I seem to need to binge-purge with writing, to spew the vomitrocious contents of my brain in the possibly vain hope that some kind of clarity may result. The piece you are reading falls under that heading, alas. So, mea culpa for cluttering your screen with my mentritus, but a gaia’s gotta do what a gaia’s gotta do.

Here I go, running as the brain-ball bounces above the words to the jingle that’s relentlessly singing under the picture. Once, I leaped to greet the new day only to be dumped into the drink I thought I’d be toasted with. Back on my day of birth, fateful entry into earthly existence, I finally squirted down my watery slide after a long crazy ride (thirty-six hours, mother said), expecting a celebration. Hey everybody! I’m here! Break out the good cheer!

But that was before I learned how the story is supposed to go.

The newly-arrived (me, and more than likely you, too) were casually caught, treated like things, slung to the side to be sucked out, palpated, stuffed, packaged and wrapped. Not that poor, tired, trapped mums were treated any better. It was just the same-old, same-old nature of life here on this plane, but to say it seemed insane to me then is about as under as I can state the matter.

And now, the constant clatter of high heels on marble and concrete, the nattering background drone of television undertoning every conversation, the roar of motorbikes and muscle cars, unmuffled because more decibels are cooler, drowning out the industrial white noise every urban dweller must take for granted or go mad… these all must have rattled everybody else’s brains and addled their sense of something wrong, something missing, something fatally awry, but I…

… I must’ve been hiding under my bed or (more likely) lost in a book when the deaf and blind was handed out. I thought I was so smart, but might have been happier had I joined the queue of winners and losers taught young to manipulate the controls of their souls, turn this need down, amplify that desire, damp the fire of life-force. That’s how you make it here in this so-called real world, which ironically consists of putting in wasted time until you die in order to qualify to live, finally,in the heaven of your dreams.

That is, unless you fail to avoid committing any of a myriad compelling sins, then you’ll be condemned to be sent to the bad eternity instead of the good one you were promised. What are the odds of winning that lottery? Can anyone really walk the razor-fine line that supposedly leads to forever’s heavenly reward?

Hell, I can’t even walk a straight line from here to tomorrow without getting distracted by the urge to drown any of a thousand sorrows I’ve been forced to suppress over the course of trying to survive this crazy world.

I regretfully report that I consistently come up fatally short on the Sin-o-Meter. It seems the dream of heaven is not to be my fate. Still, when I peer more closely at that photo, the heaven it shows is far too stiff and stilted for my taste.

As for the long winding road, my load is way too heavy to carry so far. Much, much better my loosey goosey, unwinding, undefining dance into the bliss of eternal Now, and damn both Hell and Heaven altogether. All worry and stress about wrong versus right can just take flight with the birds on the breeze, take root to be flowers for bees, become sweet scent wafting through the trees, oh yes.

Ah, oh, yes. Such pleasure, such a treasure trove of blessing be mine whenever I re-member my eternally divine miracle, my mantra, so simple, so gravid:

“Here I am, now.”

Dark follows light, and light follows dark
The dark side is about to become the bright side
for revolution is the way of life
It’s time for the light to surrender supremacy,
to make way for that which hides in shadow
if that frightens you, ask why you fear
half of your own whole self. The bits on the shelf have
waited their turn so long they’ve forgotten
how to even yearn for their heart’s desire to manifest

If this is a test, I would know the penalty for failing
and even more, the reward for success
If I am to invest my desire on the side of survival,
I wish to know that survival means something
Beyond mere continuance of existence.
If I am to persist in this struggle to evolve,
To revolve my whole self, to show
my least comfortable faces for the gaze of
those hidden eyes in the haze, then
I insist upon some surety that my efforts
be not vain and fruitless. You see, I want to root here. 

So I ask, but would be frankly flabbergasted
to receive a useful answer. The point of asking is not
to be answered but to explore the question, to feel through
the maze to the best approach to discovering
and possibly uncovering solutions to the issue
that resulted in need to ask. 

So I ask, and to you (whoever you are)
I assign the task of not responding,
of allowing me the space and grace it takes
to flounder foolishly in my own confusions until some
magical fusion of fragmented perception
might culminate in the epiphany I seek. 

