New Souls

The roots, thicker and more twisted than any serpent, squirmed and curled from the tree, divided the Garden of New Souls into nearly equal parts. Two flowers nestled at the Y where two of the three diverged—one down, to the land of the Half-Dead, and one the wiser still follow to a land of goat’s milk and almost finished walls—and though this in itself was not unusual, crowded as the Garden was with flowers, each of the thousands perfectly different, the tree took notice. And unfortunately for the fresh-blossoming flowers, so did the moth.

It had been been meandering, an all-too-comfortable smirk spread across its minuscule face, when it spied a target. In the few sunbeams who managed to pierce the canopy like elf-shot arrows, flowers glinted and fluttered, glittered like falling butterfly wings, and one grew so close to the root it looked connected. A long stem shot up, bent under unseen breezes but somehow still supporting symmetrical spatters of leaves and a tiny flower, puffed silver and lavender.

The gypsy moth grinned and zoomed in to inspect the fragile thing with every-angle eyes, but when it was only a few inches away, a puff of warm air burst up, sending it tumbling. The air carried with it a new scent, a heady smell more invigorating than wine, more exhilarating than new love, a gift that ghosted over the moth’s wings and surrounded it in a cloud.

Even through faceted, red-tinted eyes, the moth could see the sproutling plant curled around its former target. A nest of oval leaves shimmered—green through one lens, blue through another—below scattered clusters of bright flowerbuds just beginning to open. One shone, at the base of the taller plant, yellow with flecks of red, like the sun had planted it herself.

A careful observer could have heard the moth’s tinny laughter as he swooped, lazily, closer and closer, but even the three gray women were distracted arguing over the fates of newly-made gods. And so the bug flew on, rubbing prickly feet together and landing where the pale roots emerged from the ground to soak up the sunlight and open more yellow flowers. Like seeds, the dark eggs were thrust deep into the rootstalk, too small to be noticed for many lifetimes.

Only the tree would be unsurprised, uncounted years later, long after the flowers had bloomed fully and floated off to other planes, returning time after time to compost and rejoin the world, when those eggs hatched. Slick with evil, the crawling caterpillars slunk down veins and up capillaries, taking sharp turns to fingers and brain, licking and tasting and demolishing what they could.

First Sight

My bad on skipping last week… I started one segment five different times before I just ripped my face off instead. And tonight, I’ve found a place to live. I also back-posted some filler poetry for last week.

~

Sunlight floated green on the air, drifting like snow flakes. I could smell the fresh spring—new flowers and sprouting antlers and spilled blood, because baby birds have to eat—and followed my nose downstream.

My foot steps wound through spindly trees, branches brushing my cheeks like a lover’s eyelash and pushing me towards the little stream. Bright, reflective water burbled and glinted under the sun, ribboning through the moss-strewn forest with the sharp dexterity of a knife. Multi-layered melody burst from my throat like a flock of birds, but I did not sing; the song came from me like spider silk, drew me along like Minotaur yarn.

The stream doubled back like thread through the needle’s Eye, curving around a pale ash tree that stretched too tall towards the sky. You sat at the base, one leg extended, toes slipping away with pebbles and dirt. Water splashed against your waist, elbows, legs tangled with current-sanded roots, drifting and mixing like paint. I looked at you, pale lips and unguarded eyes, saw the hair dripping down your cocked, quizzical head, and my thoughts bubbled clear like the deepest icy spring buried beneath the broadest shade tree.

Soft, reedy whistling spun away from you in drifting scraps, caught on the breeze like the scent of warm pie.

I watched you—lips undulating in unthinking music, twiggy fingers wound through dandelion stems, palms yellow and cheerful with pollen. Your eyes were far away, downstream, until a thin, brittle branch cracked beneath my bare toes.

Your eyes found mine like sunflowers chasing the sun, but they were pale moon shadows. Glimmer-gray with shifting faces, shining with a light I’d never known, they snapped to mine. Things swam as my nerves ripped free of my surroundings, and I felt bones shatter between my sure fingers.

Memories flooded me, coated my veins in changing tattoos. Not memories I could recall in my own life, but they were mine, without a question, pouring over the gates to remind me. Red blossomed into my vision, shutting out the warm day like falling curtains, thunking to cover a scene gone wrong .  And the thunk alerted me that something had gone wrong, that the warm green day was being covered with tattered pasts…

Blinking hard, fighting my own unknown memories, I stepped forward and reached out my hand. I grinned even as I felt the memory’s urging at the back of my head, tugging at my willpower, my friendly face, like serrations clawing through a thick rope, fraying threads pulling loose one by one.

I grinned, my friendliest grin, and reached out my hand. “Hello,” I said, impeccably. “I’m Dyon,” I murmured in the subdued language of those who live and breathe the woods.

You grasped my hand with fingers that felt like they might break apart, melt like a spun fragments of sugar in the rain, and your pale lips curved nearly into confusion.

In struggle,

Bargain Puppy

Dream: The Last Day Ever

Girls with green hair are running helter skelter through the landscape of my ambition, over the cragging peaks of the mountains of my dreams–cold, steep places filled with skittering rocks and watched over by the same solemn condor, turning slow circles over each peak in turn. Girls with their every inch tattooed come crashing over summits, rushing through canyons, their biceps bulging with flowers of inimitable strength, their eyes and noses strong.

Chased by the hounds of Artemis, deer-horned dogs, they sleep with swollen eyes at the graves of Orpheus and they alone know he is an ancient Afghan man from the time before gods. They alone can see his bird’s beak nose and bird’s wing eyes. They alone know he was buried unsung in an unnamed French cemetery. They alone know it is–it will always be–nineteen seventy-one. They drank the Kool Aid.

