FORBIDDEN FRUITS

At first, I was born and I had all I wanted.

Then I turned 1 and was told what I could not want.

And so my longing was born. My belated shadow.

At 2, it was forbidden to whine about longing,

so I learned to hum and sing and whistle and cry.

At 3, it was electric plugs and switches that were prohibited,

so I learned to beg for one more story before lights-out.

At 6, it was colorful candy that was vilified,

so I stuck my fingers in the Hungry Caterpillar book.

At 9, it was lovely laziness that could ruin my life,

so I wrote stories about princesses who had it all and lied around all day.

At 12, it was sultry smoke that was made to look ugly,

so I drew pictures of punk girls smoking cigarettes that they couldn’t smell.

At 15, it was understood that the boy next door might as well be in China,

so I wrote him and he wrote me back.

At 20, I moved out and, finally, I had it all.

By 30, ten years were lost to satisfaction. 

I had had it all so much and so many times

that I was tired of it.

So I broke the last taboo 

in my feminist family

and had a baby.

I breastfed him until he was 2, hoping to satiate his longing,

So then he learned to laugh himself to sleep.

I was pleased he barely whined.

At 3, it was electric plugs and switches, and so his longing was born.

His delayed shadow. 

And my shadow was now layered, filtered & transformed.

The opposite of longing is not the loss of desire,

it is the caring for love acquired.

At 20, he will have moved out and until then,

I will take care to leave room for his shadow when I hold his hand,

paying as close attention to his ethereal as to his material.

And maybe, he can have it all, in a way, in his way, on his way

to fulfillment, never needing to reach the end of his desire.

TRANSPORT

I sit on the toppled tree trunk and await the elephant. The seat is hard and ridged with grot, but smooth from the polishing by repeated bottoms.
A purring, roaring stench of gases rips around me as sleek panthers, creaking rhinos and whinging work horses fart on home to feed and breed.
Soft, sticky slips of air slide down vines, pierced here and there by rare sharpened sunbeams.
The canopy buzzes and crackles with the communication clouds of insects overhead,  zooming blood-suckers collide into the milky-webs of carnivorous mummifiers.

A woman sits on the trunk next to me. Her stench is so strong, I can taste her. A pungent musk emanating from under her clothes fingers its way into my nose, plays some octaves on the organ of my tongue, huffing and puffing onto my tastebuds. Her greying tan skin tones make my palate salivate. I look over and she blends perfectly into the background of flaking mud. She may be well camouflaged but the rancid smell is a dead giveaway.

A camouflaged storm bashes through the jungle corridors, leaves explode, the insects tornado down hungrily. Our elephant arrives and wobbles to a halt. I feed it some nickel nuts. He wraps his muscular trunk around me and shoves me inside. Others are already stewing within, their mumbles faintly echoing the great rumbling stomach. Locals pick the best ribs to sit on. The rest of us grab onto slippery intestines, dangly nerve endings, and eachother. We fuse together as the swelter seals us.
We become a many-headed mass, a puzzle of poking bones and rounded drooping flesh. Coughed, sneezed, expectorated: waves of germs ripple out. Our breaths attempt to skip over them but the germs are patient and hang out, spreading slowly in the dense air.
The mass stumbles about as our elephant barrels and charges, and stops short.

Carne con Ojos - we are a big swaying lump of mottled meat with lucid liquid eyes poking out at the surface.
Every time we stop, I peek through as the entrance gapes and lets in a circle of outside information. A raw red halo surrounds each passenger as they enter. Beyond them, I can see the familiar landmarks confirming the uncomfortable distance to my destination.

At the first stop, I can see the Cooperative Trees in their neat rows, with their perfectly layered branches whereupon the dominant breed tends to their nests. Blue-jean birds, with their rubbery white feet and synthetic feathers. They are carrion birds and can pluck you bald if provoked. Gaggles of them get on the transport as other gaggles get off.

Then darkness and more barreling and charging. The powerful elephant covers incredible lengths of land this way. Then stomps to a halt again.

At the next stop, my ride's viscous maw slurps open to reveal the noxious Flower Fronts. Giant blooms, larger than our elephant, plop open their purple pink and puce petals to entice us with overwhelming odors of sweetness and distilled favors. Brightly confused hummingbirds sip at the forbidden drops before being sucked in by the slobbering sinuous stigma. Bloom-tenders hover about outside. This species dedicates itself to the flower: after a long morning ritual involving much licking by the stigma, the tenders apply petals to their sculpted bodies. But beware! One wrong-way touch of their shimmied velour outfits can end in grievous injury. Their footwear involves long heeled stinging thorns. Even their prattle is dangerous and can strip your bones before you know it. Only nectar zombies get off here.