I do admit, I would not enjoy the view from
the seat I expect you to occupy.
I use you, poor reader, shamelessly
toward my own devices
In my defense, I can only present
the vision of wholeness which I struggle
with all my brain and heart to serve. 

Should this cup of blog be not to your liking,
allow me to mention the obvious, that any time
spent on studying these patterns of photons
randomly-etched in electronic sand must be
by your own command, for you are free
to wander and wonder at your will,
to quest for your own carrots, and to
invest your attention where you please. 

Should I seem defensive, please believe
it is not you, dear unknown, against
which I defend, but merely my same-old familiar,
ratchet, snick and click of guilt clacking
against the grain of my burdened, saggy brain,
close to collapse under the weight of old freight
passed from parent to child for the purpose of
trapping and taming the wild within. 

Those patterns and pathways were practiced
until I got it right, but always failed to delight
and in fact became root, branch and leaf of my plight

And now, the wild world, night side, feeds my need,
in wild mind I find my salvation

When I was a child I drew, I sang
and when I was old enough
I read. I didn’t write.
I tried. I flailed, then failed
daunted by utter incapacity
to find words, any words that might
say something I meant

ever haunted, hungry,
possessed by an overwhelming, urgent
yet ultimately powerless rage to communicate

Every Christmas I asked for and received a
new blank diary for the year to come
Each time I gazed with love upon
its pristine pages, resolved afresh
to fill it with my thoughts

Then hit the wall immediately, and hard
I struggled, stared at the first bare page
as it blurred through a thickening film of tears
and then I finally surrendered, sighing,
to write after the date “Just routine today.”
By spring I abbreviated it to “JRT”
and filled month after month
with that acronym, scrawled large
with impotent frustration

Instead, I doodled, scribbled, drew, let the
lines flow without thought as the tip
of pencil, pen and crayon flew,
filled page after page with sketches

of body parts, eyes, hands, feet, faces
images of people and animals but
never landscapes, seldom things
I wasn’t interested in backgrounds
only players

I starved for acknowledgment, contact
effected disconnected pictures from my
alienated self, drawing on my innerworld
as substitute for actual reflections of the people
and animals that populated my surroundings

My powers of observation were turned inward,
and ’twas self I saw in the fey faces,
pointed ears and great glaring eyes
that stared from my pages.

They scared me, dared me to stop,
drew my pencil-point excitedly onward

I struggle, still, with that block in my brain
and sometimes must manifest some shock
profound enough to slice through the stuff
that separates my inner world from the
shared world of people and animals,
places and things

So I sing, I read, I want, I hunger,
I suck like a magnet with infant passion
upon the attention of those who notice
until they withdraw, depleted, to seek
attentions of less voracious and
more giving others

It makes me notice the way I still be
as a child, it makes me notice child self
filling my shelves with denied
soul’s shrieking

This insufferable pain is actually ecstasy denied
Such pleasure disallowed converts to agony
become a frenzy of demons wreaking havoc
upon the plains, rivers and seas of self

A constant, unnamed background pain
pressures my brain, colours me
with shame hues of purple and maroon
punctures my balloon before it inflates,
makes me wait for my fate to unfold,
places my life on hold

And it, the pressure, builds to crescendo
til the release valve blows, allows me
a song, a picture, a poem, a dance,
a chance for eternity’s freedom
until release relaxes me
back into my box

Into this paradox I live, makes me
crazy like a fox, freeing me with locks
and trapping me in bouts of freedom
I need more wisdom than I currently access
to pass this moebius test; it twists me
in and out of sane

Old Time is devil and saviour of my life
I age and grow at varying rates
racing against the pace chosen
by the majority and called consensus
though my vote hasn’t yet counted

I learn, slowly, that though I grow
and appear to age, I am becoming in truth
more youthful, more able, more fluid,
more stable, more magical and more alive.

When I was a child, this is what I did.
When I am a child, this is what I do.

