journal 1

this that i would do. what is it in plain words, that i can record some kind of progress, some record of changes or insights, that either i or some other might chart, backwards perhaps, some course?

i do not know what to say of it in plain words. i only know the half-thoughts i’ve kept hidden, as if from myself, a safeguarding of an intent that i’m in fact afraid of, a thought that slips up into my conscious mind only long enough for me to hush it back down into the safety of a darker forgetfulness.

and yet, some effort must be made. i am too much mortal to trust that i will not of subtle device tire, and eventually waver, and in some secret dream, forget, that i might drag to some ignoble salvation what is left of my pierce-able flesh. and so a journal that is not a journal, this elaborate mock sincerity, to make record of what is not truly a chronology or chain of events, but is rather a fiction of a reality for reason only that the reality is too much for me to face head on, the crushing potence of the great tower, even its shadow to heavy for me to bear, too great for this tiny sense of i to inflate itself toward, to constrain within.

today is the first day only in that today is the first day of my choice to begin a record. months or years we could as easily before demarc some beginning, but today i choose to take this fate firmly in my hand. in slippery thoughts of maybe and tomorrow and perhaps there is another way, i have too long postponed this most obvious course, and given license to the dalliance that distracts and for slim moments averts my mind. but there is nothing else than this, always and forever, down and in.

long-winded statement of intent aside, there is work to be done. a record that records only the occurrence of its own entries has no use, even in this most introductory of cases. apologetic for today already written, there still lingers the question unanswered of some triggering event, some catalyst to put into motion.

it was not this morning.

i’m going to change my tone.

i was out of town. i travel sometimes, for work. i’ve been, as all writers, writing since i was young, daily or nearly so, almost obsessively, able to stop but unable to stop wanting and needing to. not because i feel some great pressure of my own insights bursting forth or flowing over, but rather words themselves, like glossolalia, in my throat and at my fingers and on my tongue, speaking almost for themselves, using the shape of my thoughts and the contours of my memories as their foundation or skeletal frame, fleshing out their own architectures and monstrosities, a parasite or symbiote comprised or composed of a thousand little words, each an entity to itself, layering themselves like cells of some intelligent, living thing, organic upon the other, until things i have scarcely imagined emerge.

but out of town. in a hotel room too expensive for my taste, but with no more class than any other. the poverty of taste implicit in most transitory space, bare but not barren, hollow but not empty. i am not enough the romantic to have come to some realization looking out the window. not watching the people below, nor peering into the back alleys and fire escapes, however colorful to the imagination. it was, instead, simply the absence in the room, the lack of presence, even my own, as if this fragment of habitation could not impose itself on the pressure of the vacuum, noise in the silence only an echo to remind of its own flagging, failing, ultimately inarguable end.

and it was not a new revelation, no experience with which i somehow so long had remained unacquainted. instead i simply relished it, this echoing out onto the void, so many times known, and realized i had heard it too many times. that it as it has done for so long, echoes out of me as well. a silence into the world, a hole, an emptiness, projected into space.

shamanism and magick and sorcery and meditation and sufism and all sorts of psychonautic voyage. i’m changing subjects only for a moment, and only in a sense. i’m no great occultist, no master of energies ethereal and esoteric. whatever the bent of my experience though, i have heard the sound and seen the face of the void.

there is a recurring image in the occult world. the tunnel, the tomb, the cave, the down-and-in to the chthonic, the underworld. shamanism makes primary use of this, to descend into the other, to find the world of dead and the spirits. across the globe this same series of images arises, suited to local color and tradition, but essentially the same. there are vast pantheons of this subterranean labyrinth, hecate at the mouth of it, samedi with his crosses, and then those even deeper, no longer the gatekeepers but those of the dead and the dark.

this is a simplification. the traditions and thought systems behind these entities and even these images is more elaborate and complex by far than some simple reduction. but i need some symbol to point to, to explain where i’m going, to leave a mark on a tree or a broken twig of where i’m headed.

i was supposed to die as a child. born too early, too weak to live. too sick in my childhood to act as other children, i should have, spartan-like, been thrown from the cliffs and let the wild parts take their piece of me into their bellies, my broken body sustenance for the inhabitants of the borders, the hyenas and the coyotes, taking me into their mouths and devouring the flesh of the thing that was dead before it was born.

