I dip between all these liminal spaces

Like a virus

Where every breath is poetry

Even if I am the only one who hears its meter

I know

That this failure is more

Than one can just pick themselves up from

Instead it is a Chironic wound

One must carry evermore

In gratitude

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

I want to tell myself something real. Something authentic. But you are listening in while I’m pretending I’m all alone. How can I have any clarity on what is moving though me when I can’t help notice you there? I smell you. You push against me. Does that mean the truth is between us?

If I seek the truth must I ask your consent? Do I bend to seduce you into seeing eye to eye?

This is the part that I have been avoiding. Why the fuck am I writing this?

I live a lot in my head and so I think that I need to be grounded in the world.

I pick up a book and scrawl some words

like a squirrel

I bury it in the ground.

I can forget.

I can go on.

Here I give myself, resigned

At the mercy of others who may

steal every bit of symbol and meaning from my story and words

from my intention–that is just an inside joke in your gaze

An impenetrable haze tumbling between our worlds but neverless seductive

Pornography, we both know it

But if we agree,

If you can get off watching me jerk off

Will it all be sexy?

Will it all be real?

When this all becomes “natural,” will I know that I only exist in you?