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This brittle life will break you

again, and again, and again.

But, you are queen of rodents.

You are the roughshod fane.

The bruises are your laurels;

The body, your demesne.

Thrash against thy bindings

when the reaper thee arraigns.

once i woke from a dream.

i opened weary eyes

and limply grasped

a bright and burning seeming.

but, the seeming went—

as easily as it came—

into base gray matter,

dissolved, and washed away.

class Muscle
  attr_accessor :tensed, :relaxed

  def initialize ()
    @tensed = false
    @relaxed = true
  end

  def push_pull ()
    @tensed  = !@tensed
    @relaxed = !@relaxed
  end
end

class Heart < Muscle
  attr_accessor :emotions, :age

  @@gamut = [
    :bliss, :joy, :excitement,
    :calm, :boredom, :fear,
    :anger, :disgust, :sadness
  ]

  def initialize ()
    super
    @emotions = [:bliss]
    @life = Array.new(rand * 122, :moment)
    @age = 0
  end

  def push_pull ()
    super
    @emotions << @@gamut.sample
    @age += 1
    if @age > @life.length
      throw :death, 'that is all'
    end
  end
end

a_beating_heart = Heart.new

# stumbling

loop do
  puts a_beating_heart.emotions
  sleep 1
  a_beating_heart.push_pull
end

# falling

So! You want to worship the goddess CHAOS? Good news: It is actually quite simple. Bad news: It is the hardest thing you will ever do. Thankfully, you can do it in a countably infinite number of steps.

First things first: You need to change. (A small change will do. You could start wearing the part in your hair on the other side, get into competitive international chess, or divorce your husband of several years. Anything really.) Have you changed? Are you different yet? Have you emerged/become/evolved/bloomed/withered/contracted/enervated/etc.? Very good. The next step is to do it again. Keep changing indefinitely. BASICally:

10    CHANGE
20    GOTO 10

See? Simple. But also difficult. I have kept my end of the bargain. That accounts for the steps in the set of natural numbers.

The next steps are in between the other ones. Don’t ask me to explain how. These kinds of mysteries will be revealed to you in time.

Remember that you are a living thing. What does it mean to be a living thing? You are the ongoing product and reagent of an ancient chemical reaction called Life. This is a beautiful and monstrous thing. This grand grotesque is a thing of monumental violence; all living things on some level struggle to survive. Even trees have to attack their neighbors with chemical warfare to ensure their saplings can grow. But what does it mean to struggle? It doesn’t always involve bloodshed. At the root, a struggle is a contradiction; it is the engine of change. (See Step 1.) Elements of the body that cannot coexist must change each other. (See Step π.) They change each other through struggle. In this garden of earthly delights, you must struggle; you must fight. That is what it means to be a living thing.

Remember that your body bleeds. You can feel pain. You will die. You are your desires and fears. You do not live in your body; you are your body. And your grasping, vulnerable, teetering body really only knows two things: hunger and satisfaction. Don’t split hairs. The mind is just an abstraction of the brain which is just the part of the body that lives in the head. On that note: The spirit or soul is just an abstraction of the heart which is the part of the body that lives in the chest. I keep trying to explain this to guys the running this coal train I’m stuck on, but they just won’t accept it. Something about an engine without an engineer. I figure they just don’t want to be out of a job.

I will now list the things that are not part of the body:

• -

This is all that needs to be said. You are an animal. You will die. Continue to change. Continue to want. Continue to struggle. Praise be to the primordial and protean CHAOS.

The wind without tongue whispers to the heart

through the swaying boughs and dancing leaves.

Her words, many-faced,

pierce spur-wise the wheel of the sun

rolling over moss-kissed lips.

There are penetrating

alphabet truths

in every direction.

Would you listen?

Not just listen, but deeply!

She brings rain and shine

to your twiching little ear

as your wiskers wet with strawberry seeds.

The true hearing empties the mind.

The skull, a cavern running strange water

through cracks,

deposits minerals that grow

clear,

bright,

and fractured.

The air is still,

and nothing has ever been said.

I never told how the dew on your cheeks

looked like the headlights in the rain

pushing 90 on I5.

I never said how I felt

like we were flying.