but we live in a strange world in a strange age, and some arbitrary combination of morality and technology kept the natural order from occurring, and instead i have lived. thrived. flourished, even, in my small and weak body, my sharp and twisted mind, until i have become something else entirely. antibiotics and machines coupled to keep me alive, and if the shaman’s path has ever been laid out for someone, it was me. given to imagination and vision, weak and sick, nearer the dead than the living, the voices of something else pouring forever out of my fingers and over my lips.

but with so many references to, the old ways of shamanism do not simply work for me. down that tunnel i can go, haltingly, but not to the places they say. not for the reasons they say. and the hole in the earth is the hole in me, and this void of space and meaning is the mystery that draws me ever and over back again and down and in. it is the tunnels of set, down and toward some infinite darkness, the bottomless abyss, the vertigo of terror at the realization of the hologram, flickering off the face of nothing that makes this world feel real.

there is no end to the tunnels of down. there are worlds below, and universes, and something greater, and other, and different, and else. and my reason for this journal, and the reason i begin to day, is i intend to walk and crawl and slither down in. and not to come back.

Technorati Tags: book of the labyrinth, journal, writer

dreamwrite 5

they didn’t leave the birdroom but they did suddenly no longer find themselves trapped b it either. the faces slipping in less frequently, the intensity dying down, like some question had been answered, and the final few were come late to the party, or simply to stare at the pair lying on the bed, a few moments glance at some alien ignoble coupling.

the hallway too releases its hold, gently and reminding of the close and tightness, but free, i walk back down it, still clearly keeping my eyes front, ignoring the side rooms and more passages than there were before, it has grown longer and more intricate than when i passed in, but i stay on straight, turning neither to the right nor the left, and eventually the door is in front of me, still cracked open from when i entered. or we entered. now it seems as if there were others that had come this way with me, but i do not remember their names or faces, only a smirk or a laughter that conjures up those i have lost but never known.

rest my head in the moonlight, the fullness of it trough the window i lie back in it, brushed by the white-blue light.

“yes, the details are very frightening indeed. its always the details that bring to me the horror, the crawling, implacable tide of the little, unexpected, seemingly innocuous, almost banal, until you realize everything you know has been replaced by a lie.”

Technorati Tags: book of the labyrinth, dream

dreamwrite 4

seedpod babies the swollen pussriden corpse of the mother a husk on one side the shell dessicated and brown-dry, the underbelly soft and wet and swollen maggot-writhing bab creatures slicking out through the wounds
gnawing at the cancerous skin of a mother deceased befor their birth, unfinished and unwholly unholy formed they sink misaligned teeth ingo the edible sacks of skin and fat still clinging to the carapace

brotherse and sisters dead in their segmented sackwombs, as much food to blind teeth as the rot that is the mother
eating until there is no more skin, no more flesh of the body of the bearer, and the others too weak have died and already cannibal has taken them too

eyeless and hungry thee mutated clicking of teeth they begin to walk over blasted land, blighted with plague and sunbleached
chittering insect mouths hungrily coming

i see why i laugh because this carnival is fun for me
and you
and all of those who have lost our minds
the absurd faces of pigmen wearing swineskin over mansnout
like no one will notice or care
turning gawking gaping heads toward me, staring long and as if i might perform
leering i cannot find myself even uncomfortable
as grotesque as they i offer up only my own flesh and face, and there are those who here even stop to stare, this manskin utterly obtuse to purpose here
feethandsdealing cards and an old eyeless woman who pops glass into one socket
to balance out the sight she feels from the other
the biggest needle in the back, dear
she says in good humor
that’s the one i need for my stitching up
of the children’s eyelids i do not ask if they were dead before they got here, and some don’t seem quite dead now, but too small to survive anyway, much less with the trauma and infection of this skinsewing
they look so tiny and asleep
eyes never to see never have seen
like sealed and stored, preserved, these eternal night eyes
such a high price
to find them one can see as new for just those few moments before assimilation

