?

A Walk Through Eternity

“Eternity is here and now. Right now. As you read these words. It cannot be otherwise.
Eternity is not a very long time, longer than all your memories, longer than you could ever imagine. Eternity is not very slow, something much slower than what we could conceivably endure.
Eternity is not loving or unloving, not hateful or compassionate. Eternity is not reward or punishment.
Eternity is not and cannot be something that will happen someday, something that has happened already.
Eternity cannot happen for to happen something must have a past and a future and eternity can have neither.
Eternity is what is left when past and future are gone.
Eternity can hold no sequences and no trails of cause and effect.
Eternity is complete because it cannot be otherwise.
There is no time to be lost or gained, no time to fulfill lacks or to form wishes. Eternity is simply no time at all.”

I thought of the words on the old book as I stood on the border, looking in. This was not the first time I thought of them. It probably wouldn’t be the last. The words caressed me in ways I didn’t find fully pleasant, something about their implied meaning disturbed me, hurt me somehow, something rose up within me to defend my inherent right to events, my right to chains of causality, my right to the forward motion of time. The something that rose then stayed in my chest, having nowhere to go. And there it lingered and it could only grow as I replayed the words in my mind once again.
There was a great circular labyrinth in front of me and I stood on the edge, right where the narrow path of white stones began. Should I go in? I wondered. Is this the time? The right time? I asked myself in silence. Will there be another opportunity if I were to wait? Will this moment return or will there be another similar enough that it will make no difference?
My mind was clouded with thoughts, tinged with self conscious doubt and human concerns. As I whirled in the middle of pros and cons and other random waves of kinetic brain activity, I felt the moment closing. I felt it moving past me, rushing like a slow inexorable current, slow but definitely moving…drifting through my finger tips as I stood there debating inside my head. The moment was about to move past me like a cold little stream past a heavy rock, unafraid to leave me in its wake on its way to an unknowable destiny, some place where I would never be.
I could feel the three women behind me squirming slightly, their bodies preparing for departure, ready to move up the hill and begin our lunch. Something we had all been waiting for with impatient eagerness. This was not the time for distractions. This was not the time. It shouldn’t be. I felt it passing, all of it. A thread of nothingness on the black current of emptiness, drifting away from me while I stood still, trying to decide. I knew it was leaving now, maybe forever. Soon, even the decision would be gone.

“We may experience Eternity. But this experience won’t be in the past, it wasn’t in the future, it wouldn’t be in our memories of that perfect psychedelic trip into the infinite maelstrom, or that amazing moment of meditation when the walls disappeared and all the people turned transparent like new plastic bags, or that one instant when you and I fell in love and we both knew it as clearly as we knew where we were sitting, as clearly as we knew each other’s names. It won’t, it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be the sudden burst of direct Knowledge that came over you that one day, that one day that we can all vaguely remember. Yes, all of us. It has happened, will happen, would happen to all of us. Every single one of us.
It wouldn’t have been in the future, in that bright final day when I finally accomplished the Great Work and I fused with the True Self that I found standing behind the illusion. It didn’t come when I was finally Awake, fully and beyond mistake, or when I completed my spiritual progress through a thousand lifetimes of abnegation on my way to glorious liberation which came and went before I knew it was happening. It didn’t even come the days before my death, when I finally surrendered, fully and completely, when I finally started to Work. It couldn’t have. It didn’t. It won’t. It can’t.
Our experience of Eternity can only be Now. Now as you read this. Now as you hear this. Now as you think this. As you think it in the words that are here written.”

A small bird chirped at me from a nearby tree. A soft breeze blew wisps of hair across my forehead. Without another thought, without a clear sense of purpose, without a final bout with the constant plague of imagined consequences, my foot suddenly took a step forward. My first step into the labyrinth, my first step onto the path. And as my foot took that step, my mind was completely taken by surprise. It had been left out of the decision. It was being taken for a walk, like a small dog that suddenly realizes what is happening as the door closes behind him and the cold air hits its pudgy hairy face. "Oh, I guess I’m doing this.After all that thinking, I guess I’m just going to do it." I said it to myself where nobody could listen, inside the place where nobody could reach.
My mind was shocked, but willing to go. I looked down at the path directly in front of me, at the narrow bit of dirt outlined in gray stones. I remembered myself. I remembered what to do. My right foot touched lightly upon the path, I felt the soft dry earth beneath me, I felt the heel as it made contact with the ground. Each step slow, each movement deliberate and carefully noted.