And, your laughter next to mine—how

it smelled like that sweater of mine you liked,

the one with the heartbeat

of a newborn on the sleeves.

I never told you I love you

with the right… Cadence.

I always hoped I could say it

the way the lightning cracks

when the power goes out;

I hoped I could say it

like the candles we light

to play cards in the electric dark

as we bide our time.

Kings and Queens spilled out,

they all may as well be ballerinas,

and sweet baby Jack?

She’ll be their mother someday.

Wipping her hair like a springtime storm.

Going this fast, the world outside is

an orange blue mosaic blur.

We already missed our exit,

but I expect you to come around

soon.

Watching the streetlights wash over your face,

I remembered the taste of salt. But why?

I think it had something to do with

the cool mist blowing in from the pacific.

Remember?

We laughed through that downy fog

spotted with bonfires and piles of char.

The air tasted like salt:

simple and electric and essential.

But maybe it has something to do with food.

I love to cook for you.

That’s it:

you remind me of the taste of home.

I see you in the warm corners

in the rows of fruiting trees.

You spoke to me softly

in those dim memories.

I hung from your strong branches

and felt the softness in your knees.

The tree is long gone from our world.

Its burl is a piano just slightly out-of-tune

playing chopsticks with four hands,

and the smell of decomposing oranges

marking the passage of time

so I won’t forget.

You were gone before I knew that things could go,

yet the smell of ivory soap

calls you from the grave

to speak to me in hushed tones

urging me

to go outside and play.

You hid the thorns better.

With your dirty garden shears
you
cut the pricks from the red-flowered things
until they were smooth and lovely braids.

You’re not here now as I clumsily
pick at the little pin-tip prongs
that stick out from these now leaf-bare plots.

I can’t do what you did.
You had the green thumb, the paring eye,
that could raise a mound of dirt into a garden.

From my pruning I pitch and peer
into the barren blue above
and I ask myself if you could have just
let them grow.

“Something beautiful is being born” is the kind of statement dreamed up by people with nothing better to think about. Something found scratched with a gas station pocket knife into the paint of a toilet stall door at a truck stop on the highway out of Boulder, Colorado. It’s something like the hollow sound of radio wafting out of the car next to you at the red light on a hot, ghost-willow day in July. “Something beautiful is being born.” Think about it: The passive voice? Who’s the mother? We couldn’t know. You just won’t tell us. No one ever does. She’s out there somewhere, in the throws of labor. The sweat pools on her face—puddles on the tarmac in a thunderstorm. Her voice rips and cracks through the air—heard to me as only brontide. And, I don’t even know her name. I only know “something beautiful is being born.” But, beautiful things are everywhere, I think. They are little stones in the creek; we pass by them constantly. They sit in their droves; little buddhas doing nothing in particular. The truck stop radio wafts in through the sponge between my ears. I’m not really here, but i’ve heard something beautiful is being born.

Ms. Yardley held that vacant look for a moment. I could feel the draft and it made the hair on my neck stand up. I wasn’t dressed for this mountain air; I didn’t think it would matter much longer. She began slowly, as if every word carried immense weight, “The feeling is elemental. Each chemical element is exactly what it is. There is no adulteration. Gold is gold; Silicon is silicon; Carbon is carbon. They aren’t alloyed with anything else, and they cannot be broken down without getting into particle physics. They are…”

She got that vacant look again. I could swear she saw something miles away through the pine board walls. Something awesome and terrible that made her blood run cold and her mind empty out. I didn’t want to see it, but I knew she was about to show me. I listened carefully to the cypress creaking in the wind outside. I imagined that it was footsteps on the deck around the shack. She looked at me with a peculiar smile and wide eyes, “They are prime! Not just me. Everyone— everything else. Carbon, Iron, Blood. It felt like there was no fault, no blame, no judgement. When oxygen attaches to iron causing it to rust—Do we moralize? The whole world cannot be mistaken for anything but what it is.” She turned to the wall and picked up a well-worn axe leaning there.

I blurted out the question, “What is it?”

“What?” She asked.

I composed myself and pleaded, “Like you said, the Whole World. What is the Whole World?”

She responded, “Cascade.”