even here

where madness is this flux of form, in this flux of form, something different because even in denial of meaning there is so much more staggering potence when we supply it, like the dust of a drug in trial, just a hit
these connections are intoxicating
don’t worry you can stop when you want’just one more little synchronicity, i need to feel connected one more time to all that infinity
euphoria unable to cope wit the rise in intensely subjective infinity

the intensity with which this one now is distilled down to be felt, hard and fast and pure
and it burns a little life out of you but you pay it because what you bring back
…
what you bring baack is

boxes to make up a void
without words

i saw a man standing by the room door
and a girl who threw herself out a window
it was a good story, too
what happens to a mind when hope is taken away
what is the eye of that unsaneunclean man doing in the face of that
why does it speak as if it was not that because i know the eyes and even sometimes the sound of silent thinking directed toward me, however late itmight be inside.

why are there whispers
a fascination of terror
the sound of voices saying things i cannot understand
just outside the range of hearing
piping in through vents near my head
i can hear them conferring in hushed tones about me
and the feline automata, its giant cyclops eye, straddles the fallen man, staring down as if to record his person and place and death in
“such a lovely line of diffrent brands and expectations

i’ve lost th thread that keeps me here
at any moment now i might (that is the flying part of me) fly away, keeping with it (folded like irrelevant word) my sine spoken about this place and the tunnels

it is only the shadow of terror flicking by, as if the hem of a long coat had flipped and caught the light
and cast a shadow of its own and not the owners, but of terrors it is stille a wondrous strange flicker of emotion, a mild vertigo of person and place, the uncertainty and the bizarre of

a throat laced open up to the jaw which is split, cosmetically, the palet too, held open with strong wire
that another small head and man full of tattoos and swirling bizarre patterns might thrust its tiny impossible head up through the voice of this other
speaking through the throat this little demon gremlin gnome or elf speaeks out through the anatomy of this other, a hideous and crackling voice where the voicebox of this other should be

and this litle gnome-man his tongue does not end when he opens his mouth but extends like a serpent downard into the belly of this strange wire-lace-fetishist, his black hair elegantl curled to accentuate the glistening silvery sharpness of the throatlace

the serpent down into his belly and he turns in pain, but the little elfman does not stop, his open mouth as if he would expel the hwole of the serpent into the belly of this thing

and suddenly it is over and the little man has withrdrawn the snake though i do not know how, back up int his mouth, his teeth bulging out for a momentas the serpenttongue retreated

wherever it is were’ planning t ogo
she said whimpering at the foreverness of this
i wish we would get there so i can just as quickly say this is the end
we have dfond it
but as now i could have said so as we entered for there was no end to that which has no center, and an exit is not the same as a door to something else

unflinching powdered white black skin dancesa ghost dance around me
and i don’t remember dying or taking wit the dead but they take my hands and put gravedir on them, and roots of trees to holy to touch, and they show me how in little bites to bind this all togethere in small chunks, the fruit of some uncreature’s womb, the placenta sack the harvested bit, grown inside out on little wire hooks, agony escalating the hormones in the food until it all hits you at once like the adrenaline
that’s why the kids always want the fucked ones. they figure they;ey can run each other through this and strip them out of their boringness, and make a truly amazing drug.

brother, to piss there is to piss big. you going to eat a man it’s going to be something else and i don’t care if you kill a hundred men in justificaiton, when it’s just one and the evil is equaled or bettered by the good, but the taste of it just can’t bebeaten

Technorati Tags: book of the labyrinth, dream

nonsense 5

locust woman with empty sockets, wearing a red sweater and looking sad, lost, the corners of her mouth drooping down in insectile folds of crapace or skin

stone in the overgrowth, there might be letters carved

a small bone-faced girl with her head to the side, a flower wilting in her hair, a stick in her hand

for just this one time now there is a clown man in the doorway his terror face scrambling up under the makeup i can see his jaunty hat tipping toward the door and out, his frightened hair standing striaght, the mouth of his like bloody wound oozing puss out the side of his lip, his eyes born of the undreamt hatreds of mindless space, outside the world, outside time, his tongue and teeth a merry massacre

