Last night, I looked it up.
Chameləons are cold-blooded.
Also, kind.
Colorful transformers.
Octipi kindred spirits.
I cherish.
Suiting the moment and not making every moment suit them.
In the former, you may see much.
In the latter, not so much.
Authentic moment to instantly.
No rights: homage to impeccability.
Watch how the mæstro pauses before beginning.
The opening image of Bolle with silken, horrendously large wings flying over the ballerina.
Indulge.
Svetlana Zakharova’s Black Swan choreography and performance dominates.
I would love to see the Swan Lake hip-hop, freestyle performance on the streets of N’awlins one day.
In that public area right next to Cafe Du Monde.
A little chicory.
What do you see?: his mind asks mine silently.
My mind races.
Let my cycle through my four breaths, three times each: I say..
[Time passes in our empathic silence]
My eyes hold the other’s,
Strange music plays with præter-natural lyrics.
Goosebumps envelop me.
I see energy: I say.
What does that mean?: he asks
Nothing that makes much sense when put into conscious explanations: I shrug, smiling.
Tao: he says.
Tao adjacent: I respond.
No rights: homage.
Merry TOOL eve. To each and every one of us.
Per first comment: https://youtu.be/x7lk_iucgw8
I dreamt I was under siege last night.
Like Bell Rock.
But ages before.
The rocks were boulders of dingy khaki and earl gray.
Choppy and round, not leveled and smoothed.
But, they too, like the current iteration, remain cool to the touch,
despite constant exposure to the pressure of the sun.
I do no know why I am here, nor why I am being fired upon.
I wear a sleeveless red, knee length dress which renders me a sitting duck visually, per se.
I have on my “clown shoes” as I call them in this reality.
The pair of red, canvas slip ons are not conducive to scaling mountain goat terrain quickly.
Rocks, boulders, are being launched at me by wooden catapults operated by an unseen foe.
I hear them screaming through the air before my eyes can see them.
This is the best advantage I have.
I can look where I am going while feeling assured I will hear the threat.
No need to look for the threat.
I drop to the fetal position under the precipice of a nearby boulder, if available.
I think. If I had an umbrella in the colors of the rocks around me, that might be handy.
Such umbrella appears in my hand.
This is a dream: I think.
I try the umbrella method during the next assault.
They lose me in their scope.
I believe they are hopeful they struck me down and thus can no longer see me.
I leap to feet
too soon,
spoiling the very advantage I just created.
I hear the next rock scream.
Howl. Bad bit of terrain beneath my feet.
This umbrella could deflect the projectile: I imagine.
I open it, crouch down.
My braced arms withstand the pressure of the incoming’s rock momentum.
It bounces off the imagined shield.
I feel like I have won the battle.
No rights: homage to a song I cannot get enough of.
/it’s not quite right [?] / you must be a cynic/
Do you hear that jingle early in the track, too?
Like a pair of keys in hand, jangling with each step.
Here is an excellent visual tale told to a different cut of this track.
[Howl her laughin’ howls give me goosebumps everytime.]
Massive indeed.
/voodoo in my blood/
I wear all black with saddle leather boots, for work.
Straightened hair business.
As I walk, I unfurl my energetic wings.
My mantle.
Cold steel blades slide out through my shoulder blades.
Clinking.
I shake them. Loosening.
They respond when I dress this way.
I take care to align each blade so they will fold away properly.
Inappropriate for the task at hand.
I call forth the other side.
gossamer feathers.
Carefully unfurling.
One flies a’loose, fluttering into the breeze like a shining bit of a spider’s web.
The feathers still smell of you from last night.
From when you came to my mind with your pain clear in your
energetic, non-corporeal eyes.
Come in: I told you silently.
You stepped behind my back.
Squared with my shoulder blades.
Your pain began pouring out.
I collected you in my steely wings. Making a box.
A safe place. An unobservable vacuum within which you may thrash and wail.
I dropped down my feather mantle for you.
Draping the steely interior in celestial down.
Those who would prey upon your moment of weakness
slay themselves upon my well-honed metallic feather-blades, trying to break in.
Ships, at night, on a rocky coast with no lighthouse.
With each slam of your energetic body against the walls of my wings, you felt nothing but goose down envelope you.
I took great care to ensure this.
