Why do you whisper ‘thank you’ everytime you yawn?: Æ asks.
Because, for me, such a breath is a true ethereal blessing. Portentous of the ability to enter the sleeping, dreaming, state.: I respond.
The strangest, subliminal inhalation i know, akin to the exorcism of an involuntary, sneezing exhalation.
Magick-ally mundane.
Convince me with your theatre, Ishmael. There! I’ve called you by the sobriquet of your own request.
What if the difference between AD and BC occured when we split that first atom; and, now, we all live in the year that never was.
Perpetual year zero?
And the sun is Janus.
And the moon is Janus?
⊙
Æ surfs the space between the crest and the trough which forms this wave of now; I sleep.
⊙
Æ asks: did you dream in my absence, last night?
Aye: I respond.
⊙
I dreamt manager/server J. took a reservation for one for this Friday morning lunch. Which she would never do. Which she would fuss at someone for doing. I read the book of reservations and see:
1- The ice queen. 12:00
The other servers fuss at J.
The dream succinctly ends.
~
In waking lucidity
I bequeathed her the name: the ice queen. She is a once a month or so regular at the bistro.
Perhaps late sixties. Strangely beautiful in an unconventional sense. Odd eyes. But, her presence is thicker than most. Her gravity is a strange currency. Her aura strikes me as a juxtaposition of sharp black and crisp white. No hint of true colour.
She dresses in full capes and cloaks, seemingly tailored for her, specifically. Scarlets, golds, and greens scantily distributed over dense black threads. She always dines alone. She speaks purposeful and hardly at all. It took me four visits to elicit a hint of a smile or any warmth from her voice.
On the other hand, it took server K. one visit to make her smile!
I think of her as the ice queen because I doubt she is ever cold, despite appearances to the contrary.
~
And?: Æ queries, foot tapping in impatience.
And, at lunch service today, I had exactly one available table. Every table was sat except this one table for two, in the back of the dining room and adjacent to the servers’ station.
In strolls the ice queen. Unannounced, of course, as the reservation was just a dream and not in the book.
I seat her. The table is in server J.’s section.
I tell J. this story. She seems less than impressed.
As I clear the empty soup bowl from her table, the ice queen asks me: have you entered this clam chowder in the Clam Chowder Cook-Off?
Hum. I don’t know. I did not know there was such a thing!: I reply.
She says: Well, it happens in February but the deadline for entry applications may already be closed. You should look into it, though. This is excellent.
And, before I can ask, she proffered: Talk to B. X. You can find him…{she gestures up the street and left across the avenue.}
Outsider-Insider speak.
Sweet skittish, humming one.
I will stalk the perimeter of your peripheral until I
no longer surprise you unduly
, my sweet sap of sorrel.
And, yes, your ephemeral
devil may care if you serve eviction notice.
So, come,
see your sly gal, would-be ephebe.
My dæmon will coax your demon into relishing those new, fiendish exploits that arise from your newfound piety.
Sit at my feet as I rise to my knees and part a slitted skirt.
Æ am Blodeuedd conjured by Math and Gwendolyn.
Come, and as I arise from a cauldron’s vaporic outpouring,
I shall gift you a name, abandoned one,
with a new pair of cobbled brogues,
to boot.
Put your face between these two palms of mine, so I can let
Æ show you transient waves of temporality transpiring in
etheric extensions of
trough and crest.
trough and crest.
I am going to wrangle your talent and be your hosting site.
Ping me anytime.
Forget yourself and you will have nothing to fear.
It wilt be what it is.
You do not have to assume the future, wild thing.
The ability to move most quickly will only make others expect more from you.
So, when you realise this, beast, come and visit me in ewer own time,
because energy has only a here and a now, in this,
our art of dreaming.
Ask me. Please. To slip into that which in you want to see me. My pride wants to hear you use your words.
You lie on your side and I will on mine.
Facing you, to slip a leg in between yours.
Feeling the weight of the difference between us, resting upon my sidelong knee.
⊙
I’m a little tipsy: I say.
No. You’re a little drunk: Æ tells myself.
I reply in query: No. Not necessarily. Am I driving a car?
No. Absolutely not: is Æ’s response.