“The experience will not be soon,
The experience will not come a moment from now,
Just as it didn’t happen a moment ago.
Just as it didn’t happen before you can remember.
NOW.”

Nearly thirty steps in, my mind started to dart around once again, a reinvigorated ping pong ball bouncing on a fully enclosed spherical table inside my skull. "Was this a good time for this? Will they be mad? Did I mess up the space? This is probably taking too much time! They are all waiting to eat. They are all so hungry. I’m hungry myself. This is the last thing they want just now. To be waiting for me while I slowly move through this little maze of rocks. And now I can’t even see them. I can’t even turn around to try to read the thoughts behind their faces."
And then, a calmer voice, another player in my secret private game of bouncing phrases and flying single words: "You’re doing it now, you can’t turn back, you’re in the middle, you made the decision, something made it, something inside of you…so do it as best as you can.And keep on going. There is no stopping now. There is no stopping."
My hands were swinging, the air drifted through my curled fingers like soft kisses in the momentary resting point of a long uncertain journey, deep in the middle of the night when it seems that such a journey can never end (but it always does.) My left knee bent as my whole body prepared for the next step that was surely about to come. I turned the corners carefully, slowly, watching the ground as the outlined path turned back upon itself, watching it curl back to what I had already left behind, to the path of pale which seemed already so distant.
"This just keeps going!" I thought. I put my attention back on my feet. I felt my arcs stretch with the forward movement of heel to toe. The breeze touched me again and tousled my hair. The path was still there. Curving away ahead of me. Ahead and behind and both at once, blurring into a confusing knot where the future and the past twisted themselves around each other.

“Our language, our imagination, our projections, our world of symbols… they have all conspired to give us an image of Eternity as a really long time, a time so long that it might as well be forever, a time where actions stretch forward into an insistent periodic repetition without friction or decay… Eternity as the white washed heaven of the Christians, the gardens and virgins of the Muslims, the complex Bardo chambers of the Tibetans, the rising cosmic steps of the Gnostics, the monstrous and heroic houses of the witches, the many colored visions of the shamans, the fiery dungeons of the ancient and secret God Pan. All of these may in fact be real (or real enough that we may have the pleasure and pain of experiencing them for a very long time) but they are not the experience of Eternity. If something is happening, then it will stop happening eventually. If something some day stops happening, it will eventually come back. As surely as these words will one day disappear. As surely as these words were always written, long before I seemingly made them appear from nothingness onto a blank white page.”

When I first started on my journey, I had heard the voices of the three women on the outside. I was able to imagine how they saw me, how they might see me, how I may have looked from the distant places that were outside. I imagined their thoughts even if they were only my own projections. They kept talking among themselves and I felt safe in their neglect.
But when I was focusing on my feet, somewhere along the way, their voices had dropped away into a kind of strange silence, their voices which were known and unknown, their voices which were real and imaginary. The space was now profoundly quiet, except for the rustling of nearby leaves and the occasional car tires swishing on the asphalt of the road below. It was me and the labyrinth. Me and the elements. Me and my effort. Me and the path.

“But Eternity cannot begin and cannot end. It is not an extension of time. It is itself outside of time. Time cannot reach out to swallow it. It overcomes time and envelops it like an infinite snake that has transcended all restrictions. We are, you and me, right now, in the midst of Eternity, projecting images of illusory lifetimes onto a never changing Clear Void. And the void itself remains the same, no matter how much the illusion changes.
The longing for the experience of Eternity is a struggle that can never be completed. As long as there is a struggle, the goal has not been reached. But if the goal has not been reached, the struggle cannot end. And so, like Achilles, our work will always be just a hair short of the Eternal Turtle that moves just slightly out of our grasp. Ever so close. Ever so far.”