ridiculous

beetle or roach i can’t tell it’s legs crinkcled up toward the sky, dead and scraping the air unmoving, lifeless little unfluttering wings broken one sticking out beneath the hard shell

sometimes we just jump up and down and up and down until no one listense to our bouncing bouncedness over and over it’s like we dono’t make sense but i do i make so much sense always talking rihtly listen listen there is an old man down in the bushes his beard is white but really green, his face is losg among the trees but i have seen him smiling at me

there is the smell of semen in the air, and i don’t think this time it was me

i don’t really now what a theta wave is
but it seems remarkable

if the dead could talk to me through white noise, what would they say, and mayb they are talking, show me the surreal places, i’m listening closely as much as i can, there are dreams and unheralded expances of space and time laying out in fron of me. listen listen listen

sometimes i can’t find where i’m trying to go and i just listen to the strangest sounds of what might have once been home
the slipperspeakwhisper of dark and dreadful things i feel some kind of sympathy empathy famiily listening to the sibbilant uttering

things got better but then quickly worse, crawling along the outside of a house, the pockmarked concrete looks ghost-white-purlple in the moonliihgt, i don’t know wny i hesitated but i did and now she’s going to be seen and she’s clambingering up one side of the ditch i can see her hand reaching out and i lean down but then i only grab air, she’s gone and i don’t know if she slipped or fled or if i simply woke up from or two a place that wasn’t just moments before

a man walks up to me hunched over wearing a long coat and wide brimmed hat that covers most of his face, he has a cane, gnarled and carved grotesquely in one hand, and the clack of it on stone over and over makes me uncomfortable and nervous. the dust around us from his motion is all that i can see. he hopens his mouth to speek but all i hear is the hum of insects. if he has eyes at all they are hidden by the hat.

mans head bent down an ugly red vein running along the top of his head, looks angry and infected against the yellow of his skin, the gray of his hair like wires from a filthy brush, he turns his face back to me mouth slimy-wet with saliva he can’t seem to keep from doing that, there is a wetspot on the wall and wood where he’s been resting his head. it’s filthy but he belongs to an old friend and i can’t just kick him onto the street, but he does only harm and no good for m.

what did you saay to her to make her act like that
i didn’t say anything it was someone oelse
don’t lie i saw you speaking with her and then she turned and ran and cried
i only told her what she asked me to
what did she ask you
why dies any of it matter
and i told her only about how sexy her legs were in that skirt
and she said stop to be serious and i said that only her sweet silky legs and warm pink pussy made any difference in the univere
and she told me that iw was supppppowd to be some kind of healer holy man
and i said i’m an excellent lover and something of a charlatan, but only for the fun
and she began to stiffen and cry and i just slipped my hand down her thight
and she shrieked and ran away
as if my answer was not enough for her
and i said but this is what there is (i calleed after her, loudly)
and she i don’t know might have been crying from treatment, or perhaps only because she knew i wasright
and could not at that moment turn that black desparation innt wanton sex
but that just means i wouldn’t date her
i mean if you can’t fuck in the face of a realized oblivion, when can you
is what i always ask

here they come from mikles around, and there are no better dancers in the whole of the island, nor even in the mainland, i would dare say but that it is so large and there are so many people that i might not mmatter if i become the best at the dear ance, they many not have one or it may be mostly gone by the time i join you, because the year of the yew tree had arrived like my father said it would
and i must plant fast, so fast, always with the shadow of the yew in mind
never standing too long in its shadow
for that way lies madness and one day to death
i have asked about the yeyw and it only kills and kills and kills.

once there was a man with a hammock and a hammer, but they had no treese

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untitled

“The only grace of man is sin; you’ve done no wrong, my son.”

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dreammemory 1

i know that there were 4 rooms in the basement, and all terrifying, but two with some kind of truly threatening dread, i know this though only after i crawled back up out of one of the inky black spaces.

the faded-green-white of things flash-lit by my light in the dark, only flickering on for moments, wasting for whatever reason no battery, perhaps knowing i have little to spare. and in those flashes i can see the white gleaming translucent-skin-skulls of demons waiting, only to have them turn to plastic buckets and draped cloth on chairs moments before they turn to strike. they are no less goblin for it.

there is a long rusted steel chain that i climb out through, or climbed down through, and i do not remember what it was i came to look for, but after glancing about the realization of where i am and what could be about me strikes and i climb, somehow at this moment while afraid not panicked, until i have closed the door below me and realized the 4 rooms that were nearby.