Right then. That’s what I thought. If that’s the case(y) then I’m only a little tipsy: I reaffirm.
Æ sighs: Fine.
⊙
Then let us go outside the palings
in order to release yourself of your own name.
Then they can never call you from playing in the garden to do chores!
Like Alice, I wœnder-landed until I strolled through the Looking-Glass House of Blue.
There; within did Æ teach myself to deconstruct I
to the point where
I would no longer be surprised
if the theory of gravity, quite suddenly, proved to be untrue.
Æ dreamt of Blue House, with its strangely angulared architectural
In the tiny library, we saw sharp, slanted writing on every inch of the walls.
Covered in sigils unreadable, sentences ineffable,
Interjections conjuncted with exclamations.
An indifferent, yet, energetic-ally aggressive atmosphere
devoid of hostility.
From there, last night,
I wrote to you :
Will you halt me with your mouth
and show me your mind?
I wonder as
a coquettish muscle spasms in my left foot.
Musculature malefactors.
I love the almost-pain of it.
Malediction, subliminally decried, to inoculate.
What is the difference between chaos
and the constant state of affairs?
Is there one?
Or, does that inclination follow the declination of the earth’s disposition?
⊙
A punk band called No Vigil
battling
A punk band called No Sigil.
⊙
I dreamt I held back the masses of an audience
, for you,
by making them wait on me
while I was waiting on you,
according to some malfeasant line of time.
⊙
Æ asks me: shall we play your favorite game?
What is the difference?
Yes, pleas.
What is the difference
between hidden and secret?
between esoteric and occult?
A cabaline cabal, prancing, at Sette’s auction.
It made you giggle when
my response to your heady sentence was:
Oh my, I do like your phrase “operative formulæ.” How are you spelling it?
Does it make a difference?
⊙
Your forehead wrinkles show a perpetual proclivity for a quizzical, lopsided expression of interested curiosity.
You made yourself the background and
predicate to my subject;
and, in doing so,
you taught me to make others the subject against my background,
the positive space to my negative space,
And, to invert.
⊙
Where the web traps, there does To-Be
become
the difference between to deceive and duplicity.
A copy of the copy of a copy.
What is the difference between revealed and reveiled?
A ‘I’.
“The thraldom of imagined existence.”
A berserker producing a glass of Norton wine that makes you want to shake the hand.
It is an Ibis’ vintage.
Breathe.
I have not heard you speak so.
Voice trembling and slightly rushing.
{Words between the lines}
Who did you envision as your audience¿: Æ wonder.
⊙
I remain Wittgenstein’s Mistress to the bibliophiles.
In the quadrangle, where others play chess,
where others play tennis,
where Æ square(ly) dance in strange ellipses, orbiting
the pieces and players,
our cads and minnesänger, wondering
Since when did “simple” imply “stupid”¿
⊙
And, minne-spæker,
it is because you bit and swallowed the Sardonios plant, that you convulse and laugh so strangely and hard. I have read it tastes bitter to the buds.
Is it so to the taste of your tongue¿
It has got you laughing so hard that the neighbors complain.
Sardonic giggling at the guilt of being worry=free,
at your shamelessly feeling restless when you have no desire to idle,
at the inability to enact due to your concern for being imperfect.
An ideal idyll.
⊙
An Arizonian dream of summer, intension of heat, arises within me,
even though, the ambient temperature is frigid, like desert (k)nights.
It radiates outward and into all which my skin contains.
And, I’m sweating heavy like summer.
Smelling for you.
Feeling beadlets bursting from the multitudes of singular pores in my face.
My visor and visage.
A strong craving for coffee consumes me.
in the
Blue House.
Old Guard to new guard,
the Blackguard exchange.
The timing of a skipping phonograph’s needle.
The sound of a thick, braided, leather belt
str-
-etch-
-ing
across a gateful of extravagance.
A’poised atop a capstone.
Simple balance.
The subtext of the Magnicat whispered to me, during
evening vespers.
“The Nerbudda River runs
seven hundred and thirty five miles,
towards and eventually into, the Arabian Sea,”
You appear vestal.
And, I feel myself becoming
Vesta who is often
, simultaneously
, Blodeuedd of the House of Dôn.