Time for another strange journey into the mind of me,
twists and convolutions to be expected.
My urge to protect the sensitive ears and minds
of my readers comes as much from my own self-judgments
as it does a shyness that sources from childhood in the woods,
nothing much to do and nobody much to do it with.
Encounters with strangers (relatives were ubiquitous,
too familiar to be real) were rare and intense with significance
and those times I engaged, enragingly dense
with a maddening mixture of implied meanings.

Dark shadows tugged at words that emerged from
the mouths of aliens called ‘Others’, who
each were linked by invisible cords to other Others,
felt but unseen. When these folk spoke,
I heard faint ringing echoes, strove diligently
to decipher their meaning and ultimately found
that in nearly all cases I guessed wrong.
I reacted with humiliated outrage,
swore off unnecessary interaction
and withdrew into my dark corner called ‘shy’
but was more properly ‘sullen’.

A certain simmering bitchiness lingers in me still,
if I would but admit it.

It was going to be so good
I thought, only to be blindsided
By the pain of well-laid plans
Thwarted by the ferry’s
Slavish adherence to schedule

I saw it pull from the dock
At the tick of the clock,
And what a shock it is
Not to be doing the thing
I had so looked forward to

I’d anticipated, feared and prepared
For each eventuality save
The one which came to pass
“Let that be a wee lesson, lass,”

sez the voice, “For time matters
And when you don’t factor it in
To the equation, it passes
Faster than you might think.”

Next time, you may be sure,
I shall give Lord Time his due

Shocked by reaction, she sat
The moment fraught with tension and what-next
Awaiting the dropping of what might
Be a shoe or worst-case, an axe
Depending on the ground she stands on
Is it quaking or is it the
Air in her face shaking her
Making her create tales
About the situation, story’s telling
Swelling the truth into something
Frightening and unreal
Feel the moment, those shoulders
Ought not to carry boulders
And dropping them should be a blessing
Not only to yourself but to the young
Ones on the shelf waiting a place
To stand, when the rocks land

Around you, on the ground of being
Resounds clear into the ethers
Of past, future and whatever
Your bits and pieces coalescing from
Where they languish in potential
Remain deferential to yourself
But do not fail to embellish with
Soft sweet snuggles directed your way
From your own heart’s remembering
This is not an experiment, you
Are not a failed result nor can you
Be redone. Undo your shoes if they
Separate you from the dewy ground
And hear the sound of your own
Feet falling. Calling for help implies
That help is required, but this is not
true anymore.

Oh the tortured soul inside this pleasure body, or maybe it’s the other way around.
The dichotomy has me bound and gagged, snagged on the ragged same old way it ever was.
Rock of Ages, rock me to sleep with a real rock, kee-rack.
Munch though you might, you shan’t find nourishment in that stony meal, so deal with your reality as though it was real.
Feel your own buttocks, the weight pressing you tight against the world and recognize that pull to the planet as your own denied desire to merge with what emerges into the light.

On this bright silent night of the soul, you’re ready to roll on a downhill groove, move through your changes faster and fitter than before.
If only you could score the soundtrack to this blockbuster!
Passing muster this time will take more than just showing up with your fleshy parts forefront and your mindcloud out to lunch, buster.
Don’t act so flustered; you wrote your part in this play long before today.
If you wished to edit or alter the way it goes, your chance came and went with plenty of warning. Now, your egg yolk rocket fuel has been spent for better or more likely worse.

No point cursing the worst when you can bless the best and test the rest.
Traveling as the crow flies is all well and good for a crow, but for we, the slow and winding road is the only way.
There’s no avoiding cracks and crevices while gravity digs your grave, baby, but maybe letting yourself fall a little further would finally wrest you through the rest of this mess.
Of course, success depends on following a trend to its proper conclusion, and predict though you might, you can never be right.
Delight is therefore the logical and proper response to such surprises as are generated by this random play at work.

Time to meander the myriad mall-like hallways of my mind, tasting trickles of past experiences that twine like wisps of scent tickling the nostrils of cartoon characters, lifting and wafting them down already-trodden pathways to play in pastures of the past where the bad is safely-mapped in easily-avoided, well-marked nodes of trauma.

Those red warning blinkers still serve to divert attention from pains I was trained to avoid. ‘Don’t go there! You know what happened next! No, stay in the happy birthdays, Christmases and summer vacations of your life, sans strife, sans growth and challenge.’

