I Can See Her Now

I can see her now

Stretching for miles
while dancing
lonely in the moonlight,
White long dress
and black flowing hair
Trailing behind her
like the tail of a comet,
Feet gliding over the asphalt
Of a dark empty street,
Touched by rain and wind
Cradled in the warm embrace
The invisible arms
of the endless black night.

I can see her now
Out of the corner of my eye
Eating the remains of the dead
While others gorge on hope,
On dreams of what could be
Of what could someday happen.
I can see her
Laughing at their pain
At their painful smiles
And their cackling cries
Big belly bouncing up and down
Rolls of thick flesh
making waves of pasty skin
Waves that begin everywhere
And end nowhere.

I can see her now
Even if I turn away
Her smile is ever present,
Her eyes have the knowing gaze
Of the one that knows
How it all turns out
In the end.
I can see her now
But I wish I could forget her
And then be reminded
In a sudden flash of lightning
As the Real meets my Illusion
And all fantasies come to an end.

The New World Of Sticks

The sun shines down on the little garden, bathing it in a strong heat that would bring small buds to bloom. The narrow rectangular yard is enclosed by a tall wooden fence and stuffed with young gardenia trees and a hedge of rosemary and lavender. It is a garden for smelling above all else, the shrubbery was planted with the nose in mind and not the eyes. Jasmine covers the back fence, transforming the wooden planks of the border into a wall of green and white speckles.
Beneath the lavender blooms, nearly hidden from sight below the thicket of pale green and purple is a young girl. Her bare feet are caked in dust, creating the look of a pale brown shoe that is corrected only by looking at the small toes tipped in pink nail polish. She squats close to the ground and her long brown braided hair sweeps along the soil like the tender caress of a broom.
The girl does not notice her hair, tipped with the earth’s dust, nor the shoes of soil she wears, all her attention is on the ground before her. She has arranged a series of vertical sticks in a circle and some tender green leaves from the jasmine bush have been impaled on thin twigs, creating flags for her city beneath the lavender canopy.
She has been in the same spot for hours, missing the lunch of macaroni and cheese her mother prepared and also the visit from her friend Dave from next door. She didn’t hear them calling or feel the pangs of hunger. Nothing distracted her from creation. She created a world, and she could feel nothing but the rush of excitement as the small city of wood and leaves came together.
She sits still, adding the last touches of thin sticks and then places one solitary lavender stem in the center of the city-circle. The metal latch of the back gate slams closes and she looks up. Through the fragrant stems she sees her brother walking along the back side of the house, approaching the door that leads to his bedroom in the converted garage.
“Sean!!” she cries excitedly. She jumps up, her pigtails gathering a few yellowed leafs as she runs through a hedge of geraniums. “Sean, come look at what I made. It’s a whole city. A whole world!”
He looks at her, at the little girl whose feet are covered in dirt, this little girl that smells of salt and sun and flowers. She’s running towards him, about to grab onto him as she always has.
“Mattie! Stop! You’re all dirty and I’m on my way somewhere. Don’t get me dirty, I don’t have time to change.”
“Sean! Come look at what I made,” she squeals excitedly, not hearing him.
“Don’t get me dirty Mattie, I’ll come look, but don’t get me all dirty.”
“Okay” she says, slowing down and turning in the direction of the lavender bush, “It’s this way. It’s in here.”
Sean walks towards the bushes and comes to the edge where the purple stalks become a wall. Mattie steps into the narrow path she has created among the lavender. She turns to him, “you have to come in to see it.”
Sean rolls his eyes. “Mattie, I told you…I can’t go in there, I’m going to get all messed up, I’m on my way somewhere. I’m going to get covered in that stuff.”
“Please, it’s so cool. I don’t want anyone to see it but you, it’s a whole world. It’s such a special place.”
“Look, I can’t get in there now, but I’ll look at it later, okay?”
She looks at him, wearing his clean jeans and crisp black blazer. He looks nice, and she wonders who he is going to see.
“Okay, you look nice. I guess you shouldn’t get all dirty, it’s just a little world. Maybe you can see it tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I’ll check it out tomorrow. I gotta go grab my stuff and leave now, okay?”
She nods and then Sean turns and walks towards his bedroom door. She takes another five steps and then kneels, her hair sweeping the soil once more. She takes a deep breath, then starts to breathe into the circle of the new world. Her breath becomes a slight wind and all the flags of leaves begin to flutter.

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.