The rings were getting smaller. I turned corners more and more often until I suddenly reached the center which was both more than and less than I had imagined. In the small round heart was a mosaic stepping stone that had small stones and beads upon it. Signs that others had been here, signs that they wished to be remembered even if I would never know their names or their secret agendas.
I closed my eyes. I saw small sparks of electricity playing on the canvas of my eyelids. I raised my hands out to the sides, opening them wide.I then lifted them high above my head and finally brought both hands together in front of my chest. As if prayer. As if there was something there that would listen.

“In the deepest void within you, behind you eyes, behind your thoughts, behind your emotions, behind your secret wishes and desires, behind your bright nightmares and dark dreams, behind the twisting and gyrating thing that you think of as you without ever thinking about it, behind it all you have Eternity. Right now. Your experience of it relies on your ability to maintain your attention steady, to look inside and not be instantly repelled by the frightfulness of pure untouched Nothingness.”

Oooooommmmmm, the sound was not as pure as it has been, not as pure as it could be. I noticed that fact objectively and I held my attention on the sound and my diaphragm, even as the sound cracked slightly. I pulled my stomach in as my rounded mouth continued with the elongated vibration. I stood in the center, feeling the soft breeze, feeling the sun, hearing the sound of birds, feeling quiet, yet electrified and alive. My ego had fallen and I was overcome with a sense of lightness.

“There is a reason why we are here, why we move through time, why we play our parts in this infinitely complex labyrinth of time and space. There is a reason why things happen, why "we" happen as we are happening right now.
The reason is entrenched in that elusive experience of Eternity. When you enter into the heart of the Labyrinth, the inner circle that never changes, the secret chamber that never started and never can end, where there is no past and no future and no semblance of either… there you will understand the reason. It will be as clear as it ever was, as clear as it ever will be.”

My body turned back. I took a step, I raised my leg firmly like a soldier, placing it firmly on the ground. I took another step, a very short one on the tips of my toes. I slowly walked back through the rings, sometimes emphasizing the movement of my hips like a supermodel, other times walking erect and with a sense of formality. Other steps, I glided loosely as if I was about to grow wings from my back. I alternated between movements, improvising each like a chaotic dance with my attention as the thread of consistency. And the more I played, the more alive I felt. My smile increased the more I played and I shed more of myself upon the soil.

“This has happened a million times before.
To you.
This will happen a million times again.
To you.
You have experienced Eternity. Directly. And now you are here, in time. And the part of you that recoiled, the part of you that fell, the part of you that opened that door but only slightly, that part that saw the primordial union that cannot be seen, felt or heard, and ran away, afraid that it might have seen too much, afraid that the precious object of desire would never give it the compassionate pleasure of coming to an eventual stop...”

There was nothing else. My past was a distant part of my imagination, the future was never coming. There was only each single step and the thousands of movements which seamlessly created it . The labyrinth and I were playing. We were lovers in union. Dancers intertwined. Actors upon a stage. Beings in a living void.

“…that part of you knows why we perceive Time and why we imagine that there is a past and there is a future.
At the heart, right now, within you and without you, everything is still, quiet and outside of Time, beyond Time, around Time. Here in the innermost chamber we can truly say without any hesitation:
Nothing ever has happened
Nothing ever will happen.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.”

The Hanged Man

He’s waiting to fall like a fruit that falls when it is ripe and ready to be eaten.
In this way he waits calmly for his moment to come, allowing his energy to accumulate in his head.
He waits to fall and the sensation of falling is all the time growing more and more intense.
The moment that he waits for is the moment of the fall.
The riper the fruit the more intense is the sensation of falling, until the fall becomes reality.

This is the man that is hanging.

We all have had that sensation when we sleep, that sense that we are falling (or that we are about to fall) but we avoid it. His message is to see things from another point of view and to allow ourselves to fall.

He is suspended in the air without touching the earth. His hair looks like the snakes of a medusa, his yellow arch is like the halo of the saints. The trunk that he’s hanging from is like the cross of Jesus, and his clothing is like that of a dancing buffoon. His face is serene and his eyes, which watch attentively, seem to invite you to establish visual contact with him. There is always the impulse to turn him around and see him from a different perspective, or one has to see him upside down..

