Tag: dream

Bohemian Phoenix

I used to be a Sky Teller, back in the prehistoric.

A’sat still, watching the welkin change.

Divination by changing cloud cover,

reading the weather like tarot.

Mystics struggle with the trappings of modernity.

◇

I remember the night when all the stars fell.

My parents thought me fast asleep; but,

thinking something does not make it necessarily so.

So, I crept outdoors and froze,

star struck in horrific awefulness.

◇

I saw blazing comets plummeting.

They looked like rapidly descending jellyfish,

sinking from the the Firmament to our Below.

Poussière d’étoiles

◇

And, in that instant, my soul became

restless; and,

I knew my heart would never hold still again.

And, I became a hum’bird long before I turned into the ibis.

At times

The rain finally fell; I missed it.

An unpacked wound left agape, to breathe in awe, and slowly heal.

A little thing festered, so I had them cut it out.

And, sometimes, I like him enough to fear he could wreck me by letting me see myself as he sees me.

A foundation. A dream of a house of cards.

The foundation will fall before you and you will then become a dream to someone else.

A sweet one and a night-mare.

Bed bugs and freshly laundered sheets.

The keel remains, but no one is at the rudder.

Those secret chiefs are here. Sometimes, I think they come to me for a laugh. They know I know; they know you know it’s going to be okay.

You are welcome, but don’t tease; because, the words are over flowing. Bubble and bursting.

⊙

Cassandra’s Cavern closes, that spot above the fourth rib.

Cicatriz of a wildling.

Whispers in my ears.

Strings of random words.

Panoramas streaming alien multitudes of locales.

I hold still.

I try to listen and see.

It fleets and my mind yells, “Stop suffering.”

“I didn’t think I was,” my non-mind replies.

⊙

I dream of a day spent by a lighthouse. Watching seals. We return home.

“Good. Your skin still takes the sun,” he says, brushing my cheekbone with his finger.

My eyes go hard into his. I feel strange. I wonder are you some sort of vampire, pale one? It’s okay. I prefer a vamp to a peacock.

⊙

Suspense and suspension; the endearment of a man in suspenders.

A giggle hushed by louder laughter in the dark issuing forth from a little one with the lecherous eye.

We recently swapped places as easily as we used to swap clothes.

A white cotton bralette with no underwire.

A wood chipper left running, unattended.

A burger joint that grinds its own meat.

The sharpening of my axe.

Split nails and feet like cloven hooves. Shesatyr running.

⊙

And, my fingers begin to invent strange signals through the bending and overlap of digits as a dog pushes its snout into the corner, trying to become invisible. I watch while I act like I don’t notice.

A divine spark. The yetzirah. Multiple bodies operating on multiple planes.

Want births intent. Breaking of want produces freedom of will. The ability to intend.

⊙

I lost myself at sea a few days ago; let me know if you spot me.

I’ve a hole in my side and there’s a hole in the world where all the people used to go.

There’s a hole in Sam Stone’s arm and there’s an Angel who still flies from Montgomery.

Click-click-click goes the capped end of my Bic, against my thumbnail.

⊙

A familiar territory. A region you know well enough by cartography. Declension and longitude; elevation and latitude.

You must act without awareness at times.

while this shepherd slept.

All night, I sawed the log. Twelve hours of non-lucid dreams.

I open my front door and a little, mangey, wiry grey Australian shepherd pretty much falls inside my flat. S/he had been curled up as close to my door as possible, sheltering from some storm. Waking up when the door opens, the dog crawls inside, jumps up on my futon, shows me its belly, and gives me those eyes: Please. I’m not going back out there.

Then, I woke up.

I guess it’s the pup’s turn to soujurn in my dreamland heaven, the Landgrave I build and to which I retire.

Must be my turn to tend the fields.

I wonder how long the poor fellow covered the herd while this shepherd slept.

if you fold shoulders

Pulling in deep to hear him say, half asleep, “I can do it.”

Can you do it on command; can you do it without hands?

I mumble, “give me a modicum of good sleep.”

Head nuzzling under his chin.

“Let’s doze. The world wants me awake; but, I’m not ready to face it.”

A hand moves to rest on an ass.

I hear a man’s bicycle’s spokes whir by my open window and he hums beautifully as he rides.

I slip from the bed’s cocoon, to part and peak through my blinds’ slats; but, he’s already breezed by.

