 
Secret Stories

By

Dwight Peters

**Secret Stories**

by Dwight Peters

Copyright 2014 Dwight Peters

Smashwords Edition
Contents

The Man Who Turned Into A Garden

A Shadow Play

Famous Orphan Girl

The Value Of Simplicity As Told To A Deaf Turtle In The Voice Of A Tomato

Wildman

Hero

This Story Stinks

Music Of Body's Footsteps

Perceiving Doors

An Oak And A Shepherd

Everyone Deserves A Little Celebration

Naked Reading

Don't Be Suckered Into Worrying

The Third Nipple Is Never Blind

Gypsy Girl And Woman

Portrait

Be Movie

Parentage

Chip Dip

The Excitement Of Silences

Days Over When They Begin, The First Quiet Breaths Of Morning New

Normal Dangers

A Self Sacrifice

Ocean's Tide

The Philosopher And The Stranger

The Killing Of A Bad Man

Over As Well As Under Development

The Eye Of Acquaintance

The Wait

Alone Again

Nature Walk

An Interview With A Social Worker

The Gift Of Strength

A New Fullness

Documentary

Introduction

Reality Show

Amuseum

Don't Ever Settle For Simply Settling When Settling Down

The Reason For Rhythm

I Was Wrong

It Is Essential To Know This

Prescription

Touch, To Know What Giving Is

A To-Do Today

Touchdown

Potty Training For Potty Mouths

You Are Beautiful Inside Your Insides

Prehistoric Urges

It's Okay To Have Vision

The Man With A Mirror For A Face

The Woman Who Was The Earth

Children Can Be Cruel And Everyone's A Child

Travel Time

Wild, Western, Cowless, Cower Less Man

Untitled

Audience

Crane

Sightseeing

Internet Cafe

Water Music

Fire Music

The Salty Madness Of Mixed-up Nuts

Ash As Fire

Wave Goodbye, Wave Hello

Meditation On The Smiling Beautiful

The Man Who Held His Breath And Became A Cloud

Workforce

Street Smarts

I Would Drink An Entire Volcano While Walking In The Middle Of An Ocean To Create An Island Paradise For You. But Wait, Don't You Know You Are My Island Paradise?

Letter Written At A Café In Bright Sunshine

The Philosopher Says Hello

Impossible To Bear

The Smite Of The Melted, Smitten Smiths

Seems, Stitches

Art Tune

Intimidate. Intimate.

All The New/Old Rage

Modern Medicine

What Was Theirs Is Now Sometimes In Some Ways Mine

Many Bodies To Consider

Log Ick

Doing It

Redicktionism

A Cliché Story With Or Without People

How Much Humiliation Does It Take To Become Humble?

Lesson Plans

Marriage

City Life

The Smiling Scent Of Lavender Above The Clouds Becoming Fragrant Moonlight

The Philosopher And The Crazy Person

Bedtime Story

At The Height Of Being Grounded

What A Lovely Day

She Is A Painter

Peak-a-boohoo

In An Open Bedroom

Bees At Bear's Knees, Bear At Bees' Knees

The Light Of Love Through Space And Time

An Honest Discovery Presents Itself

The Secret Of The Sad Dog

Nothing Normal Is Normal, Normally

Pet Friendly

Flowers

Sea. Transparent. See.

# The Man Who Turned Into A Garden

A man became weak from the stresses of his life, so soon his body was unable to fight off the invasive organisms that healthy bodies fight off. But something very different happened to him. His body began to change a lot in a very unusual way.

The first change that he noticed was a patch of grass on his back. Then, soon after, he found a small flower behind his knee. After this, there was so much all at once: some thyme grew on his arm; under his chin was an eggplant the size of two of his chins; there was a large bunch of grapes on his head; and there was a green bell pepper on one shoulder and yellow one on his other; also, he was confused by the rutabaga that he had to trim from each his ankles one morning to get his shoes on because he remembered rutabagas were root vegetables. And over the next few weeks and months there was a lot more: parsley, figs, green beans, dill, lemons, zucchini, basil, spinach, plums, rosemary, tangerines, kale, asparagus, cilantro, cherries, and a few hot chilies that stung a little. All this and even a lot more grew until nearly all of his body was full and lush, and he had more vegetables and herbs and fruits than he could ever imagine figuring out what to do with.

Somehow most of his stresses didn't bother him anymore. His neighbors would come over often now, and they would talk and laugh and drink a tea made from some chamomile that had grown on his stomach. On the small round dining table that he placed next to the front window of his home, he kept a pair of gardening shears; and, when his guests were over, he would give them some of the vegetables, herbs and fruits that had grown from him. One day, as he went out to a farm to give what he could to a family whose farm wasn't able to produce much, he let their cow chew some grass from his back.

Since all of this began, he noticed that he had been going to bed earlier and waking up just before sunrise. He would sit at his table looking out the window at the dark, feeling happy and fortunate, waiting for the sunlight.

# A Shadow Play

He kept seeing only half of his body whenever he glimpsed a shadow of himself. And it wasn't sliced by length or width—he would look and see a collection of scattered parts.

After he lost her, he said and said that it felt like he had lost a part of himself. This feeling of loss undermined his ability to function in the basic daily things he always did. It was more than he was ever prepared to consider and be able to figure out a way through. The experiences that had made up his world were no longer possible. His world was severed.

He asked himself what he could possibly do to put himself back together again. After a few months of trying to answer this—when he barely fed himself, rarely washed and stumbled to the few places he actually did go—he found what he thought was a solution. He decided to live entirely in the dark.

Immediately, he moved to a house in a rural area and covered all the windows so no light could get in. He took out all the light bulbs. He bought sunglasses that covered his eyes and the areas around them completely, applying duct tape over the complete surface of them; wearing them always, except when he washed his face—but, as he did that, he kept his eyes shut hard. He learned to do everything without seeing and never left his house, having his groceries delivered. He tried to see himself only in the way where he still was what used to be, telling himself that his shadow needed to be removed.

# Famous Orphan Girl

A father died and left his teenage daughter orphaned and in debt. All but a few of his things were seized by creditors at the time of his death. Her father was famous and anything of his was worth a lot of money.

As she got older, the woman had to sell her father's personal items and gifts to her that she was able to keep.

By her mid-twenties, the woman was incapacitated by having lived her life around people who didn't see her as anything beyond her being part of her father. She loved her father deeply; but was not sure what to do to take care of herself because she was unable to discover how to go out into the world and live: her memories had taken on a physical presence and battered and bondaged her.

After she turned thirty, she barely left her home, living off of what savings she still had from selling her father's things, all of which were now gone, having sold one thing and then another until there was no longer any of her father's things left. She went out rarely. She ate little. And she couldn't meet anyone without them talking only of her father; none of these people ever noticed anything wrong because they never listened to or saw her.

Most of the rest of the woman's life was spent living off of money from selling small bags with pinches of her father's ashes in them. This was the only way that she could figure out to survive. It only took a couple of sales a year to give how much it took to get by. One person even put the ashes in water and drank them, wanting to be more like her father.

When the ashes too were gone, something changed in her, though by now quite old, within a few months she got married, adopted a child, and started working on something that was meaningful and wasn't based on what people saw her as.

# The Value Of Simplicity As Told To A Deaf Turtle In The Voice Of A Tomato

After years of accidents that have formed my personality—where I have been forced to accept that I am making sense of the world, but doing it one disaster at a time—I have finally found my way to be capable of telling you this story.

One day, as I hung growing happily attached to my vine, I fell to the dirt and suddenly became a mouse—scaring myself. Instantly, I found myself running through a monstrous field full of what seemed to be similar to what I had just been. As I got to the edge of all the vines, I paused from the shock of all this. And, when I did, I was cut into many awful pieces by a large machine.

Instantly, again, I changed and became dust and was blown into an old farmhouse where workers slept and ate as an uncountable number of separate tiny parts, making some of the workers sneeze as they had their meals and rested. Months later, when the rain began, I was formed together again in the mud after being blown back outside, and I became a parasite, finding myself in the body of a worker.

The worker became ill and had to return home, which happened to be far away by the sea. When the worker died, there was a ceremony where the body was put into a small, weatherworn boat and covered with many scraps of wood and burned. I, still in the body of the worker, was burned too, and my ashes brewed with the salted water and became an egg that came ashore and was buried by some children. Eventually, I hatched as a turtle, small and unsure at first—living a long life across oceans.

# Wildman

I told myself I wouldn't write about this guy—who called himself the "Wildman" thirty years before—who was the old fashioned university professor—sleeping with students and embracing moist excesses of any available high. An older man now, a man living with his average looking but loving wife and adult son, a family man, he awakes in a hospital from a two-day sleep after taking an overdose of his antidepressants. I drop off a couple of his favorite books for him.

# Hero

An oil spill in an ocean happens. There is a fire on the water.

A man on a nearby ship sees the water appearing to be burning. He misunderstands what is happening, thinking the sea and soon the world will cook away.

After a few quick moments, he finds out what was actually happening. But these few short naive moments hold too much meaning for him. He has already experienced the end of the world. He recreates and re-experiences this in his mind over and again while at sea—seeing the flaming water—trying to understand what the meaning is.

Back home again, he goes to his favorite place to get sandwiches and sits and begins eating. Halfway through, it occurs to him that he can see the end of the world in his sandwich too.

# This Story Stinks

Originally written as a response piece to Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions number XLI.

There is a life-sized, plastic rhino. A prostitute is sitting on its back. One of them has gotten a nose job in the past three years. This is all happening in the middle of a circle arranged for a New Age book club. The book club is reading about horns. At a zoo somewhere there is a Buddhist monk who complains about the smell of shit, and who has never understood the meaning of his practice. A dead Frenchman, with his gourmet nose, smells this same shit and understands his own death, finding compassion. There is an unhappy, young girl named Compassion who dies after trying to change her name. Compassion is so sad, even in death—why? While dead, the girl becomes a woman who also becomes a prostitute who meets a life-sized rhino made of plastic. The prostitute climbs on the back of the rhino, and the rhino melts and dies from the heat between the prostitute's legs.

There are two lovers naked in nature. Rolling on the ground together, their sweating bodies, moving over leaves, have leaves stick to them, coating them. The leaves are the leaves of a book not yet written. The couple's blood writes the words as they move. The book tells of a coming harvest. Everything is ripe now.

The couple makes love through spring and into summer without ever stopping. The leaves of the book number tens-of-thousands of pages, moving off of their bodies a page at a time when the writing is finished, then binding itself to the other pages. But, as summer comes, the couple shrinks to only a fifth of their original size; they also are unable to move away from the spot where they have been for so long, unable too to separate physically from each other. As winter comes, they are suffering and cry out. When the roots beneath them hear their cries, they grab the couple and the now finished book, pulling the couple and the book into the ground. Soon after, snow comes.

In the ground, the couple becomes earth and the roots of a single tree absorb their essence from the nutrients in the earth. The book becomes earth too, and the roots of the same tree absorb its essence also. That tree then grows far past the clouds deep into the sky. The tree stops growing and immediately after it hears the sky say, "You smell like shit." The tree responds, "It is only love and compassion."

# Music Of Body's Footsteps

A man lived a life where many others wanted to kill him. Not because of any wrongdoing that he did—but because of what in this man reminded these others, of something, somewhere within themselves, that provoked a violence—a violence many times unknown to these others.

One day this man was walking through the city as he often did, and often did at this time with a particular woman. It was not unusual during these pleasant meditative walks for him to be confronted and for violent attacks to be attempted towards him. But it had always been that this man was able to communicate between himself and his attackers a unity within the attackers, himself and all other people that was itself a perception and action of non-violence, disarming the circumstance and finding a practical and affective oneness of communication.

This day, as many others, went along similarly—walking through the city with the same particular woman—being confronted. On this day, though, he was killed. He made his understanding attempt at communicating, but his body was brutally destroyed by the violence of incapacity.

The particular woman walked away calmly with a joyful peace of weeping smiles.

# Perceiving Doors

He grabbed the door after opening it from the inside and somehow broke it off its hinges. Holding onto it for a few steps, he then threw it to the ground outside. As all of this happened, he felt himself become the building, with and without a door. He had always thought that when inside of a building it was an entirely separate space from the outside, but as he walked through the doorway carrying the door he felt differently. His rage diminished with the understanding that there was no such absolute difference.

# An Oak And A Shepherd

At the old brick high school that has been closed for several years now, she looked at the once richly flowing gated up entrance, up past the fourth floor to the roof of the square building, wishing there was some way to get up there. She leaned against a tree that had been carved into some time ago, a heart with her name within it sliced through the surface of the wood. After considering the history of the heart, she glanced back up towards the old school, noticing that at least half of the windows were boarded up.

There were ideas in her mind of what a wonderful and fun home she could make out of the building if she could get enough time and things to work with to fix it up the way she liked. As she started to talk herself out of this and walk away, she noticed one of the boarded up windows had what looked like a face cut out of the board. It seemed to be crafted perfectly, with thought and effort, by someone very skilled. Looking intensely at the face, it seemed to be more than something made well—even much more than simply something; it seemed to express emotion—its own emotion. She felt warmness towards it and from it. She paused a moment and thought that perhaps if it could feel that it could also understand. She looked around and saw no people, so she yelled towards it. She told it about what was going on in her life, about her troubles, about her dreams that she felt she couldn't quite meet, about her feelings of helplessness, about the love she wanted to honestly and intimately share, about her place in the world and what she felt she could do to be a healthy, happy part of it—and then she sighed and again began to walk away.

She got all the way to the far edge of the building near what used to be the sports field, which became a park when the school closed, and saw that a board on the first floor window was loose, so she pushed it in, being careful as she climbed inside to avoid the nails that had been hammered through the board into the window frame that now pointed straight up. The building was dirty and dangerous, having been squatted in, used as a dump, stripped from inside the walls of valuable wire and miscellaneous parts, looted through everywhere else, generally abused for amusement, then finally neglected. Finding herself within this, after a short walk through the hallways, what was left of the gym and a few classrooms, she turned back.

As she left, she thought that she heard the face that she had seen talk to her and say that it knew her, and things would be good, and that she was good. And it told her that after she left she should visit in her imagination.

