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

was first called

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.

She admits

He rolled over, having fallen fully asleep.

My cape slipping away.

I roll over and drape myself across his back.

The refrigerator starts humming.

I tap out a rhythm with my right foot’s big toe.

The tap comes easily so I’m not dreaming.

Hyper lucidity,

yet, the bed remains empty.

~

She smiles. She shakes her head.

She admits. She misses him.

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.

that with which you speak

The knob’s lock unsnaps. The deadbolt sounding in turn.

A door creaks open and closes quietly.
It is the day after the rite of the last night.
“I want. I want to,” she says, quietly.
“I want, too,” he whispers.
They are two.
“Kiss my lips,” she says.
“Which pair?”
“I don’t care. Just put that with which you speak to the pink of that with which I feel.”
“I feel too big,” he says.
“Then your heart is full and hollow like a cactus tree.”
“I wish I felt emptier,” he says.
“Why?”
“So that I could dissolve back into the ether for a respite,” he replies.
“Like, die?”
“No. Like, dream.”
~
“Exorcise me.”
“Tears aren’t cutting it?” she asks.
“No. Fall apart with me.”
“Why don’t I just pet your head when you feel worthless or uninspired?” she coos.

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.

an egad of e’s.

Entropy can not be excised from energy.

Now, we feel the onus on us.

Let them wear those ascots and eat their escargot;

and, I shall send this erogenous epistle that is delivered whilst tip toeing through brambles of sharp thistles.

An endemic epidemic extolling the benefits of the sentence of exile.

“What would the congregation think if they could see you now?” she asks.

“I would care not,” he replies.

Epistemic and affixed.

A’human energy existant and

avoidant.

Avoid, ant.

A void, ant.

therein may we

Doll, you’ve got it confused.

You are completely vulnerable when you forget to be in the-Moment.

You merely feel vulnerable when you find the-Moment and discover you had forgotten it.

You were wandering through the Meadow of What-If.

The Marshes of Why-I-Oughta.

Your home is in Right-Now and you never leave.

You keep forgetting.

Mountains do not need to be seen to largely loom.

A pond does not need to exist continually.

Seasonal droughts come before

the flooding of Springtime

with its garish blooms and hissyfit storms.

Cycles of forgetting to remember to not forget,

abiding by celestial currents among the degrees of inclination about the axis.

As pokes retch,

a spoke stretches,

hissing,

from the rim’s circumference to the center axle.

Therein may we all meet.

the remains.

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.