Love and Hate: Part 4 - Rage

Into the gaping maw of the Eternal fortress, an astral traveler followed Death and Time. The traveler came to this realm with blind purpose. In the material world he lost everything and in this world he erased the souls of his parents along with every fiber of humanity left in him. He chose to become inhuman and escape the torture of his life to exact revenge for his agony. His living grief became everlasting rage. At the center of Time’s clock, Steve wondered how he would fulfill his purpose.

“Steve?” Time questioned “that is a mortal name. Yet before me you stand embodied unlike all others here but Gods. I fear a disturbing imbalance has taken place. Great power was at work for you to have crossed over. How did you come?” Steve answered, “A crummy fortune-teller sent me.” “There are no mortals with the power to cross over. The balance of souls is held by Death and Creation alone. Creation transfers souls to the world of flesh and Death retrieves them. No matter, if you are here as We are, something has shifted the balance,” explained Time.

“Death?” asked Time, “have you retrieved Steve’s soul in concordance with Creation? “It is my duty as the Taker to retrieve only the souls which have come to realize their end as conducted by Fate. Creation places life at the direction of Destiny. It is the will of Fate and Destiny which prompts the transfer of souls as you know.” elaborated Death irritably. “Yes Death, my apologies. Would you search your scrolls for missing souls?” Time bowed. “There is no need. I have traveled here to consult you on an anomaly.” Death answered. “Anomaly?” asked Time. “Yes, two souls have ceased to exist and I surmised it was a rift in time,” Death droned. Time added, “You have encountered another anomaly Death and his name is Steve.”

“We must consult with Fate and Destiny,” Time said with urgency, “we shall prepare to journey immediately.” Steve could feel the tension in the air and he knew these Gods would eventually discover his motives. Much more was now clear and he knew he would have many questions for Fate and Destiny.

Time prepared the Eternal Clock for his absence. Transferring a silver strand from his temple to an hourglass suspended in the center of a glowing chasm of flame directly beneath the whirling rings and gears above them. Death swung his scythe on its strap to rest at his back as he opened his robe to retrieve and unfurl a large and weathered scroll that he placed on a table. He began to write names under the many columns on the scrolls surface. “Are those the names of the mortals whose souls you’ve transferred? asked Steve.” “Yes,” answered Death, “I will report the recent transfers to Fate when we see her.”

Steve found himself compelled to look closer at the multitude of names on the morbid scroll of death. He watched as the boney fingers of Death scrawled calligraphically the names of his recent takes. Beautiful sweeping strokes became name after name until one stroke struck Steve in the gut. This name he knew. A name he created himself, the name of his son. Steve felt dizzy and breathless; his skin was on fire. His mind caved inward, plunging into the burning flames of rage that filled every cell of his body. His vision blurred and he stumbled, reaching for anything to stop from collapsing. He felt his hand grasp the hilt of an ice cold cylinder. Then red, nothing but red as he pulled back on the scythe with all his hate, catching the blade under the hood of the black figure who the weapon was strapped to. The strap snapped and he felt the handle jump into his grip, the blade taking with it the hood and all it contained, black robe crumpled to the floor.

Instantly, consumed by lust of death, Steve felt time slow down as he lunged towards the center of the room and the fiery fissure where Time was spinning on his heels to catch the curving blade as it effortlessly cut through his fingers and hand, severing them and sending them floating away in slow-motion as the blade made it’s unimpeded way to the temple of Time’s head and glided through bulging eyes as it exited in a smooth swing. Time’s body slumped back dropping over the precipice of the fissure past the floating hourglass and into the burning void bellow.

Words Unspoken

Here I there

Be you to me

And fear aware

Comes through to me

Is this that was

For love of hate

In time because

Filled we of spate

Grow distance thus

And onward lead

The cut of us

To slowly bleed

No tense to free

Lost sense to praise

The end of me

By waiting days

Last not patience

Know not the end

Moments in silence

Nor can defend

Hopelessness drums

And ceaseless be

What truth becomes

The fiber of me

And downward now

Spiraling speed

No light allow

To illume misdeed

Why love you I

We are broken

Failed ourselves by

Words unspoken

Alluvium Apple

There is a mountain that erects

There is a cloud on top that rests

Conifers like fur they lay

Aquifers from beneath display

Sound is all around

Ground is all newfound

You are pacific, watching with your warmth

Seeing nothing, absorbing everything

Just being, awaiting patiently

Ever loving, my abiding respite

I see you all around me

I feel you touch my feet

I put you under the mountain

I reach you as I climb

I miss you

There is a portion that was separated

There is a void that has abated

Loneliness is held at bay

Happiness is where we play

Smells of you surround me

Shells wash back to sea

Love and Hate: Part 3 - Time

Death’s grin was teeth beneath a black hood’s shadow. Steve regarded death as an enigma, as did Death of Steve. “Do you know where God is,” asked Steve before Death could make any sudden movements? Death replied, “I know where they all are. We are all connected.” They…we…, questioned Steve in his mind? “What is this place,” asked Steve as a first to get to the bottom of things? “This is everywhere. This is the aether, the spirit realm, the pool of consciousness. It is the counterpart to the material world. Like two parts of a whole. This is no place.” “Is Heaven here,” fires Steve? “Heaven is a construct of consciousness to help it cope with it’s constraints in the material world. The spirits conjure many imaginations when trapped in their perishable bodies,” stated death plainly.