# Everyone Deserves A Little Celebration

Late at night ten-and-a-half years ago, stifled—without joy and wonder—I took the bus for a few hours to a place to see a friend. I sat in the aisle seat, so that when my legs started hurting from being pushed against the seat in front of me, I could turn the leg closest to the aisle into it to rest and have more space for the other—until someone had to walk past to either use the bathroom in the back or to get off at their stop. There were no breaks where anyone got to get off to smoke or eat or anything, so it worked out okay.

At one of those times where I moved my leg into the aisle, I was in even more pain and discomfort, so I positioned my whole body in that direction along with just the one leg. As I did this, the bus drove though a long brightly lit tunnel; I noticed that the woman sitting on the other side of the aisle right across from me was wearing a finely made and stylish shirt, but that it was made of a heavy fabric and had a pouch as big as a grapefruit that was padded until pillowed plush with fine cloth. I became instantly curious but couldn't see inside to find out what, if anything, was in there—but I was immediately convinced that I was right for thinking that there was something very important to her in there—and I also knew I had to know.

As the bus passed out of the tunnel, it was mostly dark again other than sporadic streetlights outside on the highway and a few reading lights that were on not far from me. I turned mine on too so I could see a little better. The woman had been sleeping, but she had just woken up—though she was upset and confused, as if she had forgotten she was traveling. Having been awake the whole trip, I talked with her about the bus ride, about where we were and had been, and this seemed to calm her down by putting her back into herself—back where she was at that moment. I couldn't help myself from taking advantage of the situation, hoping she would feel indebted to me, so I asked what was in the pouch.

Initially, I was annoyed when she started talking about her glasses—I hadn't even noticed her glasses before—but what she told me made me very interested, taking as good a look as I could. She said there was a tiny man inside the pouch, and that there was a special sticker on her glasses that made it possible to see him without looking in the pouch so that she could watch him to see what he needs and to make sure he is well. I had so many thoughts, questions, and wild emotional responses jump into me, but I said nothing. She got up and leaned forward into the reading light and let me look in the pouch. There was a real and really tiny man, but as many more thoughts, questions, and wild emotions jumped into me, I was overwhelmed and fell asleep. Not waking up until everyone on the bus had already gotten off at their stops, I was lucky that my stop was the last stop the bus had.

Six months ago was ten years exactly. I have had a little party to celebrate the possibility of the existence of something like the tiny man every year since then with some friends—although I never told them what the party was really for, other than that it was for the celebration of the joy of the possibility within life, which they seemed to take as a pleasant eccentricity of mine more than anything else. But, six months ago, I saw the tiny man again—only this time he was about average size. He was wearing glasses—though he hadn't been before—and a finely and stylishly made shirt with a padded pouch. I am completely convinced that the woman I met was tiny and in that pouch.

# Naked Reading

I handed the person what I had written. The person began reading and then said "It makes me uncomfortable to read what you wrote," without saying why. I asked the person "What would you read if when you read you did not know you were reading but were immediately, sensuously experiencing anything that might be in the physical world or imagined?—If this was reading, what then? The person looked at me tellingly and mysteriously and puzzled, without answering. Then we went for a quiet walk, stopping at a cafe on the way back, talking about other things.

# Don't Be Suckered Into Worrying

A woman who was about forty-five had to go to the dentist to get a tooth fixed that had broken when she was eating pitted olives very quickly and one of the olives somehow remained untouched by whatever it was that was supposed to gets the pits out——staying that way when she bit into it with an enthusiastic, shattering chomp.

She immediately called the dentist for an appointment, but the dentist said it would take about a week to come in. So she only ate soft foods for that time—and very carefully.

When it was the day of her appointment, she was on the third day of a cold that made it so she couldn't breathe out of her nose. She thought about how it would be possible for her to get enough air through her mouth that could be used to breathe while the dentist was working. But she didn't want to worry, so she went regardless of any of this. She asked after she got there, and the dentist said it wouldn't be a problem.

The work began in her mouth, and everything seemed fine. But, in a very short while, everything felt too cramped, so she signaled with her hand to stop. When this happened, and when the airway in her mouth was completely clear, she took a deep breath while the dentist was still right in front of her. Her breath was so strong, the dentist's body was compressed until it was tiny and was sucked inside of her.

# The Third Nipple Is Never Blind

He was in his mid-forties when he first became curious about his body and decided to explore it. There was a long mirror that was held on with screws to the door in his bedroom. He looked at himself naked in it for at least an hour, stretching and turning for new angles of discovery. He felt like he couldn't stop just because he had run out of ways to move his body in front of the mirror, so he found a screwdriver and took down the mirror.

The mirror lay sideways on the floor as he stretched himself down beside it. He was only able to see a few more angles than before, so he held the mirror up and maneuvered it around himself in different ways for about twenty minutes and then dressed and went and bought more mirrors like the one he had.

When he got home, he covered his bathroom walls and ceiling so that there was no bare space. Now he was able to see every angle that he was capable of adjusting into by using the mirrors that reflected back onto the other mirrors all around him. His whole body was strange to him, and he briefly felt wilder because he let himself believe for a quick moment that he was to get a close up view of an animal free in its natural setting.

After quite a bit of time and a trip to the refrigerator that for him had a similar feeling as an animal searching for its food, he found a mole on the back of his neck that he had never seen before. Touching the slightly raised surface, he was reminded of a boy who went to school with him the last two years of high school who had a mark on his chest that he and his friends teased was a third nipple.

# Gypsy Girl And Woman

A mother tells her young girl that together they are journeying in the same way as the ancient cultures that led nomadic lives. She tells her daughter this when knowing nothing about such peoples.

From a friend the girl once knew five or so years ago in kindergarten while still going to school, the little girl heard about gypsies and thought maybe she might be like at least some of them, but she wasn't sure. She wanted to call herself a gypsy anyway, so she chose to create her own idea of what gypsies were while knowing that this was her doing—so forgetting about whether or not any of it was real while creating with good care her own real self.

Together, the mother and daughter drank tea with honey in a motel room in a town they couldn't remember. Somehow, they were on their way somewhere.

The girl couldn't sleep, so the mother told her how they were inside of a story of adventure touched by great wonders, about how nomads lived and about how they are just like them. Then, the mother sang to her.

# Portrait

When I was leaving my house holding the bags I was to be traveling with, the explosion happened that sent me moving quickly up, passing by where my roof just had been and then farther and faster into the open sky. And as this happened, I somehow still held onto my luggage, which flew weightlessly along with me. Suddenly I stopped, and everything around me continued moving upwards into the sky. I felt it only and saw nothing, now alone above the clouds still holding onto my bags.

I stayed like this for quite some time thinking back to when I was very young spending several hours in a swimming pool, pretending I lived underwater. I remember how I saw everything differently before I had gotten into the pool and how there were very strong senses afterwards in many directions. Sometimes, as I saw it then, I didn't ever have to go back up for air if I didn't want to.

All these thoughts left me and everything for a period was completely blank. I then saw in my mind many naked people, some unspeakably beautiful, others average, some even disturbing in their appearance. I must have seen several hundred of them. And each in every detail. It only felt sexual for a brief moment; but, then, as more appeared, that went away and my feelings changed to wonder, shock and curiosity. Quickly, these feelings too were gone.

To my surprise, eight, large silver colored fish swam out from the deeply forested clouds. Jade-mouth suns appeared in many numbers above me and danced. Structures formed in the air near me, and I moved into one of them. In it was a hall that looked far away of stone on red brick. Around me, when immediately entering, windows glared in lush tree green. Blue-white checker titles began to talk in open soft light above me, riding fast on brown of earthen wood tones below. I moved further into the structure that I had only just begun to enter. I did not think to consider my situation or desire to: it owned me entirely. It was as if everything was always supposed to have been communicating with me in all ways and was.

# Be Movie

He became a scientist because he loved science-fiction movies. He was good at what he did. He married a woman who was also a scientist, who also liked the same kinds of movies, and who was also good at what she did.

He married a woman who was also a scientist, who also liked the same kinds of movies, and who was also good at what she did.

Most days he didn't like his job, though, because he felt like it had nothing to do with why he wanted to be what he worked so hard to become. He wanted to make something useful and imaginative that would be as fascinating as his initial interest. Although, his job was very complicated, he was also very bored. More than just lack of interest, he was extremely disappointed.

His wife's job was also extremely complicated, and she was also disappointed for the same reasons.

They talked about what it would be like to work on something together that they would feel passionate about. They both had to follow formulas to make products that sometimes were useful but usually weren't, products that lacked all interest to nearly anyone who was not selling them.

They remembered and discussed the themes of their favorite science-fiction films, the warning of future dangers, the progress of new creations. They felt like they wanted to be mad scientists together but to work for the betterment of things. They didn't know how to start doing this or what they would do, so they just talked about it sometimes.

His wife went to work earlier than he did. One day, after she had gone, forgetting that his life was much more than the job he had at that time, not allowing the speculation of his future possibility, he killed himself.

# Parentage

Her Grandmother was dead. Her Mother, also. This wasn't a surprise to her—she was about to turn eighty. But it wasn't until she got to be the ages that they had been in her memories that she could understand them.

# Chip Dip

Joe walked around the mostly natural foods grocery store as he spent most of his energy investigating women. He would look at their carts to see what they were going to eat and to see if the good looking women ate the best proportion of good food. As he did this, he mentally licked the ones he was attracted to that also ate the best, but he did this with a slight bit of skepticism as to whether or not his ideas about good food would really make that much difference if his romances went further than his mind and the looks back he sometimes got. He felt a lot of guilt because of all this.

The guilt Joe felt was because he knew that being educated about nutrition and being able to afford much of what was good food was a privilege, also because it was a fundamental conviction for him to not overvalue privileged ways of living, especially at the expense of others. He knew the underprivileged too need loving understanding. He also now understood that his actions, past and future, needed deep consideration.

Joe's guilt then led him to a large chain grocery store full of processed food on special sales. On the aisle with chips on one side and large plastic soda pop bottles on the other, near the buy one get one cookie end-cap, he first saw the woman that he would call Joann. He called her this after himself because he knew that he and the people in this store were the same. She was poor and wonderful, exciting every part of him. In her cart was terrible food, much of it he hadn't eaten since he was a child buying school lunches. He stopped a moment, then licked her in his mind. It was better than the women at the other store.

Now Joe knew he understood the common people, and he knew he would try to help them in any way that he could. He thought he and Joann would represent the underprivileged together.

It had been at least five minutes since Joe licked Joann in his mind, since then seeing nothing but a colorful blur from the distant cookie end-cap he had been staring at while thinking. He hadn't noticed that the woman had already left.

# The Excitement Of Silences

In his life, letter writing has been his main exchange of thoughts and emotions. In fact, he has no memories of ideas or feelings until after the time he started writing letters. The letters are where he recognizes that he can communicate and know intimacy. He does try to figure out how to speak to people and to hear them, but still the quiet moments alone are the ones where he is most together; there is a freedom with this way of communication for him that extends beyond his abilities with his physical presence, beyond the relationships he has been able to have with anybody.

He once got a letter from someone who told him that they knew of a person who had so much trouble expressing any part of much of anything at all that meant enough—so much trouble being close to others—that the person would go to the movies and sit a few seats from someone when there were plenty of other places to sit that were not as close to anybody.

# Days Over When They Begin, The First Quiet Breaths Of Morning New

Just before a young father's death, in a moment simple sight evaporates into vision, a man sees his small child's entire future life and the reality of his absence; seeing also the significance of his life's relationships and seemingly simple choices, seemingly joyful successes and perceived hardships: experiencing in that moment all his child's intense future struggle and pain.

At experiencing this vision, after his death he explodes imperceptibly up past the sky and stars, finding the ability to come back to life again and again as various animals to watch over and protect his child—knowing that this is all he ever had the ability to knowingly do—to be a transcending movement of love—himself a child at his living death.

# Normal Dangers

When I finally died at seventy-one, full of scar tissue and abnormal lumps, bumps and lesions that I had been collecting since my twenties, the coroner was surprised to find that the cause of my death was not sourced from within my sickly body. It is possible that when the coroner learned this that there was the thought for a moment that the killing was done simply because someone saw how ugly I was—but possible too that this dissector, this people person, saw a little beauty in my misery, in my physical horror, also perhaps glory in the fact that the grizzled meat that was being carved had to be hunted to die.

But who murdered me? This was a popular question for people to ask. But I already knew. And, I knew why. There was no mystery to it for me.

The street where I had lived had on it a school, restaurants, offices, bars, and several other buildings, which I could never figure out what they where home to. But the street, somehow through the years of adding and subtracting became home to only one residential residence, a one-story triplex where I lived in the center with the other occupants on either side of me.

A woman I liked who lived on one side of the triplex allowed me to come over and have coffee and entertain the idea that she might love me. She was eighty and had already lived two full lives—with her first husband who passed away at the younger side of middle-age with whom she was married to for twenty-three years—and her second husband who had died a few years back with whom she was with nearly thirty years. When I met her, she was an independent and single woman, and I did my best to gain her attentions despite what I am sure was my disgusting appearance. She was arrested for my death, and she herself died in jail. It was believed that she was so against any ideas of loving me that she felt that she had to destroy me.

On the other side of the triplex was where the killer lived. He even told me he would kill me the day I died. This is how I know it was he who did it and not someone else. He thought that he had his own personal parking space on the street where I would usually park when I could. But he only mentioned it once or twice and in a very friendly kind of way—until that day—so I kind of always thought he was joking. Anyway, he poisoned my protein powder, so when I had my shake that day, I died.

The police could not see any good in me—as if I must have done a lot of awful things to be the way that I was. In fact, the bar that most of the police frequented was across from the triplex and the cadets and rookies used to harass me when they were drunk. Once these cops had worked for a few years, though, and seen a few things, they stopped. But still, to learn about who I was, they asked my neighbors.

# A Self Sacrifice

She began her day realizing every part of her body without it being touched now gave her sexual sensations, many more painful than enjoyable—at the simple awareness of the flesh. In her mind, she also felt that every thought, and through this everything that she experienced on a day to day basis was now somehow capable of holding the power of an intense fetish of which was also at least as horrifying as it was satisfyingly electric.

