And, by the time she finds a page and a pen with which to record her whereabouts, she realizes, she has lost the thread.
Having pulled it taught over countless right angles and teasing curves to have only misplaced it.
It sprung back, in release, undoing god knows how many yards of work, in her negligence.
Disorienteering with Ariadne.
Tagged like feral game; categorized as uncategorized.
She catches a chill and undergoes a shaking spell.
Then, she is overcome by an awful heat and feels each pore producing perspiration.
But, she refuses to yield to the wind’s howling blasts. Wet hair whipping her cheeks as she walks under the gray sky.
“I am inexorable.”
And, she is glad to have a little, physical battle to fight. Anything to distract her from thinking of her subliminal war.
And, though it is Friday night and she strides down Main Street, she passes no one.
She recalls how it stayed cloudy all day. The light did not change.
She studies her left hand, as she thinks she could be dreaming. But, it appears innocuously mundane.
“Daydreamers are still sleepwalkers,” she realizes, giggling.
Then, she feels too silly for her age and too aged for her years.
Unnaturally timeless. And, still, the moment passes but her face remains essentially the same.
Rules are simple lip service if unenforcæble.
The fleshy mask worn was the kind of face you put on money.
And, blind hogs suffer no disadvantage in finding acorns.
Snouts sniffing and hairs on chinny, chin, chins bristling.
The caller received a courtesy disconnect.
Provided when the wait is too long and no-one is giving up.
A psst becomes easily confused for a hiss.
And, she finds it a bit too easy to be silent until she thinks of exactly what she would like to say.
In the face of all they have done.
“Let it languish,” she hears the silence say.
A breeze blows like a whisper, across her windowsill.
A universal exhalation of the collective unconscious.
Feeling it tickle her cheeks like jet-current streams, she inhales the salty, trade-winds through her mouth; and, holds it like combusted tobacco leaf smoke.
Letting it, leak out, eventually,
as unseæble vapor through her nostrils;
because, it feels more filthy than expelling it through the mouth.
“Slowly,” she thinks.
“I’m just fixing to have a real good time,” says the Southern (Parçi)gal.
She recalls more quotes to express the feeling than she can count.
But, she says none.
“Slowly”, she says from a mezzanine of her own.
“Let me show and you can tell. Tell me what you see when you look at me.”
“That way?” he confirms.
” Yeah, when you look at me that way.”
“And yet at that time, when the sweet savor of your ointment was so fragrant, I did not run after you,” sang the Song of Soloman;
to which Augustine of Hippo, immediately chimed in, “Therefore, I wept more bitterly as I listened to your hymns, having so long panted after you. And now at length I could breathe as much as the space allows in this our straw house.”
The earth reversed the direction of her rotation about the axis.
The world inverted.
A hunched over, limping man walks a sandy path, alone, with a heavy burden.
Something of a phenomenon, alive amongst a barren plane.
A tesseract is a cube eating itself endlessly.
The curves of her moebius strip.
Her figure eights, accompanied by her steed’s flying-lead changes, enables both to fly off on another tangent.
“This is the fruit of my confessions,” says Parçigal.
“So says you,” Æ reply.
“No. I quote.”
And, Bloddeuedd wandered through the first forest clearing, naked; and, she felt no unnatural sense of self-awareness regarding her state.
Her unnatural sensory organs felt that portentous sensation indicative of The Merlin’s presence behind her.
Back aways.
Back away.
Back always
She could turn around to try to catch a glimpse of him.
That never worked, experience suggests.
Instead, she looks down at the meadow under her bare toes.
It feels crisp. Quite pleasing.
Her hair, freshly cleaned, contributes its newly found aroma to that which is already aired by the local fauna.
She hears the beatings of a large bird’s wings over her head.
She recalls how a demon and a dæmon are not the same thing.
But, sometimes, one is the other; and, it can be quite pleasing.
And, her brow somehow furrows while her eyes go wild and big.
Deep focus on what seems alarmingly terrifying.
That sound. That noise.
Echoing into silence as quickly as it came.
Unnaturally brief racket of an ungodly symphony.
She shakes at the hearing.
Strange currency.
And, she realizes she has been holding her breath.
So, she exhales, inhales, waits a moment, and, makes a strange sign over her left shoulder, using the fingers of her hand.
