Neptune’s Bed
The delights of Neptunian effects in everyday life.
Neo and Classic
She’s turning classic, giving her own meaning to the term; narrowing down the choice, detailed somewhat scant, precision stripped to it’s bareness, it’s natural sequence, towards her neo-persona. Her attire mimics her stride, the now subsided curves of her limbs hide in asexual elegance, they dissolve in the comings and goings of morning coffee, the routines of cats, the crowded city street at noon. She’s polishing the silver, but only the pieces she intends to keep; arranges the china, but only for real and good tea. She washes her hair with the uncomplicated suds of a boutique formula, that may last half the year. Her beauty regimes now high end simplicity, barely a fuss when she massages her skin with primrose oil. She’s letting the techno-boom be, whatever she can accomplish is fine, no push. Her efforts follow the precise formula: desire plus outcome divided into what means are at her disposal right now, and won’t worry beyond that point. The world’s gotten so meta-modern, she knows it’s beyond her and her formula for peace. She’s returning to her future, full neo-classical woman. She demands her foods be real, nourishing, prepared so that her body feels sure it’s been loved. She’ll only listen to textured sound, layered music, vibrant creations worth her time, and lyrics that mean something more than the obvious. She wants clean air, her days fluid, uninterrupted. Sustenance had without excessive show or exhibition, the comeback of exact restriction, to keep the natural flow of time, the ways of being that won’t push to dissociation, the ways of waiting, and kindness. She’s gone classic on her own terms. Poignant, needy, dependent love, won’t do anymore, it lost all color. Now she hunt’s for vintage classic with romantic undertones, a simple handful of healthy roses. She’s her grandmother anew, the Venusian’s version of crone, returning to the garden where her kind conceived a real home, where it came to be.
Piro and Roses
I’m going to light a match and throw it your way, I’ll be perverse, bring it all back for you, at least for a moment, a reverie to before you strayed, when your need to please took the path that looked well on paper, defaulting to the logic of Boomers, and the fluff of money. Gonna stir it up again, just for fun, at least I’ll know I tried, that I never lost faith in the fire, my secret belief in your stars, and the juicy rose that collapsed in your heart. Throw in your maths as I throw in the match, ¿what are the possibilities of brittle petals reviving from the hangover, the drunken aftermath, your broken body, and self induced amnesia? I’ll bring us back to the heat, the roses of your scientific dreams, bohemian late nights. You with your books and a cold pizza, half consumed. The perpetually unmade bed, sleepy eyes, like the deepest drop of dew on a petal of red freedom, deep fire. This is my own science experiment to throw us back. Don not try and apply your theories on it. It’s a leisurely summer morning with nothing better to do, but to dive deep in the realms we know almost nothing about, and yet light us up enough to alter the space-time continuum of this room, our spaceship. We converse. Chopra’s Quantum Healing, time travel, the mysteries of particles involved and your mind pure stone, Asscher cut semi-precious, reflecting on possible theories. One by one we climb, ascending, and your heart blooms fragrant roses. I’m feeling a tad wicked now, wanting to watch you stir, as I throw this match into our past without much thought, just a freak of piro to watch you bloom, fill in his slippers again, the spacey physics professor, the renaissance man who left us stunted. ¿Will you please free him? Give him back his books, let him find God in the beloved length of wave, speed of particle, and don’t let him stray again.
Ancient Stag
Hades in my throat, be ware. A splendid stag stands frozen in my chest, if he doesn’t summon his devil. He can see you before arrival, you shouldn’t bother him with pettiness, what your constant boredom comes up with. It’s not our fault you can’t fill in the void, not our making that you’re mental machines like to stir up the waters, scared to death you might find yourself accountable. My horned animal stands behind me, it doesn’t appreciates strangers who assume, or familiars who insist on doing so. We have a road, we’re not idle, it’s our nature to stand guard. Tricksters believe themselves entitled, by some imagined privilege. Not here, we know you’re running from something or deflecting with a broken mirror. You cannot see the forrest and its messengers all about. My stag is nervous now, you should stop taking up our time, or pretending to be logical. Your’e damaged, just see it in the full brightness of the moon, as she peeks through the clearing, on a quiet night, then breathe and weep accordingly. We are so stern here in these woods, not one of us will soften reality for you, and yet, you might find it silly after a while, it was all about nothing. Here lives real beauty, dark as deep green, cool as a mossy hide away, silent and full of meaning, disciplined yet kind. You might be welcome if and when honesty sheds old skin, sobriety glows like an ancient moon in your eye, when you offer your pain as a new chant for all. We lead with quiet devotion, our sanctuary isn’t glamorous or golden, but elegant and ancient. Here lies your soul retrieval.