While getting out of bed to go for her regular walk, but to nowhere in particular, she began to search her thoughts for what she had always believed to be the most common and most pleasurable desires that seemed natural, even somewhat, but she only found that she could not find them. Disturbed and overwhelmed, sensations one atop another, she could not identify any of them.

The distraction of these feelings was to the extent that she had to distract herself from them, so upon her outer thigh, a delicate design she carved, a razor dance across narrow streams of blood, gently overflowing. Clothes where put on after she cleaned and bandaged it; then, she left for her usual walk.

# Ocean's Tide

In his bed, in the moments before he falls asleep, layered within four blankets wrapped around him, his head and pillow slowly becoming one soft thing, he looks up at the tops of the blankets; the one against his skin is pulled closest to his face—and, from there, the rest of them each slightly further away, all moving together in a distant cascade.

He is startled as a wave is falling over his head. But by this time he is sleeping, being carried away by the ocean.

# The Philosopher And The Stranger

A philosopher later in age asks a stranger during an evening walk what he should do to redeem himself for having wasted his life asking questions and engaging in ideas instead of following through on plans. The stranger, surprised at the question, and further surprised at how serious the philosopher was in the deep belief of a wasted life, thought to himself that the philosopher seemed to be convinced of an idea that meant that certain kinds of action alone were good, as if all people should act only in certain ways. The stranger thought more for several minutes and then answered by saying that the philosopher had misjudged what action is, and that the philosopher could not possibly know all the reactions of the actions of his questions and ideas.

# The Killing Of A Bad Man

A couple in a parking lot walking towards a store are confronted by a group of three young people in a car. The driver pulls the car up, almost into the female. Her male companion tries to stay calm but lifts his hands up in the air in a general gesture of frustration. The driver pulls a gun from his jacket and points it out the window at the man and tells him to "Fucking watch it!" The man makes an annoyed but non-aggressive face that the driver takes to be personally insulting, so the driver tells the man not to move.

The couple look at each other in terror and with the horror of the violent change from a pleasant evening out to what could end their lives together and entirely. A blaze of movement occurs instantly, and then is over; when, while the gun is pointed out the window, the man grabs it from the driver, knowing that the woman he is with is still in front of the car, pulls the trigger, hitting the driver and causing his death.

During that time, the other passengers from the car leave running and the woman lies upon the ground. The man then puts the gun on top of the car and goes to her while seeming unflinched.

After two weeks of feeling alright, his thoughts begin to become obsessed with the life that he took and the things that he found out about after the incident. With each thought came connections with new empathy fed from his own memories, and this caused him to become ungrounded and disoriented in a way that he found astonishing.

Through all his positive efforts, he could not get past it.

Part of the problem was that he was now simultaneously convinced that he could have easily ended up being in the same exact position as the driver, and that if the same exact incident were to happen again, he would do the same thing.

# Over As Well As Under Development

The fog moved further than usual in some direction, as it sometimes does. Another naked morning in a folding chair, eyes of abstractions—stared too long into the screen looking for what wasn't there. He moved to the window, but it made no difference. He felt pleased that he lived in an apartment that would surely fall apart in an earthquake—or on top of him (perhaps in his sleep)—he liked to see his environment as a mirror to himself, natural disasters and beat down foundations and surroundings gave him that. Nothing else quite did in the same way, despite serious efforts.

Let us now move on to someone else for the moment. We will return to him when we want and when we feel it is appropriate. Not before.

Her—her from there her—her from here—she, of the deep-shimmer, oh my—skin, sweet-sweat shine in sun. She walks. She walks by not looking once but seeing more fully in some ways then most ever see of her in their minds.

So that is her, or at least what most sort of get to see of her, and unfortunately pretty much all of what is here about her because what is about her from now on is about someone else.

He seems prudent now because he saw her, and she didn't see him (his thoughts not ours)—though this was before and not the naked morning that we have yet to finish up with. She walked right past him. He wanted to say something to her, looking away from the fact that he never made eye contact. There were thoughts of running after her and making some excuse or ridiculous story or playing innocent and ironic saying something like, "I bet you never met a guy like this before"—but, then, realizing that if he said it differently, he could have said, "I bet you've never got with a guy after he chased you in the street." Total disregard of ambition concluded as silence: he never spoke to her.

After his short fling with the window, he spent an hour and a half getting ready, during which he thought of her several times, to go out for the day and enjoy wherever he lived. He walked up and down hills, past shops, into shops, sat at a cafe, and had a cup of coffee and then went back home. He was out an hour. He took his clothes off again.

# The Eye Of Acquaintance

Someone compliments someone else many different times on many different occasions, and each time the person complimented speaks back with words that are self-critical—saying something that goes against what was put forth as positive in the compliment.

But, after each time, the person complimenting keeps complimenting so disregards the negative criticisms and continues to be loving towards the person. And this is so until a time where within the mind of the one who used to compliment there begins to grow something negative where all the self-criticisms that the other person put forth begin to solidify and manifest themselves within this person as being true.

So, the next time these two people come together there are no compliments, no loving actions, and there is nothing being put forth as positive—rather, in the place of these are the beginnings of hatred, fears that are the beginnings of destruction.

For both people, there is a deep, inexplicable sense of loss and helplessness.

# The Wait

For his first fifty years, aging didn't bother him. He liked it, really—recognizing his developed confidence along the character of his advancing skin.

After fifty, he felt something deeper in his flesh. His confidence would now quietly leave him. Years that had moved naturally now had long, loud pauses of doubt; here is where the obsessing began with analyzing his own picture: a picture every week of every month of every year—each the subject of a demanding critical review.

He turned 62 and discovered the problem. He was decomposing. This was very clear from his pictures.

All the pictures were taken secretly when alone. He told no one anything.

# Alone Again

Our love became a tire that was shot through and hit with an axe—where we used all our air trying to blow air into it. We tried to save our love, but we had no trust left and were frightened of each other and ourselves with each other.

After a year or so, we did break up. Then, one day as I brushed my teeth, I relived the entire relationship in a few moments while I stood over the bathroom sink staring into the light shining through the window onto the mirror. This shocked my body so badly that it somehow caused me to grow to twice my normal size and stay that way.

Two-and-a-half years later, I went out to a specialty shoe store, and sitting in a child's chair was you know who, half the size of before.

Later, we talked about it and agreed: we both had the same thought at the same instant when we saw each other again—both taking very deep breaths—this is going to work!

# Nature Walk

There was someone who lived in a city who walked to and from everywhere in the city that there was any going to or from.

A car hit this person, and the person slipped away through the concrete into the land that the city was before there was a city there—where the whole of the landscape was visible with a single sight.

# An Interview With A Social Worker

He explained that he wanted to sleep outside even if the weather was harsh because it made him happy, and because being inside quickly made him feel like he was locked in a decorated cage that kept getting smaller until tight on his body, causing panicked horror. Being outside was not all a bad thing for him; he enjoyed the company of trees and all the freely moving things that he knew weren't unlike him.

# The Gift Of Strength

The breakdowns he had become more severe, and he could not see any possibility of getting through them; there seemed no way to move or breathe and no way to consider a future: the only feeling he could identify with was a horrific emptiness. After his last breakdown, while he was in the hospital, an older woman who was there for similar reasons as himself smiled at him in a peculiar, knowing way. She said very little than hello at first. And, then, on the day that she was returning home, she approached him and gave him a book, and told him that she had read it many times over the years and that she found something in it every time she read it. It was a paperback, pocket-sized book of a play written one hundred years before, and its spine was broken in several places.

Later, as he went to sleep—right as he closed his eyes—he felt himself taken away into the experience of the woman who had been so kind to him; he felt that she also knew the same horrific emptiness but somehow found possibility.

# A New Fullness

He nodded his head in thanks to the person who had saved him when he began choking on his food at the restaurant. As his eyes teared up, there was a desperate need to escape all the people that were now around him, so he pulled out what was nearly twice the money that he owed for what he ordered, putting it on the table as he left.

In the street, alone, there was a soft rain but also sun. There were ten blocks walked in panic. He couldn't figure out why he was so upset. By the eleventh block, he had made his way back to what he thought was his confident self, looking up at the sun and rain. But, by the next block, it all came back upon him, and he said to himself, "I'm afraid of not having the control that I have been able to have while being alive"—feeling that he couldn't handle not knowing how things would work for the others in his life if he had choked—thinking of all the people close to him and of their lives. Then, briefly, he questioned the value of himself to others, though quickly knew better.

Twenty-five blocks from the restaurant, he found himself still not having any belief or disbelief in any religious ideas—the same as he always remembered being, still very logical—but he discovered that he was doing something that seemed like praying—not to any faithfulness—but for faith.

# Documentary

A person never existed. But a few people wanted to make a documentary about this person who they thought had existed.

They traveled to a very small place that seemed enormous in the endless view unblocked by big buildings. They talked to the few people that lived there about the person, and all of the people were happy to share their stories.

The film was not very successful at first. There was no audience that wanted to watch a movie about someone that they had never heard of and their friends had never heard of.

But slowly a fair amount of people did watch it. Everyone told everyone else about this amazing person and the movie that was made that they had to watch. Twenty years later, everyone believed that the person that had never existed had existed.

# Introduction

When she closed her eyes, she saw their whole lives—from birth to death—one, and then another, each very quickly—having no idea of who the people were. The intensity of these experiences caused so much trouble within her that she had a difficult time sleeping and became sick. Part of her knew these experiences were good, but she didn't know what to do with them or how to manage them emotionally.

In a few months, as the experiences continued and increased, she could see the birth, death and lives of these others in her worn body.

Soon, everyone she saw caused within her the same kinds of experiences.

The weight of all of the experiences, of all of these people, became heavy. She panicked. She went to visit a hospital to try to shock herself out of having these experiences by confronting them. She snuck into the maternity area and got as close as she could to a baby being born. Then, going to the other side of the hospital, she walked down the hallway where the most critical patients were, looking into their faces as she passed the open doorways. And, coincidentally, as she was leaving, she walked by a body in a bag being taken to the morgue; although, surprisingly to her, she did not feel shocked from seeing it. After doing all of this, and after a week passed reflecting on what happened, even though she continued having the experiences, she felt better but without knowing why.

A couple of months after visiting the hospital, she was at home during the afternoon. She made a cup of coffee. As she began to drink it, she experienced the birth, death and lives of all of the people that had produced that coffee and also all of the people close to them, along with all of the people who had packaged and shipped and sold it and those close to them.

Not too much time had passed before something changed within her, and she felt better and wondered how long it would be before she could travel to a place far away and already know everyone there.

# Reality Show

All the times we wanted to spend with music in each other's arms that we spent on opposite sides of the bed in dividing escapes with the TV on—we could have been what we were.

Now we have become shapes of different sad-toned colors made up of pieces from characters of various episodes of various shows. Now we are apart and distant by the thousands of literal miles.

It could be dangerous if we blew kisses into the wind long across the land: it could confuse strangers; people would chase the kisses and try to stop them under their feet, only to find that they had stomped on a resting bird or old people's toes.

# Amuseum

He saw a painting of a lion attacking its prey; at first only seeing two figures, one on top of the other, not distinguishing one kind from the other—so, not knowing if it was a painting of sex or death—he laughed.

# Don't Ever Settle For Simply Settling When Settling Down

An area an hour outside of a city, an area filled with many small farms where coops full of chickens and barns full of bigger animals are common, on a regular day of chores and neighbor kids playing together in mud and grass, they sat together at their dining table at the first notice of the setting sun, each in a defensive stance but ready to be the first aggressor. The small, ranch-style house was full of most of the usual contemporary things that people would want and get, though at the lower end of such things—full of enough food to eat that is full of nutrition—and usually full of three children that were surprised by what they discovered when they all came home together from playing outside in a field with other kids down the street. The children saw their parents taking the first bites of very accurate gelatin molds of each other's heads—one was lime, one strawberry. The mother and father were sculptors and knew how to make such things. They were often angry at each other about how much a family costs. There was an argument over the food budget. There was a fight over half a leftover sandwich. Somehow gelatin would settle everything.

Silently, the children went outside to the barn to stay warm in the quickly cooling coming night. They were frightened. The hay and animals were comforting. They didn't know what else to do but sit closely together waiting. In the house, the parents finally followed though with their threats; they took each other's heads off—somehow replacing them with the partly eaten gelatin molds of each other's heads. Nobody ever figured out how they survived like this for any amount of time because nobody knew. The next morning their bodies were back to normal, but they were more peaceful together. Later that morning after comforting the children and sending them to school, they remembered a conversation they had before they were parents about being ready for parenting—about practicing first with stuffed animals—then with dogs and cats; they had no regrets about their choice to begin immediately instead: the practice was still the difficulty.

Forty-nine years later, at the bedside of the last living parent, the only child that kept contact with the parents, who was now the caregiver, made a gelatin mold of the parent and included sections of it as dessert with meals for a few months until it was gone—with each section eaten there was more and more compassionate understanding of mistakes made and what affects these had on the children. The gelatin somehow displaced the perspective of a child; the air changed to feel like it was cool and warm, and within the adult child's mind there was a sense of soaring out of oneself, of knowing what is beyond in a melodious empathy never thought possible with what was familiar experience.

When the child was alone two years later, there was another gelatin mold make. The child made it of itself and ate it quickly in the next few weeks, appreciating the value and uniqueness of many things that had been upsetting, and understanding some of the things that still were. Phone calls were made. One of the other children tried it right away, and the other tried it while in bed being taken care of by its children.

# The Reason For Rhythm

Every day she would research different traditions throughout the world to discover a holiday or celebration that she could give herself to and find joy within. Eventually, she had a calendar filled with reasons to be happy and excited every time she woke up.

She had been lost in despair and could not recognize herself enough to get out of it. But, when she had the idea of finding reasons to make the days better, and when she began doing it, she realized that even though she gave herself to these celebrations that she could recognize within herself a feeling of who she was.

Through her research, she became interested in the dances that went along with many of these different holidays and celebrations and soon saw that she had become like the movement of these dances.

# I Was Wrong

Just a few blocks away from me, a 78-year-old man living near the top floor of a ten-story apartment building killed his wife with a heavy object and then jumped out the window to his death.