The hanged man.
They tied his foot, because his foot was his head.

The natural fall.
As in birth, it’s the head that first comes out to see the light.
The rope that is tied around his foot is the maternal rope that comes from the navel.

Being hung up as he is, he doesn’t look down towards the ground, he looks forward without worrying about his situation. It seems that he is where he is by his own will, without resistance, without wanting to come down.

If he could speak, what would he say?
If I could ask him why he is there, what would he answer?
Was he at sometime in the past walking like any other man?
Did he climb up there for some reason and did he tie up his own foot?
And what is he doing there?
He doesn’t wait for anybody it seems.
And why does he have one leg folded and his arms at his back?
Are you the forbidden fruit of paradise?
If I were to stand in front of you and talk to you, where would I look, into your eyes or into your mouth?

The light that shines in you is a light that comes out of your head, but it’s a yellow light, as if it was lighting up your presence.

You appear to be a neutral being, neither good nor bad. You don’t smile, you don’t cry, you seem like a battery that is being charged.
How much longer are you going to be there charging?
And what will happen when you fall, will you feel that there is no further sense in living?

You will stop being what you are. Only hung up can you feel good, your feet don’t want to touch the ground.

You seem like the opposite of the crucified Jesus Christ. You are there without suffering, with your head facing down, alive and serene, without expecting anything.
Watching.

It is not in suffering that enlightenment is found.
It is in the other direction.

You are hung up and your blood runs from your feet to your head. In your head the energy accumulates and your folded leg has something to do with sexual energy. Perhaps you are holding it in with that foot, sending it from that place where it seeks to be released up to the head.

It appears that you have a certain kind of discipline to be there, straight, peaceful, and maintaining that strange position.

The Fire Hydrant

“What has gotten into you Jonathan?”
It was the voice of his mother. He didn’t have to look up to see the deep lines of worry etched in her pink forehead, or the downturned pale lips that seemed to tremble while waiting for an answer that would never come. He could picture her hands on her hips, the gold band of her wedding ring glinting in the sun, her gray-blue eyes darting back and forth from the neighbor’s house to him, and then up once again, scanning the cul-de-sac for curious eyes and sneaky glances.
He lay on his stomach above the sidewalk, the cold cement had worked its way through his clothes, and now the cool hand acted like an anchor despite the wind of worry beginning to blow.
He let her sounds float over him, drifting away like a bad smell. And when it cleared, he took a deep breath and renewed his attention on the fire hydrant towering over him. He had been sprawled on the sidewalk in front of his mother’s house for nearly two hours, taking photo after photo of the worn yellow hydrant. After each click of the camera he saw something new, a spider web, a crack, a spot of rust. And as he looked, he went deeper and deeper, seeing variations in color he had not seen before. It kept going and going. He had walked out of the door just to take a simple picture, but the hydrant was a door, and the moment he looked at it, the world opened and he could not look away. There was more to see, so much more. He could feel the chains of earth calling, it was a voice he recognized.
“Jonathan?”
He had been in a frenzy over the past week, that’s what she called it. He would take photos throughout the family’s house until the camera’s battery died, then he would plug it into the wall and while it charged, eat like a voracious animal. After the meal he would crash on the nearest padded piece of furniture, the couch in the living room, the easy chair in the dining room, or in his bed if the family’s large German shepherd had not already claimed it. His mother had begun to worry about him. She had never seen him like this. He had always been a creative boy, painting and writing and making things out of clay, but he always did it in his spare time, after classes or on the weekend, not for hours and hours, letting his cycle of sleep revolve around the battery instead of the moon. Something had snapped or changed and she was not sure why or how, but it worried her. There didn’t seem to be anything else in his life, just photos, just the camera.
She stood next to him on the sidewalk in her slippers and bathrobe. She looked around nervously, wondering if the neighbors could see them through their curtains. She hoped not, there would be little she could do to prevent the rumors from starting.
“Do you hear me Jonathan? What has gotten into you? Laying on the sidewalk, out here in the cold for hours, what could be so interesting about the hydrant?” She looked at his subject with a critical eye. It was yellow, but with cracks on the sides and rust along the edges, but it was a hydrant, and if he had not been out here, she would have never given it more than a second of her time, she never had before.
“I’m worried about you.”
He did not look up. Now he was only vaguely aware of her presence beside him, and it came only from the dull nagging sensation pulling on his skin, making it just a little more difficult to work, just a little harder to find new angles and cobwebs and worlds. He would not respond, he knew words would do little to appease her. He knew it did look strange, he was strange, but he could not stop. There were doors, there were angles, there was eternity to capture.

