There is no story I could tell on these pages
About my life
That isn’t already engulfed in mythology
The world is full of stories of petty kings and queens
Who, upon reading the secret texts of the alchemists,
Learn to fly in their dreams
Brimming with lust, they stretch to outgrow themselves
Their skin, reassembling in layers like feathers
Gathering in flock and formation when magik rings the stars
But chemical reactions have their own secret lives
And the body is always dreaming
And the self-same Eros that grew them into lovers
Now rearranges them into petty Gods and Goddesses
Vain and brittle deities
who find sovereignty in the appetites of mortals
And birth all manner of deranged children, with the
blindness of Samael
Or there’s the one about the valor knights,
the ninjas and amazon warriors
Who battle to keep their kingdoms secure, their way of life intact
Against a mysterious sort of devil, shrouded in chaos like ocean fog
The natural shape of the threat is only apparent
when the warrior’s sword is already thrust
halfway to its heart, its death immanent
The hero never knows until the end
The natural shape of her life, or any others,
in a world of contemplation and peace
But stories do abound how these fighters are beguiled
by poison, and witchcraft and general bad judgment
into laying down their arms
Only to be ensnared for all eternity
Dying every day
Their cyclops eye, a window into and out of cosmic history,
But occluded, impotent
The vacuum of blind fate holds them as if in a cocoon
And if that wasn’t enough proof, I just read a sad story
About a woman who fell in love with a man
Who loved her for a minute but then left her alone
Alone she grieved and ached and wailed
And she cried out against the cruelty of the gods
who reclaimed their fire from her hollow hands
But by and by she discovers
She can see her love again, anytime she wants,
when she takes ketamine
She said she danced with him, talked to him, and even believed
they admixed their souls together in a rite of astral sex
They were married out there, until death, I think I read
I think how unprotected she was
Going out into the swirl, naked but for her zealotry
Which stood in place of her longing now
But it was a shark in passionate disguise
Thanatos with fins and teeth
Who found her flailing in the dream with her infinite open heart wound bleeding
He raped her repeatedly
And carved up her mind for his gothic minions before taking her as his own
These stories stop me in my own hubris then
Where I might despair should I not see
How instead they place me square in the hubris of the world
Yet just a bit closer to the vault of heaven,
in whose mirror I might adjust my dress, my hair, my mask
If any of these stories sound familiar, it is because I stole them from the mouth of the world
While the world slept mindless
Dreaming me up
The Body is Always Dreaming 