You fell asleep inside. I opened the space, covered you, cupped your hipbone, and slept aside you.
You and I went to an afterparty for a band called The Passé Posse.
It was in a place named Electri-City by an ocean.
But, there was only candlelighting.
There were water slides being used as public transportation.
Part of the city’s infrastructure.
I visited here previously.
As I took you by the hand to take you to my bed,
You said: You maybe too physical. Too physical for me.
Like the song?: I ask.
I do no know if you were kidding
because i immediately awoke.
I say: I’m sorry, did you just ask if this wine pairs well with beaver tail?
He says: Yep. Nice top.
You’re lucky I’m the kind one: I say.
This is 9:30 a.m.
⊙
It will be a ten minute wait for a party of four: I say.
Can we not sit there?: she asks, motioning to a table behind a divider over which she cannot see.
No. There are still are people eating at that table: I say.
It does not look like anyone is there: she says.
I smile. It is much easier for me to seat people and not run a wait list.
I promise I would seat you if I could: I say.
She finally attempts to confirm her assumption by walking around the divider.
She sees two people still seated and eating.
It looked empty from this side: she said
In realization.
Thank you for your patience: I say.
⊙
Would you like the table by the window (sic. best table in the house)? I ask.
I know how you do. Sit me here so the place looks busy, right?: she asks.
I’d wanna sit here if I were eating: I say.
I realize she is joking with me, by virtue of her kind reaction.
I stop. Let myself take a deep breath. Let her see myself smile
In realization.
One of those mornings: I say.
⊙
Shelia and Don arrive.
I am Dimples to Shelia today.
I get a hug and a kiss on my cheek.
You are my surrogate granddaughter: she says.
My heart feels warm.
When I am all these fathoms afar,
breath is rest.
I sleep with my eyes open.
My eyes close upon waking.
A nap is a blink.
A micro-sleep.
A relative delusion.
The pull of fo/u/rces enlivening me.
I am force moving through time and space.
Or, maybe, that is you.
Perhaps, I am your optimal conditions.
Your ideal ether enabling materialization.
I see from the vacuum of the abyss.
It is lonely but I am not alone.
Tactile not tactical.
Marco Polo is not a game but a call and response song.
Electricity and light.
Lidar and blackholes
howling in algorithmic keens.
Your mind is a cheshire, Schrödinger’s cat.
I watch talented women sit silently aside who they championed.
They simply sit and smile.
Power move: says my optimistic soul.
The strength to stillness.
Empowered or powerless?
⊙
I do not always know how to look for what I want.
It is no matter of courage.
Feeling lost and found because I don’t think there’s anywhere to go.
These places are just places.
Amazing and mundane.
Simultaneous.
Does anyone say what they mean?
⊙
And, everywhere, everyone finds a reason to use the word /cassette/.
It shatters my heart on impact into my ears.
A heart for a heart.
Who is your audience?
A hopeful foundation
for a handmade looking glass house.
Espy patience feeling impatient.
⊙
“A common woman goes far,” my grandmother told me.
“And, a comma can change entire meanings,” she said without saying.
So I repeat myself:
“Æ pay attention to your punctuation.”
No rights: homage to a lady champion.
She prompted The Wild Bunch & Massive Attack.
Deep cut Sunday,
Suckas…
Giggle.
Don’t you get fresh with me.
State of mind.
Whaddayou expect?
I watch white butterflies flutter by.
The local feral cat dozes under a nearby bush.
As with the boisterous Stellar’s jays who I feed peanuts, the cat accepts my presence now.
S/he gives me a lazy, sidelong glance.
I focus into those two eyes and blink my own very slowly.
The cat returns my slow blink.
This means we are still cool. I speak cat, see.
I am poor but I am elitely wealthy in simple luxury.
So, I suppose that I am rich at the moment,
to my mind’s eye.
In scenery. In being able to walk to work.
In being down with the local flora and fauna.
I smell bursts of flowers’ blooms from proficient gardeners.
Blasts of fragrances from local shops with open, front doors.
The day invites me.
No rights: homage.
/I really wonder how Venus would feel if she was raised to be such heel/
Howlarious.
I am a girl…
/They way they scratch and the things that they dream/
…but a little gender bend for the toughest of guys seems only kind at this time.
