The Gray. Hollows Eve. The Lake

It's a gray day, the kitchen-window light filters in anonymously, unwelcome, and I burrow deeper into the blankets afraid, my phone turned off, my costume hanging a hook on the door where it has stayed since the night before, where it glowed in the faint aquarium-glimmer of the television set left on.  Am I dreaming?

 

"I have been to a place beyond words and it looks like this," he said, a modern-day Prometheus in a trucker cap, having been farther down the highway than man is deigned to go.  He held up his hand.  Only forefinger and thumb.  The bar was called the Legends of Light, it smelled like sour mops.  He sat alone, paying for each drink as it came, and paying for hers.

She saw the emptiness in his eyes.  The cigarettes in his pocket.  She said we should sit next to him.  "It'll be fun," she said, "who ever heard of a meeting with a stranger gone awry on Halloween?"

I was dressed as Icarus, my wings tarnished, waxy and frail, ash on my forehead and skeptical.  I followed her perfume around all night.  She reeked of sin and promises,  a slutty demon.

"Hey Joe, buy me a drink?"  His eyes glazed over her chest and the long legs screaming out from under her short skirt.  He laid the cash out meticulously.  I quietly asked for a tumbler, and made sure my mask was straight in the backbar mirror.  Didn't want to be recognized.

"What do you do?" she asked, all smiles a hand on his striped shirt sleeve.

"Drive truck.  You folks?"

"He's a writer and I'm student.  But I'm going to be teacher."  She put the other arm around my neck in a damp embrace.  Perfume was driving my hormones up the wall.  I shrugged her off and finished my drink in a fast swig.

"I don't like schoolteachers," he told us, "Never did get much for good grades.  Teachers got their prejudices like everbody else has, and they never sized me up to be much of anything."

She frowned at this, and downed the drink.  He paid for another two.  Laid down the cash the same as before.  "Like writers ok though.  Know a good story when I hear one."

"Well, I'm not really much of a writer," I confessed, waiting for the debit receipt to sign, "just words mostly."

"Words.  A writer's religion.  A feast for the fantasies of the soul."  That's when he pulled his left hand out of his coat pocket.  "I have been to a place beyond words…" he said, and then he asked us to follow him around back.

 

There is a lake, deep in the chill landscape of my past, where I like to go when I am scared.  The corn is all stubble in the fields and the leaves are all gone.  The clouds over the windshield shout behind their muffled glass "Go away," and we do.  Sitting indoors we wrap ourselves in blankets by the fire, and eat the food we have stored for this winter and we put off life for a while and we tell stories.

 

Looking out over the lake, there is a house.  I told you about it once.  I go there when the sun sets early, when darkness takes over the land.  Seeds disappear into their frosty dreams underground, waiting for their debut in the inferno of spring many months away.  The nights are quiet and long, and even the sun is afraid to interrupt its mysterious domain, keeping out til late morning, when it rises up against the high naked limbs of trees, gangly shadows across a deathly bright sky.

 

            "Here come on, I wanna show you something," and he led us around the bar and to the back where a long brick hallway was poorly lit with little frosty patches of yellow light shone on the black and white portraits on the wall.  Stoic men and ripple-muscled horses.  It was cold but I was sweating.  We stood against a shut door a moment and he pressed his ear to it.  Sounds of scraping metal.  Pushed it open and held it inwards for her but not for me, we entered a large chamber with a concrete floor filled with swaying chains that hung from the walls and ceiling.

     "A holy place," he whispered "is a refuge.  Where the mind is clear we feel closer to God, or truth, or whatever it is that we happen to worship."

     "What do you worship?" She asked.  He grinned like it hurt him and pushed aside a dangling chain, leading us to a dark figure we had not seen draped in the shadows and curtains at the far wall.

     "Pain—  It's the only thing I can believe in."  Her grip on my arm tightened.  I could no longer smell the perfume back here.  A man emerged from the shadows.