The Emperor And The Moon

Sara bent over the bucket of foaming suds and dipped the over sized sponge into the warm wetness. As she did so, the daisy dukes tightened and strained around her apple shaped ass. Her father, who had just come outside, blushed at the site of his 15 year old daughter’s figure poised so accidentally alluring. Immediately, a wall of words was raised between his forward consciousness, the “I” that he presented to the world, and the desire that had surged in the darkness of his heart and loins.
“Sara, telephone.” He called gruffly from behind his black beard and she started at the sound of his voice, then smiled and dropped the sponge into the bucket and hurried up the driveway. Her youthful breasts bobbed under the thin tank top as she lopped over to him, sandals click clacking on the concrete. He noticed that the white straps of her cotton bra were exposed over her bare shoulders.
“Who is it?” she asked breathily, chest heaving gently from the mild exertion.
“Somebody named AJ.” He told her, his voice still bear-like. Something in the tone made her feel guilty, although there was no spoken rule that had been broken. She reached for the phone, but he withheld it and said,
“You need to get inside and put something on. Those shorts are way too short.” The tone was accusing.
“All of my shorts are like these.” She protested in bewilderment.
“Well,” he said wagging his head, “You need to get in here and figure something out, because those are totally inappropriate.” And then he relinquished the phone and turning his back on her, he stomped back inside.
Sara clutched the phone in her hand and fought back hot tears. Guilt and rage and sorrow welled up in her chest and constricted her throat. Her mind howled with questions that danced around a central point: regret for having earned his disapproval. The intelligence in her struggled with the emotional storm of self loathing, reasoning that she had not done anything wrong, she was not trying to be “inappropriate”, which she knew really meant “sexual”, that others were defiling her with their inappropriate response to the sight of, what? Her bare legs? The parts of her body left exposed for comfort in the summer heat while she washed her father’s car?
The great excitement that had fluttered briefly through her belly upon hearing that a boy was calling for her had transformed entirely into a lead weight. This boy calling her also confirmed for her father her “inapropriatness”. Her overactive mind wrestling with her turbulent emotions churned out a suspicion that now that she had become the subject of this “inappropriate” attention. Her father no longer loved her and this in turn became a rage directed at herself, at her own body. At last she sniffed a constricted,
“Hello?” into the receiver.

Leaving

A small leather suitcase sits open-faced on a purple and white floral bedspread. Just a little over half full, there are neatly folded shorts and colorful T-shirts stacked in neat little squares. Along the edges are soft balls of black and white socks. A young girl stands close to the bedside. In her arms is a striped sun dress. She presses the garment to her body and folds it, placing it carefully into the suitcase that sits like an open mouth, waiting to take whatever she gives.
The room hold the remnants of a recent childhood. The walls are painted a pale shade of pink. A stack of teddy bears sit in the corner close to a near-empty closet and the dark light of the night is blocked by a red velvet window shade. It is a girl’s room, but the girl in front of the suitcase is no longer a girl.
She is slender and tall, just over 5’8. Long brown wavy hair cascades down her back, looking like the rushing movement of a waterfall. The girl wears a long flowing nightgown with a yellow floral print on a white background. It is an old fashioned nightgown, covering her arms and legs and reaching her collar, but even beneath the yards of flowing cotton fabric, the body of a young woman pushes through, pushing itself outward like a daisy meeting the sun. The fabric below the lacy neckline is bulging with pointed breasts, but she stands in her bare feet beside the bed, next to the collection of little dolls on her dresser, the new woman still swimming through the child-like waves of time.
An older man with a weathered face and graying hair stands in the doorway, it is a threshold he cannot cross. But he stands staring in, looking at the girl he can barely recognize. Who is this woman in a girl’s room? He clears his throat and finally gives voice to his thoughts.
“Gloria, I really don’t know what you’re doing. You just can’t take a bus and get dropped off in the middle of the city. They’ll eat you alive there out there! Come on! You know better than this. You don’t know anybody there, you don’t have any friends there, you don’t even have a place to stay for Christ’s sake! What do you think you’re doing? Are you trying to kill your old man?”
The young girl holds still, then tucks another folded sun dress into her suitcase. She turns to her father. The gray hair by his ears, the sagging skin below his chin, the lines around his eyes, he looks older than he had at dinner. Wherever there was skin, there were worry lines etched into his face, but they had been there for years, slowly getting more and more defined. She looked at him with a small smile, a little bit of sympathy welling in her heart, giving him the smile of the truly innocent.
“You don’t need to worry. I know what I’m doing-”
“How can you possibly know what you’re doing?” he interrupted. “You’ve never been there, you have no place to stay. This is a half-baked plan at best.”
“Look, I’m almost eighteen, I can take care of myself.” She heard a small snort come from him. “I do. I told you already, I’m going to get a hotel room until I can find a place.”
“Do you have any idea how expensive hotel rooms are in New York? Your birthday money is going to disappear like that!” he snapped his fingers and tried to look out the window, but it was covered in a red shade.
“Look, I got to do this. My teacher said I have talent. What better place to go? I’m going to get a job and an apartment and it’s all going to be fine.”
The old man shook his head. He was powerless, unable to stop his daughter with force or words. She just had no idea…no idea at all. He shook his head and looked at his shoes, unsure of what to do next. She turned away from him, picking up another cotton T-shirt and folding it, tucking it neatly into the suitcase, it alone was going with her, into the heart of the city.