The Taste

It had been a month since he had them in his mouth. 30 days exactly. A flip of the calendar, another one lost to time. Lost to the darkness of the sparkling, a spinning orb moving through a sun-filled sky. One month since his entire world understanding had been flipped on its head for six hours. It was a bitter taste, but not something he couldn’t deal with. Just chew, let it do what it does. Lay back and let it come.
If anyone were to have looked in his window, if they had been hiding in the darkness of the garden, stepping on the bed of red geraniums that would have been colorless at night, they would have seen a teenager on a bed in a messy room. Just a normal adolescent, some books on the ground, CDs all over the floor, a few empty soda cans littering the ground beside a full metal trashcan that was overflowing with other drained cans and crumpled pieces of paper from a poem he could never quite get right. There was a black and white poster of Jimi Hendrix over his bed, staring straight into the camera in a moment of vulnerable strength.
For six hours that night, he was a teenager on a bed, at least his body was there, above a thick woolen comforter, his head resting on a plump pillow. His body was in the midst of adolescence, but he traveled that night, beyond the place were age is a number with arbitrary limitations placed upon it. What he had placed on his tongue that night took him away from high school and the small bedroom next to the garage. It took him to the other world, a place among many others that existed outside the realm of earth and the place of the human.
Soon after his teeth started grinding and his tongue lubricated and his throat swallowed, very soon after his body became a simple material which was absorbed quickly into the mattress. The mattress became the floor, the ground became soil and dirt and the earth itself melted onto a seamless black sky that held the sparkling possibility of tunnels in all directions.
He was there, travelling through a small space, he was there, floating in open black nothingness. He was everywhere, he was everything and everyone and there was no body or bed or existence. The cross hanging above his door became a simple shape made of wood, holding no meaning, no significance, just two pieces of wood, set at an angle. It was a pretty shape. A very pretty, simple shape.
For six hours he was nothing, nothing and everything and he kissed it all and gave himself to the black sky and the open sun that waited and laughed, hiding its secrets with bursting flames. He lay for six hours until his mother popped her head into his room to offer him a sandwich for dinner. She found a motionless boy on a bed, her boy, motionless, barely breathing. At the time he did not understand what was happening, he could not, for people and words had lost their significance and meaning, and his mother was just a moving shape that cried out in large, booming sounds.
When the six hours of nothingness slowly seeped away with time and when he began to emerge once again into the world of perceived substance and roles and rules, he found that no one was happy. He saw gloomy worried faces and the eyes of steel on men he had never seen. Later he pieced the events together through the various accounts of different family members and next door neighbors.
His mother, fearing he had been in a coma, had called 911. The police arrived in tandem with the paramedics and quickly understood what had been on his tongue. It didn’t matter to them that he had tasted the world as never before, that self had dissolved and each atom looked no different than the next. He wished he could have described it to them, but they were cold stares and metal and bits of flesh that could be called human, but there was no warmth, no blood for them to give him and nothing that he could recognize and take with open hands.
The people he had known his entire life, the things they had taught him, everything they said he would be, he saw it as it was, simple nothingness puffed up in a make believe world, they were shapes that had been given meaning, but they were only lines and patterns. But he could not tell them, they were metal and steel. They were rules. They were vengeance. Justice for them was synonymous with punishment and he knew there would be consequences for the nothingness he had been.

