13 Ghost Points

Do you know where your ghost points are? It’s very important, I would think. This guy, on the train, vacancy sign flashing in his pupils, scratching his head and his feet so heavy, looked like they would sink into the floor, seep through into the parallel universe, where he is surely riding the same train, just a little bit altered. But not enough to change things. He hasn’t a fucking clue. Neither does she, that middle aged woman murmuring to herself, since the subway doors didn’t open up fast enough for her. Typical south american type – you can see the mesa in her cheeks, her arms like stumps with no intention. Pulling her in and back, more than down. Her parallel universes could be firing laser pistols at her in all directions and she wouldn’t know it. Her anger is too strong and too self contained. When the doors finally open, you can see her face, pinched and bitter, the arsehole of a rotting lemon, retreating into itself. A face like that never comes out of that. You have to feel badly that she couldn’t encounter a smile or physiologically let it pass onto her face if the heavens opened, and rained down golden dipped elevation from itself. She sees ghosts as a bad thing; something to be feared, mocked or let sit unnoticed in the deepening folds down and diagonal to the creases laying eggs in her eyes.

Ghost Palace – This is where we think we are home, and we are not. We think we run the show, only to find out that the gardener, the old men with a surely stutter and missing teeth is poisoning our drinking water and shitting in our thoughts daily, with nothing less than a lifelong building up of resentment, because you never saw him there, tending gently to your flowers, the ones the neighbors think are so lovely in their form. He goes unnoticed and what’s worse, the only way you will know when he’s gone is when the flowers all of a sudden stop being so bright, so lively, so adorning of your face and front wall. He has sunk into the soil, and you can’t even explain to him how much it all meant. The colours, the fragrance, the fact that flowers have NO meaning.

Ghost Sincerity- This is how earnest we try to be. Saying good morning, when you just don’t give a fuck. Offering up our opinions and structures even though no one asked for them. Shouting without urgency at these little games we all play, and to what end. No end in sight.

Ghost Pile- All the things we own….we covet and want. Eating even the oeroubus that enslaves us with its gut centered destiny. Gluttons, all, can be a good thing. But don’t serve it like it’s your air to breath. It can’t save you, when you’re sinking down into quicksand, the one you mixed up all special in that golden cup you thought would see you through? He’ll just whip around you, smack your face in with his tail as you try to bite it off, but it’s too late. You can’t take it with you, even for a moment.

Ghost Heart- Ah, yes. The veil. This is the one that is both seemingly neverending, and the one which dies little by little each day, with each shard that’s kicked from its teeth on down. Even when recovery works, there is still scar tissue there, growing in more primitively and less expectantly than before. It hurts as it dies, and it only dies because we let it. Most of what we want, plan, do and say has absolutely nothing to do with our heart, which in case you didn’t know, is our soul. Overused and overripe words, but all the same, there is no better thing on this earth, while we have it in our midst, than to love outright and without fear or boundaries. If you get that right, death ain’t no thing t’all.

Ghost Road- The ghost road can be one of two things: If you are following that great passion which burns inside, whether in the wee hours of the night, in the in between times of day when we wait on nothing to gain nothing, else sorting and planning and trying for any of those dreams that once filled your soul, then the ghost road is the one you could have traveled, which lays open and bare, dead carcasses and roadblocks, emotional, pointless wars and every day filled with dead air. Ghosts sleep on that road. Not I. If you are not living in accord with yourself and your truest visions, then you travel the ghost road, and the real one is lost to you, which is the greatest tragedy life can imagine.

Ghost Pillow- The ghost pillow is similar. We sleep at night, dreaming of the other sides to our brains, worlds, and selves, and that is the way of it. When we dream of the backwards motions in this life, the ego stained particles which find no home properly in our daily world, which is some kind of “reality” (a word which truly has no meaning, for a flower’s reality holds much more weight), all carpet burns and life choice, well, then the pillow is on the wrong side and dreams are wasted. Night times are for the matchable reality, not a preferable or nightmarish alternative to this one.

Ghost Bed- Same idea. Don’t fuck one person, say you love them, then try to fuck someone else because you follow a rigid plan and not that ghost heart. Every queen should be a whore, every whore can be a mother, and there is no duality that makes for a vital life, in the sheets of the ghost bed.

Ghost Market- We all walk down a ghost market daily – shuffling our vision to avoid the distasteful, grabbing at anything we can as we feel we are entitled to (back off of that, and watch your world open up…those mean and pinched ass-lemon faces are a thing of the past and arguments seem pointless, unless they are utilized as foreplay); no one owes you anything is the real point here. Nothing you need at buy or take at the ghost market.

Ghost Cave- This is where the madness hides; it hides like a child who’s been slapped across the face, tears streaming and drying too quickly. Every single crack in our existence is due to something. We shove those children into this cave, in the darkness, holding desperately to each other and whimpering as you keep ignoring them and shoving them to the side. They will fashion instruments, weapons of some kind and have their day. They’ll club you to death in your sleep before you know it. Then the ghost bed and pillow will have no meaning whatsoever. They’ll run amuck and tear down the walls of the city, dig up your gardener and kick at his dead and dusty bones cause they’re bored. You should have listened to them.

Ghost Hall- Simply put – the place before the place when the light shines on you, and they all see you there, making each and every entrance. The silence before, when you know if you are right with yourself, or not.

Ghost Store- The market is the same as the store, except the store might also be the room in which you hide your treasures. They need the light of day, else they too will die a sudden and silent death, the rattle and the collapsing liquid in their throats measured up against a life not lived.

Ghost Leg- It’s supposed to keep you up, and walking, and moving forward. FOR-WARD. Stagnant water stinks and the sharks can wait forever, while you wade, and your muscles tire and you slowly go again, yet again, into the Abyss. Which, in case you haven’t heard, isn’t some great light…..it’s a lack of light and darkness, and a lack of all that can create.

Ghost Seal- Marked onto you from the start, the face before the world was made, to steal from an Irishman. But, despite the nature of a seal, it can always be re-written. Coming to yourself in the final moments of your deathbed is a greater and truer life than living with the ghosts every minute previous and never allowing them to know that you were alive, and they could be too.

I hold the gaze of a white electric light flickering through the lattice of a fence, wrapped and kissed by vines from all directions, and supported and adored by the semblance of light which it calls its world, just the same as yours.

M. Lucia