Traveling the Backward Path

I am a living Mandela Effect: my connection to my old self— my old beliefs and my connection to reality— has evaporated and changed. Each moment, I adjust to a new normal. I navigate a world of archetypes, symbols, and allusions that bubble up from some secret subconscious space, perhaps cultivated from a lifetime of reading books, watching movies, listening to songs, and teaching English. Then everything shifts. My subconscious hadn’t forgotten anything. Every moment exists— to be lived, relived, explored— in the Knowledge of Everything. And here’s the hard thing to explain: When you hear the voice of God— when it surfaces like a white whale and then pulls you under the waves— when you  think  you’ve heard the word of God… what comes next? When you play catch with Him in the mirrored hallway and forget, momentarily, who you are, you have no choice but to anchor into space and recognize yourself as a fragment from another time. What you once knew no longer makes sense. It’s al...

From the Hand of God for Arba You will submit and then see the truth The ending is always the same because            it is always the same as the beginning  You will realize the stupidity of your struggles In a moment’s time, you will remember the old trick  And you will curse yourself for having betrayed Him once again  You will kneel before Him  You will kiss His hand            His finger            His ring finger You will lust for Him  And your tongue will taste His hand  You will long to be with him again, near him, to caress him  You will confess all of your sins  And You will know His love which hurts the most  Because you will know His vengeance And you will be cut from the hand of God  You will be the ring finger cut from the hand of God You will be that reminder to Him of something tragic, fearful, and base  The hand will survive wi...

Thrill Seekers He left me standing there on the beach  And I felt so stupid as the sand buried my feet.  The water washed back and forth  And held me in place  Like a statue  Held to the dirt.  The ocean roared  And he couldn’t hear me,  But I screamed as loudly as I could.  My scream mixed with the roar of the waves,  And it killed me to watch him walk away.  I went blank.   I don’t know how else to put it.  How do you process the end  When it’s part of your center?  Before any talk of leaving,  He’d told me about his plan,  His familiar plan...  I never wanted children because   I knew I wasn’t mature enough  Or dedicated enough.  I knew he wasn’t. I knew we were meant for one another  But for nothing more.  But he had other plans.  Why?  Why would he need a creation to validate his power?  Hadn’t we done this before  And again  And still now?...

I will punch— punching holes in fearful symmetry. I will seek absolution, offer forgiveness, offer to trade places with you. And you? You'll have all the time of the evermore. Time to explore every line, every life, every dream. Time to sit with each bubble of the flow, to extract every remedy and meaning. Time to mourn with the weepers, to survey every curvature. It is all yours. I will hold you here, if you wish, in the light of this partial eclipse— here on a bench on the edge of the labyrinth. Above the poppies and the weeds, the whistling birds delight. As do I. I brought incense to burn— I heard you liked it. I offer the mid-morning breeze on your face as a gift. All of it, I offer to you. You are eternal. You can be whole Where you like. But I will hold you here, if I may— just long enough to sit and talk on the stone bench as we have always done before. This is the part where I say I am a speck of a speck of a dream’s dream. A haunted hallway reflecting uncertain in a pane ...

The boy on the bicycle  is really quite a man. He’s got on a shaved face  and he rides at a steady pace.  When I look at him,           for just a moment, I think about colliding particles And how close can we get And how close can we be  in the human life? *** It’s a blustery day,  windy and grey  with full bellied clouds. They look like huffing, pluming horses  Reigned in. A storm is coming at noon, they say, So I am out on my walk at 10:08. I hear an unfamiliar clacking sound Stirred up in the wind… They are chimes, but not silver-metallic  Glittering bells. They sound ceramic and earthy And I am excited to hear them.   I pass the pepper tree, and for a moment I think of the boy who died many years ago. I imagine him, wherever he may be, Still present in his eternal moments And I pray for him to choose the good things Like kindness and joy and hope and justice… Whatever this feeling is, I wish it for him ...

April 2008 000/444/888 Last night, I closed my eyes before bed  And imagined life in eras now long past.  I saw the Shakespearean actor shuffle down an alleyway  While, on the other side of the globe,  Scrappy, thin men carved out a fortified village  In what would one day be the United States.  I drifted in the thunder and rolling clouds  On a warm jet stream high above.  While civilizations below conformed to  The advancements of the ages in which they lived.  I imagined the inevitable pull of westward expansion,  And I saw great ships establish trade routes to usher in  A new prosperity.  I spent time in houses.  Sometimes, I sat in the rooms at night  And watched the people who slept.  They could never guess that I was with them,  But sometimes, they would look nervously  Around and stare with alert eyes  Into the darkness where I sat watching.  They could not see me,  But they c...

Perhaps I will know when the final moment reveals itself and then tumbles as a last breath from my mouth. All of history Is in that moment. Everything gathered, and everything stolen... it will all be there in the ever-spoken Word. This is the last syllable of recorded time. Is it a stone from a stone fruit thrown into the gasping mouth of a well. Falling evermore toward the bottom, it speaks as a  single collective thought. Oh, you are there and I am too, collected in the zeros and ones, calcified like bone and squeezed into a bubble. …bubbled up and calcified  You  from me. WWWWWWWWWWWWW The relics of all  formed from the  we. Hide now in a different tense— spoken secretly. (Not past, not present, not future.) Our binary brains can never explain the syllable strain of that final moment. Within the orb, the particles collapsed. Every particle— under the weight of underwater pressure. A force compelled a kinetic collision that formed the core of everything. In t...

The Sentence Before Time (after Water Mountain) In the beginning, there was the Word— not spoken, but formed. The Word was the shape of intention before breath, before bone, before the split between river and mountain. The Creator pressed dust into flesh and breathed into it the infinitive. He named him Verb. And Verb sprang forward without knowing where forward was. To think, to sing, to cry, to be— he moved like water without a shore. But the arrow in the hallway never reached its mark. There was always a halfway point. Always a next. Verb said, “I feel as if I am only half realized.” And the Creator, who knew the shape of the Word, understood. That night, from Verb’s rib, He took Noun. She was person, place, and thing. She was the object of desire and the subject of becoming. Verb flowed toward her. Noun stood still. Sometimes she pulled him. Sometimes he pulled her. Together they made a sentence. Until the serpent came— twisted into an 8, a glyph of recursion, a number among words....