There's Something Wrong with ME!
There's Something Wrong with ME!
The Atrocity of Love: A Serial Love Letter to Love
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The Atrocity of Love: A Serial Love Letter to Love

Chapter Eight: Virtually in Love

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I Wanna Take You on a Little Journey…

Envisioning being wedded and living together, I have no idea from where this thought comes, what drives that desire, prodded no doubt by a thirst for camaraderie, all those precious things lost in the fire, where a home once stood now a foundation gutted, gravity distended. In its vacuum sorrow and sadness now dwell. Where division is sown the center cannot hold, destroyed over time by the uneasy, tense and anxious vibe that rides on a constant crest of constant duress, heightened stress, a foul dissonance, distorting notes and lyrics, souring the melody of a tune whose discord in that space was never an actual peace nor a harmony.

Where once lived an ash tree, thought to stand for good, for noble and just memories, for dreams and reflections now starkly only a bare patch of dirt, the glare of a cold, ugly truth piercing the delusional rose-tinted stare, mere illusions of what never in truth existed in that space. A tree that provided nourishment, majesty and shade, a well-founded history documented in knotted circular lines dating back over the span of its decades cut down in mid-stride, a relatively young life as far as trees are concerned, an adolescent or young adult as far as I could count back and discern when viewing its saturnine rings, quietly ebbing last vestiges of vitality, its timeline naked and exposed. No dignity in death. I’m sorry I wasn’t with you, to hold your hand in your last breaths. It’s ok. We’ll meet again.

Only rot and decay, the same narrative of a lie, is what I now see, posing with its twin brethren, branches spread and intertwined as in any living organism called upon to nurture life, stir a sense of home, hearth and community. Now all is lost, splintered, broken and solely in the void lives strife. No time. They never had any time. Does anyone ever in the constant feeding of distracted urges to keep up, compete and get …to wherever the ‘there’ was in feeding the lie?

No need to remain connected to our planet at a fundamental core, nurse and tend Her with utmost care. Hedonism rules. Seven generations? What’s that? Fuck. It. We’re going in. Go on. Bulldoze the bitch. Build another golf course. Quick decisions are best, rapid and with little reflection, little trial and error and kinder, gentler ways to problem solve. Surgically excise the mess. That’s the solution, alternatives be damned! Call in the arborists. Let them survey then summon the woodsman. ‘Timber!” Haul it away. It’s no good to us anymore. The dependable, expendable nature of human to-go consumption and our insipid parasitic existence.

Romulus and Remus, as it were. Thousands of years and not one thing learned.

Family. A word. A definition. A technicality. A transaction. Construed and founded in sensibility and discourse in its highest ideal form, a foundation upon which generations yet to be born would thrive and spread their firmament of budding Spring leaves, enjoy comfort under the canopy of Summer afternoon’s shady chlorophyll-filled harmonic breeze, turn to Autumn’s chestnuts to feed critters who busily bury their treasure as they nest, build shelter inside from the pending Winter storms. The body’s fallen branches shed for them and for many as kindling to light the hearth, stoke the fires brightly lit and warm.

The ash trees from the author’s childhood home, now gone.

Finis. Done. Caput. No more.

Left unattended, these cycles over time merely became poor drainage, overgrown and chaotic sprawl, hazards in heavy snow, winds or dry seasons, tectonic plates upended in heaving shifts of unsteady and inconsistent, prophylactic means to ensure a vibrant life. Disinterested, My Dear and indifferent lack of care, they were left in a state of neglected disrepair even if they looked fine on the outside. Humans.

Did you think I meant the trees? Oh, how precious. How wonderful for you that you care so much! Most people live a lie, teeming with a beaming “HI!” on the outside, ever chasing the illusions of ‘self-care’ and ‘growth,’ all the while barely treading water, unable to touch their own misery index let alone cope. We the People in The United States want the ready-to-wear perfect Union. Make sure it’s at no actual cost, only the illusion of sacrifice and a land where we can just ‘get way from it all.’

We all need the glamorous life. We all want the utility player husband or wife, children perfectly aligned and camera ready on Christmas Day, all in a row wearing their perfectly matching Polo™. We want The Pop Tart Method™ — ready made. Just cut open, place on a tray, warm and presto! All set to consume, hedonic urge satisfied.

I count myself at the head of that line but truth be told too many care too much and too many sacrifice too much, disproportionally in their care, their productivity and their willingness to resource. The gap we must truly mind is not the that invisible line, the one between poverty and despair, between them and us, between the hoarding wealth and all the rest who pay at great cost.