Knowing my stop is next, I use deep jungle leeching techniques  to move to the exit: I bite into the salty fleshy mass until my skin is released from mutuated suction. I have to repeat the process in the total obscurity until I reach the fetid pedestal by the out-hole.
Passengers are screaming to be let out, others groan from the depressurization bubbles that push, pop and squeeze through them. Little gasps of rotten banana and aged kaki fruit break out of the bubbles then dissipate.

"Faces" © Lilia Mazurkevich

Finally, my stop. I struggle with the others to separate my limbs from the general mass and dive out with the ejection cycle.
Steaming and jumbled, we pick ourselves up and apart. My skin prickles with habitual distaste as I witness the inevitable lump of random limb that sits congealing to the ground. Some poor sod is going to have to get a graft.

I gather up a deep breath of river pong. Even the black furry flies and tough corner crocodiles can't keep me from enjoying this. I know this river, this is my way, my territory. My friendly neighborhood stench. I dive in the thick waters and let my traumatized body float downstream as the glowing leaves above wash me with their cleansing songs of clorophyll and oxygen. Breathing deeper and stretching out of transport compression, I ignore the unidentified tangles of roots and eels that bump and nibble my fingers.

A foreign bird flits into my field of reverie and calls to me with clipped squawks. My neighbor. Ever-present. I can never tell whether she appreciates or loathes me. I've never seen her blink. I've never seen her ruffled. 

I scramble up the banks, mud squelching between my toes. I stoop through the hole into my home, dripping all over the floor. My hair is pouring water down my legs, tantalizing and also slightly annoying. I should dry myself but first I must turn on the air conditioner quick. My skin prickles, but this time- with pleasure.
I flick on all the house lights, the answering machine, my computer, the t.v. and throw a meal into the microwave.
Hummm Sweet Home!

photo © idogu

Happy New Number 201102

numerical alchemy
music of the spheres
yearly incantations of renewal

a looking glass year
as two jumps into the whole
and splits into ones
ones bounce off each other
and become impregnated with potential too

---
one winter to another
the purity and terrible beauty of life at a standstill
momentum lulled and colors buried deep
we wish you tenderness

---
one spring and another
eyes and leaves open and shut and finally...blooms exploding to seed
the wheel revs up, colors alight and stick to the surface
may you humm with fresh energies

---
one summer so another
the complicity of heat, sharing of fullness
the apex critical with buzzing, beings plump with desire
this wish is for us, you and us, somehow somewhere, celebrating and cerebrating and coeurelating together


---
one fall to the next
resuming movement, gaining speed and vision
the harvesting of mature dreams, the raking of old and faded ones
we wish you the strength and solace of understanding



one to one to one to one
to
two to one to one
to
two to one to two
to me and we and us and you

the dance of the cycles spirals on
may the flow be with you

Jerry’s Games

“You’ll get square eyes” shouted Jerry’s mother from the kitchen. “Why don’t you turn that thing off and do something else?”

“There isn’t anything else!” screamed Jerry. Only four years old, but already he was back-talking like a teenager.

Thirty years later and Jerry was still hunched over a gaming screen. He tapped his square-rimmed glasses against the side of his head and chuckled as he remembered his mother’s warning. His slight smile faded as the game turned and he sighed thinking she should have worried more about his posture.

‘The hunchback’ was his nickname throughout most of the gaming parlors in Las Vegas. Jerry wasn’t really that hunched but it came to him automatically when he sat down to lose money. Or to ‘recycle paper’ as he called it in front of his daughter, Emily. Bright as desert dawn, the little 6 year old wasn’t fooled. But she appreciated his funny shame. Jerry’s wife, Linda, appreciated it much less.

Jerry’s favorite thing to do after a hard day of gambling, was to bring his daughter on a sunset roller-skating round of the neighborhood. His back would straighten as he would get up on his wheels, ‘2x2’s he called them, old-school skates. Emily preferred the more modern inline skates.

The first time they ever passed his childhood house, Jerry pointed it out. “That’s where Daddy grew up.” Emily scoped out the surroundings and as she wheeled around her father, she questioned him about his childhood: was this the street he played on? How many friends did he have? What were his favorite games?

“There is nothing else!” Jerry screamed. But in the silent absence of response from his mother, while she played her daily bridge game at the kitchen table, Jerry gazed blankly out the window at the boys who passed by on roller-skates. Jerry had no such friends. Only the children of his mom’s bridge partners who would sometimes come by. They would play silently side-by-side, destroying each other on the video screen.

It took Jerry all the courage he could muster to rent the skates at the roller rink. Eighteen years old, but with the longing of a four year old, Jerry took to the rink and closed his eyes. His back relaxed upwards and he wheeled, for hours. At first he just let his weight bring him forward, round and round the rink, but eventually the blaring Michael Jackson tunes woke him up and his feet started to weave in time.

“Isn’t it dangerous to skate with glasses on?”