Their nails have been worn roughshod from scratching at their rusting iron eyelids, eyes like caves frozen in horror at the destruction and the degradation. They think they caused it, poor dears, running as they do in stilettos made of melted-down tanks and still-sparking nuclear weapons. No one knows why their hair is green, if they are so jaded or if they had it tattooed in days not long since of surly-faced idealism, of hulking kindness. They cannot speak. Every night they trek to the ends of the earth, to an unnamed graveyard, and sleep nose deep in the soft, tilled earth beneath a towering ash tree where a giant vulture roosts, eyes shining and brimming and wide. Every night their blank eyes and grasping ears and malnourished souls see dream after spinning, bewildering dream, hear songs which play only on unmanned harps made from the heart strings of poets and dead gods. Every morning they breathe bright and fresh, every morning fill their rusting skulls with clods of earth. They do not know you cannot overdose on nature.

In five years, perhaps, after untold tries, they will give up on suicide and be led to the kitchen–where all the knives are–and because dirt is not convictable, they will not be charged with malicious intent when they carry these same knives with them to Judgment Day, but they will be charged with conspiracy to blaspheme when they stab the Holy Ghost in his spineless, whining, immortal, pacifist heart. Jesus will sterilize the gaping-empty hole with a bottle of Kentucky’s finest moonshine while the devil lights another morning star (half crack, half morning glory, half factory-synthesized tobacco). “Industrial revolution complete,” he reports to the boss in the upstairs corner office while green-haired girls lead one thousand mules from cotton-candy clouds to molten shores.

The beach is crowded today. The whole world has come to party, barbecuing puppies over the smoldering remains of reality. Talk show hosts wade in the strawberry-red sea, pulling antiwhales back from the waves wih apologies for everything that got them the job in the first place. “Siva is dead,” they cry, “and the god damned queer deserved it.” Infants hold a sign in their clasping fingers, a sign of a night-blue god dancing an Irish jig on the balls of the cowboy of ignorance–eight millennia in hell, it says, and only four more days until the beginning of eternity.

On the last day ever, the bastard child of Kali and Gaia, whose birth killed both zir mothers mothers a full seven seconds ago, comes: a whirling dervish with long green hair and one white wing, quadriceps like a butterfly, comes stomping from ocean to ocean, shy one lifetime and hard-lipped the next. Zie rides a flaming Razor scooter to the earth beneath the ash tree, furrows the loam with zir uncouth finger- and toenails, flings seeds with the fury of a child caught in tantrum. As dandelions flower and puff among the Three Sisters’ roots, zie throws zir head back and, throat bursting like a roadkilled rabbit, howl-sings to call back the green-haired girls. They cry aloud in sightless, mute wonder and with the first words of their unheard song, Kali, reborn, claws one long arm up through the deep dark soft dirt. She shakes clods free from her thickly knotted hair; each clod falls, breaking into a cloud of sunshine. Sunflowers unfurl as trees shoot long, secret roots.

The Razor scooter, left forgotten at the edge of the clearing around the ash tree, lights the sky to a wild flame. The atmosphere burns with a vengeance, silhouetting a low-flying, slow-circling bird, as the world explodes into life.

In struggle,

Bargain Puppy

The Event Horizon

I may not have noticed Dyon’s return right away, but Calla’s never been too subtle.

I’m wandering empty streets still sticky from the day’s tarry sun, barefoot and rip-kneed. The new moon shines invisibly, falsely illuminating my pointless meanders; I keep trying to be empty-headed, but my legs keep bringing me back to the sickly, glass-sparkling puddle where the first fine, tinkling notes fell and cracked. My mind keeps taking me back to that dark alcove.

She melts in and out of thin, creeping saplings’ shadows and I almost don’t see the thick, muscular outline glide-stomping across the too-lit street. She stops right in front of me and I see her. The street light above my head buzzes out like a dying bee, and soon the rest are gone too, flickering out one by one, taking their shaking light thoughtlessly. She smiles and I see the rims of her eyes glow—the event horizon.

She waits, wrapped in a cloak of night, thoughts and noises held close to her body. I wait for her, sucking slow breaths deep into my lungs and letting them out in tiny, trembling gasps. When she finally speaks, her few words hang heavy in the stagnant night air:

“Be careful. He’s back.”

I say nothing. I try not to look at her, try not to acknowledge what she said, but my eyes can’t help but look at the dark mouth that released those words. Treacherous self. Her hand reaches out, pale-shining hennaed palm up, brings my uncertain chin up until her eyes catch mine. Her dark pupils bore into me with the force of an obsidian avalanche; I feel the painful ink rushing again, fresh, remembering.

“Oh, Ashley. I’m too late.”

Mutely, I nod, holding her gaze with my self-destructive obstinance. I can never find my throat around her–Calla, with all her soft words and caring hands, scares me more thoroughly than even Red Calla. More unreasonably than even he does.

Her hands, strong and sure, grip my shoulders. Pull me into her. Tuck my head into that all-encompassing throat. Smooth my back like I’m sobbing–maybe she knows I should be. Her hair hangs heavy around me, covers my head in an impenetrable curtain, and I thank the darkness within the darkness.

“You don’t smell like hair grease anymore,” I’m mumbling into her numerous knotted necklaces, surprised to be talking at all. I just want to break the silence filling me, shatter it so I can stop thinking again, sink back into the confusion that kept me safe for so long.

“You remember that, kid?” She could be flattered, or amused. “That was a long time ago, and I don’t do that fake Egyptian princess shit no more…” Her mind drifts and her hands still. But then she tenses. “You can’t go back there, my little Ashley. It’s too late to escape now, and I wouldn’t let you even if you could. You know that, you’ve always known that, haven’t you?”

I nod again, pressing agreement into her chest. She cares too much.

In struggle,

Bargain Puppy