Nightswimming.

I’ve only known fractured faërie tales, discord. The concept of seeking refuge takes varied forms, from the most horrible and very real war-torn nations that destroy foundations of trust and splinter a society to the core to the emotional turmoil and dysfunction — to put it mildly — fought at home between spouses, siblings, irrespective young or old. “Family” is a myth. It’s what one chooses. I hear a voice talking back to the night, laying naked with me entwined in careless whispers. “Hush. It’ll be alright,” a winsome lullaby, Her shadowy feminine curves rise in the silent shadows to slip on a negligee of silken ultraviolet light, tiptoeing from our bedchambers to take flight.

She was never solely mine.

She must abide and travel ever west in search of the next town seeking rest.

She has a flock to tend, those whose hearts and minds also need to mend at day’s end. Sun set upon which to contemplate in the days’ weary afterglow. All whom, with great dignity, have done their daily deeds to pay the rent will break bread in the entrails of the fading Evening Star, put up their feet or tuck their children into bed, yielding to Her arrival. Mistress of Blackwatch Night returns to extend her hand. Unseen forces approach: Pythia’s memories, dreams and reflections; The Love of Aphrodite, birthed from between her life-giving thighs, fed from the supple milk of Her kind breasts, nourished from mindful attentive watch from between Her kind eyes; and last but perhaps first, The Wisdom Athena lends. All of them in concert as Zeus and Hera look on. Tomorrow is another day when Apollo returns to gift us a new dawn.

For now, the seductive caress of The Mistress gently lulls lovers where they lay, heads resting on her pillowy chest as they pray. In turns of affection together as lovers who spoon, soon lips softly walk along the spindly path, careful to scale over the neckline patiently, aware. Treating love as an art. A craft. Lovers belay each other, hands clasp to break their fall, together as one — a free solo act of the most intimate dare into the abyss of nothing but this moment, this kiss, skin melts into skin, a union of heated embrace, glorious and sublime, the sacred and the profane devstate the hearts as lovers crumble, tumble and finally levitate.

Comrades in arms communicate in tongues and touch, commune as one with God, flush and frenetic and fun, a complete surrender to the fall. Their bodies to rest, souls once separate now one, rise from that place, walk amongst the stars hand-in-hand with The Mistress, enjoin Her tireless march across the stratosphere, one that rivals and is equaled only by the preening, perfect Sun whose showboat, potent plasma display will never throw shade on His Nightswimming Partner in their dance, the one of Blackbird and Morning Dove who together bring one continual song, Her soothing undertow the rest in sweet repose, where we pray and together all separate from our bodies, our minds and each receding day to join along the paths, the corridors and milky ways of this and all galaxies, a quest to repatriate The Mystery as our bodies take rest.

In the endless cycle of life and timeless time, The Mistress in Hers will follow the glory and the majesty of Apollo’s fire-breathing thundering steeds who dutifully heed his mighty word, carrying their Minister of Divinity across the firmament, galloping ritualistically into the western retreat, once and again the white hot light of day complete. The cycle of life, the mystical and the sublime, the Earthly bound limits transcending the Divine.

ME THINKS therein lies the rub, the magic of a human connection in even one waking to their conscious connectivity to the theory of relativity. To glean the same from behind the black pearl windows of another looking back at you, two together? This, to me, is the rapture, the love making that sears The Seekers’ flesh in sweat-soaked lust, Two Seekers’ journeys now one, beyond that primordial place to discover their singularity is merely a fleck of cosmic stardust and yet the entire Universe, the big bang —LMAO, Yep. I did that — in actual not mere theory and the wanderlust amongst the stars to marry together with God, communion between the mortal and Divine.

Then, Nihal, Came You.

I’d be happy to read about and view the world through your eyes. That’s one way to transcend, to escape off my own Rock, imprisoned here in the Chateau d’if. I am my own warden, debating whether to hand mysdelf, my own captive his keys. If you possess yours, don’t hesitate. Were every one of us to liberate from our own bondage, the very ways we self-incarcerate in sadness and doom, woe and misery, doubt and oppression, then in their place each day a renewed presence of what seem to be onerous routines, mortal cycles and rituals, would elevate to a level of religiosity mixed with the mysticism that it all is merely a single, continues energy beam upon which we together as one move. We choose. We decide how to live, eat, wake and dream, clear-eyed lucidity or depraved with animus and hostility.