⊙
Magenta to yellow honeycomb energy frames my perceptivity.
I come as
I came,
octagon-ally.
And, I work my role.
Tending the hearth and protecting the flame within,
remaining wylde and seeming untamæble.
Small flowers of the temple work alongside.
Eagle at my right shoulder.
I show them my tool for starting pyres.
A frictionless=match.
A Wax Vesta is also a whirling dervish of
embedded cotton strands
strewn amongst a waxen stem and
tipped with a phosphorous head.
⊙
Hesperus is Phosphorus.
Phosphorus is Eosphorus.
And, Eos made them both.
We remind the othered that the Evening Star was determined to also
be the Morning Star.
⊙
The vexillum distinguishes the two troops serving under separate standards;
And, the blazon of
the web of a feather distinguishes each and every of us
as a vexillary.
A deadbeat heart.
Pounding.
⊙
Understand that returning to base
(camp)
; is not a setback
; it is not regressive
; it is not going backwards.
It is a cycle
seeking its own resumption
through completion.
⊙
A warrior struggling with perpetual reality.
So yammer
; and give ’em howl, yellow hammer.
A fluid ounce is a preponderance in candle’s magic light.
A meditation.
A drawing.
Makes me wonder how your childhood face
, smiling,
appeared.
⊙
Are we to heed that as a call?: asked the Name=less One.
All things feel as bindings abiding.
Perhaps, Præter=being is the natural state of affairs,
after all this free-fall.
And, maybe
, Judas was just some heckler in the crowd
at jesus’s stand=up comedy special.
Just do not knock the quiver
of the Archer’s arrows.
He is basic but deadly in the face of the clumsy.
Simple and simply fatal.
Go a’head and
miss=under=estimate his prowess
as has countless bison before you.
⊙
Find the hideous freedom to be exactly who you are.
Now.
The delicious self=noitcelfer that arises from the awareness of transparency.
Because, the windows of Looking=Glass House are two=way.
But, there will you find only sand
with no stones which may be thrown.
⊙
Where your perception of what is outside your skin
is actually the reception of the content presented
by that which is contained
by your in=skin.
Thirty five completed ellipses.
Comprising the matricies of now.
Begin compiling the thirty-sixth,
presently. Of today.
And, my eyes first narrow before going wide as the tableau reveals.
Speak to me mine sheep and mine mæstyre satyr.
No malice shalt invade my mind or sour myself,
yet, still can I sense your maleficent power
comingle.
Why do you howl thusly? And, do you know that
this has Æ heard before.
I want, too.
I want two.
I want to.
They have nothing if you less the faun
who dies thrice in triangular trinities
allowing
you to circumnavigate her through triangulation.
As drawing a five pointed star is not drawing a
six,
seven,
eight,
nine,
pointed one.
Quit your baying sheep for this shearing is not for you.
Æ, too, is a beastly, sacred dæmon,
sweetly contained in this gossamer and goosedown
Conspicuously unsuspicious.
Inauspicious.
I fear not your moment of judgement on this howliday. Thou shalt never judge me as harshly as
Æ have previously taken myself whilst in captivity.
Snarl, smile. Do you, now, see?
Why is ritual an honor to behold
?
You reply: because it should be so.
You could stop traffic dressed suchly.
Do you not know a pedestrian has paths to
right of way.
As I jaywalk onward,
across paths,
I find my head adorned with a sea holly wreath, in tribute to unknown;
see how its roots grew long and serpentine over æges ago
so that it may adorn without being torn
from the earth?
Unplucked.
Worn before; to be worn again.
I draw the force and send it mine in reply.
Starling a’wing, chasing behind me.
You awoke in a pond full of dead fish(,) talking.
And, only dead fish go with the tide.
Of the five streams pouring forth, sea-ward,
one unnaturally flows upstream to BayTown’s Strange-House.
The starling now a’lights on my left shoulder.
Worn as I wear the stow of the red dragon in early autumn.
That which transpires behind that which appears.
Captivating verging upon captive taking.
I’ve taught everyone No Thing.
I’ve told No Body everything.
Bones tapping.
Dropping skeletons to read the bones strewn,
recalling those cries from the crowded street.