4 rooms in the basement.

the book of the tower.
the book of the labyrinth.
the book of the mirror.
the book of legion.

two of these i fear more than the others, my death in very real and decaying hands waits for me in two, but i do not know which two. samael will read to me, he will read to me his words from the books, and i will find the basements deep below the surface of the earth, and though they may not be the same i know that they, with fell chance and terror, know of the other and round behind me and about me, until my mind is driven before and behind, lurching side to side, wild and slashing like a blooded and angry boar.

Technorati Tags: dream, samael

to the wind

dumas i will call myself silent as i can never be
and angelic holy as i have never been,
samael perhaps as beast and god do strive
so black the demon side his face and wondrous pure the other

but neither these i find myself, instead but man, as man.

masked and draped i am more naked now than i
have ever been, exposed and bare as no more
fear can mar my sentiment

this is not to teach you anything.
this is not to make you acolyte.
ignoring will change your life no more than might attention paid
it is only i that begin to change as i speak, becoming something that i cannot unmediated be.

a new kind of story, woven into the fabric of the technology around us, photographs of notes and videos of raving, the soft whisper of pornographic image conjured in voice.

Eliade’s shaman had an underworld beneath those feet, into which plunging down the long shaft or up the world tree much the same, ascending into the sky, and further to the celestial gods.

but i know only one way down. the old stone path won’t open for me as it did for them, try though i might to brave that mouth. it only ends someplace far down from which i can bring nothing, remember only as halting flashes of dream, all meaning forgotten by avail of consciousness shifting, until all that was profound simply cannot be made to join again together.

i have a hoarder’s fear of losing what i mistakenly feel has been mine by generation, but words as free as breath once exhaled and carried on by force not my own

to the wind i dedicate my words
to the whipping and roaring and blustering sounds
to the whispers and creaks and unsilent tongues
to the ends of the earth and back again
the drive of it whimsical, wistful, joyful, melancholy
and at the end, mad.
to madness i commit my words.
to madness and the wind.

between glossolalia and eloquence, tongues and intellect, fire and wind.

Technorati Tags: samael

faceless man 2

man on the floor and i’m not sure why he stood at all but to frigghten or moest me. but hisold body has collapsed halfway through his journey, as an age old knight waited too long, unablenow to devend any post, not even so humble as an apartment door anda sofa. his hands are curled up in what might be arthritis, but he’s clutching a pen and a piece of paper in them, and i, with a surprising lack of concern for thie freshly dead, take the note from his hand. the paper is wrinkled

someone wsa soming to see him tomorrow his little note says, but not who orwhy. just a time and a date and note that says “he’ll be here”.

is there a hoping against hope that there will come a precice oment where everything can change, and if it came would you havthe courage to take it?”i dont know if i would. so caught up in comparison and judgeement of better and worse and more and less and good and bad and want and dislike.

i sometimes worry i would turn down eternight because i didn’t know what i was getting myself into when it was offered me, and when comparing the ineffable to the here and how, perhaps it is only the hear and now that can be measured in any way to responde.

dreamwrite 3

from now until forever till the end of the world amen.

from now until the moon drops out of the sky and we all scream in blood raining down on us from on high.

amen.

standing at the edge of the abyss we look down into great geometric voids full of patterns of spacetime unmathematically complex, symbols representing illogical numbers and patterns that linger in a limbo of almost until they flicker back out to the wandering chaos, the spiral graphs of time weaving itself down and in until it is back out and you’ve lost the shape of it again, the glimpse as if for a moment crystalized reality like an infinitely dimensioned fractal, every part reflecting and re-representing every other in micro or macrocosm.

but then it slipped away like meaning, and it’s gone again until you feel an overwhelming silence. a silence that is not simply void of sound but a sucking, gasping silence, the mouth of the desiccated corpse, the hole in the universe, the forever at the bottom.

and on and on and down forever.