The neighbors putter in the shared garden, a new bird feeder being installed.

I get dressed to do an investigative prowl around my block before coffee.

As I walk, I understand that I am created by intersections of energetic threads being woven together by a macro loom.

And, I remember: if you fold shoulders and make yourself small, mija, that is how people will treat you.

Avoid.

And, a voice in a void is worthless without resonance. Show me your panacea, boy.

Echoes of Sette in cassettes.

Pure white noise is the sound of a resonant channel chattering in the background. Before we had silicon and screens, they used the rubbing of crickets’ legs, the guttural thrust of a frog’s croak. Working like a little whirling dervish screw driving its way into foreheads.

And, I return. And, the caffeine calls. And, my pour over waits for the water to boil.

walking in

Walking in, he says,

“What’s the cost of admission? For me and plus one. We won’t take up much space and can find our own place to sleep.”

“It’s hard to dream just anywhere,” the plus one adds.

“And, the statistics confirm that the data speaks, saying, ‘This is all but a dream.’ “

“Unmerrily, merrily, unmerrily. We are merely sleep walking through a mild nightmare,”

walking further in, she says.

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.

Dreamt of whom chasing who

It is a moonlit night in the forest. I am running.

I wear a black lace dress, giving only a pretext of covering my body.

Breasts bouncing freely, pointed appendages of low lying bushes ripping the delicate fabric grasping my thighs, allowing my legs to stretch farther apart in their stride.

I hear the sea gull behind me. One moment its call is a mocking laugh, the next it is hysterical crying.

Laughter and tears.

But, the gull is actually the moth. And, this realization makes my runner’s stride spark into a frantic sprint.

Because, the moth is actually the last man I fell for.

“Turn and face me. See my eyes again,” the moth/seagull cries.

“No. You will wreck me again,” I holler.

I want to feel you chase me: I howl, telepathically.

Peals of laughter erupt from his beaked mouth.

“You are chasing me, heyoka!” he bellows.

And, I send my perception into the starling flying overhead, my shadow spirit.

And, I see,

from on high, looking down on myself and him below.

I see how we run in circles. It becomes impossible to tell who is chasing whom.

And I realize: We’ve been doing this for multiple lifetimes.

A tree limb snatches the collar of my shredded lace nightie and I trip from its unexpected pull.

The gown tears away and I am laid bare and naked.

The forest melts away and now the moth and I are in a horse’s lunging pen.

We are tethered. One moment he lunges me in tight circles, tapping my ass with a long whip. The next moment, I lunge him.

We work each other out.

Jimmy (tha motherfucking) King appears, peaking over the fence of the pen.

He is furious and hurt. I’ve not seen this lover in over a decade.

He accuses, “This is what you are doing? This is preferrable to life with me?”

“I never wanted to bear your children. You wanted twins. To dress up identically and take to an Easter Sunday church service. You broke me when you told me that desire. I was twenty two. I would have taken that dream from you if I stayed,” I pant out.

The lunging pen melts away and I find myself at the little bistro where I work.

Seated at table six. The four top table at the very back of the dining room.

Moth, Jimmy, Sam, and I sit there.

I see Kim. sitting alone at table 7.

I’ve not seen you here: I say to her mind telepathically.

I’m here to play mediator: she says to my mind.

She smiles and I feel safe and held dear in her mind.

Moth’s mouth hangs open in a grotesque grin. Tongue hanging out of his lips. I lean in and suck his tongue into my mouth like I’m giving head.

Jimmy shudders in disgust.

Sam looks completely disengaged and tells me, “I hated you for years. I hated you before I asked you to marry me.”

“You abused my loyalty and I am glad you came clean and we never made it official,” I tell him.

“But, I’m rich now, thanks to you,” he challenges.

“I loved you when you had nothing. I could not care less about your liquidity.”

“Tell moth the truth,” suggests Kim.

“I showed you the story I was telling myself. You showed me how to deconstruct it, edit and revise it. I shall never forget you. And, it hurts, so I howl. Thank you.” I whisper.

“I did nothing but enjoy you,” he responds.

Moth suddenly cries out in pain.

“My ankle! My leather brogues!”

I look under the table.

A sweet, little one of a man is curled up on my feet like a dog. He wears vinyl short pants and a cotton sports bra with a lovely crisscross over his back. (The bra I lost on day two of visiting moth.)