"Pleasure, pleasure," he breathed wetly, "Smoking? Smoke?  Anyone have—"  I held out my pack of  Parliaments but the trucker had beat me to it.  A panel on the wall sparked with white light and smoke.  "CP! Cigarette?"  Another man emerged from the curtain.  Younger and frighteningly skinny, almost emaciated.

"Hiya! You folks new here?"  She said yes and leaned in to get a light and show off her cleavage.  "I'm CP and this is my cousin Sy." Sy licked his mouth, he didn't seem to have any lips, and stared at her chest.  His eyes were wide in their cavernous sockets.  They both had long fingernails and patched wiry hair.

"What is this place?"  Young Sy gave a nervous chuckle, and CP quickly scuttled off into the folds of the curtain again.

"The many layers of the city, like the many layers of the air we breathe, are filled with parallel worlds.  Just beneath the surface lies a mystery, lays magic, the hands of fate, the uncanny trickle of desire, the art of lost sounds…"

The blinking and beeping of an electronic switchboard interrupted the Trucker's words.  "I call it Forgotten Gods," said Sy, scooting up close to her as a motor started to rumble and the chains began to whirl in a large spherical shape around the room.  "It's an art project!" he yelled.

The chains draped from the wall began to spiral up and out, taut as if drawn by magnets, and spinning rapidly like fan blades.  Two chains touched and snapped in a loud ZAP of electricity that made us all jump.  She screamed, and I could smell her perfume again.  Sy threw his cigarette into the melee and watched it spark against a link of spinning chain.  Laughing.  The motors got louder and the spinning grew faster.

The hair on my arm rose.  The static on my skin made it feel as if my clothes were floating across the surface of me. She dug her fingers into my arm, I started to bleed.

     "Are we safe?" I asked.  But no one heard me, they were all looking at her as she started yelling and flailing her arms.  She threw her purse onto the floor like it was possessed.  Her cellphone and keys flew out and skidded across the concrete into the middle of the room where a length of chain whacked the phone and it exploded in a shower of plastic parts.

     They turned off the motors and the chains fell dead.  I looked and she was crying.  There was a burn in her side where her purse had been, a cell-phone shaped blackness in the side of her costume.  The boys in the back came out and made a half-hearted apology.  Sy picked up her keys for her.  We walked quietly out and down the hallway, through the bar and out into the cold night air.

 

The sight of stars beyond stars will always resonate with me.  The equity of longing and emptiness, where from a distance everything makes sense.  Unrequited, unrepentant, "the lovers I have left behind, the Minotaurs in the murky maze, and I, Icarus without barriers, seeing no difference from on high between the lover and the fighter, those who miss me and those who hate me."

 

"Shut up," she said then, and I remembered all the barriers of language.  The uncertainty of words.  How the only sun we can fly too close to is the one in our minds.  Fear will keep us all in place long after our conflicts, our planet, our physical barriers are overcome.  As long as we are uncertain with ourselves…

I looked in as we left and the trucker was back in his seat at the bar, stuffing a wad of cash carefully back into his pocket, having laid one prudently on the bar.  Full of stories to tell, no doubt.  Stories I don't want to hear.  The night outside still abuzz with revelers in all their merry disguises.  No one in control, no one leading the horde, men walk alone and women walk in pairs and everyone walks without knowing what is inside anyone's mask.  What is inside the Legend of the Light.

 

I offered to take her home, propelled again by the old raging draw of her perfume, but she refused.

     "That was fun," she said looking me straight in the eye, "But I'm fine.  Have a good night." She ran off down the hill, disappearing into the night.  I held my wounded arm as a gaggle of vampires strode past.  Ghosts raced by.  Time marched on. 

 

Love is not enough, especially not when compared with death.

 

Cepheus, in all his mercurial innocence, married a beautiful woman, too.  It killed him.

 

As I told you, there is a house by a lake that I like to go when I dream.  When our fathers are gone and we become the elder stars in the twilight of the young one's eyes, and the leaves all blow away down the lane and the lake freezes over I watch and listen to the crackling of the ice like the brittle snaps of aging bones.  At night the stars come out and haunt us, begging us to crawl across the wastes of cold and lifeless space.  "Please," they say, in a dialogue expressed without words or language save that of quiet terrifying motivation "give chase and cross," they say, "please come."