Linda was sixteen and very sweet. She would have to wait another sixteen years before getting bitter.

“You been at it, haven’t you?” Linda began the tired old conversation like a ritual. Jerry had run out of all excuses and any explanations. He just looked at his wife, her exhausted face and clothes coated with waitressing and cleaning dreariness. He simply replied with his usual white flag: “I’ll make dinner.”

“You’ll end up losing more than just your games.” Linda was beginning to sound like a television public announcement. But Jerry couldn’t help it if he woke up every morning feeling luckier than the last, hungrier and impassioned for the potential fulfillment of a win. If he could only add another zero to his last big win. It was only a few months ago but odds were Lady Luck, or ‘Esmeralda’ as he thought of her, would release her little hunchback soon. All his years of praying silently would pay off and the big big win would allow him to do something else.

Jerry slouched into his seat at the Paris Las Vegas casino. He always avoided the high-rolling area around the ‘Salon des Tables’. He was superstitious about pretension. He wanted Esmeralda to notice him for his humility. He placed his bet and as his glasses slid down his nose, he heard the comforting finality of the croupier’s call: “Les jeux sont faits.”

Nothing more to do but wait.

When Jerry finally turned off his gaming console, he sat in the dark and listened to his mother’s friends babbling and clinking and shuffling. A cloud of mentholated smoke hung at the door. Feeling the emptiness growing around him, Jerry quickly turned on the television and stared.

“Well, this is something else,” thought the four-year old. “Isn’t it?”

All You Do Is Done To Be Undone...................... (a skip-rop)

Es la hora
de devolver la
dignidad
a si, tierra

Hemos cogido y ahora escogimos
nuestro debido en la semilla
Olvidar antes de nacer
division, sumacion,
hem' crecido
mas grande
que
el nido
ahora volamos o callamos
desde las perspectivas
mas altas
los nuestros funden
y se confunden
desparecen
hasta
que en muchos
somos uno

y nuestra bola
si que mola
JODER
y tu, puto chulo
mordiente el culo
vete a la mierda
o hazte compost
pero con respeto
hombre
siempre con respeto



(respect to La Mala y Bebe)

Summer night's wish

Last night I made a wish
a deep wish, with a roaring heart
and a face pressed against the night sky.

The stars were moving.

They fluttered and flashed shooting sharp red sparks
saudering the sky from point to point.
Planes connected the dots and
satellites held up giant webs to catch the constellations.

We, prisoners of a dark orb, count up the points.

Who is winning? Who is reveling in the bigger picture?
Who can draw an exact portrait of the vast night face from memory?
fugitive moments of oneness

The step from you to a star is simply a question of fusion.
Fuse-one, refuse none, all alone

As the giants dip out of sight and north becomes relative,
new stars rise over the horizon, riding red carpets,
lining our wishes with smoke-screened promises.

We are closer than ever to the stars and yet
they remain just as distant.

When we wake in the middle of the night,
what twinkles back our eyes, what hums the dozing song?
Images glimmer, smiles making money.
Windows reflect, transparency for our humility.
The doorway lets in love, random and true.
The roof remembers Pandora and sits tight.

Last night, I went out and watched the sky dance
as the dogs wailed an ode of yearning to the bony moon
and I hummed along to the crickets rubbing out a drone
to rub into our dreams.

Last night, I wished upon a plane.
And my heart and face and stars and gods
laughed and wept
until finally I slept.

THE ORTIST

~~~image by Masha Vasilkovsky~~~

TIME: The Edge of the Last Fractal before the Next Bloom

PLACE: The Landspace Contimuum

1. Once upon a time, twice upon a time, thrice upon a time...that's six times upon a time now, henceforthwith dot.

2. The Landspace was lush, the time planes were synchronized to a gentle buzz with flurries of excentricity and inebriating odors.

3. There, was i me myself her she we us&them ours, not you yourself & they but you and all of us. you & me. flee. be. tree. 1, 2, 3. Ready steady go. No time is no time like space.

4. Four, knock on the door. The time of the Ortist has come. The digits show the way.

5. Messages from the stream. Order from chaos.

6. So the landspace goes under attack and riproarers bellow, beckon, behold. The Rhizome uproots, implodes, rises to reveal our connection.

7. Chaos to lyrical. Life teaches us to dance. Our teacher is the hub and the shuttle through the weave of our complex emotions. We follow her as she follows us. Our heads raised, faces upturned burnt by the sparks from our minds. Bodies spinning, intertwining.

8. At night the bird beeps mournfully, a faint heartbeat of our vitality as slumber whispers in our ears. Reassures our realities that they are not intentional programs but real and honest, and random, and destined, and parallel and unprecedented. Interconnected being.

9. The Promised Land is molded into our own flesh and blood.

~~~image by Masha Vasilkovsky~~~