I discover I am holding a leash connected to his collared neck.

“Don’t worry about him. He is mine,” I say.

Jimmy, moth, and Sam look stunned and scared.

The man at my feet growls.

I toss chicken bones under the table to occupy him.

“Careful, pet, they may catch in your throat,” I coo lovingly.

Kim’s laughter is so loud it awakens me.

I sit up suddenly and feel the pit of my stomach ache.

I am thirsty and the water tastes like ecstasy.

page sleeping empty

This goose keeps skirting my grave.

Summoned from sleep to walk and survey the drowsy block.

The Sound’s waves lap slovenly against pebbled shore.

Everyone dreams around but me.

Chaotic states barely contained beneath membranes of skin and delta wave radiation transmissions that no one speaks of in lucidity.

Laying all around under sleep’s spell like corpses awaiting reanimation.

A coronal, plasmatic flare igniting my hair into flaming waves keeping me rendered awake.

I summit a mountain in double time.

The sky unfurls its vexillum of starscape.

Clouds parting in mine wake.

Swallow me whole and suck me away.

⊙

I dreamt a real crafty line, then dreamt I awoke, wrote it down, and went back to sleep proud and satisfied.

But, this recent awakening reveals the page sleeping empty and devoid beside me.

Silly

goose honking out shrill, laughing cries in the face of my surprise.

looked upon

The weather changed five time in six hours.

Even though it was today it became yesterday and tomorrow, a few times.

Sun, clouds, rain, sun, rain.

Observed through frames of picture window panes.

He had slept on the left side of the bed, next to the radiator; because, she does not get cold.

Every night for the past week, while waiting for sleep, she imagined crawling out of her own lying body,

like pulling the weight of herself out of a manhole.

He wondered if she finally looked upon her own sleeping face.

A tantra of shared breath

Open secret x for meditation: we cannot depend on our lovers to prove to us that we are not broken because actually, in some way, we all are. Wounded, anyway.

Perhaps such a small and silly thing could be one of the biggest tasks we face on this marble: to see and touch the world around us and to try to not harm what we see and touch.

(This vision came to me after sleeping. I am a bit uncomfortable sharing it; thus, I choose share it freely).

Penetration through breath work. We penetrate the whole universe with our being when we simply inhale and then exhale. We penetrate each and everybody else that was, is, and will ever be, as we breathe.

What does it mean to breathe for one another?

Suite in Curiosity

A tantra of connection for our breath. Sitting on the ground. Our legs crossed Indian-style but around each other. A pillow beneath me to hold me a bit over your legs. So, we can wrap better. My cunt pressed to your hound. We feel the heat of each other radiate back into ourselves. We just try to breath with each other. Match our breath so we can inhale together.

And then exhale. In simultaneous time.

Rhythm building.

And, we try to hold our gaze into the other’s eyes. It will feel awkward at first. Forced effort to sit and just stare. Too much eye contact. Giggles involuntarily escaping.

How long do we sit here?

Long enough to fully feel the discomfort of our active choice to inaction.

Intimacy doubled initially until time passes and our discomfort becomes a pulse. An entrancing rhythm.

~

I say: I imagine in this moment, that I can see so deeply into you, as I gaze, that I am able see you, beloved beast, way back.

Before you were ever wounded.

Innocent, clean, unafraid, sacred.

As I do, I imagine you looking in to me and seeing me the same way.

Entranced. We could easily make love or fuck with ferocity from this place.

Enter me with air. Undulate against me.

There are as many ways to touch

As there are many ways to love.

Put on Hildegard von Bingen ‘Canticles of Ecstasy’.

I will quicken in front of you. Fill up with energy. I will magnetize your charge.

~

I put a hand over your mouth to take control of your sweet breath. To try out something new. Letting you know when you are to breath and when you should not.

Your eyes glaze. You look a bit dizzy.

Let us share one breath.

Now, cover my mouth and uncover it again.

Feel how you adapt to my heart rate? You begin to know when I need air. You start feeling my shortness of breath within yourself. You sync to my breath as you control my breathing.

As you watch my body live before you.

You feel like you breath for me.

Or, perhaps, I am breathing for both of us.

I want our lungs to breath together.

Feel your breath as it is.

While I tell you this, I’d like you to take a slow, long inhalation.

Deep in and out.