A Moment of Difference

The apartment’s living room was a wide rectangle. Across one of the wide sides was an equally long single pane window which looked into the shabby courtyard one floor below. In the courtyard, the circular fountain had stopped flowing many years before, the grass had turned yellow and just the hearty oaks continued to thrive. Daylight was beginning to break into an electric spectacle of brilliant blue. It came in through the unobstructed window and added a tint of dim light to the room.
He sat on the tall wooden backed chair stolen from the kitchen. It was the only bit of furniture in the room. He sat nearly straight, but for the small hunch in his upper back. An unfiltered cigarette hung from his lip, just as they had hung from the bristly upper lip of his father. He took a long drag, holding the cigarette with his thumb and index finger, his eyes rolled across his loot, they rolled across it like a pilot surveying the curvy hillsides far below.
It had been a good night, a productive night. There were a few TVs, one old VCR and three nearly new DVD players. In addition, there were a handful of CDs and a few necklaces. One of them had some pearls on it and he made a mental note to check their worth.
This was what he liked about his job, the tangibility of it all. The rock solid possession. There was no abstraction, no maybes, just good solid atoms that came together to form recognizable shapes. He would sit on the same chair every morning, when the light was just cracking through the horizon, he would sit back with a swirl of smoke and ash about him and survey the bounty.
He likened it to being a hunter and having something tangible at the end of the day, having something to show for the effort, something earthly and real and solid, something he could pound his fist on or throw across the room. It was real and he liked it.
He avoided numbers on a check and their abstractions. He didn’t play around with banks that promised money on little slips of paper. They were all promises, and above all, he hated promises. Promises depended on someone to fulfill them, they implied vulnerability and trust and patience. He dealt only in the real as much as he could help it.
The TVs were real. He could plug them in and watch them or sell them or, as he sometimes did, throw them from the window in a fit of madness. He would watch them splinter and send their screams through the courtyard and he would know they were real.
He had no time for the objectless, for the illusion of accumulation and wealth. The world would not provide for him, the world would not keep its promises, so he made sure to take what he needed. He never asked, he just took.
When he found he needed something, he went out and got it. He took it. He made it happen. The night shadowed his intent and he moved through it like an animal, sniffing out what he needed, finding a way to shift past the obstacles unnoticed and then, as the light changed to blue, he would slink back into his cave, bringing with him the prey he had killed.
He needed… he took. He wanted… he took. There was no need for patience, no need to slave away as a salesman or beneath the hood of a car. If he needed it, he would get it. It was simple. There just wasn’t time for patience, a gentle finesse, or even a polite “please.” It was now or never and he never waited an extra day.
The light came through the window in a brilliant mess of blue, it caught the smooth glass of the TV set and he saw his reflection. There he was, in his chair, in his white T-shirt and rumpled blue jeans and short brown hair.
He saw himself and remembered another. The man he had seen walking past the bookstore two nights before. It was so dark that night, but the man’s white hair was shining in the darkness like a gleaming orb of promise and knowledge. He himself was hidden behind a car on the other side of the street, hidden in the dark shadows of the city, waiting for the perfect moment to take what was about to be his.
But for a moment, he forgot his intent. He watched as the old man walked slowly past the dim illumination of the store’s window. Walking as though there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to be, nothing more important than the one step he was taking at that exact moment. The long white hair fluttered slightly with each step and each one was taken with a deliberate slowness. It was a slower gait than any he had ever seen, almost like a dance of liquid.
For a moment that seemed to continue forever, the man walked, trailed by little specks of white light and a blue trail of dust. The man took the world like a drop of water smoothing a stone. It took more than a moment for him, more than a lifetime perhaps, but the man could ultimately bend the world into the shape he envisioned. It was not now or never, but just a matter of time.

When Do We Leave El Salvador?

When do we leave El Salvador?

Do we wait for a certain day

When the sun slides over the shivering leaves
And drips from their green edges like golden teardrops
And the sky itself is so blue as to seem transparent
And the wind is like a constant caress
From the most gentle of lovers.

Or do we leave on a day of storms
When there are gunshots in the distance
When there are large trucks full of black clad killers
Roaming through the shadows
With large heavy machine guns over their shoulders
Looking for their next victim,
Looking for a place to unload their wrath.