She hears the click of a jaw going clenched.
Merlin saw.
She watched the Spanish moss tremble like brittle, witch hair, from the tree top canopy.
She swayed in the tire swing, to the tempo followed by the fauna of the faux ceiling.
Fayish brow radiant. Macabre grin smeared like lipstick across her wet lips.
The full moon loomed much larger than the sun. Hanged very near to the horizon.
And, the sun clearly existed to cast its light onto a face of the moon.
The moon existing to reflect the light.
Beguiled. Not mislead or manipulated.
So, breathe and find your space. Set it.
Sit on the floor and command a stunned crowd.
Crickets’ legs start singing in the midst of your wake.
Hyenas and spiders, hucksters and tricksters, wipe slates clean and call themselves rock stars.
An amplified battalion of holy Roman candles.
She swings on the rubber pendulum and watches them burn out, one by one by one.
And, they make her feel timeless as she watches their combustible timelines fly violently up, by, and, past hers.
And, the world around her transitions from dusk to dark.
And, this is howl she howls.
Shielded by the shadow of the tree from which she swings,
pitching her head back and pushing her face skyward,
she takes a deep breath in with her mouth.
And, she forces the air hard and fast from her lungs, back out of her humid mouth.
The anatomical line is straight.
She lets it whisper a vibration over her vocal chords; plucking a hushed, prolonged “ha” from the guttural.
And, she feels all her venom pouring out like ectoplasm at a traditional Victorian seance. It is ebony while everything else has gone red.
And, she swears she has forgotten howl to breathe; but, then she recalls she is unable to remember what made her believe she needs to breathe at all.
Secret doors and hidden entrances, collectively called
a hunch of archways.
The price of admission is the cost of focused attention,
afforded by the prise of having discerning eyes.
Period
.
<full>
Stop
.
Hunker down and cross the threshold.
The gatekeeper nodded you in and whispered, “god bless.”
.
<full>
Stop
.
Speaking softly to unseen entities,
she was pacing the bridge over the salmon ladder,
looking like little red riding hood in a scarlet dress and houndstooth coat.
A mile in the woods, gazing into the water below and becoming quite sure it was actually the sky and what she thought was the sky above was actually water.
.⁹
<full>
Stop
.
The sky below and the pond above.
The pond does not reflect the sky.
The sky above is a giant mirror reflecting the bits of sky below
which we call water.
.
<full>
Stop
.
She feels her pupils suddenly dialate revelation of the trance state, wherein visions and dreams do come.
You were right to call it tricky.
Time flips and drips like a resinous sap down the bark of a tree’s trunk.
Slow and viscous.
Unable to be wiped away, time’s flow simply smears the surfaces.
Strange distortions.
It was as if someone had spread butter on all the fine parts of the stars,” she sang in her mind, looking at the watery sky.
And, in that moment she recalled something she once knew to be true.
She wonders, does it remain true even when I forget it is true?
I need a soft in.
I can give it to you if you give me a hard one.
Abel and Baal are one in the same, bloodline seeded by Seth.
Descent of spirit into matter; the mystery of redemption.
The Queen of Magnets rides a bull. She remembered Chorozon moonlights under the alias Klingsor.
A ChAlice is the final formula of ecstasy, as the original spelling
contains the moon, the sun, and the great name of One.
The Gral
that redeemed him during the descent of his spirit into matter.
This was back before time grew out of joint:
Before he claimed to be the great, lost serpent;
before he told me, “I am Leviathan;”
a black rose formulated by the organic organization of one hundred and fifty six petals.
A song that the Sphinx hummed.
He came onto me singing, “the beat of my heart is the pendulum of love.”
I spoke unto him, “who is not both predator and protector, whilst also who is not preyed upon and in need of protection?”
“I wish I could make myself practice as much as you.”
“I don’t make myself. I enjoy it. It is pleasuræble. It can be escapism.”
“Well, some days the doing it feels like hell to me,” he says.
“No. Hell is timing traffic redlights in Siberia,” she says. Deadpan panto, yet utterly sincere.”
In surprise, he asks, “They have stop n’ goes there?”
“I dunno. Roundabouts, maybe?” she offers.
Shrugs.
Shrug.
~
“How long do you think this stunt of practicing the writing of dialogue will continue?”