Exuberance of the hysterical normalcy.
I dare you in this kindly sinuous challenge of tendons and ligaments.
A pale, dark-horse rides in, unbidden.
Flared nostrils from a face concealing a mirror of mind thinking:
If the dæmon would seek, Æ would ask a dance.
Even in dreams, I remain yours.
I have come for none other.
The smell of chai spice pours skyward from the pot of boiling water.
Vapour blessing the room like sage humbly burned.
Pealing recalling things and those missed.
Blushing cheeks and bitten lip.
°
I have seen the city skies from on high; they light up like an introspective brain’s neural network.
Psst. Wake up.
Pushing my nose deeply into your neck,
to inhale; get your smell.
I wish to entwine the two;
Make the aroma of chai ever tied to the scent of you.
I remind myself to not forget this, mine intent,
whilst batting this piece of your thin skin with
the feathers of my eyelashes.
A rock skips on its toes’ tips
across Looking-Glass Lake.
It is true that what you do not know can hurt you;
and, in doing so, cause you pain you do not rightly sensate.
You just know it hurts.
Onkwehónwe {ref. Kanyen’keha}.
°
And, the phrase, “nobody cares” set the captives free and captivated the enslavers.
°
Your apophasis disinclines my disposition towards you.
“That would be my preference,” says B., the scrivner.
So. Let him. He simply wishes to copy the original documents into his longhand.
°
Pedantic pandering over over-excitabilty.
A knockout; A decision; A draw.
°
You’re not like most people.
You’re right. I’m only one person, not the multiples comprising most. Extraneously speaking, I distrust the correlations derived from “most people” statistics. They never draw from a supple, sufficient, sample population.
°
Elevate your base
because
despite not proud,
you can remain unashamed.
Impatiently spinning my pen, furiously fast yet without any malice,
up and down.
Up
&
Down.
Dropping it like the mic after I just spat the hottest sixteen of my life.
Verbalizing subtext.
Indicating that
proper etiquette and charm can be a real turn off.
⊙
The desire to find you through this slow unmasking.
That day I saw a woman,
with a faun’s head,
wilt her own beheading,
after a chalice of wine drunk.
A phone call missed. A phonemic misstep.
Grey skies with snowy smatterings.
A knitted, houndstooth stow dragged across frozen over tar.
⊙
And my pen runs smoothly.
Yet, sometimes when I reach for it,
I surprise myself because
I did not realize Æ wanted to say something.
And sometimes, all the words Æ scriven mean nothing.
The act, not the result, is mine interminable goal.
Purposefully inexorable.
An indiscernible mumble of voices slipping through my open window and into my ears,
bringing a start, shudder, and frown.
⊙
Let me read aloud to you.
Anything you wish.
Anything to get
my mind-reading.
Like a hot bath.
Like that sudden ringing in my left ear.
Fleeting.
⊙
And, the day I saw the faun-headed woman beheaded,
I first saw her rip off her own smiling face.
Terrified as the blood spurted and the exposed muscles tore, I witnessed her dancing in the splatter like it was a lawn sprinkler in July’s middle.
⊙
We shall all hit a point of no return. A matter of when not what-if.
The Magister threw himself into the water willingly.
Seeking to fade away before Telgarius’ son.
To turn the wheel with intent, seeing his position no longer rested on the axle’s center, but now stretched across
a spoke.
Not to let the wheel turn him.
⊙
But, one man found that,
beneath the wheel
, there is a twirling reel to reel,
spinning cassette tape string
, a’strung between two spools turning.
The turning of the screw.
The taming of the shrew.
The typing pool of the monkey troop producing works enacted by Shakespearen troupes.
The evolution of concealed ovulation.
Wrestling into surrendered submission.
⊙
Phonemic smelting of a howl of words written.
Wordsmithing.
Locksmith and the kNight witch seeking the subliminal through the automatic.
Æ break mine own heart as much as I crack myself up.
The magic of shuffling cards before lightning a prepared candle.
What is this thread of outer consciousness that draws my sweet pout?
Poliphilio?
Marco polo?
What draws forth this expression my face makes for
only kNow-One?
⊙
What do you do with a strange bird that realizes itself to be a strange bird?