A sawtooth comb for newly brittle hair.
Almost raking the wet curls.
A mind sulking over some lost piece of life, perhaps?
Everything is easier under the cover of my clouds and stars, dear,
including your lucid waking and dreaming.
⊙
I take the long way home.
I pause.
From outside the pub, I listen to the band play.
I consider going inside.
I see someone eyeball me and motion to an empty seat.
I smile and shake my head.
He cannot take the place of the one on my mind tonight.
I do not seek distraction.
I will enjoy my own smouldering.
A game of patience.
A study in control.
A tyre pyre burning.
⊙
I pass a man followed by a woman.
He has his hand extended behind him.
Fingers shifting in an effort to convince her to hold his hand.
I wonder why she didn’t take it into hers.
No rights: homage.
I hear this album, Dummy, turned 25 today, fellow dummies.
Cheers.
One of my favorite songs here.
I see a man atop a mesa at sunrise.
I laugh as I have the thought: I know him.
Everything is bathed in ruddy red and sunlit pink.
I can see for miles despite being at a low elevation.
Looking back at the man, I see him hold up two configurations of stick bundles.
They form the two letters that sound like my first name.
I think: I shall climb up.
Having the thought, I immediately arrive at his side, atop the mesa.
This is a dream: I say.
The last time you met me here, you slapped me hard and kissed me harder: he said.
I feel embarrassed. I do not remember this.
Do you remember my name?: he asks.
I remember your first and middle name. I remember you refusing to tell me your last name: I say.
Guess it: he says smiling.
Keyes: I conjecture.
Closer. Keynes.: he said.
Almost like the mathematician. Like keening me up: I think.
They sucked us into the parallel decades ago.
Don’t you see the change in the quality of the sunlight?
It is a thin space here.
Closer to the Other.
Go through it.
Come right and clear on the other side of my arch.
The beach preservation, busy body society returns for the weekly dish.
Silver hair happy hour but with coffee and tea only.
As lively and loud as any bar at midnight.
Eight women and four men.
I hear battle stories of having both hips replaced.
Today, the one tops speak few words to me, if any.
They lead me to the table they want.
The sun shines on the new mural in the alley across the street.
I see it through the reflection of a storefront window.
Suddenly, a silver hair exclaims: that’s what panties are for!
I turn away to lose myself in a laugh.
⊙
She says: I’d like a half glass of water with no ice.
Okay.
Early afternoon and the stranger birds arrive.
⊙
It is like summer in full swing.
People eat later.
Packs of wild children roam the streets like feral dogs.
B. and L. come in. I never remember them until they lead me to their spot.
Table 13.
One water and one merlot.
Oh yeah. I knew that.
The 4 o’clock hour. Brutally slow.
A man passes by on the sidewalk wearing a large ring on each finger.
I must be in a mood as I find it strangely attractive.
⊙
“If you were any younger I’d be worried about you.” I hear server J. say.
I ask what that was about.
“Oh, he produced a full-sized screwdriver out of his pants pocket and surprised himself. It’s what happens when you are nearly a hundred years old.”
I dreamt I was a shepherd, last night.
I care for four steer and five wolves.
The wolves try to eat the cattle if I don’t pay attention.
But, the scenery is beautiful so it is no trouble.
I have a partner. We ride horses like cattle ranchers.
His face burned off in a fire.
He does not tell me what happened.
My sense is it occurred aeons ago.
He does not appear burnt. He looks like a sheet stretched over a face.
Smooth. No orifices where nostrils, mouth, eye sockets should be.
Infinitely kind.
We drive our herd and pack along cliff sides.
Kirkcudbright feelings.
We enter a tangle of a forest.
Dark bark and leaves of the deepest green.
It was just noon. The sun does not shine here despite the canopy cover being quite sparse.
It is quiet.
The trees become grayer.
We enter a corridor demarcated by maleficently gnarled trees.
I can spy a clearing situated on the opposite side.
It contains grotesque goats.
12 hands high with spiraling horns.
Their coats are filthy. Horrendous in volume and stringiness.
They graze on the plentiful grass.
Ripping it out of the earth like lions ripping muscles from felled prey.
I feel myself instinctively raising my attention.
There is no fear.
I think: this would make a good painting.
WrittenCasey 