That fucking Gypsy, cursed Steve to himself. No God but Gods. This was going to be harder than Steve thought. What was he to do now? He had to delve deeper to find the cause of the abomination that was his life. “Who is in charge here,” spilled out of Steve’s mouth? Death explained, “As I stated, We are all connected. Together We control the existence of the cosmos. I manage the flow of spirits from the material world to here. We all have a function to maintain the balance.” “Do you have a leader,” Steve asked as he began to formulate an approach? “There is no leader, only facets of the forces of existence,” elaborated Death. “What is the most important facet,” Steve asked getting closer to understanding? “All Gods serve their purpose but without the machinations of Time the cosmos would come to a halt,” answered Death. “Can you take me to Time,” asked Steve of Death? “I can,” Death replied, “I’m on my way to see him now.”

Steve rode with Death on the back of his equine beast, clinging to a cloak of black that seemed so dark it would swallow him to be lost forever in its eclipse. They proceeded through the vacant plane with nothing but gray streaks streaming around them. Onward they rode towards the darkness above in the gradient sky.

Eventually, a gleaming asterisk appeared in the distance. It grew into a golden arch that rose and expanded out of the firmament before them. As they approached, Steve could make out an enormous and complicated structure with spinning disks and rings that split and multiplied into interlocking sections with constantly moving mechanisms of pistons and gears. The travelers reached the base of the surreal mechanical monstrosity and waited as a large and heavy metal ramp steamed down on thick hydraulics to reveal the silhouette of a man bathed in fire light coming from inside the fortress.

Steve found himself leaping from Deaths horse to stand before a tall brooding man with long gray hair tied back in braids and wearing a grease covered mechanics jacket and worn work-boots. “I felt your presence approaching, Death, but I did not sense this one you’ve arrived with.” said the mechanic in a deep resonating voice. Death rasped, “Time, this is the one who is Steve.” Steve stammered, “Um, I thought you may be able to answer some questions for me.” Time replied, “I’m hoping you can answer some questions for me as well, traveler Steve.”

Love and Hate: Part 2 - Death

Steve slumped propped in the corner of a strange mystics domicile. The Gypsy in front of him glared at him as if she knew him. She had a premonition; a plan. “Are you sure you’ve had enough of this world boy,” she questioned? “I owe you no explanation, if the photo is enough than send me away forever,” he replied. “This photo represents more than you know boy. To place you in the aether restored, there must be an exchange of souls. Are you willing to erase the existence of the souls of the people in this photo to make the transformation?” she said as she glared at him with an intensity he seemed to just notice. It was starting to sink in. There was a price to pay for her services. There was a price beyond material things. Was he willing to exchange the souls of his parents for revenge? For Steve, revenge was his purpose, his singularity; revenge against God. “Eradicate them and make me whole on the other side you witch,” he loathed in despair and hate of his circumstances. “So be it,” the Gypsy grinned.

She tore the last possession that Steve cared about in two. Steve felt nothing at this. Nothing else mattered to him anymore, nothing but killing God. Everything was red. Flames burst into the empty space above the witches table. An incantation was muttered through her thin lips, head held up and eyes rolled back. She twitched and moaned. Rocking side to side she started to foam at the mouth. Steve was not afraid. He felt excited. Finally, something was going to change for him. And, it did. Red became black and silent.

He was aware but nowhere. Steve felt something bellow him but he could not see it. What was holding him up? As if a fog was lifting he could begin to se an outline. The outline beneath him became solid. It was ground and he was held above it by his own legs. Euphoria and glee burst out of him but where was he really? What was he now, a ghost? No, he felt something at his feet. He looked down and saw fingers then hands coming from the firmament and grasping at his ankles. He looked closer and found he could see through the ground as if it were solid mist. The hands belonged to bodies. Bodies he recognized. “Mom, Dad,” he shouted! They sank grasping. Shriveling as they sank deeper into the invisible solid, their eyes were confused as they disappeared forever.

He was alone on the plane, flatness from horizon to horizon. The only difference in any direction was a gradient in the sky. Was it sky? Dark in one direction light in the other. With arms and legs he strode through the aether toward the light. Onward he walked for what seemed an eternity yet he never tired.

