Double Reed

The vines always locate me, in the outer reaches of my deepest theta states, warm and comfortable, well at rest, stepping off the edge of the cliff, in tandem.  The song writes itself from the growing and blowing breeze insides the holes in my arms. I should explain how they got there.

This was not the ultimate trip back in time to the ancient smell, dusty, sex stinking, fanatical and livid that I had hoped for.  The aesthetic was not right at all. Not romantic, like I had hoped.  No swept up hair, no kohl marking my eyes for the slaughter of the sort of love affair that I would gladly follow into the grave, my own or any poor bastard I had to kill to please my love.  Yes, I know I've always been that sort of woman, in this or any incarnation.  Anything for the man, the woman dies by my hand.  I never made that decision, but somehow it seems it was made for me, like a cattle being stamped for her master.

This was some kind of mosaic - a no man's land of my past, the childhood, the other in between mundane worlds that gripped into a fist all my most recent, imaginary or made up memories, and images and sands of electric light on a wall.  I fall with full force every time through this wall of sand, of glass, of television light--the sort reared in dreamland.  Lately I have been attacked.  A good deal of it has produced a fever; a running, a constant paranoia, a mental overload of people just trying to put me in the ground everywhere I turned.  But somehow, amongst this constant battle for my dream body, there was no fear.  I always seem to know it's a part; there is the feeling of people watching though I cannot see them, and the sky no matter where or when, feels endless, like there are worlds outside of, beyond and in front of it, all sides now beneath my feet, kicking the dirt of my daily life (this one) about the plot I am half-constructing, half creating and half ruled by.  My ego has no place here.  I am simply a grain, washing up at the foot of God, he a grain at my feet, the abyss there right next to me all the time.

There were elements of the ancient world.  More the words used to describe the scene than the feeling and details of the scene itself.  Ships at sea, waves tossing and turning.  Made of wood - creaky, planks, wet wood soaked to the brim, but dry inside where who but members of the Velvet Underground lived, played and rehearsed - here in this boat, which I find myself upon.  He is blond, attractive.  I think to myself that I don't usually think this of the yellow haired ones, but he has a familiarity.  Then again, I cannot think who in the world he is.  There were no blondes in the Velvet Underground. Save Nico, and I don't like the ladies nor was she anywhere to be seen.  I thought, is it John Cage?  He's dark haired and Welsh.  I stopped trying to figure it out.  An older, skinny man who seemed to know more than this morose, bohemian lot of figures knew, he was around in the peripheries (he had been part of the dream before this one, where I was having to climb a big tree outside the back woods of my childhood home - it seeming huge like the soul castle.  A killer was after me, then I was he - a cat climbed the tree, became him, became me, and I escaped, cutting a thick rope and swinging pirate like back into my old bedroom window.  He was there, but I don't know if he was the cat, or the killer, or me, or the police sent to find me).

Back to the tall ships.  There is no modernity without a feeling of the profane, and oh did I allow the profane to rule the day.  Once the skinny overseer left (by, of course, silently diving into the impossibly tall waves and finding his connecting ship nearby, out of frame), we took this decadent party to nothing less plebeian than a trailer/RV.  The rest were gone, and it was our turn to act out the plot.  It played like the usual porno, we fucked this that and the other way.  I could sense, feel and exalt from everything - the viciousness of him pulling me close to him by holding suddenly onto my hips and then, my wrists, as he fucked me harder and I started to come, and then, in between the drivers and passenger seats (what a equanimous relationship this was), the blond and I fucked against each other, tongues, hair and sweat my newest cavalcade of connection.  It was something else.  After it was all done, and it did seem to keep going on and on to which I had no complaints, a woman seemed to appear out of nowhere.  She was average, and dressed more like the modern day (I wouldn't know what we were dressed like, since we seemed naked from the start).  I felt heavy with his fluids, and my own, and there she was, meek and bothersome in the corner of the vehicle, trying to get him to seduce her.  Knowing myself, I was having none of that.  Let her find her own way to the pornographic epicenter of the romano-modern-white trash-rough fuck-no frills world in which I had found myself.  Let her sail her own ships and make her own story.  I didn't so much throw her out of the trailer, as I just opened the latch of the door behind her, and the bitch just fell on out.  

Well, this skinny little thing set upon a rage at us both.  I yelled at him to start locking the doors, since she was out to destroy us (funny I had missed her stalking presence when I was in the trees in childhood).  We both started securing the vehicle, but somehow there were so many steps to doing this and reaching outside became a part of the locking up ritual, so there were ultimately loopholes.  She grew like a stunned animal outside in the dirt, and flailed at us, mostly at me, in every moment she could find a few inches to snub her way into, on the inside of our fucking contest to ride shotgun.  Soon, we seemed to have escaped, and I was up high on a large platform indoors; still a sort of audience nearby, small, meaningless, silent, watching.  Her, not me.  He tried to get the knife from her, but it was Huge and she hurled it up at me, from right below, so she couldn't miss.  It seemed to penetrate my right upper arm, at least 4 or 5 times, in and out, like a sewing needle raping my outer layers of skin and tissue, muscle and blood.  I recognized that she "got me" but then, somehow, even after she was chased out by the now woman in charge (business suit and all), no one payed me any mind, but I wanted them to.  Because I was ok.  My tattoo, the roman one with the vines and the provincial words usually found on my upper left arm, was now on the right one, where she had landed her steel into me (and out of me, since I had ripped it non-chalantly out and dropped it onto the floor below.  It had made a definite "ding" sound on the floor).  The wounds were incredibly deep, but somehow, like certain puncture wounds are, complete in their containing of the blood that I had thought would have flowed from them like merlot, the cheap, thick sort.  It didn't hurt, and she was gone, and I had smiled at him, since our good time was un-affected.  You can't take back a fuck like that one. 

Somehow, after a few more tosses and turns, elysium took me one step further removed from action, and people, and the story, so-called.  I was travelling up the mountains far upstate, and the colours were achingly beautiful.  I knew my father was farther up, along with so many others whose atmosphere was not allowed to mingle with ours.  Maybe it was he, and they, the invisible ones, watching me all the time, standing beside me in all my adventure, crudeness, foreplay and denouement.  Always there, in the brightest of colours, blinded by sunshine, just up and around the corner of the mountain.  My last thought was one of houses, always in my familial mindset.  I would have to buy an old one, made of stone, not of wood, since that far up the mountain must get really cold in the winter, so we would have to have one of those to see us through to the new face of Spring- bounding plot lines, revengeful women, lustful men and myself being the same in all of these worlds, complete in each vine, wrapping further through me in my quiet trip up and around the mountain, wrapped in a shroud of my own ego, and my own making.

~ M. Lucia