In the distance a siren dopplered nearer. Ms. Yardley hugged the axe to her chest. Her face grew pale, and her eyes darted frantically in their orbits. I felt the sweat clinging to my skin, and I listened to the starlings, and the cypress, and the first little pitter-patters of rain. Then, the siren waned. Then softer and softer. Then, it was gone. She gave a gentle chuckle, and let her shoulders drop. The axe rose up over her head as she faced me. I wrestled against my bindings to no avail.

And as the axe fell, I contemplated it’s trajectory, and I remembered scraping my knees as a child. Rollerskates. I remembered the blood. Seeing blood for the first time. I cried. I asked my mom what it was. She responded, “It’s what’s inside you.”

A regret is a crestfallen mother
watching children hurl BBs at crows.
Those cursed animals live in my ribs;
their wings, clipped.
I'm sprawled out on the boxspring
like Tampa knowing
we are the dusty moonlight
in the pages of Fungi of the Pacific Northwest.
The dogearred tome effloresces on the shelf
with prism-splash sticky notes and pageflags.
Maps, pamphlets, developed photographs, and
the taste of peanutbutter sandwiches
haunt all the entries.
There's this,
and I can't get our song
to stop playing in my head.
It starts with loud grinning
at the appearance of
Chanterelle Mushrooms
'round the foot of the big, red tree,
and then comes the beautiful harmony
of our sixth kiss:
The one, the seven, the three, the five,
and back to the root—woven, entangled, 
burlap and silk—the spider's dew encrusted web. 
It's all just such sundrop lemonade, but it feels true;
and, it ends here every time:
At the ocean's edge, looking out over the waves
wondering when you are coming home.

So, I feed my birds, and 
I wait with my lungs floating 
in the waves.

I smoked you like those 
yellow-lipped cigarettes you like.
You tasted like menthol and went up
like a church.
"It all starts tomorrow," you kept saying,
"It will change tomorrow."

Well, ghostfire, go on then.
Go up like that old church:
Stained glass charred-black,
altar of cinders,
pews recumbent and ruined,
smoking like a wreckage
of bodies and blankets.

It all starts tomorrow!
Feel your pulse—
pressure aphotic,
but isn't it warm?
Your little furnace
won't burn long, ghostfire.
Look at the clay 
on the path to the old church;
they're sweating anticipation.
You hold the match,

and the clay will claim you.
Burn, baby, burn.

Your eyes have a chameleon lucidity—

laughter in the dark.

I’m reasonably obsessed, but

it’s nothing really:

Chemical insanity and surface tension.

But, it makes me too much the animal.

I should be something else, but

I’ve hidden in this den

every year I’ve known you.

I’m awaiting a beast knowing well that

I’m the staggering prey;

Awaiting a trial hunt, guilty.

You know where I hide

And, I fear you’ve seen

those ugly corners where I keep

the broken porcelain and ripped silk

once in the shape of decent things

like oil lamps and a good night’s sleep.

Like I keep sleeping on the mattress on the floor,

the one the cat can’t stop pissing on;

nervous and afraid,

she has always been too much the animal.

You know all this,

but you look at my face and your lips curl,

your eyes crease,

and you show me your teeth.

Those corners were so big when I was a child

awaiting judgement day

as I held my breath tight in my chest.

Now, I’m lost in our physical laws:

That chameleon look takes me in

folded arms draped in your

laughter.

I have to know that at least you

do not bring God’s judgement on your wings.

I’m reasonably obsessed, but

it’s nothing really:

Just chemical insanity

and surface tension.

along the big arm

that spilled the silvery-blue motes

over the meridian,

there are lightning scars

like the ones you see in the tree line

or guiding blood flows in your fingers—silhouttes

of mathematician laughter.

the arm sweeps over the firmament.

it is a caress so sweet and slow

that we never even notice it.

as if asleep beside a lover

who wakes from a nightmare

to pace her hand over your shoulder

for her comfort in your presence—and you

dream of fossil fuels

powering rockets

to the moon.

Sun high in the sky,

I lay floating on its rays.

There, I chant, weightless,

the chimera-loving songs

on nectar-drunk bees. I smile.