amen.

if there were rocks and stones at the beginning of my shaman’s hole i would feel better, like i had a place to begin. but outsider i’ve never really felt that hole, seen those rocks, known my cave. i’ve got no down to go into but my own, no great history laid before me full of tradition. shamanism is dying. the earth and man on the face of it is moving too fast, pulling tooh ard at the gaps, stretching itself too thin. and all the old spirituality is dying. you can feel it. the archaic is soothingand makes me want that kind of simple warrior life. but the universe is bigger now, and in this dmt age of hyperspace and meta human we’ve extended the reach and our awful grasp and there are now things bigger than us taking an interest. ligotti and lovecaft feel this pull of the outsiders, and i can tell you from my dreams that there is a powerful and utterly inhuman world just beyond this one, and it doesn’t care if we live or die. there’s no fair. there is a world of power and mystery and inhuman thought.

i wil make my mind inhuman, it’s the only way to fly. only way to go further. i can’t be human anymore. i like human and i like emoion and i like winningg and rjoicing and sorrowing.

but where i’m going will take all the energy i have and i don’t have itme or place for them any longer.

i don’t have a nice shaman’s hole into the earth. i just have a blank void and an empty page to write on, scraping out some small scratched off flake of infinity.

—————-

when i look out over the water i see little children with no arms, a ribcage only, vestigal hands and elbows creeping up and out at the colar bone like unwanted growths, and they talk to a woman about why they can’t let their arms pop back out into their sockets.

——————-

there is a tall clock standing at the corner of the street, but no one can read the time from its face. there is a small man who winds the spring once a day but he cannot read the time either. these people getting sick in back alleys to pass the time enough to make up for the boredom of immobile time, untracked or charted. and this small man is ugly and his face is twisted into a long thing pained expression and heis eyes are clouded ovr.

“she caan see, mommy! you hafe o beli

sacred son on”

Technorati Tags: dream

faceless man 1

it wasn’t as if i’d forgotten her, just that i didn’t know anymore if i cared to go see her. few blocks away but i don’t know that it really makes any difference. not to me, to her. strangers who’ve lived too many other lives between then and now to have anything to say that would still reach back through too long gone. she was once mother and sister to me, and i son and brother, and we were all that could be of the other, more and ever making more, that genesis unequaled, where i was born and made, and she became something new.

but chimera, i have changed too many times and been too many things and even that first self is now no more than so much makeup and hair dye and little bits of glamor to weave about the face. as real as fairy gold.

but i’ve had too much to drink and sometimes i forget what it is that makes me the thing i think i am today, and want to slip forward or back along this fractured curvature, being something else in my haze of forgetting and unremembering. and maybe i’ll be that brother for a moment, or a son.

down the pavement up a long sloping hill, music of car radios and open windows around me, long open streets mostly empty, going places on their own as oblivious to me, i no better to their places and goings, simply passing. dark flight of stairs to my right two kids are in some kind of untender embrace, but whether passion or inexpert fingers make them clumsy, they freeze as i pass as if caught in some punishable act. i scarcely turn my head but i am half a block away before i again hear hushed whispers from them.

set my bottle down on the curb, almost empty but warm enough to match with had enough for done. step down into the street and cross, looking in the empty windshields of parked cars, black empty reflections, my face translucent in reflection, a patchwork of leather interiors and seatbelts. sometimes when i look back at me in these moods i see her instead. or i think i do now because she’s so near.

i wonder absently if she can feel me nearby, like i think i can feel her. i have the luxury of knowing she’s near, it’s her hometown and i saw her car drive by me on the street yesterday, though i only caught the side of sunglasses and dark hair, i’m sure it was her. i wonder if we still have that precious link we always said we’d keep no matter what, though i’ve long since cut it like it was an umbilical cord, though she never really did anything to deserve it. still she’d have done the same, was doing the same, when i… when i ended it the first time.