Tunnel

Dirt cakes my fingernails. The tunnel is small, just slightly wider than the width of my body. I burrow my way through like a tiny animal searching in the darkness. I keep going, though I have no tools. No night vision, no sense of smell, there is nothing but the long tunnel ahead. I cannot go back. There is no place to turn around and the dirt walls hold me without remorse, without love or affection, they simply hold me, propelling me forward through necessity. Long ago I saw a flickering candle within the tunnel. It was that night when I stepped into the small hole full of orange poppies. I wondered how they blossomed in the hole without light, how they had managed to find a way to survive only in the moon glow. They smiled in the warmth of the flickering candle and showed themselves cautiously to the moon. I stepped into the hole with a sliver of light and with a tickling that covered the inside of my chest. I took off the clothes that had covered me like a second dirty skin. The mud soaked shirt and torn panties, I left them on the grass beside the hole and stepped into a place I had never been. I moved without thoughts, doing only what felt right. My feet took me in three circles to the right, I held up my hand towards the moon and opened the palm. Silvery light came through the soft flesh of my hand and tunneled through the length of my arm, crawling into my chest and them meandering into the circular cavern of my uterus. A sense of fullness brought me to my knees and I dug through the soil with my hands until I found the small opening. I moved as if I had done it so many times before, as though I fulfilled the destiny of the stars with each movement. I wiggled into the tunnel on my stomach, using the strength of my elbows and forearms to push me into total darkness. There was no “front,” just endless black that opened before me. Never a wall, never a fork, just endless open territory. I kept moving until sleep overpowered me. I lay like the dead, allowing the drifting forms of flames to enter my mind while my body lay motionless in the tunnel. I awoke frightened, unsure of what I had done, terrified to find myself surrounded on all sides by the thick walls of earth. Moving backwards is impossible, so I continue on. Moving towards the place I might have been but do not remember. I keep going. There was a flame, a moon and solid perception. I had once felt something, I had known something beyond words, now I travel through the swamp of fear and dirt, moving towards a place that has no name.

The Magician

The room was dim, lit only with one small white candle in the center. The candle flickered in a shallow glass dish above a square wooden table. The table was plain, embellished only with the swirling grains that came naturally to its form. Below the table was a striped woolen rug. There was not a single window. At one time, it had been a storage closet, but it had been converted into a living space not too long ago. Though the sky was hidden behind walls and a roof, he could tell it was evening. There was something tangible that had changed, something just a little softer that came through without the constant glare of the sun, like the walls themselves had relaxed with the setting sun.
A man stood upon the rug. He was five foot four and very slender. His feet were warm in their felt slippers, protected from the scratchy woolen rug below him and the cold linoleum floor which surrounded it like an ocean of cold. The man stared at the flickering candle on the table and spoke softly, just a few decibels above a whisper.
“Yeeessss!!! Oh god, Yessssss!”
The man looked up at the wall in front of him. The wall was bare, but behind it, on the other side, was a woman.
“OHHhhhhhh!!”
Her sounds were deep and guttural, mixed with a sigh of pleasure and a hint of pain.
He had never seen the neighbors, but he heard them often. Every few days he would be jolted into their universe with the first word that traveled beyond the wall, finding him amid prayers, or reading, or having a snack.
She always found him with her moans, and when he heard her screaming, it was like he was with them, in their bed, naked and grunting in unison. He imagined her spread-eagle on a bed where the sheets had been pulled back. Taut white skin glistened beneath the dim lamp and beads of sweat dropped from her lover, splashing over her firm nipples. He was with them, staring down like a bird, watching her wince in pleasured agony. He swooped down, nipping her skin with his beak, filling her open mouth with a drop of his spit.
He imagined the man, a huge beast that turned his woman into tiny pretzels, filling her with every bit of power that he had. And he was with them, when she moaned, he was with them, glistening and panting and moving in one more time.
He moved his toes in his felt slippers.
“Yes,” he said to himself, “come back to what you are doing.”
“AHHhhhh!” the woman screamed.
He wiggled his toes again in an effort to ground himself, to bring himself back into the walls he knew as home. There were other times he could be with them, now he had started his mantram and he needed to focus. The walls of his house, the candle before him, his feet above the woolen carpet.
“Be here.”
He felt a flush of movement within him as his mind raced back to the naked woman. His penis filled with blood. He took a deep breath, the slow inhalation lasted for thirty seconds. Then he held it, letting his chest grow tight with the pressure of so much air. When he couldn’t hold it anymore, he exhaled slowly, so slowly he felt like he had to take another breath very soon, and though his body cried out for air, he maintained his slow release.
The candle flickered violently in the wake of his exhalation and he looked into the flame. It moved always, allowing him, if he could manage to hold his attention, to never see the same thing twice. He stared and it was long and slender, nearly completely white, then it flickered and danced, moving to the right in a graceful sweep around the side of the wax. He inhaled slowly as he watched it, drawing up the energy which had filled his penis, letting it rise and swirl within his chest.
“Oh yeah, oh yeah, ohhhhhhhhhhhhh……”
“She’s climaxing,” he thought. He let himself feel her tension, letting the sound of her come into him while he held his eyes on the candle.
“Don’t fight it, take her in.” he told himself.
He listened to her, he could almost feel a rocking motion in the floor, he could hear her panting. He let the reverberations of her pleasure fill him with energy. He brought it up, out of the solid shape which had been his penis and into his spine, up into his chest, letting it move through his heart. The question was never where the energy would come from, but what you would do with it. And he felt a rush of gratefulness.