 

Scared voices coming from God knows where.  In my mind or somewhere outside.  Sirends in the lonely distance.  I walked around the block for a strained hour or so before deciding to go back in.  Ask just one question of the trucker.  But the bar was gone.  Not closed, vanished. I couldn't find it anywhere.   Retraced my steps, the streets slowly deserted, only lone recylcling bins standing sentry and the late, late, oh so very late hours rolling by like stars in the sky.  I went home. 

 

Quiet in defeat, I hung my wings on the door and turned on the TV for the little comfort of static.

 

Soon it will be morning.  Hollow dreams will give way to another gray and disappointing day to sleep through.  Light peering moodily through the windowpanes while I stay in bed.  Afraid to live.  Content to dream.  Alone, and empty, and afraid.

C + Wonders Revision

Neither Christ, nor Buddha, nor Socrates wrote a book
-W.B. Yeats

All the children sing! Perhaps we are in love, this pizza and I.
Perhaps these dirty fingernails, that pinched ass, this closed door, a dead winter sky, perhaps these are all the beautiful things we have.

Perhaps the man in the mask has lost his mind and lost his trajectory and is spiraling further and further down this frustrating loop into a winding river that leads to the limits of psychological insight and self-truth. Some men have a battlefield. He has a bathroom mirror at 2 AM, taking off the mask, letting it writhe to the floor and feeling a nebulous nothing.

Expect something? Get nothing.
Expect pizza within the hour? Try 45 minutes! Yay!

The University Hall, like a shadow of men no longer standing in the light, haunts in its steadfastness and we meet in a small stone room ringing with silence. 15 pages, the man commands, and we stare solely at our feet and twiddle our pencils and bite our dirty fingernails and a large percentage of us start with the word "I", most of the rest start with "The" and I start with "Everlasting sun, continuously exploding, why nothing to give but light to my sorrow?"
Laura takes white pills and holds her breath under the sea of blankets. She drowns each night, writing poems inside her dream and swimming to emerge at the surface of wakefulness in time to write down their titles. That's all she can ever remember. Laura was happy.
Joseph has a Jesus tattoo on his left wrist. Ask him WWJD and he'll answer Hell to the fuck no before taking another bite of his cheeseburger. His life an epic poem of filling up on grease and sputtering fleshy deposits into the coed dorms. Occasionally Joseph writes, in massive thuds of paper that he cannot control. It’s all there, I just feel it and ingest it and spit it out. Unfair, oblivious. Pass the Monster wouldja David?

All the children! David is happy that he is sad. Jane loves to write because she cannot write to love.
Whitney is old and foreign and is home wherever she is. Bobby loves attention. All the children sing!

The ecstasy hides within the mundane.
Real feeling hides in death.

These people can be happy, eating pieces of the pie, rolling out term papers that unfold like the dawn and what am I? Masked and sitting here. Feeling like writing a testament to the plumate clouds, homage to future seasons, my ruffled hair, the way your hand brushed mine and I felt bombshells under my skin.

The wind is cold, that cigarette was dull, these pizzas are warm, those thoughts are refusably not-good-enough and perhaps this is love!
Above all, perhaps this is love.

Dreams Before Dreamers

In dreams we go back to a time before time. Before we saw faces and recognized the flaws in ourselves, before the lucubration of solid bodies. When spirits reigned in a sea of mystery alone, and they weren't confined to dreaming of that sea while coiled into the tragic forms we now pass on the highways slipping into infinity where it all will end.

Harold made a symbol for everything. His stack of papers threatened to crush him. His symbol for his work was "End it All" and within it were the fractions of other symbols like "Man floats into space" and "Dogtags= individuality".

HIs project was a semiotic history of the future, and each day he would brush away the sand and compile a new set of symbols for everything that defined us, and each day he journeyed further into the truth he found himself further from it.

