In the act of identifying as outside the norm, or in presenting outwardly with attributes which fall under the encompassing label of anomaly, one is thusly distinguished by self and society as an outcast.
Cast away from the middle ground, removed and divided from the dot that hovers on the center of number line– the heart of box, the eye of needle–one becomes adrift in a land of make believe constructs.
Broken truths, as yoke from egg, fall as they may; the sun of knowledge blinding the eyes from beyond. Beyond what is, removed. Beyond what is, replaced. Beyond, existing still in another time and place, forgotten and lingering on the threshold of reasoning. A waiting watchman set upon a hill of misty sky.
Society, as too a construct, dictates limiting and finite truths based on anomalies in perceived character. An interdependent system of preordained order that creates something of nothing, collecting assumed data as input, to produce a tangible interdependent product of conclusion.
Thoughts built upon thoughts. Castles in the sky illuminating bricks layered upon bricks of a builder’s wants and truths.
Even as the watchtower keeper rises, his naked eye upon the many, parading his power and dominating might, the causation blossoms. It’s blooms as dark petals penetrating what was in a place of no end, nor beginning.
As a bonafide noun and as a moving verb of action, the keeper himself, who houses his truths, in baskets woven by weaver same, cannot exist as a singular, without observing below. His careful watching a method for collecting truths and making sense of senses. A complicated matter, as even the senses were once eradicated from the mist, gathered in safekeeping to make sense of what seemed of something.
Interdependent is the onlooker, whether glancing in the clear lake or within the walls of decorated turret.
One, in himself, split he wanders; footsteps marching, pounding through the differences within and without.
Within, erupts comparison to aspects of other parts of self. In how fingers move to become separate from hand, as the heart from the mind. Likewise, spirit from soul, life force from nature.
Nighttime fails, and he, the one, divides and divides into separateness, not as an organic substance, of blood and pulse, but one moving in way in which the outside orchestra is silenced.
A singular onlooker, the outer world wiped clean, what is recognized, other than wholeness, other than a new one: undone, unraveled, re-birthed.
His mind drifts and a voice enters:
“As the baby is of all, undistinguished, as is man, though he knows not of this. By nature we take from what has been seen and create that which is unseen, illusions twisted into fabrics of causation that speak of a forbidden truth of naught.
A twisted, again, labyrinth of makeshift corners and caravans, marauding living forest of unknown potential. A potential to mask the substantial of what is, to procreate what has come before.
We are neither here nor there, but bound to the evidence set forth above and below us, as even the ground and sky become tangible in their blundered separation. How the blue that is not blue, divides the sky that is not sky, from the earth that is not ground.
And still, we seek this separation to makes sense of what is naught. Keying the inlet of mind with a cause for opening, as fish spawning in river too cold. What is birthed is naught, as creation is numbed in the shivering-blind.”
Opens the eyes, the keeper, if such word as ‘eyes’ existed. If such word as ‘words’ survived; if either ‘existed’ was scribed. For if person existed to scribe, with instrument to hold, and hands to grasp, had he grasped for the end, recognizing no beginning, recognizing his recognition was not of him?
A some semblance of a once someone drifted. Neither here nor there, in being, but in believing he be, and believing he believe.
For who is the one who believes?
Said I, “I am I.”
Said I, “I am.”
Irradiate the one (of I), irradiate the all of illusion.
Irradiate the illusion of more than one, irradiate the separation, the norm, the typical.
For it is not this ‘them’ that breeds and dictates isolation and destruction and ill-ways, but the belief of the belief.
For when all is erased, as pounding wave to sand, what remains out of sight, are the intricate makings of mountains crumbled, smoothed over by the ages of time within time. A barrier to existing within existing.
And how can this gentle mind of man, this watchtower keeper remain nimble, yet taught? Centered, yet swinging? A spectrum concaving into the unbearable light.
And though he be the mountains still, and the very sand beheld. There is nothing of nothing. No words in his tale, as the very breath that is blown, becomes wind to cast sail to sea drifting in existing, unseen.
The wandering keeper, stepping: a dream within a dream.
His castle, shifted.
The bricklayer, the valley, the very bricks, merged.
The one who watched becoming the one watching. The one who waited becoming the one who arrived.
You came to me in distant dream, trumped out in your making, meandering through the causeway of ever more. I saw you there, and starlight shifted, beckoning me forward in the routine fashion made of man; and yet, as dove undone, you vanished in the skylight regions of my mind, as I sat vanquished by your doings, with eyes that danced as merry men alive, bending to the stardust ripened, harvesting the dew, listening to the avenger’s touch caressing vapor skin.
I seasoned, say ripened, in this hallowed out space deemed mine, situated between the burly blade and the spearing spine, tingled and tantalized by the mistress named me. I came to her desperate, in search, in want, determined to sever out her remains, to section what she’d become into distinguishable identifiable sectors.
And there I stood, as daffodil unopened, marrow-filled rapture segregating self in want of rescue. I listened to the voices of unknown trekking past my soul, forgetting my presence, erasing my cause. I became abandoned again and again, wrapped round the corners of my own doing, laughing at the shadowed self as another set near, raven to the blind man, pecking at the wounds I’d left behind.
How I’d wished to be seen. To be scooped up and caressed. To be harness against the strength of a million upon a million, and set free from the prison of endless self. How I wished over and over for the rupture of tangled substance, to disassemble and be brought back as something recognizable and just.
There I bathed, in the dismal garden dying, created of my own suffering woes. Dripping of blood-let talismans—signs, symbols, flashing tales of what was naught. I gave up then, beneath the gravestone I’d erected. Eradicated the beginnings with the end, and brought to life the newness reborn.
The failing called out. The failing caved in. I curled in submission, the babe to the tender yoke of my very own soul. Evicted, I was, in the terrible eternal voice of self, seizing the days and bringing back to the torturous home deemed hell. There I was, forlorn, forgotten, dedicated to the bleak and black, bathed in the destitute, naked in the face of what could only be the devil’s own foe turned sour.
Mocking, haunting, grinding, leaving, coming and abandoning once, twice, and ten times more, I was there. Yes, I was there. And in the ways the memory grows old, my soul grew sightless. What appeared once before as hope, now faded in the background, as clovers do in an expansive field blurring into green; a tender turtle belly up to the singe of a penetrating light field, named death.
And I remained, there, in the twilight of my spirit, inching through—worm through core and back to the depths of suffocating dirt. Shifted and sifted, brought forth as a burden undone, fertilized through the tunneling of causation. Circumvented once more and made flesh. I came out scathed, peeled and pinched into a version unrecognizable. And rested there along the curbside in an unfamiliar way, until you came once more, grazing towards my cause. The champion of the sun bride nestling between your legs, the virgin dough I be.
Heated, I bled out the blue I knew, and emerged risen thrice in fashion, braided bread for the masses. And it came then, in gentle knowing, this voice of unreasonable kindness venturing into the platitudes once known as this vessel me. And I cried, aching for the place she’d once been, the face she’d once had, and anchored in the vestige brought to center stage.
I called for her, pleaded for her, to return, though her battered bones now rest beside the cave dweller’s refuge. And thusly I sat, huddled in between the shadow I’d been and the canvas I’d become—chiseled remains here and scattered light there. And nestled I wept, pinpointed in the extended space, in the lap of plenitude, graced in the end gone and the beginning once more returned, tracing the furrowed path of fear, with fingers made chariot wheels, merging into the human reformed. And I danced there, within my vast becoming, twirling into the daylight, set loose into the wild woman’s psalm.
Belly of a Star 