Excerpt: "Emails from Infinity"

Squeezing into a space between two walls, shimming sideways I become shrink-wrapped in cobwebs, a cocooned figure dusted with pulverized plaster raining down from above. Deeper still I notice an opening in the wall space ahead, a hard lean and push and I’m in a clothing rack at a shopping mall. Stepping from the hanging clothes I’m surrounded by bustling customers and blinded by bright halogen lights. Recoiling at the hordes of people and the normalcy of the surroundings I venture back into the clothing rack. This time there is no wall space, rather a vast defunct nuclear power plant perched on a polluted shoreline, where silvery water laps against soot-colored sand.

Borderland

There's a dog that's not there,
there's a man with no hair,
there's a rhyme
that shouldn't be spoke.
There's a dump that's on fire,
and blood they perspire  
in a wasteland
where we try not to choke.
The plants have all died,
there's something rotting inside
in a warehouse
where chemicals leak.
And I stumble the fray,
broken hands held to pray,
but I'm awake 
and alas
I feel bleak.
   

Excerpt: Emails from Infinity

Starting at a very young age I was taken from my body while I slept, yet I am not a typical abductee. I wasn’t struck with a beam of white light and levitated into a spaceship. I wasn’t visited by grey-skinned creatures with enormous oval eyes bent on investigating my body with an anal probe. My experience of abduction was different. The process of falling asleep and dreaming opened a doorway―a passage between parallel dimensions.

One of my first memories: lying in my crib in my dark bedroom I became aware of a presence in my closet. This “Something” was peering at me through the gap in the closet doors. Its two eyes blazed, one on top of the other as if its head hung on a broken neck. I was immediately coated in hot sweat. My stomach churned and hardened. Blood throbbed in my temples as alarms in my mind screamed, urging me to get away, but I was unable to move. Its gaze had paralyzed me. The Something in my closet was not alone. A spidery thing appeared on the ceiling directly above my head. It hung in the air, a prickly dark ball, a tangled wad of living hair. As I cowered, eyes bulging from my face, it descended towards me. Stomach acid boiled into my throat. My small hands clutched at my favorite red and white Pinocchio blanket, I couldn’t move.

There was a sensation of knowing but not one of understanding. I knew that this thing was guided by The Something in my closet; it had been sent by The Something. As it came near hair prickled my lips and I was swept away from my room, sucked from the body that lay in my bed. I passed briefly through vast hollow darkness; then I was flying over a flat landscape that stretched endlessly in all directions. I hung upside down and helpless below a dark shape, my head too close to the coarse landscape, any closer, and my face would be erased. I flew at such a speed that my teeth chattered together hard enough to shatter, and my skin felt as if it would be torn off. I thought I might vomit from the pressure.  

It’s hard to describe the horror of a place that has no boundaries, a place that goes on forever. Think for a moment of the worst thing you can conceive of, rape perhaps or torture. I flew ever closer to the embodiment of the most terrible thing I could imagine, something worse than rape or torture, a place of raw emotion. Yet there was something else, something beyond my years. I would come to know this as fear of death. The understanding that we all owe a death and that my own was and continues to stalk me. This flight would become a recurring experience for me for many years.

Where I Hide...

Bury me in words,
a sarcophagus of sentences,
a deluge of dialogue,
to nourish my decomposition,
to nurture my restless creation.

Feed me the images
that startled my soul,
sunset skimming sky scars,
that free-flowing form
that precedes solidity. 

Those tendrils breathe my breath,
the atmosphere inhales me.
Cooled by the distant 
canvas of night,
my shimmering coals,
my blackened flames. 

The room between the floorboards
hasn't a key,
only neatly laid passageways,
saturated in empty space.

I have two floor plans
that co-exist,
blueprints for the same space,
though I always ask,
how can one place be two?

Amidst Zach's lost spoons
and Georgia's grasshopper jar
I place this small piece of the puzzle -
small but substantial.

Parting the Veil

Strawberry eyes drawn grey,

awoke in nights ruined black.

Awake, roused from cobwebbed dreams,

and so little light to navigate the spongy floor.

A diffuse beacon reminds,

but so much faith required

to move through the thickened air.

A tickle, a quiver, a bowed back stands rigid,

and so small steps quicken—

then STOP.

What is this unseen motion

running like static charged fingers

through bed-sheet stamped hair?

And then there’s the thumping,

rushing from chest to ear,

throbbing like a conqueror worm

feasting on coiled grey tissue:

run and it will chase.

The beacon reminds:

chase and it will run.

And so movement comes with reluctance,

the cloying atmosphere

gummy and resistant.

Yet something stirs the solar plexus,

pulsing out,

grappling with some undefined point

near the beacon,

things become clearer.

This unbearable push and pull,

so the pace is perfect.

The moment blinks blindness from its eye,

nothing so raw as being here now.

And this notion robs the past of its future.

Be here now,

as if there is a choice. 

Bee Shaman

It pulls a flaccid mask of skin away,
empty sockets without eyes to stare.
It is revealed,
glistening in honey and wax.


Its call brings the bees,
swarming they enliven the mask. 
It pierces me with a gaze
that cleaves my thoughts,
stopping them.


Should I thank it?

The bees percolate out its mouth,
just a trickle at first,
then a fountain.
Billowing yellow smoke
they take to the sky,
defining intricate patterns 
and writhing constellations.

The crowd sees a show,
and thinks it's a performer.
They throw money.
Just another gypsy street artist,
a bee charmer.

I know better.


Curious words fill my mind:
teotish stammish,
tombayashi,
and others I can't write.

I'm invited back to its trailer.

As it dons another costume:
radiator face
and eyes with no whites,
it shows me its wares.
These fuzzy cones
aren't just decorations,
crafts and curios.

I don't buy them,
but they already own me. 

Before the Flood

My hands are overstuffed
Mickey Mouse gloves -
numb and enormous.
Paralytic poison
seeps from the seams,
stitching tingling tendrils
up my forearms
as I roll onto my back.

The door to sleep creaks shut.

Everyday awareness infiltrates
my sanctuary, 
reminding me with the dull ache
of blood starved limbs
engorged once again.  

Spirit becomes matter.

Something scurries away,
slipping into the murky world
I've left behind,
where my overstuffed white gloves 
now lay in wait.