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I used to have secrets - things that lived under bridges in my mind. My sister spoke with spirits under a willow tree near our gate - and grew up to have demon dreams. Imps squatting on her chest breathing out her life, and when she woke up the daylight was already seeping out of the sky. My secrets were about pale skin and sadness. Hers were about doors to other worlds - worlds or perspectives, no difference. We had a secret, doors and gardens and cold rooms on holidays. We could have gone a whole lifetime without remembering it, and that would have been a different lifetime, a different world, a different perspective. Universes that will never exist.

Carl built stone villages when he lost his mind, and slowly he found it again, and came to the centre, the vortex, the centrifuge that purified him and made him certain. He wrote later on that to him the world was like a maze of transparent walls that he looked through to see other minds and the universes they would create if left untended. He reached into those minds and spoke with them and tried to heal them. New perspectives, new universes. He was never fearless, but he walked the labyrinth to the centre anyway. Those paintings and drawings of circles and whirlpools, so many of them, too many for sanity, too many for anyone but a healer who had given up everything except purpose.

Sister, mother, father: my world. Like a knife dance in an amphitheatre made of hills and fields and broken stone seats - and we spin, we cut each other, we play out the choreography as we were taught. Glowing things in our arteries and our minds, painting trails in the night-time as we circle each other. Flickers of moss and grass and needles on the edge of vision, radiant green splinters. We dance but we don't speak - if we spoke we would spill everything out. Blood, sound, secrets. We prefer to dance. The knives flicker closer, closer, closer. Glowing cancerous, yearning to be free.

Draw a circle between you and me and there is something that will always be secret - I have nothing left to offer. Everything is emptied out into past and future - a past full of memories I lovingly keep alive, a future full of new life, the only thing I had to offer. And so on, and so on, moths circling a lamp, comets falling in love with the sun, you can make the rest up yourself. Electromagnetic secrets rippling emerald in a solar camera, glowing and burned-out a million miles from where you are. Where I am, where you are - bits of information smeared over a soul like iron filings lining up around magnetic field lines. I had a sister who saw secret things, I had parents who blinded themselves, and I myself wished only to be clear and empty, clear and empty, without secrets, only walking in my mind out over that radiant field, green grass stretching out in a circle to every hidden horizon.


Secretly, as certain dark things are loved. Do you believe in magic? Will you look into my eyes and deny the knowledge of secret green and glowing things? Are there gems that burn with liquid fire smoldering inside you? Does your hand crave a source of eternal light and heat? Have your nostrils inhaled a secret smoke that twines around your mind? Was I the one who melted the ice in your heart and warmed the blood in your veins? Can you feel the heat of my blood? Would you let me heal the scars I see in you? Have you left your mark on me? Are you afraid of me? Did you know that I can read your mind? Your silence says more about you than all the words that pour from your tired hands. Am I in love with the poet inside of you, screaming for release, pushed aside, cast out of your life, denied, rejected, scorned and thriving against your will? Coming out when you least expect it in the eyes of a stranger you thought you knew.

Will I read regret in the bruises under your eyes the morning after a late night conversation? Were you aware that my cruelty exists because you share love and light and laughter not with me but with another? Have your eyes been drawn to a flash of sparks in the night? Did the flame reach towards you as you warmed your hands in mine? How could I keep my hands to myself when you offered me a taste of what could be? Do the days seem empty and meaningless without me? Has your sun grown cold as you watch the calendar mark anniversaries we could have spent together?  Do you recall the way my fingers wrote on your skin? Was my message unclear? Did you misunderstand me and my intentions? Was I the archeologist discovering your hidden secrets? Does my intensity scare you? Is that why you lied to me? Is it? Answer me God damn you.

Ask yourself why you wake in the middle of the night. Is it to check on me and what I might be doing? I know that you have secrets. They seethe behind your eyes. Did you forget that you can not hide from me and what I know? You can turn off the music but you can’t dance without an image of me smiling up at you can you? I wish there was a way to erase the past. I know there will never be anyone else like you. We have had our midnights. We shared the break of day but just as morning chases the night away you, like Judas have kissed me away. I do not doubt that you have forgotten me. I know that you have cleaned me out of your life because we are like peas in a pod. I have relegated certain memories of you to a forgotten corner of my mind. Maybe one day all of this will be as true as the love I had for you. Then again, maybe not.

For Dream V i r u s

The US House of Representatives recently approved
a plan to bury nuclear waste on sacred Shoshone land.

In Nevada's Yucca Mountain, spent reactor fuel
and ancestral ghosts agitate the same rock.