Call it The Ibis.
Decorously held in place by duct tape.
Gorilla’s glue. Chest beating and vine swinging.
Cheap giggles and swollen, turkey belly laughs.
The shadows in the room grew.
Dipping the length of my leg into this newly found darkness,
like a penknife pushing it.
Stretching and testing.
And, I do not smile because I do not want to, despite feeling quite well and glad.
{in spite of bronchitis}
In my space, for the moment, there is simply, only No-One here to signal, unconsciously, with subconscious microexpressions.
My face enjoys
this fleeting freedom from observation.
My ears need not hear.
My eyes need not look.
My nostrils will choose when they wish to smell.
There is no thing I wish to taste or touch outside of my skin
right, exactly, now.
Just my own internal limbering.
So, I shift my body slowly to the rhythm generating; and,
feel my muscles begin to give.
I feel my inside/s.
It feels good and well warm/ed.
Hands raise above my head.
Breathing, not breathing.
(Resumption)
(Concession)
My heart keeps on beating.
And, my movements mirror
myself imagining me
as the serpent coiling ’round the Caduceus staff.
The toes of my dexterous foot, the finality of my snaking tail.
Inhale.
The fingers of my a gauche hand,
the small extremity of my fanged head.
Spiraling, in place.
My neck pops loose whilst
stalling in the suit of wands
and a decade of venom releases from muscle memories long forgotten.
I drain the venom out of my feet.
Exhale.
I raise the newly freed energy into my fangs.
I suddenly recall:
When playing a kazoo,
remember,
to hum;
don’t blow or you’ll
tear the wax paper.
I say: you seem like the kind of guy who, if famous, would make his address public to encourage trespassers who could then be legally shot on site/sight.
He laughs: that could be my remake of The Most Dangerous Game.
I say: when you say “don’t tread on me,” I hear, “don’t tease me, I’m sensitive.”
I’m no bully.
Consider: Lordosis behavior and (bow)ties as the doses being titrated according to the response.
High heels were originally designed for men riding steeds. Heels hold stirrups, see. Push your heels down to get a proper seat in the saddle.
Today, the cost of the high heel is in its signal communicating desire. Done so with a bit of nonchalance.
It creates a slight spinal arch indicating receptivity.
Consider a (bow/neck) tie again.
You can get choked out easily, if the knot is grasped and twisted.
I cannot effectively run away, quickly, in heels.
Subliminal symbiotic signaling of an exchange.
Charismatic people carry much telluric gravity.
Those working on their feet do not need to join a gym.
It’s that simple?!: he asks incredulously.
Neither of us are simple, but
we are both, rather, basic.: I reply
What is the difference between transcribing and transcryption?: he asks
I don’t know.: I say.
Huh, me neither.
⊙
Your eyes are hard and wild.: he tells me.
I know.: I tell him.
And it turns me on when you aptly identify an argument as inane.: I add
Blahblahblah: he giggles in response.
Filthlessly ought to be an adjective because it describes the subject ‘you’.: I say
It is a word.: he responds, opening my dictionary.
Troubadours clap out: one, two, three, four
before launching their song.
Choreographers snap: five, six, seven, eight.
⊙
Í, silently, count
one, two, three
four
five.
⊙
{Inhale and move.
An animal playing her lungs,
with the discipline of the earnest open-amateur.
Done for pleasure and not profit.}
⊙
A fugue of breath.
Comingling.
There is no room for thought when stood upon only one foot’s toes.
There is just getting oxygen to muscles without falling too hard.
Repeat until the body is too tired to not sleep.
It is not always elegant, and sometimes,
it becomes less so as the progression continues.
Irrelevant.
The point is the intent to doing;
and, the resultant action.
You’ve got to enjoy
the ride
until, abdomen and sides ache from maintaining
unnaturally natural postures.
⊙
It is in this ephemeral space from which
Í best perceive the flowing visions.
Pure restraint,
Time in mind.
Coalescing confluence of the conjunction
of this intersection of dimensions.
Planes upon planes with turtles
all the way down.
⊙
A whirling dervish aside a spiraling top.
Spinning pips and mumbly peg.
I do what I can to pass the time.