This was a very sad story to hear. These were real people that died. And what a terrible way for that woman to go. What suffering!

At first, though, I couldn't accept the story as true because I had trouble accepting that someone could live to be that old yet still lose it. I guess I believed that retirement applied to going crazy too.

# It Is Essential To Know This

When he was little and cuter than most—but also much naughtier than most—he used to live on a couple acres of land. Everyday, he would feed a rabbit or two, a couple goats, a sheep and chickens, as well as gather the chicken's eggs.

His neighbors on one side had a goat farm with a few dozen goats and a cow or two.

His neighbors on the other side had built a replica of a small old town with very precise detail. Behind their town, in the back of their property, they kept a donkey that he could see through a wire fence if he went all the way out to the end of the field where his goats and sheep ran around, grazed and played.

For two straight months, he visited the donkey at least once a day for at least a few hours at a time. He studied it at first, but soon he felt like it was his friend too. He listened to and imitated the noises that it made and made the noises back to it and watched its movements and moved like it as best that he could until he felt that he could speak and the donkey could understand and that he could understand the donkey when it made one noise or another or looked at him a certain way. He began to act like a donkey around his family and at school, making loud donkey sounds at dinner or during class, moving this way and that in donkey like maneuverings.

One day he felt like everything had come together so that he understood everything there was to be a donkey; he wanted to be a donkey too and felt like he could do it just as well as the real thing. Given his new confidence and his overwhelming desire, he decided to make a very convincing looking outfit to complete his new becoming. When he had finished making it, he ran into the field where his goats and sheep were towards the fence with the donkey on the other side, forgetting that he was running on two legs—and, that while his costume was rather accurate, that it had no hooves, so he was running with bare, human-toed feet. When he made it all the way there, he saw the donkey move its mouth in a way he had never seen before, and he heard the donkey say to him "Don't be an ass!" So he ran up to his house and started watching TV.

# Prescription

It was eight years before the doctors thought they figured out what was causing my symptoms. They had tried since I had started seeing them to get me to sleep all the time, saying, "While you sleep, you have no symptoms that need treatment."

Eventually, though, they told me that they had to kill me. "There are no more ideas—there is no way we know to fix you," they said. I tried to get them to think of new ideas, to create new possibilities, but they didn't seem to understand what this meant. I asked them "Why do I have to die?!—Why aren't you trying to help me!?" They told me, "Your illness could become contagious and spread to other people—so we have to do it to protect them." I asked them, "What is my illness?—how would it spread to others?" They said, we think we understand it now."

Then, they brought in another doctor that I had never met that said: "Your situation demands great courage;" and told me, "The same thing happened to one of my best teachers when I was in medical school."

# Touch, To Know What Giving Is

The body's memory had forgotten what touch was—what it felt like—its power. Something else remembered the nights of joy where sleep was easy, remembered the attuned rush of breath when getting up in the morning; but the body knew nothing of this and felt itself become ridged under the skin in jagged cold peaks that pressed painfully into itself. The body knew only the cruel starkness of what was when without memory of touch.

The body spent the brightness of the day walking at a constant, quick pace. As there was transitioning into dusk, the walking continued but the pace slowed. As night came, the pace quickened again. Only when exhaustion came was it time to return home and try to sleep again. Sleeping well though the night was rarely possible without great amounts of exercise if the body did not know touch.

The something else struggled, looking in different directions to see things in new ways to try to discover what it could do to make things better. It wanted touch so intensely that everything seemed to blur, distort and taunt.

The body kept walking.

The something else kept struggling.

One day, after many months of walking until exhausted, as dusk again came, the body stopped walking, moved to stop by a force felt beyond its limitations as just a body, when it met a large, mixed-breed dog that had been abandoned. The dog was frightened—a pad on one of its paws had been sliced open from broken glass. The body knelt down and petted the dog and then lifted its leg to examine its paw. Panicked and hurt, the dog bit the arm of the body very hard, but as this pain went through the body the something else that struggled came together with it. The dog, sensing the change, rolled onto the ground on its back.

As this person re-approached the world after having gone through these experiences, there was a sense of intimacy within a community that had no boundaries—so even around strangers far from home. And the intense want of touch became the desire to come together with another as the body had come together with the something else.

# A To-Do Today

Through their living room windows, the sky was orange the night before. There was a mouse in the wall between the kitchen and bedroom that kept them up. A cat was there but slept. Their apartment, though imperfect, was, after nearly eleven months, beginning to feel like a home.

This day, they drove east one hundred blocks to pick up some t-shirts that one of them liked from a department store. On the way back, as one of them was reading the crossed off to-do list that they had written that morning, so that they made sure they didn't forget anything, while the other drove, there were gunshots, and a bullet just missed their car. They continue to have trouble accepting that they could be killed so violently when things seem so safely ordinary.

# Touchdown

There is a place at the edge of everything—near where the campus meets the canal, where the university hospital and the sports arena overlook each other. "So much struggle," he thought.

He thought of how strange it was for there to be a game full of cheers and ambitions right next to so much death. He thought of birth too—and wondered if any newborns ever heard a loud, happy burst of excitement from a crowd of thousands of people just as it discovered the world it came into, wondering if one did what the effect was.

# Potty Training For Potty Mouths

Walking into a bookstore, used and new books covering most of a city block, with multiple floors, there was an overwhelming feeling of disgust—imagining all the books as one living beast that crushes those that enter it between its thighs.

"What more can be offered!? What is worth doing beyond this abyss?!"

After looking at the map to find the bathroom, making it across the store and up two floors, while urinating, there was a stranger's voice from a stall that said: "People have been doing this in their own ways since people have been around. It is important not to let everything you take in block and sicken you—so be healthy in what you eat. Sometimes you need to push a little. Be patient. Sometimes, like now, you have to deal with crap—but other times there can be wondrous things that come out of what happens."

Making it back across the store and downstairs on the way out of the store, a feeling of empathy with all the parts that made up the book beast overpowered all other feelings; lucid thoughts arose that went beyond the mass of books, finding a deeper appreciation for them and for what went into them—the thoughts led all the way back through time so as to know all the ancient stories and why they were told.

# You Are Beautiful Inside Your Insides

The gradual decline of the hill, from where the shops are to where the park is, made her feel as if the entire length of concrete that made up the sidewalk was one long strip of belt on a treadmill that only seemed to be taking her somewhere. Around her: there was movement on the street; along the sidewalk was the wind waved parts of shrubs and weeds in a bed made for flowers; and there was an indecipherable sign-language from the handless, fingered arms of differing trees.

As she got to the park, she saw the beginning of the trail that turns along with the stream. Remembering the last time she was there, when it was a hot day and she got cold as she left the sweat of the sun to an area just off the trail that rises above the stream overlooking the fish that is so thick with trees that it was chilled to near darkness—where she imagined in this place as if she was at the bottom of a lake in a secret forest as a special creature.

Turning at a certain point onto a short path leading off that trail, she had passed through the areas she felt as wild to a play field and parking lot. Shocked a little from the changed surrounding, she looked around slightly shaking. There were several cars and a dozen or so people of various ages doing various things.

She saw a park bench and told herself a story. "There is a park bench that floats in the air," it began. It continued, "When someone is able to get up to it, as it sometimes comes close enough to the ground, the person can stay there without eating or drinking or any other bodily need or want, staying this way still in time as a cloud or moonlight if one of these were an only vision for an entire life. There is no way to know what determines when the person touches back down to the ground, but when it does happen the person is gone only a few hours or days even if it would have been years if time had not been still. Nothing is different for the person who has sat on the bench that is known by that person. And there is no memory of this, so there is no experience. The only difference is that there is a greater connection to the beauty of what is encountered, so that there is never a complete sense of giving up, that the person would find the separation of oneself from this beauty before the time of letting go worse than any suffering."

The woman walked back to the sidewalk—this time going uphill as she took her first steps again on its hard surface.

# Prehistoric Urges

They climbed to the top of the brontosaurus at the museum. She bit one of his ears as they fell. Landing on the baby brontosaurus, their fall was broken. She bit his other ear as they realized they were still alive.

As the pain became increasingly severe from her continuing to bite his ears, he saw a vision of something that would be stupid to call simply beauty. He felt strong. A changed man, as they say.

But the pain overpowered it, and he felt another change within him. He turned into some kind of medium- sized, carnivorous dinosaur that he didn't recognize. He moved to bite one of her ears. But accidentally ate her head.

Upset, he turned into an egg.

Ten years later, the egg hatched two invisible dinosaurs with large chewy invincible ears.

# It's Okay To Have Vision

Light through evening window, painted sky. He discovered it today. Most told him it didn't exist.

For the past few years, he was convinced that he didn't exist, being absorbed by the doubts of others. But now, for the first time since then, remembering himself, yet not forgetting his relationship to others, how they shaped and inspired him, even if indirectly, even if they doubted him, he felt real to himself.

His vision viewed him in reaffirmation.

# The Man With A Mirror For A Face

No one could ever tell what ethnic background he was. It seemed that from every angle came a different guess that made its way around the world. Somehow, he seemed to be whatever someone else saw him as, he not helping the guesses with his voice or manner or what he said. People would look at him and see themselves. Only a few spent their time considering his parents—who would seem, upon consideration, to make up two halves of the whole of all the people of the world.

# The Woman Who Was The Earth

There was a nameless woman who had no identity of her own but who identified with everyone else, as well as every living and non-living thing, to where her personality encompassed all around her. At first, the range of this was nearby only; but then, also not at all nearby—so much so to where it was nearly all the way around the world; and it continued until she became the whole earth.

# Children Can Be Cruel And Everyone's A Child

There is an old man who is an artist—an artist who only works naked because he is sure clothes separate him from receiving inspiration and that clothes also separate him from his ability to express from inside of himself to outside of himself.

When he was twenty-five, he used to have a job and work full-time there, but he felt conflicted about who he was and what the right thing for him to do with his life was. Not knowing where to direct the force that he felt because not having yet discovered a way to get through to a place where he could express and create something on his own, he found himself working to make every project a masterpiece. In the office, he would focus intensely on small details that were not very important in the end result of the particular project. He knew it was good that he did a lot to do his job well, but all of these efforts made his job much harder than it should be and caused problems with his co-workers and bosses.

He often also had eccentric habits and peculiar idiosyncrasies that concerned others who had never spent time with someone like him before. At first, he didn't notice how people perceived him. But, once he did start to notice, it caused discomfort within him that made him have trouble paying attention to his job. In a panic to get focused enough to get his work done so that he made sure he did his job well, defensive about how others felt about him, he began to try to do as much of his work that he could at home.

Some months after he had been mostly working at home, during the spring, after a long night of work where he wore himself down to complete exhaustion trying to perfect a project he was working on, he got undressed and took a shower. Getting out of the shower, he walked over to his bed and fell asleep naked on top of his blankets. He woke up the next morning and started working immediately, not noticing that he still had no clothes on.

Something happened when he worked naked that had never happened before. There was no conflict within him and with how he related to others within himself—and there was a rush that overflowed him with expressive force, limitless creativity. This was something wonderful and powerful. Even though he was at first scared, he moved through his fear and decided he could and should do something other than what he had been doing—knowing nakedness was the only way this could happen. He called and quit his job so that he could put all his energy into exploring this. For the first time he felt like an artist in a way that he understood to be true.

Somehow, soon everyone he knew found out that he no longer had a job and was spending nearly all his time by himself inside his home being naked. The reactions were largely not good. Family mostly stopped talking to him. He had almost no friends left after not a very long time. There was no history of similar behavior or ideas from his family or from those who had been around him.

Although he did take odd and temporary jobs when he needed to so that he could make just enough to get by, most of this man's life was spent exploring what could be expressed that might mean something that in some degree was as meaningful to others as what he felt when naked alone. Most of this man's life was spent thinking that he needed to be by himself and that that he could never meet someone who understood.

This man is now seventy-eight years old and lives in a basement, studio apartment in a section of a city near a university, living off of a small, monthly check and food donations from a organization that delivers to him twice a week. His life has been difficult and lonely, but with richly beautiful rewards within his dedication. He tries not to define his life as simply a sacrifice for his work, knowing it has been much more.

He still struggles with the consequences of the nakedness—the consequences with what he has done to be in an honest relationship with art. But he struggles less now than he used to: he recently realized that there were others like him; that while he doesn't have to give up the significance of his solitude, he can grow past some parts of loneliness.

# Travel Time

At three in the morning, there can be a satisfying stillness. By the bay, the boats and trains can be heard clearly going to and from. Sleep does not come to some, but one can become transported to destinations that are excited discoveries.

The last boat, that with its music passed, took everyone aboard to an island not far yet distant; the last train, with its frantic insistence, took everyone aboard home.

# Wild, Western, Cowless, Cower Less Man

As I sat lone on the ragged beach, surrounded by sand and rock, upon a piece of driftwood about my own size, with my hat on my knee, my head in my hands so that my eyes were fixed on what was in that moment the highest point of tide, with a tilt of my head upward so the heat of the sun absorbed from the nape of my neck to the bald of the top of where my hair once was—after time had passed and the tide had risen—I saw a horse's ear cut through the water. Soon, the rest of the horse followed. But it did so in a slow, gentle manner that I found more surprising than the fact of it being there—the comfortable softness of this reassuring me that it did not and I should not feel any fear—that there was no danger occupying our presence together.

I stood up and touched its side near its back. Then I touched its mane, petted up along its strong neck, over to its head and face, then moving my hand to under its jaw. I felt like after some silence the horse invited me to sit on its back, as if it wanted me to so that it could take me somewhere important. I climbed up, and the horse started to move: first a trot; then, a gallop; then it felt like flying and got quicker and quicker.

All my energy and focus had been pushed towards the direction of holding onto the horse and how fast the horse was going—so, during this limited period of focus—somehow—amazingly—I hadn't noticed which way we were going. Finding the ability to look around me again, I was astonished as I realized we were moving atop awesomely powerful waves, the shore now behind us: I a lone man riding atop a wild horse, now approaching the frontier of the Western Sea.

It was more wild the more west we went, moving at still soaring speeds deeper into the sea's frontier. Around me, I gave my attention to whatever it could absorb. There were towering trees made of moist, heavy air that lingered for lifetimes, with each year bringing a new ring of thick mist. There were tumbleweeds of a billion lost voices, tumbling words never spoken because never thought and felt. In the almost lazy light, a dark dusk with striking bolts highlighting the contours of soft-pulsing circulation—there were tones of colors I had never seen. There was no sound at all at first because I couldn't recognize what it was—so in absence of anything else to understand it as I mistook it for silence—but soon it ripped into me with the growl of an ocean made of fighting wolves. I felt the presence of many animals there yet could never see one clearly, catching only glimpses of unknown parts of what I didn't know.

We traveled further, and the intensity of it began to wear me down. I became so tired that I fell asleep. While sleeping, I dreamt about having a pet cow. The cow had been abused by whoever had it before—hungry, scared of people, even scared of cows, terrified of all others, so animals and things of every kind. I went to the cow and it was frightened, and I was also. It ran from me and then tried to knock me down as I went to it again. I knew that what happed to this cow was wrong, but I had no idea of what good was. I thought about what good could be, about what else was not good, and I could not come to a clear and direct statement of it. The cow finally came to me, and I helped heal its wounds and gave it food. Within the dream, I seemed to live together with it in a house built into a large grassy hillside for at least a decade.

I woke up and realized I had no cow and felt a profound loss. I thought of the interdependence of everyone, of how relationships show what relations really mean. I thought of how the cow could be independent now, and I discovered what that meant. But then, I realized the horse was moving fast again—faster than before—so fast that I could not tell where we were until everything stopped and I noticed we were in my kitchen. The horse was eating from my container of oatmeal that I keep on the counter to make breakfast with every morning. I laughed and the horse was gone.

A month or so before this, I was changing my pants and had a thought that didn't really relate to pants but did relate to changing. The thought was that most of my life I have felt partly hidden, sometimes purposefully, defensively; other times, like the greatest part of myself didn't exist to others. It was hard to understand this. It was hard to know how to act. It was easy to dodge through fear having to act in a way that would change any of this for the better. I watched my life and others' lives—panicked, helpless—unable to be part of what I saw in any good and meaningful way—cautious not to interfere—careful not to assert the greatest part of myself.

After what happened on the wild Western Sea and the within the dream of the cow, I changed. I stood as a man—knowing when to and when not to interfere. Asserting the greatest part of myself to fight for what is good, to keep fighting for what is wonderful, approaching the world and each situation I'm part of within it—no longer a boy, no longer hiding—knowing what it means to be grown.

I couldn't tell you what the difference was that caused this change, but there was a difference. But I am not a man now because I cower less or because I am no longer hidden; it is much more than this to be grown. I am a man now because that part of myself that was still a boy has grown enough to get me to that place. Getting grown, at whatever age, is different for different people, but a lot is also the same—much more than it can sometimes seem. Perseverance and strength become present, and there is responsibility that is wild and taming—a place where you and others are nearly fully present, and you have to act accordingly because it matters. But anyhow, I am saying all of this here and now because I simply wanted to tell you my story of finding freedom on the frontier in the cool waves of the ocean and about the cow.

# Untitled

This guy goes up to this woman on the subway and sits in the seat right next to her and tries to hit on her. The woman lifts her left hand to show him and says "Sorry, I'm married." The guy lifts his and says "Me too!—See, we have something in common already."

Is there a meaning to this story? Probably. Are we going to look for it? I'm not. You can, though.

Why does it happen in the subway? No reason whatsoever. It could have happened anywhere—even the woman's house, the man's, or yours—but not with you in the story because you don't belong in it. If it makes you any more happy, you can be in some other story— not in this one though, like I said already.

Do the people in the story both have to be married to other people for it to work? No. Do you have to be married? No. But you might consider it, lonely!—You might consider it, grumpy!

Do I need to mock you and poke fun? Yes, definitely.

Were the people in the story wearing rings? Maybe.

Was the guy rude? Maybe. Was the woman? Maybe.

Do I need to go to the bathroom? Yes.

By the way, this story was actually titled: Masturbation for Realists, or, Masturbatory Zealots, or, The Happy Story.

# Audience

There was a movie played in a theater. It was an intense and sad story. A man cried about something else that the end of the movie reminded him of and ran to the bathroom. Some of the other people who were at the movie, who saw this man, thought that the man must have found the end of the movie to be too much to experience without crying.

# Crane

From my apartment, there is a 150-foot crane across the street. It falls sideways and kills me as I write this.

A crane flies by.

# Sightseeing

They held each other as they looked up at the religious building that people of all beliefs had come to see for many years. They experienced a period of inspiration beyond what they had experienced at any time before.

With no particular beliefs of their own, nothing that they held up as truth beyond the data of facts—with not having ever known such sustained inspired experience—they wondered exactly what it was that had happened to them? They wondered what could cause the creation of such beauty?

Why?—they needed to know—were the temples created—different throughout the world—throughout different beliefs and lives of faith? What was such inspiration? How—they asked—could it be so real yet so distant from the experiences of what they knew as their lives?

# Internet Cafe

It happened to them, different people scattered throughout the world; they stopped communicating: the part within themselves that made all of their relationships matter was no longer possible to express. They spoke words from their mouths, but they were completely insignificant. They went on their computers and wrote messages and then more messages, but none of those meant anything.

Then, they all imagined one place they could go where communication was completely possible—and where they could be with everyone everywhere. They all imagined a small cafe, a mile's walk from wherever they lived, where they went to and met all the people of the world. In this place, everything that they heard and spoke meant something. In this space, there was a connection beyond place.

# Water Music

A person was unsure of what to do. The difficulties of the situations that were and continued to be started a small fire within this person, starting in the outside part of left leg just above the knee, moving through the body burning various parts in varying degrees. A fire that, while this person rarely thought it to ever have taken over the body completely, in moments closer to clarity clearly caused severe distraction from finding the ability to perceive what was happening and from making helpful decisions.

What once seemed clear and full of potential at once was engulfed entirely, so that in the same place that passionate, thriving ecstasy for all that was the wonder of life once was, there then became a temperature that left all as nothing as the fire flared. This person, if not dead to life forever, through the outcome of the actions that occurred during this, dead at least in the moment of this heat to how this person knew all that had mattered.

# Fire Music

There was a place that sank into water with all its people. The people did not die: but their blood lost heat; their movement lost force; and their minds became frosted with numbness. The people tried to live as if nothing had changed, pretending that their lives were the same; but living their lives coldly in slow movement pushing against the water, bodies needing a heat that had left when the water came: living portions of full lives that had been lost with the force of the water.

Generations past, and the new generations never knew warmth. At this later time, a person in this place, who had never experienced anything but the cold of the sunken place, traveled to the edge of its border, finding under an uprooted tree stump a hole in the ground from which an intense sensation flowed out of. Traveling back, away from the edge of this place, the person soon realized that the sensation that was felt was an experience of heat.

With the experience of heat, the person said nothing for a little over five years, upsetting with worry those close to this person. When the person could speak again, heat flowed along with any words spoken from the person's mouth. Soon everyone in the place heard of this and traveled to this person and had also experienced heat.

Nearly seven years passed, and during this time, while the place wasn't full of people who could not speak, there was a strong silence felt. But this ended when there was a very loud sound and then two more afterwards—three people in different areas of this place erupted with intense fire—the heat from each evaporating all the water around, these spaces covering the whole of the place so that the cold water was gone.

# The Salty Madness Of Mixed-up Nuts

This squirrel says to this bird: "It is no good to be a squirrel. I'm up here in the trees all day and sometimes run around down there down on the dirt running around but..."

The bird and the squirrel are up in a tree together —the squirrel keeps talking and says: "...But most of the time I'm up hopping around these trees playing with nuts and stuff, trying to eat and stuff like that, and all the time all I'm thinking of is flying around like you with wings and not having to jump and grab and worry about falling. You know I had a really good friend and some family—some family I really liked too—fall. And you know what happens when that happens. I know it's pretty up here, and I now it's the nice part of the tree. I can tell you all this because you're a bird, but what I really want to tell you is that I want to be a bird too, like you. But I still want to be me, you know. I want to fly from tree to tree and place to place and glide down slow when I want to go down to places. But I still want to talk like a squirrel and be known as a squirrel and do squirrel things."

"You're nuts," says the bird. "How does anyone get so mixed up? I've enjoyed our conversations in the past, but maybe somehow you've gotten the wrong ideas from me. Being a bird is not always easy. Do you really think that it isn't hard work to fly around so much? Have you ever done jumping jacks or just flapped your arms a bunch? Imagine doing that for a whole day, and if you mess up, you fall. And you know what happens when that happens. I sometimes have wanted to be a turtle or worm or something, something that isn't much work."

"I'd be a turtle," says that squirrel.

"Alright," says the bird.

They both become turtles. And they both fall out of the tree. And you know what happens when that happens.

But that's not the end of it because for us they are still turtles, and in some, which is our, way of seeing and telling things, they end up together in the water. Also, it isn't all that clear what was what before, but now one is a guy and the other is not, so there are little turtles and that kind of thing. And they all play together in the water teasing tadpoles and other fun things.

Until one day, when one of the little turtles starts telling stories from the perspective of the time in the past when it was an adult bird, but telling the story as pretty much a baby when not even half the age of the adult bird that is says that it was. The whole thing sounded like a whole mixed up mess of time and total strange confusion of being a turtle. But the little turtle said things like: "When I was a bird and had a family and bird friends, I would fly around and sit in trees and then glide and float up from the branches to the clouds."

After a lot of stories like this by the little turtle, the turtle who was a squirrel before started to cry, and it and its entire family exploded into fiery light, then turning into different animals, including one silly human, except for one that was a plant.

# Ash As Fire

Upon the second week struggled, alone in a small room—at a point where the senses were lucidly melting and flowed as liquid, blending at times together—something occurred that is not expressible.

Different sized natural wood and herb incense sticks had been burning, but it was without realizing it that the amount and frequency increased until the little room was full of thick smoke.

Sitting in a position overlooking the window's night sky, with a pool that was the endless view of lighted houses and streets, the vision occurred of a pattern—pieces of one at first—then complete; and incense was picked up, and the pattern began being branded, done slowly by pushing the burning ends of the incense sticks of different widths into an arm.

After the entire pattern was complete, there was a deep exhale and a long but undetermined amount of silence that was not noticed. Then, the memory of the burning skin falling away as ash finally ended the struggle of the past two weeks and some of the previous struggle of life.

In the next weeks as the wounds tried to heal, an infection grew. The pattern on the arm turned to a mess of rotten flesh. And in the moments before death, another vision came of the joy of life.

# Wave Goodbye, Wave Hello

While a man is in the ocean water, enjoying the feeling of waves moving upon him, a dead sea turtle is carried within a wave and strikes and kills him.

In a house nearby, there is a woman looking up the best way to make gravy. Satisfied that she has a good grasp on beginning to understand, she goes for a walk on the beach.

The sea turtle has been carried back to the sea and will later wash up further away. But the man washes up within a couple dozen feet from where he had been before he entered the water.

The walking woman sees him and recognizes him from a recurring fantasy, which brought great pleasure to her for some years by this time, of a man she thought didn't exist. As she begins to be upset, she has the fantasy again but with another man. And then she never has it again.

# Meditation On The Smiling Beautiful

As he passed through the crowds of people that appeared as only more crowds, he felt agonizingly alone and angry because of it. But he didn't know to where or towards whom his anger was directed. He kept moving through the people and felt brutally more and more torn apart. There were so many happy people with so many other happy people that he saw; his distance from being this too devastated him. His painful sense of his own destruction continued through thoughts of suicide, violent pure hatred, and absolute dread turned to crippling numbness, until something within him changed. He was left only with a glowing happy frown and a shining sad smile.

He tried to figure out what this meant as he quickly walked away from the crowds to leave. Then, as he walked, stepping hard upon the ground with his fast moving feet, while not stopping or even slowing down, he looked back at all the people and saw things in another way while in the same moment feeling a complete sense of calm.

# The Man Who Held His Breath And Became A Cloud

Everyday he said out loud to himself the same thing while he was getting ready to leave his apartment. Before he said anything, though, he would look around and laugh. What he saw around him was an apartment shaped like half a donut, the whole of it, other than a tiny, port-a-potty-sized bathroom near the front door that bulged slightly towards what would be the donut hole, was one curved hallway slightly wider than narrow, with a kitchen in its center conceived in arrangement just well enough to walk through, and at the end of the hallway an oddly square-shaped and small bed that, when put into place, was pushed tightly against each touching wall. What he said was "One day I will dunk this place in coffee and eat it."

On this day, on his way out the front door, with the front door swinging in, striking the out swinging bathroom door that he'd left open, he said what he always says and walked out to a busy sidewalk full of people—but only a-block-and-a-half later realizing that he hadn't been breathing since breakfast when he thought it would be fun to see how long he could hold his breath, timing himself during the first ten seconds then forgetting and doing everything he normally did. So standing in the right-side part of a left-side sidewalk walkway, with the many passers by either annoyed or oblivious to the obstacle of his unmoving body, he wondered how he finished his breakfast without breathing. Then he wondered how he spoke without breathing—and after some other wandering wondering, finding his fixation focused on how he was alive at all.

As he stood there, as he watched the movement of the people, he saw a woman walking quickly somewhere begin to slow down. Following her slowing motion with his eyes, he watched as she began to look as if she were a wax-figure creation rather than a living human being. As her movements stopped altogether while still standing, she began to melt just as wax would melt. After seeing this with strangely little thought in his mind about what was happening and why, he then looked around in the street and saw that everyone had stopped moving and was also melting. He said nothing to them or himself as all of the skin, hair and other people parts, as with the clothes, became liquid and flowed in colored wax seas—a slow running over his feet, his ankles, up to his calves, splashing waves upon knees and thighs.

He noticed heat now and a lulling inside him, feeling faint then heightened in every sensation of his body to where even each hair on his wrists tingled through his spine and felt like light shining from the depths of his flesh, wrapping around his body and then wrapping around the entire world to where he could feel himself within many other people in many other places as well as others in him. As he felt this, while still standing in the same spot on the sidewalk in the sea of colors, a bolt of lightning struck him from the clear sky and evaporated him instantly—then he lifted as vapor to form the single cloud in the day's sky. The cloud stayed completely still in the sky until evening; then, in time, the wind pushed it around the world twenty times before it lost form and was no longer possible to see.