Omens on the AM
¿A flying red demon? Oh no, the scorpion fly, a real insect. He hovers huge and intimidating in the lamps potent glare, showing himself with intention, but for the moment I can only make out the blur of those chopper like, winged layers, and their high pitch rattle. Meanwhile, at the base of the barn, a toad sits unimpressed, shaded in the the damp ground. The week after my odd encounter, a small, greyish, scorpion, landed right at my feet, while in the house, out of nowhere, but definitely from above, as if thrown my way on purpose. ¿Who and why? ¿Is this mockery from some trickster entity? The woman intuitive on Youtube says be ware of backstabbing, but nobody in my vicinity makes for a potential backstabber at all. Come early next morning, I woke with a jolt, just before dawn, and sensed the seeds of it, the origins of you, the unwanted one, the illegitimate son, the outsider, the enemy, and your fated backstabbed existence. She passed down the curse. They all backstab eventually, when they tire of your aims to take off the ground, go higher, faster. The never ending demand to push ahead, as if everybody was one of your soldiers. I used to be your best ally, the most loved, the white soul, you said. But today our backstabber’s dense, terrible, revelations, bruise my brain, open up the wound, and yet, they do hold seeds of truth. You carry around your own downfall when you force open their forgotten attic; when you bring out the unacknowledged infection, when you puncture the inflammation, as you eventually do, and show yourself like the scorpion fly you are. And they can see it, then and there, the downward spiral waits at the base of the barn, where the toad watches the entrance to their very own underworld. ¿So what does this particular grey specimen want from me today, besides a whack with my flip flop? ¿More of my pity? Or shall I sit as stoic as the toad, through your next chapter of turmoil, and hope you get it right this time, as you claw your way back to safety. ¿Shall I sit here and not reach out, nor backstab, nor be the ally, but only hope, pray you are able to see the final closing, the dimming lights of your own stage of backstabbers? I’ll pray hard for it to be closing night.
Stripping Down
Let’s get bare, all out, leaving what’s true and told, nothing to add or fix. The story ends here, a chapter played to the best of its capacity, nothing better or new will come from it. Cords severed gently, no fuss, loosened knots, we’re closing up the tent. Built, used, and spent, we have several humidity stains, a few cracks, and some peeled walls. We’re weathered and salted by all of it, and aware: we must complete the other half of the tale, and we want to. People have slipped away without too much racket, maybe a few grunts here and there. Regrets finally put on their proper shelves, memories found a trap door to come and go with dignity. We own nothing, we’re guests, administrators in a way, creating environments conduit to many tomorrows, lives that must be lived toward horizons our gaze might never touch. We cannot fathom it yet, all that will unfold, but this is us now, and it is its own perfection. We are enough, we’re servants, travellers, but never tourists, because we are beyond the randomness. Our steps are as real as the symbols revealed in Earth’s breath, the utterances of her animals, her windy spirits in the trees, her changing patterns in the clouds. Totemic visitors appear in our dreams, summer nights quiver while flashing messages light up the sky. Our bodies tremble, they are vessels in the process of a change in voltage. We are taking the back road now, where the mother turns to crone. She walks by herself, stripping away what she believed she ought to carry, what she could never fully trust to bloom right. It’s our turn, abated of defence, security, as bare as when young and gleefully ignorant, left only with the choice to trust or wither away like a disposed carcass. Disrobed, left in our flaccidity, our weakened joints, we recognize, we accept. It’s us, the next preface to hundreds, maybe thousands of stories into the future, where we might still remain, as whispers, dream catchers in the breeze.
Disillusion
We are not the illusion. Hidden from view, deep in childhood, the night comes with crickets, picnics are set nearby the river, a brick home stands proud in the countryside. When I utter brother, mother, father, I expect to feel them even in the distance, able to pull them closer with a simple wish. But what I got is the awkward, the alien in its own country, many a contradiction of terms. I used to believe, but had to stop. That story got told for many childhoods, until it spread so thin it tore. I longed for people so true, I’d laugh remembering their quirks. Our inner strength would’ve been built steadily around a bustling dinner table, under umbrella glass blown lamps. Our tribe’s vacations captured at the beach, in pastel polaroids. Faithful smiles for the family album, and nobody ever absent. I believed until I stopped. What I got were strange angles, twisted smiles, closed eyes, and weak stances. Imagine a full van, its passengers not needing to rush or arrive in haste. Light presences enjoying the view, and the kids complain, ¿are we almost there? Mature adults assure them we’ll get there soon, hey, let’s play a new game! A cozy quilt of predictable patterns laid on the back seat. Somehow, the patchwork and the array of colors just go. I believed in it, but not anymore. Now it sounds more like a crash echoing another, mirrored anxiety, unraveling. Someone never fully decided, never wholeheartedly believed, and still pretended to be there. I wanted softly undulating memories gurgling in a lazy river, on its way to a larger body of water, and finally the sea. Chapters that made sense in themselves, not needing much explanation. I yearned for a narrative easier to convey, that my words didn’t take up so much space and time. I wanted to keep the belief but gave up. It never was the illusion, and I shan’t go back to entertain it, even though it pleads and begs for my young girl’s eyes. These days, I only want freedom from the story that never was.