Do we leave when the walls have turned to dirt
And the dirt has turned to mud
And the mud has turned to sickness
And we can’t live here anymore
For we are just one step away from dying
And to be a step away
Is worse even than death itself
For it is shivers and pale faces and open eyes
And nights of waking dreams
And days of bright red nightmares.

Or do we wait until we are old
So old that the days themselves have grown shorter
And death is no longer so terrifying
For it has danced close to us so often
That it has become a well known friend,
And our body is slowly turning to dust
Right under our very eyes
And we can do nothing but allow it to enter
And take us where it wants to go,
And look into the distance and wonder
If something else comes later
Something
Anything
Anything at all.

Can we ever truly leave El Salvador?
Or do we carry it with us,
Like a stone that we swallowed when we were little
And it refuses to dislodge itself from our loins,
Is it now a part of us
As much as our eyes, our brain, our heart,
Is it so much an element of our nature
That no matter where we go,
There will come a morning of light breeze
And bright clear sunlight
When we will hear the bells of an ice cream cart outside the door
And we will hear the sound of kids laughing in the distance
The sound of feet hitting a plastic ball
The sound of cars turning slowly at the corner
And it will all be so clear as to be blinding
And the clarity will rush up to our chest
And hurt us in a way so strange,
So strange we won’t understand,
So strange we won’t even try to explain,
And the windows will be open
And the doors will be open
And our eyes will be open,
And then we will know
That we never truly arrived,
And we can never truly leave.

Walking In The Woods

I clear my mind before entering. My chest fills to the breaking point with air, my belly extends. In and out. In and out. The car is the known space, and I sit still for a little while, looking into the world of green. Time to move.

My right foot hits the earth, then the heel of the left. On and on I move, my feet in rhythm, my arms following. My breath moving. I reach up to push some hair out of my eyes with my right hand, I look over to my right. There are some red silk flowers on the lawn. Close by are other faded objects of sadness, left for one who might never see. Everything is cultivated and sculpted, “control” is the word that comes to mind. Beyond the small fence is all chaotic earth and woods. Completely wild, exploding in sex and death and birth and decomposition.
My feet take me through the boundary between the known and the wild. I enter another kingdom and I am home. Only it is different. And I am different. And I have never left. And I have changed, and it has changed and we are both the same.
Here, the rational is buried. Here, the birds know how to build nests and crickets don’t have to be taught what to eat. The mind is not needed. Language does not bend the branches to its will, it all moves, no good or evil, no sentimentality. Here, we move as we must and here, I shed my skin.

It has all changed so dramatically. The river is smaller, the weeds that line the muddy bank are taller. I walk through the same woods, yet different woods, new trees, new birds, new water and leaves. It is the same place, on the same patch of earth, but it is all new, just as every moment we burst and are born again. There are new creatures that scamper and fly and burrow. A new body that has brought me here and takes me through the thicket of green and brown.

I want to follow the creek.

I hear birds up in the leaves like hidden wind chimes. Calming the air are crickets or cicadas. Their intuitive noise slows me down even more. My right foot takes a step forward, my left foot rises and hits the earth. My right hand scratches my thigh.

I walk a little deeper. Just the woods in all directions. Life without language, life without a structure of concrete morals or rationality. In these wooden arms, in this body of green and brown and sex and life and death, everything is new and everything is old. Everything is here, present and eternal. Here, beyond the edge.