“I’m a diabolical, so indefinitely. Plus, you talk all the time. If I’m gonna ‘practice,’ I have to get it done with the earworm called ‘you’ humming in my ear.”
“So, it’s all my fault?”
“Your fault that what you bemuse from me is not your favorite kind of my writing?”
Shrugs.
Shrug.
Bitch. He thinks, cursing himself for the thought.
Cunt. She thinks, pleased at superficially pissing him off.
~
“No. It’s all my fault that you are in this tedious to read, writing phase?”
“I adore not having to tell you, ‘tell me how you really feel’.”
“And, your self-referential tendencies are less charming than they appear to your mind’s eye.”
She swells and says, “It’s true.”
“I know,” he says.
” ‘I know’ is a bespoken phrase of pure bemusement.”
“It is true,” he says.
A peculiar pretense.
Silence accelerates cell senescence.
The Oracle at Delphi did not say as much.
But, your neckline and forehead say volumes.
Draw a bath and unfurrow yourself.
Read between lines and parted thighs.
Phædo was first called Swan Song.
Fecundity and cycles of the sickle.
Bathed in adrenal springs.
Limbic projection of intimacy.
A cat purrs before a blazing furnace.
Static shocks spasming muscles from time to time.
What would you want to know? Ask it.
Do you remember telling me of how you called forth the wrath of the Holy Roman Empire?
Of course.
Okay. I was wondering if I made that up.
No. Æ did. Is that your question?
No. My question remains “May I ask additional questions?”
If I say “no.”?
I ask myself “Can I ask additional questions?”
We both know you have a metric fuck-tonne of questions at any given nanosecond.
Thus, of course, I can; so, if I may not, I’ll simply compel your response with my high quality kind of curiosity.
~
Take the day. Grease your lips. Tend your nails.
Past time of prettification?
A’yup. A’purposed this time.
Our conversations must seem odd to the outsiders.
That is why they listen.
They often see themselves as you.
Æ know. Æ am your subliminal signaling, your beloved shadowy unconscious. I’m your other half.
My sneaky roommate in this skin.
And, a strange heaviness settles into her heart.
Pulling a momentary black hole that causes her stomach to ache.
Surprised at your own impatience?
Patiently, yes.
And, that restlessness is why we took today off.
The night moved slowly through steely rain tapping out a steady hum drum accompanied by a rattling of the pipes.
I lying amongst these ghosts of all the souls no longer embodied.
Bidden recumbent repose poised before a magma flow.
Then, the night wrapped around and slung rain against panes,
slapping blinds behind the other, open windows.
And the scent of you entered.
Full frontal and central.
The knob’s lock unsnaps. The deadbolt sounding in turn.
The day the dome of the sky fell, the sky had been pure and light blue.
Then it shattered, falling like bits of flaky white about a shaken snow globe.
Slowly sliding down, the cocoon broke as glass.
And though, the visual trauma, momentarily, made everyone’s impatience subside,
the Universe cared not, in spite of everyone, everywhere thinking It did.
“You seem eerily confident since the event,” he said, nine days after.
“The sky has fallen. My insecurity shattered. Confidence is all that remains,” she replies.
The feral dog needed to be muzzled before he learned to accept a nuzzle.
Unfixed.
His owner’s stride was clearly too wide for her legs.
But, she strode thusly, somehow appearing unhurried.
“How long should our walk run?” she asks him, cracking herself up.
The dog looks up, tongue hanging from mouth, happily.
“And, so it shall be, sweet pup,” she whispers.
An elderly couple stops her.
“Cute dog. May we pet him?”
“Of course. Scratch between his shoulders. Steer clear of his face and haunches,” she replies.
“Not used to strangers yet, huh?” says the old woman.
“You’ll be just fine,” her husband tells the anxious canine.
I run up and down Main Street. Trying to appear not too insane.
I rush the bank in calculated urgency.
“Do you have an emergency defibrillator machine?”
“A what?”
“An emergency defibrillator machine?!”
“A what?!”
“Shock paddles. For someone having a heart attack?”
“No.”
I keep looking shop to restuarant to bank.
The paramedics arrive.
I return to the bistro.
We throw tables and chairs to clear a path.
~
“We’ve been doing CPR for nine minutes continuously,” says one of the nurse practitioners to the paramedics.
I see the glow of his Bardo.
~
And, yes, by the time I returned, his face had grown green and empurpled with veins.
He looked dead.
The paramedics take out the prize of a pair of paddles.
Finally. The defibrillator has arrived.
Fashionably late to the luncheon party.
They shock his heart.
His exposed chest heaves. He starts breathing.
He exhales; and, from this rest his next interval proceeds.
The color returns to his cheeks, though he remains unconscious.
Lazarus. The corpse reanimated before our stunned, gaping eyes.
~
A woman presents a check presenter containing her tab and a credit card, under my downcast eyes.
“I need to pay for this,” she says.
I respond without thinking, muscle memory taking over in the face of surprise and confusion, “One moment.”
I look up and see the face of Lazarus’ wife looking into me with tea saucers for eyes.
“Oh. No ma’am. We will take care of this.”
“How kind,” she dreamily responds.
~
The paramedics remove him to the sojourn of their ambulance.
I lock the front door.
Everyone decompresses.
Talking to a pair of diners, the owner accidentally drops and breaks a piece of stemware.
The busser rushes over to make ammends.
I reconfigure the dining room slowly.
Until it appears as though nothing happened at all.
I walk to table 12 and tell the pair of practitioners, “Thank you.”
Turns out they are engaged to be married in September.
Trying to enjoy a simple Valentine’s lunch.
The ambulance encasing him remains parked outside for twenty minutes. This is a good thing, apparently.
~
The ambulance drives away.
The staff makes a collective exhalation.
Pneuma.
~
I unlock the front door.
I say, “Happy Valentine’s Day. Welcome. Party for two?”
Wearing eyes like tea saucers.
Appearing disembodied and ghoulish.
“A man fainted,” the diner at table 7 tells me.
I look around. The fellow I seated at table 1 is lying on the ground. Flat on his back.
It is Valentine’s Day before noon. There are balloons everywhere. A pink and red rose vased at every table.
We just finished breakfast service. They were one on the first lunch service tables.
I had just pulled the jar of freezer jam from their table.
~
I recognize that I am seeing a man in full cardiac arrest.
I fly to the back office and tell the owner.
She calls 911.
When I returned, over him,
a crowd of people stood and stared.
“If you aren’t a doctor or medical practitioner, sit down and give him space,” I yell.
“Nurse practitioners,” says a diner from table 12, motioning to herself and a companion.
He rips the man’s shirt open and begins CPR.
She asks me, “Do you have a <insert gibberish here> machine?”
“A what?”
“A <insert gibberish here> machine!?”
“A what?!”
“Shock paddles. Do you have an emergency defibrillator?!”
“No.”
“Go find one. Try the bank.”
~
And, yes. He already looked like a ghoul, when he entered.
Bloated and sweaty. Too pale.
Fat and very old.
Her companion withdraws from giving CPR and says, “it’s been one minute.”
His female companion resumes CPR immediately.
“Go!” he says to me.
The burn of the glare of a mal-humored bend of sunlight
coming through slats of blinds.
Water boiling in a pot before being poured over the Hummingbird blend.
Coffee soon with heavy creamer.
Thighs still sore from quaking.
Ass still sore from tightening in nervous tension.
Cheeks still sore from smiling so hard for so long.
(And, she looks for some sort of transition here,)
And, finding none,
She moves to the
Room under the moon.
The backside of the house was struck by sunlight following a cloud burst’s clearing.
Casted like spells looming, the pair of old trees guarding the home’s back door entryway, conjure a pair of ancient shadows, saying:
“We were planted nearly a hundred years ago. We saw it all. The doctor and his wife, first. They planted us as they built their shelter above the groping outpouring of our subterranean root structure,” says tree i.
“We saw him deliver the daughter right out of his own wife’s belly. Right next to the butler’s pantry. Midwife present to mediate the metaphysical nuances of old-timey, natural, live births,” says tree ii.
“He was the only doc in town, see,” ads tree i.
“And, we saw that daughter raise her children here, just as she had been raised above our roots,” says tree ii.
“And, though you bring us nothing but you, a lonely homesteader, we see how you learn to erect the ether of your own root’s structure,” says tree i.
“Yes, discovering the dimensions of your pyramide before constructing,” tree ii.
Build your radix for me, priapus.
Show us the wasted seed of what could have been the next generation.
WrittenCasey 