Dream VII: Crocodilian Lumber Yard

The the shards of a dim remembrance of peculiarity I summon back to my memory forcefully three steps out of bed, thus:  a saw mill, tall, cross timbers giving it height, mechanically, a crocodile carcass is emitted from its output, stripped of extraneous limbs and the tail chopped off nearest to the base as it can. Still alive it is dropped in front of the mill, mouth moving in agony. Two workers come up walking with the precision of automatons and carry it off and I watch on dispassionately from some unknown space, detached from the action. They stack them up high like lincoln logs with other crocodiles prepared in the same manner, three this way and three cross ways, some of them are unmoving, while others still wiggle their jaws. They are gigantic reptiles, all of them over twenty feet and this without their tails, their torsos are wide and immense from a long life of waiting and eating and waiting.

"Now it's your turn," they telepath to me as they hand me an ax. I don't resist, though I am not entirely sure why they work to accomplish this, and overall find the action of questionable value. 

Prometheus Bound & Down

The rock, beyond those of mortals, inaccessible to corporeal deposits of animate matter, its sacred stone stained an inch thick with black-crusted bile spilled at the behest of stubborn Zeus sitting solemnly in the heavens sipping soma. He views these stains from eagle eye view, mottled with gray growth long dead and green moss gaining sustenance from the leaking organs of the throttled god lying chained and impotent there to experience the forever event of his punishment.  

It is little known that Zeus ever improves upon his torments by small increments. For instance, he now allows Prometheus a few newfound freedoms which only make his torture more tedious. Left arm unchained and beside its body it wanders about to search for something other than rough rock, anything else really... what is this? He lifts the smooth object forged of glass and metal found blindly by his nomadic arm. He brings the thing, an iPad, before his face and taps the Facebook icon with his nose. Page loading... page loading... (Data service is astoundingly slow upon the rock, though by intentionally hellish design.) 12 hours later it finally renders the page, sidebar says "Events" and under it: "Liver torn out by tense talons sheathed in godblood and left to rot simmering in the sun!" A morbid feeling compels him to click on the event to see the description, and at the top of the page in foreboding letters, it says, "You are attending". Yet to his chagrin there are no options to change the status. His fate resonates particularly grimly within the god, who had long since lost his ability to discern irony.  

Now to check the baseball scores. What? How could this be? ESPN.com is actually loading?! Ok, well, maybe this is a slip up... but how are them Yankees doing? Final scores let's see here, Yankees: Fuck you, Marlins: bastardcunt [.gif of a little bearded man giving the finger].

Wu Noir: Forget to Remember, as in, Reincarnation [Part 2 - Interlude]

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Huìnéng said to Hui Ming, "Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born."  
At these words, Hui Ming was enlightened...

          -Fragment of Case #23 of The Gateless Gate (Wu-wen kuan)

Immaculate, unconceived of, ever conceiving. Violet hum glowing rests on eyes, multiplied hundreds of times into conglomerate blur, whining, buzzing, another passes my aggregated gaze nearly unknown, but sporting that certain signature, that certain noble hint of pheromone attraction, attachment...

Zzttsssss!! (The bug zapper I flew straight into single-mindedly with many of my own kind, guided gracefully with compound eyes and without fear, what is death?)

 A clear gaze suddenly attained, everything as it is perfectly, utter deployment of fly faculties shredded asunder, completion, a dim memory of distant self, a few glimpses through sharper eyes, visual field better defined, but still obscure, unable to differentiate, very still, wide open and free from interpretation, green waterfalled over brown bars (a distant vision of simian grace, eons later perhaps, who can tell?), respiration heavy, vast gusts like turbulent storms drawn from deep within, embracing it and eternally giving it up again, to intermingle with the uncountable molecules of air, interred in caverns of familiar flesh, familiar phrases... return to the tongue, fluid air venturing through the grimy passage of the vocal cords, stuttering together to chop-up and order the vibrations of air, I remember the vibrancy of feeling, an incredible palate of expression at a moment's notice, unperturbed being everywhere at once... but yes, the air humming past, distilling emotion into something simpler, devoid of the original really, but still teeming with the intent, encoded with it and decoded... passably well, enough to taste the gist of it on your mind like a drop of lemon in a gargling spring, an oasis, an echo of another time, the camels all together looking on impassively at the drifting dunes, impermanent, palm trees beside lifting their glittering leaves up to worship the sun, