Category: Writing

simple lip service

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.

just fixing to have a real good time

“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.”

curves of

“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.”

sometimes one is the other

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.

Couldn’t make this one up.

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.

POW’s of an invisible contagion

The restaurant had been taken hostage by some invisible organism/s which may or may not be present.

The siege occurred five days ago.

Ever since the onset of the hypothetical, immediate threat of possible hostile occupation, the front of house staff has stared out the restaurant’s windows with tea saucer eyes like anxious animals in ASPCA advertisements.

Please, sir, won’t you come inside and have another?

Prisoners of a war that may or may not need fighting.

In the back of house there is a shell called the ‘skeleton crew’.

The chef runs the silverware through the industrial dishwasher twice when we run out of clean spoons with which to reset tables.

The absence of the spoon in her settings, distresses.

So, a hostess gets uppity when she runs out of spoons.

She gets especially uppity when it happens on slow days.

But, today it does not matter.

So, she cares not, just notes it needs doing and notes whose rotation it is to eventually do it.

Today there is no dishwasher. They called him off.

We take turns with the task.

She simply sets tables without spoons;

knowing full well, no diner will be seated at the incompletely set table for quite some time.

No patron will arrive to suffer this mild inconvenience.

Aesthetics suffer almost imperceptibly while the bottom line suffers devastating loss.

But, she goes through the motions automatically.

There is no need to increase hygiene standards.

That shit is always first and formost.

Global freakout or otherwise.

“Funny how the WHO’s commercial guidelines for handling this threat are exactly the same protocols we already follow,” she mumbles to the owner.

“Who do you think is actually the problem?” he asks, through a thick Vietnamese accent.

“Let’s all just wash our hands, not touch our eyes often, and get on with the business of being alive,” she thinks.

She brings him oatmeal with his favorite fixings, without being asked.

Just like everyday, she makes sure a table is spotlessly clean, disinfected with properly diluted commerical cleaning agents.

“What is the real price of convenience and luxury?” she wonders.

The hourly wage of one dishwasher’s full shift.

The daily hourly wage of a line cook and sous chef.

Two hours of a hostess’ time.

One hour of the second in server’s time.

The present guests receive the best service possible.

~

Everyone plays dead for fear of becoming dead if they don’t; but,

a few diehards refuse to sacrifice quality of life for speculative quantity.

And, she bebops, dreamily hosting the modest volume of today’s lunch service.

She notes a newly added sign over the hand washing sink at the server station.

It says: <insert restaurant name here> EMPLOYEES. PLEASE WASH YOUR HANDS. IT IS GOOD FOR YOU <insert punctuated, smiley face here>

“No shit.”

She knows the sign is not for the benefit of the restaurant’s staff.

Your server is far more worried about catching something from you.

They wash their hands to keep you off them, not to protect you from them.

~

Her energy always turns over when the clock reads 3:33.

She doubts her shift will last this long.

Her focus refreshes at each daily 11:11.

This occurs approximately eleven minutes after her clock in today.

She renews herself everytime she recalls her own selfhood.

A startling state.

~

A man at the bar counter suddenly catches her eye.

Her mind wanders and the tray perched above her left hand, rocks like a drunkard trying to walk.

A drinking glass full of used water falls and shatters.

Bomb of contagion spraying soaking shrapnel.

It soaks her entire left side.

It sounded crisp. Quite pleasing.

It is her first time dropping a glass in the restaurant; and, she fears she might quite like breaking another.

Fayish brow

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.

a mile in the woods

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?

dummies mis-take/fools smirk

My double assemblage point is sensitive enough to recognize when you run at a different wattage than me. And, tonight, you receive no friendly, instructive spacing or paragraph breaks because I am hotly impatient with the amount of patience you require from me. And, dummies will mistake the body of this page as scrawlings of anger. But, fools will smirk in empathy. Yelling into the Void at your shadow is not always prætty. Sometimes, it gets dark.

The saturation point.

Night witch

There is the window.

There is the empty tub.

Here is the towel rack; and,

on that hook is a robe hung.

Hanged.

The robbery of the spirit was abetted by the victim.

No one to blame, so

don’t take it personally.

Take a person-ally, one who will sing the body electric; and,

hold them dear even when they diss-appear

like leaves of grass

under winter’s precipitation.

Like snow, so heavy, ceaselessly falls,

a voice sings, “I will bury you all.”

Wolf People.

original spelling contains

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?”

Æ don’t make myself

“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.

water fell

The light stayed dusky; water gently splattered from the sky.

Tears of tedium; the guts of Humpty Dumpty, raining from the wall of the Earth’s atmospheric dome.

After she caught him sleeping, Alice felt his big fall shake the forest.

Portentous of the lion and the unicorn.

She grabs a pewter ewer filled with water.

ChAlice of ecstasy with which she seeds grails, making them holy.

She wonders if someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah.

The black kitten or perhaps the white one, or maybe that other sweet thing.

~

Alice shakes her head for no reason except to shake out the sing~song thought “someone’s in the kitchen, I know.”

The diners share a conversation.

“What are your thoughts on this?” he asks, turning to her.

She pours water into his glass, saying, “I think I do not have an opinion regarding the matter.”

“I adore fresh slates,” he says, pupils dilating in anticipation of diatribing.

“Sshhh. I adore not having to opine on inanities,” she replies.

“Strumming on the old banjo,” she thinks.

~

“What do you call yourself?” he asks.

“Your snake-charmer, making venom drip,” she says.

“Fee, fie, fiddly, ay oh,” she thinks.

“Speaking of which, I had to disassemble two outlets to deal with a leak,” he responds to her omitted question.

“When you discovered the outlet wiring goes through the sink of your stomach?”

“Huh.”

“Hum. Automatic articultion of your abstract mindscape needs practice. ”

~

Vouchsafed.

~

“The sky is so blue.”

“Azure?”

“I don’t know.”

“We shall look up the Word.

demolition and assemblage

He pulled back his jacket to reveal a pocket watch on a chain.

She immediately begins crying.

Why? She does not exactly know.

“What just happened?” he asks.

“You invoked the memory of an old magician whom I know.”

“Vanishing act? All smoke and mirrors?”

“No, a wicked little string trick and he could cut the girl in half.”

“Did he always put her back together?”

intermittent fasting

“You don’t have to know it all around me,” she said, stroking his head.

“Are you saying I’m a know-it-all?!”

“No; but, you just called yourself that.”

~

It became dark, then light, then cloudy, before darkening again. And the spool of film plays in rolling waves of punctuated equilibrium to the RPM of the spinning vinyl disk. Obelisk well balanced and too big.

Margot likes working in the theater, on her feet. Laughter for poor Albinus.

Are you erudite, obscure, or just confounding?

Can’t you tell?

No, and it seeps into my dreams, pet.

I find your pettiness precious.

You could eat.

So could you.

Dueling stomach growls proving there is something to be said for intermittent fasting.

Empty and floating.

The revealed interior, behind my internal veil, scrutinized.

A Second Æthyr.

~

“Tell me what you see,” he suggests.

“I see Sky above the white-capped Sound.”

“How does it appear?”

“Like some animal beat the shit out of it. Bruises of cold, blue, steel gun silver clouds. Lower scaping of a hazy, purple mist with undertones of blue and grey interplaying with the rays of occasional sun bursts.”

~

Another virus breaking through the ice queen’s firewall.

~

“Tell me what you hear.”

“Creaks of cracking support beams, slowly unseaming, internally, above me.”

~

Oh him? He’s an emotional support beast. Don’t pet; he will eat your fingers. Fair warning.

Lent of a Leap Year.

Self-referential

Different parts of the same translation; the map is not the region.

(Turns out he had picked up about thirty pages before where she had left off.

Tolle lege : her favorite moment in the pagænt of St. Augustine’s confessions.)

<Fat Tuesday gluttony,

Ash Wednesday and crosses signed upon foreheads.

The Lent of a Leap Year.>

~

“What are you giving up?” the eighteen year old busser asks the thirty year old server.

“All hope,” he jokes.

Spring time questioning early autumn, at the winter’s end of a snowbird town.

~

The ache first settled in her stomach as discomfort.

(Then it arose like a tingling in the base of her spine.)

<Then her left shoulder began to ache and howl.>

~

The set of a matrix iterating itself endlessly.

(Completely incomplete.)

<Inexorable.>

(Consistently inconsistent.)

<The diversity of psychic unity.>

~

Charles Ludwig Dodgson once told me
“Kurt Gödel spoke the purest sentence and all he said was ‘G’.”

~

F systems

(Unprovability.)

<the set of Sette, containing all sets>

Referential self

Æ and Parçigal took today off

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.

A pear of dreams

Dream one

I am in a grand space. Odd architecture. Every room is a scarlett bloom or plum and empurpled. Arizonian dream scape again.

“I am near the mesa,” I think.

I study my surroundings.

Bemused, I discover myself in a very decorous beauty spa. The kind of place wherein people stay two or three nights.

No mere day spa.

“What the howl am I doing here? I can’t afford this,” I think.

Suddenly, it hits me. I’m dreaming. That’s why I’m here.

I get a facial. I get acupuncture for the first time.

“Oh, I like,” I think, strangely aroused.

I re-emerge into the hallway of the spa.

There are many people wandering around in robes.

Suddenly, I start howling in full dreaming lucidity.

Cracking up. Laughing and laughing at the luxury my dreaming mind has conjured for me.

Then, everyone I am passing in the hallway starts laughing hysterically.

I realize, they are not creations of my dreaming mind. They are actual other embodied humans who are also lucid dreaming in this same astral plane.

Some of them laughing at watching me come to understand that we are all sharing a lucid dream.

Some of them laughing because my laughing has made them become lucid and understand that they, too, are lucid dreaming.

I laugh so hard I wake myself up.

~

Dream two

I am at a strange encampment. Deep in the woods.

There is an almost-valley; it is better described as a geological indentation, akin to a bowl.

It has been made into a cathedral with no ceiling but sky, which

is portentously grey and fretted with storm clouds.

There is an altar strewn of blackened, twisted tree branches.

People are present, but, not kneeling in prostration before their god/dess.

They frolic, idiosyncratic, rapt ecstatically.

A calliope’s pipes pumping out folksy sound in the background.

I suddenly can jump eerily high.

Like gravity changed.

Nearly and for all practical purposes, I flew.

And, I knew my task was to observe and report with no judgement.

slowly through steely

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 bench, aside.

The Mæstro sat on the bench, aside the novice.

“We shall make a song. I will play middle C. Quarter notes. Choose any key and add a note.”

The neophyte pawed at G in the next octave up.

“Now add another.”

The beginner stutters in anticipation of selecting the proper note.

“Savor mystery momentarily, but do not consider. Do.”

A hammer strikes a string. An E resonates.

Now, scaling C in three octaves, the Mæstro’s eyes close.