The inherent paradox of progress.

When it rained he would stop and laugh until the rain stopped. Dry silence at the heart of the watery roar.
He would write poems when he tired of drawing new symbols. Poems that splatter-painted everything into very small boxes of information, because he was alone.

A publisher expressed interest and put out the first volume, taking it away from him. You can't have the thing you put your love into. Harold made a symbol for that too, and housed it in a large pictogram for "Fear". "Rain turns into Snow" was only partially visible within "Everything you can see is already lost" and "Factories shipping soldiers off to War" made up nearly a million pages representing "The Limitations of Love's Geometry"

At night he would dream as the rains come. "Rain on me." His heart would rush and never heal. He would laugh in his sleep and his laugh would bounce like an echo from the future, dreaming of a laugh before time.

In dreams we go back to a time before dreaming. Before ambition or the requisite need for more. Slipping into the firmament of happiness where there is food that has been eaten and sex that has been pounded. Leather hides beat against an earthen floor. When clouds were solid and content, not so much floating across the sky amorphus but stable like ripened fruit, filled and succulent like juicy stones declaring themselves in loud voices. Not empty with promises we have today.

Yan laid stones at sunup. One stone on top of the other as the sun pulsed down, slithering his slow creation up the hollow solar throat. In the morning his senses were dull and each stone was merely a stone. Bricks, dull in their stoic stance casting sharply hemmed angles against the brilliance of the light-blue canvas. By midday the rhythm of the masonry was infectious and his body acted of its own accord in time with the narrative of the song. One rough-hewn stone, one slathering of mortar, a wall emerging where once there was none, sturdy in its stance and marching indomitable until dusk, when the stones became his spirit. The spirit of his son. One grandfather stone. One enshrined soul after another. A wall of ancesters slipping slowly up into the concave kingdom of the hereafter.

His stones were part of a temple. He was one of many and they worked for the glory of something greater than themselves. Adding stones in a line, their otherwise unpunctuated lives strung out day-by-day like the side-by-side bricks they laid, pausing for darkness and traversing the gravel roads back to simple homes where their wives and children waited.

Each day was a new stone, slathered with wet earth and pressed to the rest. He recieved small payment for his efforts. He thought of little else. He thought very little at all. One stone, and then another. THe past piling up in an ordered row of labor, towering architecture of time that never moved while the sun spun round and round.

Yan kept his head down like all the rest. The sun was dishonored by the glaring of human eyes. But at night when the sun had gone and the stones were left for another day, there were times when he would cast his eyes up past the coil of rock and stone, and the stars would shine down on him like flashing grains of sand along a distant ocean shore. Never just one star, a universe of stars. Others looked too. Who had placed those stars there? One star after another. And were they, too, slowly erecting a pyramid into the space between, a bridge toward the infinite where one day all will meet?

He dreamed of man hoisting stones along a rigging. He dreamed of so many stones they could not be lifted or heft, but simply rolled into place, until not one was left over. Until the tower stretched higher than the eye could see and still there was more space to fill. He dreamed of removing the stones from the corners of the lower foundation and carting them off to the top, unbuilding the building until the structure was built on nothing but air, floating higher and constantly stretched further in an endless recycling space, but still there was no end in sight, the higher it went the thinner the stones, and when they were one on top of the other, every stone in what was once the world left far behind, man chipped each stone in two, then in three, until a chain of sand was all that he had made, and then he spread each grain of sand apart, farther and farther until it was reaching across the sky and saw that he had made the stars.

In the morning he awoke before the sun and followed the narrow road with all the rest. Grabbing a stone he placed it lovingly among the rest, a little bit higher, and pressed it down. Then reached for another.

In dreaming we cease to be the dreamers, since before the first dreamer there was a dream. Before the chicken there was an egg, laid by the chicken which was borne of an egg in a formula that spirals back on itself until it can never end, but the formula exists. So too with dreams. Immune to gravity and time, the dreamer follows them into the dark caverns of nothingness where all interceptions of reality break apart, and yet the dream overlaps with the dreamer and he wakes, knowing no such dreamed thing can exist, and yet it does.