# Workforce

There was a woman who had to work. She did not like her job, and she thought that all jobs were mostly, beyond any practical purpose any one job might have, means by which people became unhappy, the many varied ways that fill lives up with work for the sake of doing work instead of something that was or was at least related to something meaningful.

While it is unknown if she ever changed her mind completely, later in her life, a young man who was out somewhere one day, and who was himself at an intersection of circumstances where he was trying to figure out what to do with his life, met her, remembering for the next twenty-five years (the rest of his life) what she told him (though telling no one).

What she said to him was: "The way that I was able to bring together my anger for having to work with my feeling of certainty in knowing that there was something more meaningful that could be done instead was that one day I saw in my mind everyone in the world, everywhere—working—even those that couldn't or hadn't worked. I saw all of them all at once and then separately in what I would have to think now looking back on it would take forever—but in what was then only a few moments; at first, everyone I saw worked in fields, then in many offices both fancy and not, then in rural country stores—all of them knowing each other's work and understanding what it is to do it; some of them were then angry at others yet some were then no longer angry at ones they had been angry at—though I did not understand why. After this, I saw everyone experience more kinds of work and many of these kinds of work throughout long stretches of time, throughout long traditions. There then came a point within the time of all of this when I realized that the people were no longer working; and also somehow no longer angry or not angry—they were full yet opened up in a way I had never known or seen, ready for what was happening to them then. Although, I could not figure any of this out either until it became clear to me that each of the people, through what was experienced, then created a way to live that both took into account everyone else but that was also a unique contribution of themselves in a way that had meaning beyond simply working, even if they could not always choose the kind of work they would do."

The man who had been young at the time of meeting the woman remembered that the woman said that this is what she tried to create with her life and that through the years she had come very close. The man did not remember, however, what other things the woman said, where he met the woman, or anything else about her.

# Street Smarts

She had met him while walking down one of the city streets that come off the largest artery that leads into downtown from the direction of where she lives. The street she walked leads to an area of the city that was once full of busy and well known shops and restaurants but in the past few decades had decayed yet also opened itself up as the home of many that have lived and still live distant from most people's, in this city perhaps especially, ideal of success. As she walked, she saw the man come out of his apartment in a daze. When he saw her, he attempted to smile but instead made a pained face. Concerned, she asked him if he needed help. He said yes, then turning around, moving away from her back into his apartment.

Sad that she could not help, she kept walking, thinking of the man, trying to imagine who he was—what he has known and felt, what he knows and feels—pushed to understand why he wouldn't ask for help if he needed it. After imagining and thinking these things for several minutes, she briefly drifted away from her usual awareness, her body still walking while she had no sensation of control over it; she, for a small part of a second knew for herself that she was connected completely to the man's awareness and experience, fully within the now of his present state, fully within his memory, and also the history that pieced together the whole of him. When this ended for her and she felt within herself again, she wanted at first to run to the man—but continued to walk away from where he was in the direction she had been moving.

She, while still walking, felt that she understood what the man meant by help, the larger meaning, it having been almost a joke in the way that he meant it to her while it was also very serious. She also felt she understood a view of the possibilities of the choices of life that she had never known before.

By the time she got to the place she was going, she had an appreciation for the man where there had initially been pity; she had a respect for him that she would struggle to communicate to others in conversations later on.

# I Would Drink An Entire Volcano While Walking In The Middle Of An Ocean To Create An Island Paradise For You. But Wait, Don't You Know You Are My Island Paradise?

There was a couple that saw each other both physically and mentally as if they were still nineteen years old, the age they both were when they met. For very many years, it didn't occur to either of them that this was done. For instance, after ten years or so of being together, aging together, loving together, in their own minds, not all the time but often enough to notice yet not enough to remember, each would say "poor ______ looks a little tired" or "______ looks a lot like an adult in a movie today" or even ______looks kind of funny today" and at rarer sometimes "I must be in a bad mood because ______ looks kind of ugly today."

After another ten years, there were some variations of these impressions but mostly they remained the same, and always they amounted to nothing. The main variation being a feeling while in each other's presence when they argued of—though not as if either were there own or each other's—the other being a parent of somebody somewhere in the world: it was an obscure feeling neither of them could place clearly; it seemed like it was no longer them alone in these moments—as if they were with a more mature authority though they didn't know who.

This couple lived together, stayed together, loved together until they both reached the amazing age of one-hundred-and-ten, at which time the both died. But it was around the age of seventy-eight that they both had some experiences that confusedly shook them.

In their fifties and sixties, they had more impressions of each other, similar to but somewhat different than the ones of the previous few decades, such as "______ really should have a lot more energy" which related a bit to "why is ______ so often "tired" in bed?" also things like "it is sad that we have both lost our parents while so young" or "______ smells different" and "______ feels different" as well as "______ sure eats a lot of oatmeal."

Somehow for seventy-eight years it never came up in conversation with others that they saw each other as if they were still nineteen both physically and mentally. When they talked with others, they used the language that would seem to express that they understood that it was going to be the year of this or that birthday or that they qualified for senior discounts, but the real significances to them never had any weight beyond the surface of fleeting conversations.

So it was then when at seventy-eight they were in a grotesque and tragic car accident while riding in the car with a couple they were friends with, a couple about their own true age. One of the couple was driving and the other was sitting in the seat behind when a large truck cut through that half of the car destroying their friend's bodies as if the bodies had never had a solid form. With such destruction, with such devastation of their friends, they were not even slightly injured physically: no whiplash, no nicks or bruises. There was a lot of blood that covered their skin and clothes, however, and the horror of this, along with the loss and emotional trauma of the accident, shook them. At the funeral the deceased couple's three children wanted to talk with them, and it was these interactions that confused them because they couldn't really deeply understand what their friend's children meant when the children asked questions or said things to them. All previous significance had lost form when their friends seemed to explode as volcanoes of blood.

It took a few months time of living in confusion where nothing meant anything, but this faded and they began to understand. From the rest of the year of when they were seventy-eight up until the year they turned ninety-nine, they stayed together in a near continual embrace—whether with one arm each around each other on the couch, or holding hands on a walk, or holding hands with whichever hand had no fork or spoon while eating, or fully embracing standing up or in bed lying down. They spent most of these years reliving the past years as if they were fully aware at each passing present moment throughout those times: knowing a growing of simple discovery, a new-old time with fully rich experience; the significant sensations of those times moving through the feeling of their together bodies.

After they turned ninety-nine, they still embraced constantly up until the time of their deaths, but they spent most of their moments with others, being as aware as they could be of their interactions, the significance of relationships, what this did and could mean, giving to other's what they were able of their truest selves they could have present.

# Letter Written At A Café In Bright Sunshine

Last evening, I said to the wind: "Tell me how two people meet." In the morning, the wind responded in a single gust. In the afternoon, I say to you: "I want to see your smile as we play together, when the fullness of our openness is here and dancing in a single joy."

In the short distances of day-to-day seeing, in the most painful pulls and twists of struggles where we cannot see ourselves, and even in the furthest distances within the goodness of our imaginations where it seems we cannot meet because in moments of creativity we are invisible so cannot appear—it is from these places that we can step forward as if the traveler who has walked many miles though cold pathways to finally reach camp and build a fire.

Even if the homes upon the planets we're creating while alone are traveling in different dimensions, scream at me what you feel but can't tell me that delights and frightens you—shout at me what you don't yet know you love. In return, I will whisper to you everything I have ever known and all that I will. Together, with our strengths and the forgotten beauties of our broken pieces, we are free.

# The Philosopher Says Hello

There was someone who, whenever the person met anyone, depending on age and other factors, thought questions such as: could this person be my killer? —My lover for a day or night? —My lover for my life with whom I will have a family? —Be someone who will dramatically alter what I know as my life? —Be someone who will as far as my ability to know affect my life in no way other than this one meeting and what I am thinking now? —Be someone who I met before and forgot and who has forgotten me, maybe met as kids? —Be someone who is related to me distantly or closely? At the same time the person was also thinking: there could be violence in these hands that I have met; there could be romance or lust; there could be permanence or impermanence to me in the relationship of this person to me; there could be something known or unknown, a familiar or a stranger; there could be truth in many of these at once.

And with these thoughts and questions the person was still vastly unsatisfied, knowing that the possibilities of relationships are greater than the capacity of the person's own mind's ability to think through them.

All of the thoughts and questions—and then the dissatisfaction of their incompleteness—took the person over completely so that by the time the meetings with every one of these other people were over the conversations had were mostly mysterious to the person because the words heard were the thoughts and questions rather than hearing the words of the other person. This happened for quite a long time in the life of this person until one day the thoughts and questions thought about and questioned this—then allowing something different from what had been where the person could still think and question but also listen, allowing too the possibility of interaction.

# Impossible To Bear

"If there were three whales that while singing their songs in the ocean just below a shark exploded and shot that shark out of the water directly at me teeth first so that I would be lying on the ground bleeding and screaming—even then I would want to love you. I would rip all the shark teeth out of my face and head and neck, forgetting the stray teeth scattered in different wounds until later, glue myself up just enough to live, and stride over with ragged, bloody strength and hold you, bleeding on and slightly stabbing you." This is what the one person said to the other.

The other said, "You are sweeter than a bear covered in a barrel of honey that fell into a Montana grassland out of an airplane and broke apart in a massive splash right onto the bear. Yet you are more wildly free than the bear and tough enough to beat the bear in a fight (not that I think you should or that I would want you to fight bears). What I mean to say is I love you."

Then, as they kissed in the city streets, as the passersby looked on mostly in either envy or joy, if they could stand to look at all, a twenty foot bear that was carrying a shark in a backpack type baby holder modified for fins ran up to them and hugged both of them tightly. As they were passing out, before they died of lack of oxygen, they heard the bear say to what seemed to them to be both of them but may have been only one of them, "You have intricacies of your personality that are endless mysteries, as if the sky was made of tens of thousands of different flower petals, which I could discover one color and shape at a time."

# The Smite Of The Melted, Smitten Smiths

There was someone who loved another. This someone had been together with the other person for six years. This other person had stopped loving the someone and began loving someone else. This other person was going to tell the first someone but died before the chance to do it under desired circumstances became possible.

The first someone never learned that the other person loved someone else. The first someone spent the rest of what was life in love with the other person who had stopped loving and living.

# Seems, Stitches

On an evening sometime in the early summer, there was a couple on a city bus. They had lived lives that made their actual ages a guess. Fifty maybe? Thirty maybe?

There was another couple, both about twenty-five, sitting behind the first. They were off to a friend's apartment and then to an event of some sort.

The first couple were not only drunk but seemed so incoherent when they talked to each other that it would be hard to imagine that there could be anytime, sober or not, when it would be reasonably expected that anything they said would be able to be figured out. This couple talked in near shouts with no half moments of silence interrupting, only persistent, howling hysterias in slurred, laughing rhythms there were louder than their talking.

The second couple laughed softly to each other at the couple in front of them. They did not want to judge the people in front of them and tried to laugh with them, but they couldn't make sense of what the couple was actually saying; the first couple to them became comedic in every noise and movement. The second couple's laughter built up to a degree where the first couple turned around, each of the first couple looking into each of the second couple's eyes, causing the feeling within each of the second couple that what they thought they felt was comedy was really a feeling of horror—and that these people, these broken strangers, seemingly incoherent, could know this, could know what they couldn't.

When it was the second couple's stop, the first couple stayed on the bus. Stepping down the stairs of the bus to the concrete sidewalk half-full of other people walking past, near their friend's apartment, the couple took a few steps, then stopped, both examining for several intensely focused minutes a single crack in the path in front of them. As they moved forward again, they held each other's hands—they then looked briefly over at a tree off to one side of them by a large building, noticing the evening light through leaves close but not completely together—looking at each other for a full minute to two minutes before they entered their friend's apartment.

# Art Tune

"I want to create" is said. A person is sliced in half from one side of the abdomen through the other by a large floating blade. The person had been at the top of a spiral staircase, so the upper-half of the person tumbled down the stairs. The lower-half stood still at the top of the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, the upper-half of the body screamed every vowel up from the gut that had not leaked out. "I want to create" again is said. The lower-half of the person walked all the way down the stairs. The upper-half hopped with its hands up onto the lower-half and then they were again one.

Someone somewhere else laughs. In this other place, there is someone seemingly doing nothing. This person is an artistic person of some kind, with the passion to create something. The person feels a particular inspiration moving into and through the person's body. The person in this period of apparent nothingness opens up to what feels like infinite openness—an execution—attuning to possibility beyond the person's usual living self where even the wanting of creation is dead but where there is a birth. While all of this happens, the person continues to seemingly do nothing.

# Intimidate. Intimate.

A person attempts dating. Is painfully unsuccessful. Doesn't know why. The person is caught in a web of critical examinations that spins from every known possible detail positive and negative about any current or potential date through a perspective that rearranges and misinterprets the information because it is searching and desiring for an unknown ideal—so in a way that intimidates the person and the date: the person is quickly eaten by the person's own spider. "This possibility is perfect for me" is said, without knowing any of what is, without being present within a conversation when it is, without considering was is based on or could lead to a real relationship—so ending the date by showing up for another date that never existed. "I could never see myself spending any time with this possibility" is said, closing off any possibility for any direction of what could be.

After some years of this, the person begins to know that there are problems and acts differently. The person discovers a perspective of the world and through that an essence of self, sharing this so that it allows a coming together with another; the person feels and is aware of the communication of another through which their essence is then known, responding to the subtle possibilities that is another, being present within the sensuality of the interaction of action.

# All The New/Old Rage

In large blotches of color covering his whole body, he turns purple and orange, with light lime-green looking as if finger-painted throughout the whole suit of his skin, the light lime-green breaking up the blotches of purple and orange. He is yelling at things, at people, at any thought or sensation. His flesh is quaking with violence. The rage lasts an hour then goes away. This has happened many times.