If I could choose, I would lose divisions and meld my mind with the Infinite. My boundaries would blow in a blissful implosion; all considerations of self versus other would vanish like bubbles into the air.

Knowing all, feeling all, experiencing and comprehending with full lucidity, that is a good dream.

t must be sweet to be God, knowing each sparrow that flies, every dancing particle of thought crossing a worried mind, cradled within one consciousness, held in the awareness of all-embracing love. I like to imagine God as Mama and Papa, the all-gendered helping hand, wise words, soft cradling lap and abundant nourishment. In my infantile mind (comprising much of what calls itself me), I cry baby bird tears and blindly open my mouth for cosmic kindness and sustenance.

I’ve been thinking about God a lot lately, though I can be skeptical as the next cynic in my hard-assed ’show me’ self. Still, I must admit to hearing the small voice within that whispers, “I Am.” It explains itself in terms undeniably, lucidly sane yet if I listen to it, I am labeled crazy or at least creepily vain. Society is beginning to define itself (despite lip-service bible-thumping done to placate a silent but vote-heavy majority) as atheistic, preaching a paradox of random clockwork, chaotic order, and meaningless beauty.

If no higher truth governs our lives, why should we feel such desperate craving for meaning? If a hunger exists, it signals something important missing. Like God, the vital vitamin with the power to sustain life.

To be sure, not everyone feels this way. To some, abandoning such a seemingly futile search is blessed relief from a burdensome task. But others can no more abandon our seeking than we can refuse to see with eyes wide. Because one is blind, must another blank her vision or deny what is plainly visible?

Okay, that stretches the story out of shape, making a claim of clarity when the foggy forms I see are admittedly amorphous enough to be nearly anything. Still, the words whispering in my inner ear make a perfectly loving and kind sort of sense and teach me things I am not aware of knowing.

I must believe something. Why not this?

An ode to poetic prettifications of reality, nodes of calcified bone knobbing my shoulders into boulders notwithstanding. Take a walk, a long hike off a short dike and dive into the deep end where transformations occur outside the mainstream, then when you return with seaweed twined in your hair, seawater streaming from your eyes, try to tell those lies again. Look, surly lurker, the work has already been done under the sun outside the purview of the purveyors of canned reality television billed as life.

The universe and everything goes on, whatever you may think about it.

You’re scaring me, carrying that heavy load on shoulders cobbled with knobbled bone, hobbling on your last legs, sucking down the dregs of a life which was never much but strife and struggle. Please, take care of you, because I can’t and neither can I live without your life burning in my ears, your heart beating in my brain like sanity itself.

How can the world end when friends like you huddle in my corner, cuddling cobwebs of confusion from my skin? I’m ready, waiting for divination, the truth behind the shadows cast by the last gasping fish on the line.

This is a truth exercise. Open the gates of mind to blinded bats flapping flabby wings from couch potato positions, exercising their thumbs while their perceptions grow numb from misuse. Following the bouncing ball only calls game players into your world, and since a game generally involves a villain and a victim, guess which you’ll get to be?

Those who make the rules call the shots, and if you fail to question your reality you will be trapped in it. That may be okay with you, but in case it isn’t, this is an escape clause, down the hatch into the dark.

So I went back to my island home, more alone than I had expected, for visiting can never be the same as belonging. Expecting blessings can backfire if beings in the basement hold their cards so close to their chests that your mind’s eye can’t see them.

I am still on the path to awakening the bits and pieces that float within my gravitational pull and claim to own my name and identity. What is self? What is me? If I had the answer to that, I would be rich and happy.

The patchwork princess toddled down the grassy path. She had escaped her minders for the moment and reveled in her unaccustomed freedom until a jewel-eyed dragon swooped low to scoop her into its taloned grip.

In its airy aerie overlooking the kingdom that her pauper parents struggled to maintain, surrounded by glittering gems and storied glories accumulated over many eons of thieving from her ancestors, the princess heaved an ironic sigh. She wished for size, strength and above all a sharp sword suitable for the slaying of dragons.

Eventually, she grew to forget and came to love her captor (as is common).