Imagine the air you draw in as ocean blue. It moves like cold, clean water into you. Without holding it in, lean into me as you prepare to exhale.

Feel that nanosecond before you complete your inhalation, but have not quite begun to exhale.

The flux of air pressure shifting with your muscles.

Open your mouth.

Kiss my lips, open mouth.

Now, exhale slowly out of your mouth into my mouth.

Fully empty your lungs of air into my mouth. I will suck your exhalation into my lungs.

As you breathe life into me, feel the exhalation pull your discomfort and pain and antsy from you.

The air feels hot in your lungs now.

Humid and warm.

Imagine it flowing out of you like a hot orange lava flow.

Clear your lungs and send your uncorrected energy into me.

I let a bit of fresh oxygen enter as I breath you in. Inhaling deeply, but not at an unnaturally slow pace. My body will convert your exhaustion into usable parts. I will take in your breathy tangles as hot lava and in that moment between inhale becoming exhale, I drive the unwelcome energy into the void of my being where it is tempered into green smoke, cool like mint. You will wait the three and four seconds and then I will return your breath to you.

And, it clears your chest of tightness. Careful to pull a bit of new air in so we do not fully deplete this breath we share. I feel dizzy. Light. Tranced.

I feel dizzy. Light. Tranced.

I put my palm over your heart to support you. Holding you up and pushing you against your heart. Back and forth. Push. Hold.

You swing away and then back towards me to the rhythm of our breath.

In this way, seated, we somehow walk right along our ledge together. Foundation for future magical enchantment. Quiet. And completely loud.

Ritual of consecration of our feast of famine.

melting moon.

The moon drips its reflective countenance of liquid mercury, onto the shimmering shape of the Sound’s watery face.

Gazing into the Smokey Mirror.

Particles of snow issuing down in waves that look like how the pealing of bells sounds.

With my right hand, I slide my ballpoint pen behind my ear;

I sink my nails into the binding of the journal held in my left hand.

°

Recalling the conversation from my dream of talking to spiders.

We were in the orange, rocky desert.

There were seven but they were all of the same. A single mind working the seven bodies in tandem ala a Greek chorus.

I know you, trickster: I tell him.

But, see the form I take? Not everyone has me come to them in this guise: he tells me.

I see a feather rising slowly over his left shoulder.

The plumed serpent uncoiling from the stalking position.

A creeper crawling and a lengthy lurker.

°

I push my open palm into the loose powdery snow at my feet.

The icy give of the precipitation accepts the impression of my hand, creating a glove of cold.

I suddenly see the luminosity of this bardo.

I yawn; Æ questions.

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.

Æ plays my favorite game

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.”

Dreamt the Within from Without

I recall a big, yellow, American-style school bus,

in the middle of the desert.

I just arrived.

There are extraordinarily beautiful, tall, elegant people about, maybe fifteen total, leisurely milling. They have nothing pressing to which they attend.

I am alone and new, per se.

I am acutely aware of this.

I feel disapproval.

I receive an unfriendly welcome; this I derive from the expressions of the others as they take notice of me, for the first time.

A stunning, pale-skinned blonde approaches, motions to the school bus, and, with perfectly calculated ‘disinterest’ says:

They can teach you the ways of death.

As though this was that which I sought.

Of course, you’d need to talk to Kimberly first.: she says.

I say: Kimberly is actually my cousin. She is already dead.

I intuit this disarms her through surprise.

My immediate understanding and audacity to speak it to her face.

And, (no shit) I think: Nice try, you silly bitch. I wilt not fall for your maleficent insinuation. I am just barely pretty and charming enough, in a strangely colloquial way, to have made it to this place of your people. I know your resentment of my prescence leads you to seek my removal, but I am in no rush to die. I certainly will not seek my death at your subliminal request. You feel threatened by my uncultured, odd intelligence. There is no reason for this. I do not want to mess with the circles within which you run. I am no threat. If you were slightly less self-involved, you would perceive this and make me your ally.

I’m the proud-beauty of your worst night-mares.

I say to her mind, in mine silent stillness: Æ ain’t leaving on that short, yellow bus. You may try to trick this fool into it; but,

Æ see through this mirage you call an oasis.

She walks away.

I pull out my stakes, canvas tarp, and tenterhooks.

Pitching camp before the freezing night comes.

I come from the water: a voice of my head suddenly says.