Steve noticed a speck of black in the ever brighter atmosphere. Closer it got, and bigger. A slight breeze became a wind. Gray streaks of mist streamed by in sweeping arcs. The black speck became a form. A rider cloaked in black upon a massive steed. The wisps interfered with his vision but he could make out a staff, topped perpendicularly with an arcing blade. The figure hung the weapon low, at head height, from his mount upon the horse. The cloaked rider approached and slowed then stopped just a few meters from Steve’s position. “There are no beings of form but Gods here,” called the rider, “What God be you?” “I’m Steve” he answered. “What is Steve,” asked the voice from the cloaked rider? “I’ve come to put an end to my torment,” stated Steve. “Good,” replied the rider, “I am Death and that is my job.”

Sleeping of You

Crisp and clean

A dream, a dream

A fob, a fib

A scream, a scream

A gift, a gab

A gleaming stream

Runs through and through

To the edge of blue and blue

In the distance an object soars

Brilliant round, a golden orb

A silver ribbon emerges thus

Stretching higher than it must

Coming to rest in a curving cusp

To gently nest on the nape of us

From the vale alertness peaks

Drowning out all that speaks

Beads of light become reflections

Finding their ubiquitous positions

Gazing up, gazing down

No sound, no sound

Flowing back, flowing forward

No ground, no ground

Drift and dream

Love and Hate: Part 1 - Hate

Steve never was good at anything. He wasn’t popular or good-looking. He had no talents and he stank. His parents died in a car crash when he was young and he was forced to live in an orphanage run by a psychopath with an abusive staff of perverts because the rest of his family felt they were too prestigious to take in the fat loser. When he arrived at the Catholic reform death camp his family sent him to, all he had was the clothes on his back and a picture of his parents. Steve met his rapist cellmate on his first night at the orphanage as she forced herself on him. After that, the ogre always referred to him as, “Her bruised meat.” She gave birth to their baby in the cell toilet because it was safer than going to the medical ward. Staring into the toilet afterward was the first time in Steve’s existence that he’d ever felt anything like love. The chubby child was taken into care by the nuns.

Vietnam was in full swing and he took a deal to go into the military and get out of the orphanage; maybe one day he could get his baby out too. For Steve, the Vietnam War was like hot piss in the eye and it stung like pepper spray. All of Steve’s fellow soldiers hated his wimpy attitude and they fucked with him constantly. On patrol one day a soldier shoved Steve off the dirt path they were following and he tripped onto a landmine. Four limbs less but still alive, he woke up in a hospital bed to find out his former rapist bitch bunkmate, mother of his child, had runaway with their baby.

Through months of pain, doubt and recovery he damned the very fabric of the cosmos. His dreams were always red. On discharge from the hospital and subsequently the military, he was homeless, broke, lost and rolling nowhere.

He found his only peace with the Madam at a whorehouse on the strip. Whatever he panhandled went straight to her and a chance to rest his head in her lap. She saw something in him that nobody else saw. The Madam saw something burning inside him, yearning and admirable. The hooker came to adore his desire for her and they soon fell deeply in love. It wasn’t long before she went missing. The word on the street was that she had been relocated by her Pimp at his whiff of her love affair ruining his business.

The next day police came looking for Steve at the shelter he frequented. They wanted him as a suspect in the murder of a runaway orphan and her baby from a Catholic Reform School. As soon as they took one look at him the officers chortled and chuckled, “Well shit! Guess this counts you out stumpy. Still, we’d like to ask you some questions?”

After the mock interrogation and notification of the murder of his son at the police station, something snapped inside Steve’s mind. A deep and maddening hate bore down on him. He wanted to slaughter that son of a bitch, that motherfucker responsible for everything: God.

Steve talked a recently released crack-head outside the police station into wheeling him to the door of the nearest neon fortune teller sign in exchange for his wheelchair. Laying on the dirty stoop and knocking, the door opened up to reveal a liquored up crackpot bag lady with a toothless scowl. She blurts, “What the fuck is this shit?” “I want to go to heaven,” he said. “Don’t us all,” retorted the Gypsy. She dragged him in like a lump. “I can’t send you to heaven cripple, but I can give you a glimpse of the spirit world if you think you’ll find what you’re looking for there?” “Whatever lady, all I have to my name is this picture of my parents to pay you.” After minutes of pondering she said, “Sure.” What else was she to do with the hopeless and helpless quadriplegic bum in her parlor? She stared at him with pity and thought; I’ll get rid of this waste for good. “Give me the picture,” she demanded. At her table of tchotchkes she placed the photograph down and said, “I’ll give you a choice. I can show you the spirit world so you can have a peek or I can send you there, where you’ll have your arms and legs back, but you may never return to this realm.” “I’ll take the one way ticket,” he said without hesitation. She knew he would.