sex is the easy part to give up, i think, or so we tell ourselves before we make the kind of “end this thing now” decisions we become inclined to make. turns out it’s not really so easy, it’s the part that lingers in your body after the feelings have finally talked themselves out of each other and you just kinda vaguely remember the shades of dead conversations and faded memories made as much intentionally musty to hide and discredit as anything else. but the sex you remember if it was good, because it stays with your body’s memory whether your brain wants to forget it or not. and that’s what i’m remembering of her now, my cock as full of nostalgia as my thought. wanting to fuck, the way we fucked before, with pure abandon, too young to know much other than raw and hard and fast until we were both too tired to move. the kind of fucking that’s like fighting, where you can’t stop and you can’t really breathe and you leave it all in the ring, taking nothing back with you, giving it all out right there on the sheets.

i haven’t fucked like that in a long time. girls only for need now, just to pass an few hours of stink and shame under feverish lights, just when i need to be clear enough to write or think again. girls like a shot of something strong and cheap, not enough to knock it out of you, just enough to wake you up with the sharp ugly bite of it. even inspiration has long since numbed to the hooker’s hand job, nothing about the human condition seems poignant in that moment anymore, i just leave trace dna evidence on my own belly and then she leaves, as bored as me.

round a corner and there’s her car, decommissioned taxi, still drab yellow, and i try to think of some dry connection between impotence, age, and the taxi that won’t ever carry anyone anywhere around the city for a buck again, and the only things that come to mind are mostly rubbish, better said before and nothing i’d keep to sound smart in a conversation later.

light’s on in one of two apartments in the little split house, and i don’t really know which one is hers. i walk up to the one with the light on, thinking at least if it’s a stranger i won’t have woken them. i knock and wait, and i hear some shuffling around inside. there’s a voice but i don’t know if it was to me or not. i knock again with less certainty, and there is a louder voice, but not the same one, and a rustling that stops at the door. the knob doesn’t turn and i imagine an eye at the hole, but only for a moment, then nothing. the light goes out, then another brighter one comes on from somewhere else in the room, and there is a definite loud voice now, speaking through the door, to me. i can’t make out words but it just seems like they’re asking who i am or what i want. that kind of noise sounds the same in most languages. i can’t think of a clear way to say why i’m here, or who i’m after, so i just say her name instead.

“Janet Ross. I’m looking for Janet Ross.”
There’s a noise that has more of an “N” and dismissive sound to it than a “oh yeah i know who you’re looking for” sound. it really hints more at “you should leave or we might decide to push a gun through just the crack of the door with the chain on, and wave it in your direction if you don’t leave” anyway, so i desist.

Off put i think that knocking on the door next to this almost has to be her, but now i’ve almost forgotten her again, intrigued by these people and their strangely bright light, their many muffled voices, accents foreign and unaltered from exposure to the american flavor of english. the sound of their voices almost makes english seem unlikely, their voices and tongues producing sounds that have no corollary in romantic or germanic languages that i know. sillibant at times, then melodic, then crystalline like the moment of shattering.

the bright light goes off and is replaced with red. and the door knob turns until it clicks, but no one pulls it further open. and i am long since gone down this road, hoping the moment would turn into this, some anticipation of wonder or horror, my first lover’s face and sex forgotten in this magnificent unfolding of bizarre event. i push open the door and there is a man sitting on the only couch, the only furniture, staring at me with blind or cataract covered eyes, his hands folded neatly on his lap, his feet unshoed though his dress is formal to the point of suit and tie. he has on a hat as well, but it has a band around it that has too many colors, even under the all red light, for it to be simply a part of this same outfit. he stands as i walk over the threshold and extends his hand directly to me, his blindness causing him no inability to find and clasp my hand heartily. he opens his mouth and speaks in the same alien singing crashing hissing discord, and he emphatically whisperes the word “Ensoth” to me over and over, like a pass code or a secret. i simply nod and try to shake his hand into extricating but he holds until i’m in paint, shaking now his whole body with ensoth ensoth ensoth until he finally collapses to the floor.

my welcoming committee is dead, and the lights come back on, too bright at first but then dimmer, and as my eyes adjust from the red everything else looks too greenblue to be right. A door to a back bedrooom slams hard and i turn my head to see who has closed it and by the time i look back the old man’s body has been re-up-taken, vanished someone has cleaned it utterly from the scene where i held its death grip on my hand and its surreal warning until it died.