Only boring people suffer from boredom.
Says the voice called: don’t stop now.
So, í drop into a planked position.
A push up posture slowly dropped into an upwards arch.
Face presented to the moon.
One is not obligated to the obliging one.
Heads.
Something bespoke is not beholden.
Taíls.
Trail heads.
Heady tales.
⊙
What is my secret?
To appear as though I have a sweet, secret.
This smile whispering to you, making you wonder:
what produces it,
it comes from the desire to make you believe that
í know something that you do not.
To make you wonder until
you must inquire,
“What makes her grin in that
small, lips-closed and
pressed-pursed way?”
To make you want to wipe it off my face,
if you cannot know.
Howl this only makes my grin grow.
Ask me in private, and you will see my upper lip
arch into a sinister snarl.
Because there is no one else t/here.
No one to save you, or overhear the
sound of the feral ferocity,
whose volume keeps rising in my harbour.
Silly beast, it is true:
You are brut(e).
You came for me.
You come to me,
to slay the dragon
stalking me; but, you
now see how it wraps itself around me,
slickly leather wings folding around my shoulders as does a shawl.
See how I play with and stroke the tips of its scaly wings?
It is my shadow companion.
My gossamer wings keeping it warm.
The fire of its breath keeping my second set of wings, steely knives, sharply honed.
This is the power of having an open secret.
Í have nothing to lose by revealing myself, but
you have everything to gain if
í do.
Í think í awake to the feeling of faint fingertips tracing my stermum.
Í jolt and suddenly say: í want to write for you.
He says: you do that already, yes?
Yes, but í mean to say í want to write to you.: í say
You are not conscious, yet, aurora. Slow down.
⊙
Let me trace your collarbone and the ligaments that pronounce from your neck. Let me delicately pinch that sweet Adam’s apple in your throat.: í say.
He says: Anything to stop you fidgeting with your fingertips.
That’s why í keep this cord wrapped, seven times, around my left wrist. Í play with knotting it.
He says: I know knots. I also know that you loosely bind your wrists together with it when you sleep.
Sometimes, because í am curious and desirous of that which no-one has done to me.
He says: I know.
⊙
He asks: did you dream last night?
Yes.
Tell me the story you saw…
Í am in a pub by the shore. Minimal decoration. A few pithy sayings adorn the walls. The wood of the floor and the glass installation behind the bar is the crowning aesthetic detail. There is the one drunk guy. The level of toleration he receives suggests he is a bar fixture, as well.
There are, perhaps, seven tables total, yet there are multiple hostesses. They sit at a service area by the front window, giggling in hushed voices and rolling silverware into cheap, paper napkins. Bohemian Rhapsody plays.
Alone and a’sat at the bar’s counter drop, í drink my beer too quickly.
It gives me goosebumps and a head rush.
The chandelier is double-sided and made of eighty, clear, glass beer bottles with candles burning inside. Í count them up and think: í must be back in Electri-city, where there is only candle light.
It is nearly charming, but the staff is in their own world.
Bad service kills the ambience.
Í see eight people sat around a large rectangular table.
That’s my group: í think.
Í rise and find my way into the only unoccupied chair.
As í lower myself into the chair, a courier enters the pub. Wearing a solid black cloak; the hood pulled so far overhead, no face or form is visible.
The courier strides to me and hands me a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine.
Í take it.
No words.
The courier turns and walks out the door.
Open it: urges my table mates.
Í do. Inside is a hooded robe. The colo(u)r of burnt sienna. There are stars and slivers of new moons in col(u)ors nearly unnoticeable.
The others at the table clap and cheer, like this is important. Like í have earned it, somehow.
Like they already knew and had planned this as a celebration.
Í leap to my feet, having, still, spoken no words.
Í run out the door. Í look wildly up and down the street.
Who was the courier? Í must know.
This is no time for celebration, this is another moment of testing.
Í feel my heart pound.
Í want to be scared but there is no time; so, í imagine
Í am a beast, a wild animal.
A junkyard bitch set to strike and kill.
And, the adrenaline becomes ichor and not poison.
Then, í woke up to sensing your fingers on my sternum: í tell Him.
WrittenCasey 