He has a family, a wife and three teenage children, and they all make fun of him. The transformation happens when he loses his temper in one of these terrifying rages—but his family has grown callused to these outbursts so make jokes about how he needs to write the accounts of each of the happenings down because the comic book people are waiting for their stories. His family laughs, but he feels their growing separation from him and increasing coldness towards him. He knows that even when they laugh they are cautious of him—that they have talked in private about what to do if the situation gets worse, that they are hurt by the person who he is.

The man can't figure out how these incidents of his changing happen, but he knows the rage within him causes them. He feels helpless in his attempts at discovering why he is ever upset at all. He knows he is terrifying everyone around him, everyone he loves, wondering how it will affect his children later in their lives, unable even when the question arises to really engage in what it means for the love of he and his wife. He knows he needs to do something.

He is glad that there has never been a time when complete control has been lost while in the transformed state, that he has never seriously, physically harmed anyone. And he is glad that he can at least see slightly, even if he can't understand, what is within himself so he can work on making it stop.

# Modern Medicine

On a Sunday afternoon, she read a book that describes the experience of a character who travels to a place where people still live as they have there for thousands of years. There is a woman whom the character meets in this place who knows all the medicinal qualities of all the trees and plants within hundreds of miles of her.

This woman who the character encounters seemed, as she read, to communicate with her, knowing her as if she was completely free and wild, an herb naturally growing on a hill above where the woman might have slept. She kept reading. Pausing briefly, she wondered how this woman knew all of what she knew about nature. She thought for awhile that it seemed it must be that before the woman in the book could know what the woman knew, that so many people had first died by ingesting things unknown, and even after learning a large amount must have died by mistaking something as harmless. She, while still paused, realized that this must have been the end of so many lives of people—that this must be true in many ways for real people; she considered what it means and what it takes for people to learn and how long it takes for what is learned to be passed onto others successfully; she found it hard to fully accept and conceive of within herself even a small amount of the implications of thinking these things for even a few people that have lived when thinking about people and the changes as time has passed over years—wondering what it would mean if she could know all of the implications for all people who have lived. Through the struggle with all of this, she began considering how the reality of her life compared to those before her and how hard it can be for some. She then also thought of what life could have been like for some people a long time ago in many places as well as in the place where the character met the woman, how even with many harsh difficulties there must also be and have been some other good relationships to the world that she could not easily know.

She thought about what the discoveries of the medicines such as the woman in the book knew would feel like to experience, what it would be like to know a relationship to nature in this way. She thought about a tree, the wood of which is used as incense and the first time she experienced the smell of it when burnt, about how the smell calmed her in pained moments.

She went to bed early that night and lay quietly in silence. She did this for two or three hours but didn't notice the time pass. About a half-and-hour before she fell asleep she heard a neighbor walking down the street singing softly.

The next day, as she drove to work, she saw a little boy through the window of a car and thought about everything the boy might learn and where it could come from and why, about what it can be to discover, and she also thought about the dangers and opportunities the boy could experience in his life. As she parked her car, she felt herself become the woman from the story and the little boy both somehow at once but only for less than thirty or forty seconds. As she reached to open the door of her car, all of the thoughts she had been thinking that morning and the evening before dissipated, but she was left with a feeling of connection that was new to her, a relationship with everything she could encounter, an intensity of experience that before was secret.

# What Was Theirs Is Now Sometimes In Some Ways Mine

There is a song I hear often, reminding me of a girl I knew for a few days in a hospital as a young teenager. I met her as I sat around the main table in the ward with the other kids to eat. A day or two after I met her, she was feeling better so went home.

The next day, she returned crying. Her boyfriend had shot himself in the stomach and died.

The song I now often hear, she had said the day after she returned and before I left, was their song. Sometimes, when I hear the song, I wonder what happened to her.

# Many Bodies To Consider

In a grocery store, holding a frozen box of some meal of something that was supposed to be made by real immigrants or their children from wherever the country was that was supposed to have come up with that dish, the person chose a check-out lane based upon the general attractiveness of the checker and those already in line. As the person waited with the one item, not putting the icy box down so absorbing cold though wrapping fingers, the person looked around at everyone within eyesight in the store, then stared distantly down at the very near floor.

But it was when focusing on a magazine on the rack close to the register and then on a box of cereal that someone had decided at the last second not to buy, that the checker had left right next to the register—it was at this time that the person had the experience of bodily separation where there was the feeling of having two distinct bodies that could be in either the same or different physical spaces. At the moment of separation and the moment right after, the bodies were in mostly the same place, but quickly the person noticed that one of the bodies was weightless and hovering up next to the ceiling while the other body was heavier than what was within its own capacity to move and hadn't moved, couldn't move, anywhere.

Still focusing on the box of cereal, but now from two angles, the person realized that the decision to be in this lane at this time could play a part of one or more of the people behind in the same line being or not somewhere at the "right" or "wrong" moment where a car accident could happen or not, where a close friend could first be met or not, where someone could find themselves in a situation where many experiences and perspectives come together so what never made sense suddenly does or not, where an infinite variety of possible wonderful, horrible and just okay occurrences could happen because of the influence of one simple, insignificant choice.

After coordinating a kind of couple's dance to pay for the groceries when the time came, moving the hovering body back down to play the part of puppeteer at the edges of the immovably heavy body, all the while with most of the eye's focus still on the box of cereal, the person started to come back together as one body and began walking towards the door of the store. Walking out of the store, the person reflected on the realization that had just taken place about the enormous degree of impact the person had on others' lives without even making any effort to do so; the person felt both completely powerful and completely vulnerable. Absorbing this further, the person was overcome with both energy and exhaustion, unsure of what to do.

# Log Ick

There was a place. There was a person. The person lived in the place. It occurred from this time to this time. The person did this in the place—then this happened—then this happened. Also this—also that.

This this and this means this. This that and that means this. That that and that means that and that. Theoretically, this this that that and something else. Therefore, a disgusting log.

# Doing It

Watching, as a man looks towards the light of the crosswalk and then over at the street empty of traffic, she sees his face express uncertainty, hesitation, fear, as if needing to ask permission to move even when the light is green and there are no vehicles near, so needing to be told that it is okay by an authority that isn't present—so treading tremendous trepidation; the woman wondered if this is the same way that he would enter her if she allowed it, imagining the man naked, positioned between her spread legs, looking into and then away from her eyes.

# Redicktionism

Everything the guy said was what was reduced to pointedly redefined meanings.

# A Cliché Story With Or Without People

Time moves like a river, full of fish on a bed.

# How Much Humiliation Does It Take To Become Humble?

There could be no amount of underground basement whipping, no amount of stories of embarrassing genitalia, no amount of imagined or real entire continents populated with ugly, gossiping ex-lovers, no amount of incidents with others which were so lacking in consideration that the resulting embarrassment simply for oneself sears, scarring, the whole of it replaying night after night and through each day; so no amount of daydreams of night-terrors where a fool could be no more a fool and where the people met and spoken to must have had an experience of disgust from the meeting that destroyed part of what makes the people able to smile—where one becomes a public picnic of attack feeding against others and self: there at least seemed that there could be no amount of any kind of such experience that would or could make any kind of change in behavior or perspective.

But what was the point of even asking this again? What even is humility? Is it part of some kind of humane humping? Is it, "millions of humans thinking of me," as was said by the lonely person just before drowning in a masturbatory flood? Is it being the mascot of masochism where it is a fetish of fantasy? Is it a real thing that should inform a, or, the, way to live? Is it simply being exceptionally good at seeing or missing something?

A person did this; the same person did that. Another person did that; that same other person did this. That and this. This. That. Other people. Then. Humiliation? Becoming humble?

# Lesson Plans

A college student meets with a professor in the professor's office. The professor is on the phone when the student arrives, and the student waits—nervous—overhearing the words "funeral," "family," "arrangements," "love," and other words but does not consciously make sense of them or act differently towards the professor once they begin their conversation. The student had been troubled and is asking the professor how, after some absence from the class, it will be possible to finish. The student is completely convinced that the class has to be finished right away, convinced the class is of extreme importance and that the professor needs to help. The professor helps the student, but the student again is troubled and doesn't finish the class.

A few years later, thinking about past struggles and accomplishments, the student consciously remembers the professor's phone call: a brother had died; through this remembering, there was a different way of understanding oneself, the professor, the situation, and many interactions before and after.

# Marriage

The old woman who is often seen in this city I am in, alone, walking, talking in shouts to her own mind with spit drools on cheek and chin—for a few seconds, as I walked past her, we spent lifetimes together. On the day that it happened, right after first seeing her—she, loud and spit faced—I saw her as a beautiful young lady, falling in love with her.

We were delicate yet fiercely powerful lovers, sharing soft intimacies and near beastly passion. We married and had a family, and our fires burned tall and long in many colors of wonderful joys. I also saw nearly the same life shared, but I saw her murder me and I murder her, one after the other so completely without logic—us insane—our children orphans. More than these lives together, I saw other lifetimes, but ones I am unable to recall, ones where their possibility and their impossibility overwhelm.

After I saw nothing more and had walked a ways away, I looked back at this ill, old woman and felt disgust and love for each and between each of us.

I see the woman again often and smile at her; usually she's oblivious; but I am fairly sure that a few times she smiled back: after we pass each other, I always see us, holding ourselves, together, both mouth and body.

Sometimes, I think about our children, as happy parts of a healthy family, and also how they would survive as orphans. Then, asking myself: what else could they become?

# City Life

There they lived: living in a city, seeing the places innocently. Then, in time, knowing on many blocks where blood was shed. The place on a busy avenue near where there are great views of sunsets where a girl while walking to school on the sidewalk was hit and killed by a car that hit another car and lost control; and down the street not far from there, the death of a recent college graduate crossing the street who was hit directly; the bar owner who was shot through the window of his bar for unknown reasons; the celebrating co-workers at a restaurant who were suddenly grieving because one of them was shot by a stranger over a miscommunication taken as an insult; and there was the stabbing a woman near a grocery store further from there near the water where the air is cold but fresh; downtown—beatings; more stabbings; shootings; the robberies—there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, many other places all over the city in every dirty and clean neighborhood with pointed guns; every place—every person on every street either suspicious or susceptible; the shock of the friend of a friend who was killed at this place; the horror at the family of a friend who was killed this other place; the many homeless and the ones that didn't wake up; the bus that hit and killed this person and that person at this place and that place; the train that hit and took the head off of in an accident; the many people who stood in front of trains full of people going to or from somewhere; the bridge that is a tourist draw but has so many suicide stories; and over in that area, three people shot that night; the other area the other night, five shot; two people dead in separate instances on one evening a few blocks from a good cafe on a favorite street of many who shop, eat and drink there—all these places where all the streets became stained; even one of the parks, where a tree limb fell on and killed a woman while under a grove there, the park that people go to be swallowed by a small forest where it is quiet and where many can be seen serene.

Knowing so much and finding it unacceptable, so leaving to another city where unaware. Looking at this new place lived in with cautious but similar innocence as before. Discovering different forms and methods of violence, many ways of bleeding.

Years later coming back to the city left. Acceptance of living in a place of dying. Also non-acceptance.

# The Smiling Scent Of Lavender Above The Clouds Becoming Fragrant Moonlight

Two travelers meet in a place while both are staying far from the different places each knows as home. In this place, they become lovers and create, through the genuineness of their intimacy, a single thing that is the togetherness of them. This lasts for two weeks. Each then decides to continue their separate travels.

The day both are gone from this place, an ambulance on the way to the hospital races by, nearly hitting the building where they had stayed, picking up the togetherness of the lovers, which stayed in this place when they left. In the ambulance is a person who has had a severe stroke, who in a year will awake not able to talk, move, hear or see—unable to communicate with other people.

As the person awakes, there is an awareness of fear that is the only awareness until the person becomes aware that the togetherness, which was picked up along the ambulance's path, is now passionately part of and forever inseparable from the person.

# The Philosopher And The Crazy Person

A philosopher walks for about an hour one afternoon, stopping to rest and relax and reflect in a small park with several benches spread along its edges. Sitting on a bench at one end of the park, the philosopher sees a person near a bench about fifty steps away at an other end of the park who is screaming with face pushed into the air; the whole of the person's body next jerking towards the ground; and, once lying at the foot of the bench, talking to plants and a scattered variety of objects.

"This person must be crazy," the philosopher thinks. But then the philosopher considers some of the things the person said, finding oneself rather surprised by the level of thoughtfulness in many parts of what previously seemed at least nearly insane.

Studying the person further, the philosopher stares right at the person, getting away with being rather obvious doing it. The person, now standing again, picks up an object that had been part of that person's conversation, and when the person does this the philosopher feels with the philosopher's own physical body the feeling that the person's arm is part of the philosopher, where the sensations of the object being picked up are as real as anything the philosopher had ever felt.

# Bedtime Story

The child awoke early and shouted, "Traveling on yellow hippos!—Traveling on yellow hippos!" The others in the house questioned this. "At the start of long sea voyages with tiny purple rhinos alongside us!" shouted the child.

Some of the others tried to put the child back to sleep. "When I am trying to sleep, these one-half-foot tall people with orange and green fur start tickling me—they jump up and down on my pillow and do back flips and side flips and front flips up and down my bed and me until I tell them stories about when I was an octopus and lived in the clouds." "So you will go to sleep then?" those others asked. The child said, "They leave me alone to sleep if I do that." "Do that," said the others.

# At The Height Of Being Grounded

When living in the city on the seventh floor, the mind would say "Jump! Jump out the window!" "Jump-jump! Jump out! It is all shit anyway. End it!" Over and over for most of a year this would repeat. The person would walk to the kitchen where there was a half-open window to the side of the refrigerator and grab some hummus or lunch-meat, looking through the window as the fridge door shut; the person hearing its mind's repetition of exclamation, ignoring it as best as possible, sometimes saying "Shut up!" Then, the person moved to a house in the country with a window nearly level with the land, but the mind would still say the same thing: "Jump Jump-jump! Jump goddammit!" And the person began saying "Fuck you mind! What do you know!?"

# Portrait Of A Naked Octogenarian Woman In A Grocery Store

"They look at my body thinking of decomposition, are reminded of their own mortality—so coil away. But they look again and imagine: me young and nude, imagine themselves my contemporaries, are aroused in fantasy.

The truth: I just want to pick up potato chips—not deal with all this life and death shit."