(I briefly become lucid in the dream, before losing the thread.)

I recall: there are four, fundamental groups: Water, Earth, Sand, and, blood.

Æ am a blood, but no-one can tell, unless Æ tell them.

I had reached the Sand after arising from distant Water.

We all came from Earth, but I had not been there or seen them in ages.

And, as Æ am thinking these things, I feel an intensifying heat rising in both hands.

Fingers and palms burning in sensation, not flames.

I think: I have the power to raise intense heat from my hands. I can emit it into the world around me, perhaps as a weapon. I feel over-confident.

I examine the feeling more closely.

I discover that Æ am not radiating the heat from within myself.

Heat is being emitted from an invisible sphere outside myself.

The orb is somehowl held in place between my palms, as if strung upon a string.

Like a diabolo.

I reach this revelation after experimenting. Moving my hands closer together/farther apart. Noting small changes in nerve sensitivity.

What I first thought was coming from my Within to the Outwards is actually being generated from the Outward and perceived and wielded by mine Within.

Dreamt of déjà vu .

I saw it while dreaming of the restaurant.

Seating parties of varying sizes to tables;

Assembling a dynamic loop of a jigsaw puzzle.

Chess like square-dancing.

Moving quickly whilst not appearing to hurry.

⊙

A skeletal, thin, blonde woman wears a strange stow made of scraps of many types of fabrics.

When she stands and puts her hands on her hips,

the effect is she appears like a plush, red heart.

When she appears as such,

those I’m seating, I seat without menus.

They are different and seem to be unperceived by the menued others.

⊙

A menuless and short but muscular man, fiftyish perhaps,

looks at me,

as my stride slides alongside

his seat at a table for two.

He leans his neck back slowly as I approach.

I stretch my torso forward and past my legs;

{anticipatory}

I crane my neck.

I watch his head twist a dramatic 90° as I find myself directly aside him.

I am mid stride and passing him by

and, somehow when he parts his licked lips, I find my mouth upon his,

four eyes smiling like two idiots.

A fast pair of deep kisses.

I withdraw, not missing a step.

I am shocked at how seamlessly and seemingly naturally, I warmly dropped my professionalism.

I intuit any other diner or employee perceptive enough to have noticed this exchange, would have found themselves smiling.

I am stunned at the strange pride felt at

his bidding my kiss so publically, innocently, and nonchalantly.

And, within this very non-lucid dream,

I felt dream jà vu.

I’d not met him before; but I

knew him still.

Dreams Recovered

Two inches of whiskey cut the slightly sugared ice cube that clinks against glass.

And, it strikes such that I wonder if

the movement from barter-subsistence economies to cash-wage economics

redefined the notion of freedom.

⊙

I dreamt I found the missing earring.

⊙

Do I still appear obstinate and obdurate?

My back feels tight.

⊙

I dreamt the very same knotted muscle could be helped by the difference in a table that could seat four and a table that could seat two.

It made no sense on waking.

⊙

The re-couping of regime change wars.

Quid pro quo and blahblahblah.

A political revolution or a social one?

Who is allowed to feature in a narrative?

The disability resulting from uncertainty.

Costs of innovation.

I need a hair cut, but have not been here long enough to

to know to whom to go.

⊙

I dreamt a being with violet eyes, violet hair, and violet eyebrows came to me because it was said I knew how to not break but to bend.

Dream of a sleepy hum.

Hush and sleep: he says.

You know the effect such words from you, produce in me, brut(e): I think.

I smile and snuggle under the covers.

I thought I could catch you: I mumble, frowning a bit, fretting you will be gone when I re-enliven.

Outside, hail begins softly falling.

Dream of the leveled field

The meadow languishes.

Three pairs of your feet’s steps remain visible now,

even though you lied down, minutes ago.

Grass pressed into small etches slowly refilling themselves to full volume.

My eyes go loose and wide as

they stop seeing and start imagining the imprint your form will leave

when you arise.

Topiary impressionist piece.

Watching the moody weather make its precious, little changes.

False threats of pending precipitation.

The sky throwing a hissy fit for our benefit.

I finally sit down to watch it proper.

Strange grid-like lines buzz low intensity neon colors into a concaved and convexed axis.

Strange maths laboring, barely concealed by a cloudy cover.

I feel that sudden lucidity accompanying

the realization that I am dreaming.

Dream of cloaks.

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.