Haven't done one of these in ages.
They're after the break.
Hope you like them.
It's 4:30 am in the Big Apple. It's 3:30 in ChiTown. It's 2:30 in the Mile High City. It's 1:30 in West Hollywood. And it's 10:30 in glorious Kauai.
Good night, everyone.
The enormous, laughing woman
rolled into the room
like a jovial boulder of
blubbering flesh, emanating waves
of saccharine good cheer
more insistent than the Great Boston
Molasses Explosion.
She oozed over to the black and white figure
slumped over in the unpainted wooden chair,
and bellowed in a tornado-siren voice,
"What's wrong, honey? You look flatter
than a roadkill possum!"
Not bothering to look at her,
he replied, almost inaudibly,
"I can't make the fear stop."
The gelatinous mass of femininity
next to him burst out in a good-natured
thunderclap and shouted,
"Well ain't that the shit!"
She wrapped a quivering mass
of friendly arm around his shoulders,
squeezed him like a Moon Pie,
and then snapped his neck like a Popsicle stick.
"Hope that helps, sugar," she chuckled.
Turning like a small planet rotating on its axis,
she exclaimed, to no one in particular,
"Some folks you just can't talk to,"
and orbited back out the doorway.
They waltzed in cold embrace,
their forms slowly turning to ash
as they mechanically twirled around
the unseeing room, greyish-black
puffs
falling from them
like pieces of a dying glacier
collapsing into the sea.
Their silence held unspoken
volumes,
the ashen visages of the dancers
remnants
of warmer times,
when what was hoped
still outweighed
what was known.
Their bodies slowly
broke apart
with each unheard shift
in rhythm,
the scorch marks
on the walls
the only evidence
now in view
of vanished times
and ancient lives.
He is a sordid little god,
unkempt,
stinking,
and unshaven,
spitting and scratching as
he shambles through streets ankle-deep in trash
and dog shit,
covered with scars
of uncertain origin,
and looking out at the world with yellowed crocodile eyes.
He is the god of unanswered prayers
and crumpled hopes, the god of
"oh well"
and "I'm sorry, we did all we could",
the god of drawing the knife up the river
(rather than across the stream),
the god of "I can't make it stop"
and "we're too late",
a semi-toothless carnival worker/rodeo clown/pimp of a god,
stubbing out lives
like cigarette butts,
and tearing dreams out of fools
like a slaughterhouse worker
gutting a pig carcass.
He's not all shiny and pretty like the one
that lives on Mt. Sinai,
but he gives as well as he gets,
and more often than not
he kicks his cousin's ass without even breathing hard.
The air itself was alive
and I looked with excited foreboding
as the trees bowed in unexpected homage
to the ancient master that was now
aloft above them.
The Presence glowed without light,
was felt without sensation, and
shouted without sound.
It hovered in front of me,
daring me to live,
and insisting that I speak,
with a command that was only mine
to know.
I stayed silent for seconds, minutes, years,
centuries, eons,
as all about me remained frozen
in deathly joy.
Then I broke the air itself, and said simply,
"Show me."
And I knew the unknowable.
And I became numbers
and dimension.
And I saw non-being
become being.
And I lived in the maelstrom of
stellar hellstorms,
and stood exultant in the middle of
the Sun,
and swirled walls of
galaxies with a casual gesture.
And all that was,
or had been,
or would be
thunder stormed by my transfixed sight
faster than light speed
and I lived all that had been lived
in any world.
And in that moment, and only
for that moment,
I was All.
Trembling, shivering in the
Antarctic Present,
I then asked,
"Why?"
And every
shrieking horror
raped me, sneering as it did,
and all the idiot suffering
tore my face with
razors,
and every depth of pain
became mine
even as it was not mine.
And in unhinged, lunatic rage, I roared
at That Which Is
Fucking bastard!
Inaudible weeping filled my ears,
and unspoken words said,
There was no other way.
And I felt it take my hand
as if it had fallen to its knees
to ask of me that which it had
no right to ask.
I said finally,
"Will I remember?"
The night sky said,
No.
But I was at peace,
because I knew,
somehow,
as I was about to lose
all that I had experienced,
that such places as I had seen,
are,
and such times as I had witnessed,
were,
and
that He and I
were of the same body
after all.