Julie danced with numbers. She planted them in her mind and they germinated vast equations that could explain anything and everything. As the fruit is in the seed, so too with numbers, but Julie was the neccessary intermediary. The tree uponwhich they blossomed.

She imagined graphs with an x and y axis, and the x was all ordinary numbers in succession and the y was imaginary numbers. Any point on the graph, as with any graph, connected the two axis together, only half of that point or any point was imaginary. Except for two. One was zero, and the other she could never find. It was that quest which kept her going, among many others. The point that would define the infinite. The point where sleeping birds took flight in the air or lovers came so close together that they would never be apart.

There were whole days when she would see nothing but zeros, real and imagined, in everything she did. In the row of houses along the trainride to work, in the crests of mountains in the distance and the tiny bulbs that make up each stoplight at every intersection. Maybe all the zeros together made up one enormous formula which correlated to a single point in the divine equation. Maybe if you had enough zeros you could find the crucial secret.

Julie recapped her life as a function in manifold to a set of known digits, longing for their unknown counterparts. Other mathemeticians sold their numbers to big firms with big paychecks, settling for a constant existence void without deviation. Numerals affixed sensibly to dollar signs which bettered a few and faded just as quickly into shredders and ash, a scribbled set of gibberish figures piled on the blackboard and illegible to anyone, meaningless to all. Zeros. Julie was after them and above them. A point on a mean line that curved into her dreams at night where she was a little girl at the start and being chased by a monsterous circumference, threatening to swallow everything affixed with faulty precision to the interception of angle and line.

There was perfection in her methods. She looked at integars which were real, the square root of one, the lengths of her hair in the mirror, the geography of freckles in her dying eyes, and was divided by their unique correspondence to that which was unreal. The square root of negative one, hair that was always growing even after death, and her eyes were alive. If she couldn't get it right she would do it again. Each endeavor rooted in the last, long strings of digits stretching back to the second she was born and reaching out until the day she died. Or was she thinking before she was born? Would she solve it before she was dead. Who knew how long any of this had been going on? Who knew how long it would last?

Julie twirled the numbers around in her mind, neurons firing gracefully into nuerons as the sun burns up its precious fires of gas as we spin around and around at 93 million miles away, falling symettrically into oblivion, wiling away the days and years in orbit until the inevitable collision of night that awaits us all.

As a paranthesis of routine guarded her primary functions, she watched as economies rose and fell, the train tracks slipped into the horizon, her eyes weakened and hair grew light, and the possibilities of chaos delineated themselves into the cold compositional waves of history.

Her dreams were tangential. No longer was she a woman being chased or a little girl being told to stand in a line which was only half there. She was part of a much larger numeric array, not merely a number in an equation but a fraction of a number, a divisor, multiplied with many others to equal the whole. The idea of a solid state, the exactness of cracks within an imperfect painting called Beauty. At night she would dream, and her dream would be of day, dreaming of night dreaming, of everything before it was divided into parts and knowing that one day all will come together again and be one, and be zero, and be equal.

Words in a Box

"Attractive," he says, "I think you're really hot."
And that, my friends, is love this day in age.
Oh how I wish I could hold the banner high, wrap myself in school's fighting colors and scream for our team, but that's all the dust cloud of appearances.  Men on TV wear nice suits but they are not nice.  Teabags taste better when you add water, but they do not taste good alone.

"Why do you love me?"

"Tell me why you love me!"

The thing that I like most about people is the thing they will never know about themselves.  Often its unknowable, and it goes without saying that the quest for knowing the unknowable has saved the majority of my friendships.  They are negative, I am positive they see it wrong, and we reach a kind of alkaline neutrality, send an email once a month, and then click on the banner ads for natural male enhancement.