I have no delusions here. You are My Muse, My Newfoundland, reawakening my art in romance in conscious care —and a very alluring sexton, providing map and compass aboard this vessel, your dreamy stars by which to sail.

Destination yet to discover.

You’re a catalytic converter, a jump start for this junker, giving this ol’ heart of mine that’s been wrecked a thousand times a chance to reemerge from a long, lonely winter. Yeah, I cannot lie — I want to be George Washington and chop down that cherry tree. I want to correspond daily. I want to meet you by Trailways,™ visit you visit me, total strangers though we may be. I want to arrange a marriage where we learn over time and the letters I write, stamp and slip into an envelope the essence of me, signed, sealed and delivered — Yours — as I slip into You, lick the edges clean and seal tight the dream between our flesh and through the dark night our ephemeral, ethereal light prevails until the penumbra drawn from behind the dawn of your translucent light and the mourning dove’s song set the day aglow.

You’ll never know from all this shlock and caw that I’d actually love to read your books, learn what Marxist law means to you and find out what it, you, all of this mean to me. No other decency comes close than to love and be loved in return, save for maybe to understand and to be understood, the bonds of friendship over time sealed by affection and founded in truth, comrades in arms whose shared and unique destinies intertwine as branches of a tree planted in youth.

I write You because I want to be near you and feel less lonely even as I treasure my solitude. Companionship for its own sake is not what I need but rather the conscious awakening together with another or a collective are what I crave. The mind is a powerful aphrodisiac and it’s rare I find any beaming back signs of life from their lonely planet let alone orbital alignment of all that is known, seen and unseen, indivisible and unknown. You are, without ever having met you, a quantity unlike any before or to come whom-which-that I will know. Of this I am certain. They call space the final frontier. I disagree.

It’s here on Earth where boldly few humans dare to go on a thimble threaded needle sewing the seam between two hearts and minds on the same beam, one made of cosmic stardust, founded in separate and shared vision and dreams, the wonders of a wondrous universe dancing on the pages written between their desires, aspirations and practical realities. It is also true that, in my state of higher Self that has been hard won and still daily hard to arrive to, I feel love for all creatures, old and young, for every thing and every one so I do, yes it’s true, fall into crush almost daily, sometimes hourly, with people who strike a chord in my Soul, the words they communicate and the connectivity they implore, the instance to truth they instigate in their self-expressed, self-professed selves.

L-R, Sancho Panza and Don Quixoje. Gustave Dore, 1863

Everyone is a Seeker.

Every single person on this planet is seeking some thing and I wish I would be able to single-handedly or, less arrogantly, account for and together all of us apprehend collectively that thing and, in the process, come to a bridge where we may build a learning between each of us not listening, our voices falling silent in the great divide as individuals, neighbors, even as family or friends we collide, nations and whole continents sow seemingly growing, glowering, endless division without end.

All of it is one.

We all are one Continuity.

Down is up and up is down in equal measure, neither one anything more than a man made endeavor to construct and define all we cannot divinate beyond the five known senses and the three acceptable dimensions. All that ‘fabric of time’ [only exists] in our mortal spectrum and paltry scope of vision, our meager human analysis, all of those latter points inevitably leave us frayed and tattered in an endless, un-slaked thirst to define and delineate, a mission to constrict individual liberties and lives into neatly organized bundles of lies that obfuscate, and stitch structures, strictures of society meant to defy logic, cause us to separate from the unknown, the unknown which is the entire fucking point of heading ceaselessly — maybe chasing windmills — with blind faith towards the light.

It’s been written and it needs be said and bears repeating over and over again — science and mysticism, the facts and the faith must intertwine to achieve something that will elevate this entire existence for every species, genus, family if we are to have order and class — not the hierarchy of capitalism and the vulgarity of human economic subjugations but equality, equanimity and a sense of grace in the kingdom that is scientifically, verifiably a mystery, god given by the hand of humans.

Waiting in our boats to set sail…

Sea of Joy

Bibliography

On Desire
On Decisions
Romulus and Remus
Chlorophyll
Hedonic Treadmill
The Ezra Klein Show, New York Times
Pythia’s Memories
Aphrodite’s Love
Athena’s Wisdom
Zeus and Hera
Apollo
The Sun
Theory of Relativity
Chateau d’if featured in The Count of Monte Cristo
Penumbra
Tag Line Origins of Star Trek’s
Chasing aka “Tilting” at Windmills

The Captain, Kasey Chase, 7.17.2017 Bonus in-piece track.

The Atrocity of Love, Soundtrack