Vulture
When it began they were scouting the sky, back in late august, when the summer light glared fierce. The span of their wings was the extent of a premonition. Drought and desert had come to the city to stay. Dead things lay fresh, but soon to be gone; lives run out and reclaimed back to earth. On my daily commutes they signaled from above, when doubt and dread circled my mind, like scavengers. It got better when I looked up. Vultures raking air and spotting the blue, waiting patiently, until the great swoop. Precise, economic, my winged totem advised against dilapidation of what good energy I still had. Vultures of the mind are unproductive, inefficient, they don’t leave the land really bare. Their shadowy silhouettes conceded honour to the city rotting below, it’s heart overrun with concrete, synthetic memories instead of a past. They could smell the end even as it began, and already sailed the sky with prudent grace, circling wide perimeters. Entrusted with disposal, they’d consume us back to our mission of advancement. They’d answered a muted call –look up! Vulture, a dark reputation, reference to what is unsightly, death. But by early November of that year I utterly disagreed. I liked my peculiar friend who was almost pure width. I found his stoic way, and his mystical hiss, alluring. Today, when he cruises the sea above, floating effortlessly, omniscient over the mountain range, he assures me all is what it must, even in times of decay, like these.
Slither
Slipping through the cracks, an ethereal presence, a phantom being, slithers in deep silence, at the bottom of darkness, in the abyss. There’s more beyond the cracks: new intuition, a world still without words, unseen, barely heard, more felt. Old laws don’t work anymore, only the desire for birthing something new and free. Energy build up is what’s needed to fatten up the slithering smokey ghost. I hear steady crumbling as the last degrees of march skid by. Degradation of matter, a snake shedding its skin in tatters, in a temple where nobody prays anymore. We’re are heading to the equinox of the wooden snake. Never before did I feel as a vessel by vocation. Believed in burdens, painful shoulders, the clank of the machines. Never believed in the constancy of receiving flowing care, protection by right. Long and tedious is the low key hum of tooth and claw mindset, suppressed natural impulse, aching traps. Yet I seem to be slipping through the cracks, as I did once, many moons before. That I am only asked to wait, catch the right winds, and be the slithering vessel of an ebony world inside another, inhabitant of this new womb. The new being floats as a headache, a suggestion in my spaced out brain. As I slide through, the first glimpse of a new time line, barely developed, is the hazy horizon after a grand fire. The slithering wooden snake goes forth, and is soon lost in the remaining rubble, the spray of fine debris. How she loves to stir up worlds like ours, watch us burn, but by the end, we will have birthed our new selves.
Rite of Passage
«Shush» instructed the winter wind, on a very cold morning. The Sun’s familiar hug now weak, his usual toasty shawl much too light over my shoulders, and the steep cool-down made me shudder. I walked faster, as if it were possible to to flee the chill, cutting through every nook and cranny of my attire. My feet soon built up some friction, the promise of a little heat from the brisk movement. My mind wandered off with the same hurry. That man walking towards me from the corner, he’s wearing jeans and jeans aren’t warm at all. In fact, they’re awful cold ¿Why do people insist on wearing jeans in winter? «Hush!» it demanded, «listen, because this is a rite of passage». ¿But isn’t this just another walk to the local mini market? The usual chore, one of many I cannot escape, because then ¿who’d prepare lunch? No need to answer. It was suddenly clear, for a few seconds. Spirit was present, it was the normalcy of the errand that deceived. I kept going. To my left, a lengthy stone-walled residence oozed its cool humor. The icy, whitened sidewalk, the uphill street like frozen slate, made me even colder. Today I might do this or maybe that, it depends, it’d be better if I check first and then… I strayed again. Ideas blew by like the last of the autumn leaves, wanting to be fresh, trying to be new, but no. Then his swift gust numbed my head with a chilly slap, «shuuuuush». And I did. On my way back home, the ombre mountains stood guard as always, now shrouded under a minty vail; the sky a gauzy canvas with no defined horizon. Still silent, I carried my goods for the day, simple foods, basics for the fridge; my legs were already sore from lack of a good warm up. Around the corner and a new rush of wind funnelled my attention back. «Listen. It must be done, forget the legs, take comfort in the sky, you are seen, behind the gauze, these days so usual, so basic, are your rite of passage.»