The beer ads on TV football games are created just for me.  That starry plain of advertising shines brightest from my perch on the La-Z-Boy.  Demographic. A single vital or social statistic of a human population, as the number of births or deaths.  Growth occurs only when there are more births than deaths.  At funerals we all wear black, whereas newborns, full of promise, are afforded more color.  Its fun to be wrapped in something, like, conformity.  But pink or blue are fun too, the two choices when last I checked, dependent on gender.  We bring them presents, gifts of promise, economic stimulus in times of despair and woe,  pink for a girl, blue presents for a boy, though we love them just the same.

"Love me?  Love me?!"

The father has a box.  Whatever the sky is saying, the words inside his box do not change.  Everything you trust, which isn't real, does not change the fact that there are words inside a box.  And doubt is a kind of certainty in its way isn't it?  "She's sure that he couldn't love her because she sure hated herself."  But in that sublime moment when all our questions are answered like the sea draining into an eternal abyss, and the dust clouds culminating in an event that we've been striving toward for so long down this winding road of we would feel a terror we could hardly bear.  The shadows of the letters inside your name.  The empty-sea of space where beachside houses wait in line staring over the mudflats at dawn.  "Its empty, but its beautiful," the father writes, and we believe him.  Because we love him.

"Beauty?  Is that all I am to you?"

"Yes."  The college game is on.  Its a Saturday night, and I will put it on mute to look at you speak because you are pretty.  "Yes.  Tell me about your day.  Thank you.  Was that a touchdown?"  Later we'll teach our friends that I loved you in that moment, and I'll love not knowing whether or not you knew that I was thinking such shallow things, and trust you to never rest.  Wrapped in the unknown.  Because you'll never rest, until I prove it to you in a new way another day.

Gaia Ga Ga and the Kojos of Rhythm

Fly with me. Past the din of this city. The cold night air wrapped in errant streetlamp glows, vibrant with dissafectancies. Up, like a bird over the edge of all this land in the valley, all these boxes sheltering slumbering lives, curled in comfort and dreaming.

To the moon, her pallid crescent waning against the shadow of all the light that slips past Japan across this lolling mass of earth. See how tiny she is? See how large this continent, spinning? Americans, pressed to the breast of the Pacific crest, shrouded in the conundrums of evenshade and glowing at the hope of safety these tiny white dots assure us. The moon, so small, so slow to roll about in its eternal descent. Lovers colliding in the paradoxical gravitation of the sublime. And that light, that light that draws its lines across her brow and shows us so clearly the sure azures of the ocean on the other side of our blue ball earth, coming from the sun so far away. So massive, a burning wall of fire and heat and radiation. The warm happy center we are all trying to reach, trying to shy from.

From this distance it doesn't matter who loves you. It doesn't matter who fathers your children or who goes to work on time. It doesn't matter what your carbon footprint is. What car you drive. What you buy for breakfast. What you write in your memoirs or who gives a damn. We are all reduced to a speckle. Life. One word. Our planet has it and you are part of it and at a greater black distance we shall fly and see that it is nothing but a dot. Nothing but the memory of a dot.

"The Milky Way," our ancestors will explain to their children's children's children, casting a finger toward the heavens and lowering their voice in that manner which bespeaks great mysteries afoot. "There, those are stars, and in olden times it was thought that like a stream of milk cried over a black floor, they were the bringers of life, the sustanence of the mother Gods whose love for us is a question we may spend our lifetimes answering, as a child knowing it must suckle upon the juicy breast but why? Where does this glutonous goodness come from? That soothing voice, singing a song without words, that heartbeat pounding warmth and stability and comfort. We nuzzle to it. We drink and we are filled."

It makes you want to cry.

But instead you grow. We grow until we understand that on this squirming surface life clings like a fragile lichen. Leaves fall in a mountain stream and winds blow without understanding, and night and day overlap each other until it makes you want to vomit at the sadness of the speed of it all but you do not. Instead you fly.

Fly with me now.
We are more than our thoughts. More than our heads full of ideas and more than these frowning faces, bent into the light.
Tell me we are more.
And we will fly.