# What A Lovely Day

There was a person who discovered love with everyone that was met and talked to. It wouldn't always happen immediately, but it would soon happen. There was an appreciation of this other that was met, so that there was an intimate feeling flowing into and out from both of them. When this happened, the other would feel this but would not experience it in the same way as the person who discovered the love. The others then went on with what they did and to the people in their lives.

The love made the person's body begin shining with light from every part of it. This was beautiful to the person. When the person became illuminated, there was a seeing of possibility and limitation; at that moment, everything that was that love became possible if that was going to be the choice of the life lived; at the same moment, there was also the limitation of everything else that could not happen if that life was lived. No matter the possibility or limitation, the love was fully felt and realized for the person in the experience of the discovery—it was all the things that real life is but lived in a momentary movement of light. This moment followed into another that was the experiencing of the death of all the love of all these people because the person could make no choice and because the person also didn't want to and couldn't make the others love even if there was a choice for those others.

After an experience of the love happened, when there was no longer light shining from the body, the person walked alone considering the possibilities of what could be the shared life of loving with the other that there was love discovered with. As the person walked, there was a feeling of following the lives of each one of the others, the most recent together with all the rest, along the path taken. There was the beautiful part, and there were the many real experiences of love, but the person would feel depressed, exhausted, horrified after a while when walking and then flicker with light. Walking more, there was always a joy overtaking all else, ending the flickering and bringing a darkness that was peaceful to walk in.

The last time the person went on one of these walks, while the person's body flickered with light, another was met and talked to and immediately there was love discovered. At the same time, this other, who was initially attracted by the shine of the light, thinking it was something of value, was robbing the person. The other shot the person through the head. It took three minutes for the person to die, and during this time, for the first time, the person chose another.

# She Is A Painter

There is a woman who becomes a shadow, without a physical body. The shadow doesn't move. But then, watching closely, you can see movement. Arms slowly lifting; you can recognize her in her movements.

A week goes by, a month, a few months: you watch. It begins to rain. The rain comes down in colors. During that time, she lifts her arms as if to do something, but it is unclear what she is trying to do. More months pass, and still it is a mystery what she wants. It is still raining.

As the rains stop and the moisture settles, there are pools of color all around. She walks over to a pool of color; somehow reaching through all limitation, dipping her hand in. Her hand and up to the middle of her forearm become real, covered in skin. She dips again but other parts of her, first this part, then another, until she is fully real. She dances through all the pools and laughs and sings, smiling back at your smile.

She pauses for another few months; her gaze holds you though the whole of the time. There is movement again, and she walks to a white wall. She lifts her arms again as before. This time, with her fingertips real, she is able to do as she wants. This time—skin touches, creating color. She is painting with her new self. There is no paint other than what is her real body. She can create and paint any color. With one motion of her hand and brush of her finger, there is one color painted; with another, there is a different color painted. She has become all that is the possibility of color.

# Peak-a-boohoo

Love lies around every coroner.

Love lies around every corner.

Love lives around every coroner.

Love lives around every corner.

# In An Open Bedroom

Late each night, the city's transit trains all rest together on the same track-lined yard. Tens of dozens are cuddled tightly. None sleep until after pillow-talk of the most moving, scandalous, and bizarre stories of the riders they carried.

# Bees At Bear's Knees, Bear At Bees' Knees

Grizzly bears are the wildest of animals so can't be trained. But I bumped into one, thinking my life was over by the mouth and claws of this massive bear, only to find out that this particular grizzly bear was to train me. I had gone into the wilderness to get to know nature better and never got the chance because nature wanted to get to know me—and it was a big talking bear with big ideas.

What happened was this. The bear convinced me to bring it back to the city where I live. And then the bear even put me to work. I pretended to be able to be in control of the bear, and people would pay to sit on a seat strapped to the bear's lower back while the bear walked around the city or to someplace the people wanted to go. I would tell the people they had the option of a bear cab ride or a bear tour ride; they often chose the tour. On these rides I sat in front acting like I could steer in different directions by touching the bear's neck. Every once and a while, to seem more like I was in charge, and because the bear told me to, I fed it chocolate and sardines, its favorite foods. People would pay huge amounts of money to be taken around the city like this. It was all the bear's idea, and I was working for the bear.

At the end of each day the bear would spend all the money on other animals, which at first I thought the bear being a grizzly bear would eat, but it didn't. It spent the money to rescue, ship (if from far away), on everything necessary to take care of them, renting out warehouses, buying food and toys, paying for all the medical bills, creating from scratch new healthy homes for those lost, sick and often sad animals. I wasn't sure why I let the bear train me, but perhaps it was because I was still trying to know nature and this seemed like a way to do that. I was very surprised by all of the things the bear did. But my surprise was in a good way, so made me feel like I was in the right place doing the right thing.

You might think the animals were many dogs and cats—and there were lots, very many lots of lots from near and far—but there were also many other animals from all over—and somehow all of them could talk. Altogether in the warehouse, there were many critters of all kinds stirring around: kitties, doggies, some monkeys, a camel, a little baby hippo, three orangutans, seventeen woodpeckers pecking at stuff, four porcupines acting cute and fuzzy with their pokey points, eight octopuses with their eight legs each living together in an eight thousand gallon aquarium, a kangaroo—or two, yes...two— a dolphin couple swimming in the air and in the aquarium through the sixty-four legs, a few mice, a big goofy gator that giggled who lived in a pond we made, a tadpole, an eagle that couldn't fly but pretended to fly round and round the warehouse, a pony with its friend horse and friend donkey, a frog and its buddy bull, a mostly hairless person (me), and of course the great big grizzly bear. Oh!—and there were the bees, always hanging out around the bear's knees. The bear didn't eat an especially large amount of honey, often none at all, but the bees were always there as if the bear were made of honey—though never bothered anyone who was riding on the bear around the city. The bear would tease the bees and say, "you are at my knees but I'm at your bees' knees too." The bear also had a pretend pet, a potato named Tator. The bear told me it was a "talking Tator" making voices and having it tell "tall tales from the mouth of a short Tator." I laughed a lot. I think the bear somehow changed the potato every week or so as to not have it sprout and rot—but somehow they always looked like the same one.

For special customers that were trusted enough to hear the bear talk, we would sometimes, for birthdays, go to the warehouse and all the animals would sing a very happy birthday song. Once when this happened we all stayed there for fifteen days and talked and ate cake.

After a few years, we met someone who the bear said needed a job. I let the person take over so left, going back out near where I first found the bear. I realized then that I didn't really know nature, but I didn't feel I needed to in the way that I had thought. I felt part of nature and that was enough even if I couldn't know anything else. I visit the bear and the animals sometimes. Now there are five warehouses and a big outdoor area for everyone.

# The Light Of Love Through Space And Time

When the person died what was this person split into three—a humid mist, a cold wind, and a soft but powerful light that shined from the place of death all the way through what is known of space to places in space unknown. At the time of the death, the lover of this person first felt the cold wind, then the humid mist—but only later knew of the light. The person, before dying, knowing of the inevitable consequences of sickness, pushed the lover to make good friends and discover new love. Yet even after the death the lover struggled to connect with others.

Some years later, as the lover walked past a tree near a swamp with a humid mist rising from it, on a day where there was also a cold wind, the lover looked into the branches where light wrapped around, wrapped through, seeing not the person loved but love itself, allowing for a strength of being that created an openness not known before.

# An Honest Discovery Presents Itself

An old man discovers a journal he had written in as young man and thinks for quite a long time about one particular part of his past that he had forgotten about.

"When in certain situations with another person, if you act helpless and ignorant, as if the person isn't afflicted with the same condition, doing this without pride, often, then, the other person will be something close to the self the person is when in private—or a self the person wants to be—or sometimes a self the is the sad truth of circumstance, or other honest selves, opening up to the non-threat of you—revealing—making claims and expressions with confidence because they won't be pushed against. If you can shrink yourself to see the size of another, when your passive encounter is over don't continue to feel small, but also don't be full of arrogance at your trick. Don't feel angry at the other person for misjudging you either—because it is your presentation of yourself that is the cause of any blame."

The old man thinks about if he ever was able to present himself fully and honestly, if he was present in at least most of his presentations of himself. He also thinks about what it means to be passive in the way that he had been, sizing up instead of interacting honestly.

# The Secret Of The Sad Dog

There was the worry of an ulcer, or another source of pain caused by something worse. Medical tests were done: blood, images; giving at first no explainable cause.

A more advanced technology of imagining test was ordered. There was shock at the discovery. The doctor came in and gave the information, a clear diagnosis of pain. A very tiny dog was living right below the stomach in the intestines, and it was lonely and dug and bit at the walls of the intestines to get attention.

The doctor at first wasn't sure what to suggest or do because it seemed that taking the dog out would, even with its very small size, be fatal for both. The doctor then had an idea: "The dog won't do any harm if it is happy. So, if you can learn to talk to it, then it will stop biting and digging. So then you will both be fine."

It took some time, but the idea worked. And the doctor and everyone else who knew of the dog agreed, the dog's existence was to be kept a secret.

# Nothing Normal Is Normal, Normally

There had been a great effort made to be closer to what was thought of as normal ideas of what normal seemed to must be in ways of living for others. And there become a troubling, an exhaustion, though the failure of doing this.

There was the wanting of language that felt connected and true. Animals sometimes seemed to make noises more honest than any human words. And the wind sometimes seemed to gust through a secret tunnel from one spot of the earth to another, making its way through the core, going to and coming from a far off place of unknown planets and stars. There was the need of support, of interaction, of the intimate connection of care—where living unites with like this—a need of a system that supports heaviness so there is a suspension of burden and all floats, as was thought normal; there was a need for relationships where what is joy and what is able to be beared are greater—relationships of the highest beautiful balance—where possibilities are not considered but are.

This person thought that this new normal was built. But all of the strings suspending the previous weight snapped. The person was anguished in fog. There was no knowing of where or what everything was within oneself or others. The whole of the world was mysterious, grey and damp. Even the idea of normal was lost; along with its loss so too was lost the comparison of oneself to others: during this time the person couldn't notice these losses and it had no affect then. The person lived in this miserable state for several years where everything was unclear and distant from knowing. There was no connection, no intimate warmth of care and support.

When the fog burned off, the person looked around again and again in shock—talking to everyone, asking questions. Everyone seemed to have become different bodily mixed up combinations of physical parts; although, somehow, all could still talk. There was one person who seemed to be a normal human shape but when looking closer was discovered to be only hands piled together. Some that were, umm—less fortunate. Some, perhaps—more, depending. There were others that were legs and faces only; there were many of combinations and shapes so various it was rather exciting in many ways for the person. When the person talked with these others, the person thought some were familiar in personality and voice but realized all were also made from bits and pieces of many personalities. There was something that made sense in all of this, and the person didn't ask what was normal or not anymore.

The person lived happily interacting with and enjoying the new strange possibilities of life for another several years. Finally the person seemed to meet someone who was normal—talked as if one individual, looked at if one non bodily mixed up body— but the experience of this, and the thoughts that come along at the same time were rather upsetting at first; it was so strange to find a normal individual—especially one so unusual. The person felt as if the anguish and fog was going to return again for a few moments. But then, the person felt a light burning everywhere in and on the person's body; then a tingle through the spine heating and exciting the rest of the body even further. The person smiled, and the feeling of fog returning burned away.

# Pet Friendly

The person had been hurt by people in the past so avoided intimacy with other people, preferring the companionship of animals. Animals, the person thought, were not hurtful like people: even when an animal is scared and bites, the reasons for it are easily understood; with people, however, there is a sickly danger. For a long time, the person thought like this so was reactionary to and self-isolating from others, mostly finding companionship with dogs and cats, but sometimes other animals as well, often saving hurt and suffering animals that otherwise would have little chance of living well or living at all.

There came a point, though, when the person saw other people in a similar way as was the person's perception of animals: imagining people naked and pooping and peeing outdoors, as needing petting, as being motivated by treats, as uniquely cute in each individual's own goofy way, and as sexual beings not disappointing or disgusting but as having a doggy-like style that could be appreciated. When the person thought like this, the presence of an odd inter-species empathy appeared where intimacy and companionship with the hairy, nude, human-beast was allowed.

# Flowers

A botanical garden covering ten acres, full of thousands of plants and hundreds of trees collected from all over the world—there are two women who live nearby in a home for elderly people. Most days when there is no rain they come to the garden. Today there is no rain; they are there. One of the women is in a wheelchair sleeping; she is breathing oxygen in through a tube in her nostrils that runs to a tank hanging on the back of her wheelchair. She is ninety-four. The other woman is crocheting; she has crocheted since she was a young teen. Now seventy-eight, she crochets three to four hours a day. The older woman can't get out by herself, but the younger woman makes sure she gets out to the garden. The two women sit near a tree that partly shades the older, sleeping woman. There is sun, but the day is cool. The older woman is wrapped in several large blankets with a jacket underneath and a scarf around her head. The younger woman wears a sweater and jacket with a small blanket on her lap.

# Sea. Transparent. See.

A person came to a place where the interactions of relationships within the world presented certain other people as examples of warnings—but in a way where each were real people experienced as another, as possible future selves, as possible past selves, where what it was to be oneself extended throughout all of possibility. When the person saw someone that warned through who they were of a self that was angry and quick to react negatively through fear, bitterness and distrust, there was no judgment against this someone, only animated awareness that was experienced as if it could be the truth for this person too. Because of this, the person was silent towards these other selves unless what was said was something that was kind or could add an element of positive possibility where new futures for these someones could be more likely through the expression of what was experienced by the person.

The person lived not an extraordinarily long life but a life where during the time alive had many experiences of both joy and difficulty. Many of these experiences were adventures in the world. Many other experiences were explorations within the self of these someones and the person's self, taking place in different possible selves and different possible worlds. All were partly a mix of selves and worlds. Within any given moment the person had of experience of such possibilities, the truth of the experience was seen as a swirling ocean, flowing out from the swirl to moving sand beneath feet, to solid earth, in infinite waves of hellos and goodbyes.

In this person's life, there were many honest smiles for what was more than self-happiness as well as much intense pain for the pooling tides of everything, where lying naked in the salt water pool was the person and all of what warned and was another.