Dove

She broke away from the metallic roar, from the river made of asphalt and shiny bits of red and blue and gray, the river that breathed exhaust and waves of heat and only really sounded like a river if you closed your eyes and imagined a tranquil valley full of trees and moving water. This was a river for the imagination, but she traveled through its imaginary body often, merging and branching as was necessary. And on this warm Saturday, after a nearly full day of sun and monetary transactions, she broke away from the near constant flow and began the easy-angled descent into the strictly regimented grids of the city.
The hill down was a gentle slope and she braked anticipating the light that lay 500 feet away. Something flashed white and she saw a snow-white dove coming towards her windshield. It came towards her, making no move to ascend into safety above her. At the last second, when she thought for sure there would be a bright red collision, it turned like a stealth jet fighter and tipped its wings to avoid death. Up and over her car, then it came back towards her, flying just a couple of feet from her open window, as though they were in a race to the finish. And then again, the creature’s wings turned sharply and it rose into the air.
As the car slowed to a stop, she turned her body to watch the flurry of white move through this metal offshoot. This bird was not injured, unable to escape in a moment of shock, this dove played in traffic, lunging at the cars that came from the metal-filled freeway, flying beside them as though they were its equals, mocking their strength that wasn’t earned, but bought.
The light was red and she watched this act with a smile. This was avian revolution. All death is certain and what better death than warping the images of possibility. This could be its last statement, and what a beautiful white shining statement it was. It was chaotic, but not completely out of control. The symbol of peace, the creature of gentle values defied its pure white feathers and earthly symbol and flapped as though there was nothing to fear. No moving cars, no moving tires, no clear windshields that awaited an impact. This road was for play, and perhaps the end would be covered in sticky red and broken glass, but all death is certain.
She watched, smiling with awe. She turned with a smile to the 36 year old Latin man in the blue truck next to her at the light, he looked towards her and she saw a shadow of unease and questioning run briefly across his face. The strangeness of a smiling stranger. She held her smile and turned away, searching for the dove.

The Species

The species… as old and deep and dark and tangled as the craters and canyons of the cold blue oceans. Where one fissure connects to another via some long tunnel beneath the sea bed is a secret kept by the basic shape of things. The visible form hides the more important skeletal and neurological structure, acts as a distraction diverting attention from it’s more elemental self. Although their hair might shine like moonlight on the waters surface and their eyes glisten round and black, blinking with innocent curiosity, the species is not only as it appears. It is not only the pale mammalian curve of breasts, or the lips that can pout, pucker, or smile. Nor is it even the graceful blue green tail fin, not delicately scaled like the legends propagated by silly sailors would suggest, but smooth and slick like a porpoises. They swim with the swordfish and lurk about in kelp forests like the shark and the eel, but they also encircle their lovers with arms like wanton human women and wrap their long fingers around the throats of their victims like any strangler that ever stalked whores in dark alleys upon the continents of that exotic planet upon which they dwell.
The species. That is how they know themselves, all that they know of themselves, that they are the children of some proud horrific thing from the depths beyond time, their father, their grandfather, the white beast. Beneath the oceans gleaming surface, they live as they have always lived, from one moment till the next, feasting when there is suitable prey, loving their brothers, the whales, while they can, luring men overboard to satisfy their overwhelming curiosity. They have a talent for death, for bringing it swiftly and remorselessly and for avoiding it effortlessly.
The species will never die. There are thirty four, thirty four that will never be more. Their names; Euphore, Cele, Kelke, Rapha, Dimuine Foura, Clyte, Shona, Cres, Zyl, Xie, Aphini, Bluet, Welse, Rivune, Tores, Urite, Dra, Gern, Yelb, Sta, Nin, Lyl, Mach, Fie, Owre, Ade, Fleezle, Sheut, Brin, Pit, Clo, Vrifninya. They will never bear children though they might try, and in return they will be among the last things left roaming the earth, never wondering if there will be a tomorrow, never regretting a yesterday. The daughters of Ueyegat.
The Species. Their history is written by their cousins, land dwellers with a history and concerns all of their own, but with a language with which to mention the thirty four. They too are not what they appear to be, living among men and dying among men and sometimes even mingling with men. Unlike the species, they can watch the waves crash upon the shore and see the deep as a foreign and fierce thing, a devourer which does not have them yet in its maw, but will some day, in the far off murky future. If only the slow death weren’t eating away at their spirits, the civilizing factor, maybe then they would be as remorseless as the thirty four. Instead, as the albatross glides over the sea and land, they glide through life, and when they are weary, they will be forced to land beyond the face of the shape of the world.
I am Kulthru Rae. So I will live, and I will die. But the species will live on and on. The world will turn and perhaps someday, if I cannot live without time and words, I will at last be their master, and write the poems that will tell of these things and others. But first I will have to master the slow death in me. And in the meantime, they are there, thrashing about in the icy, dark, and turbulent waters, as happy to be there as a babe at its mother’s tit.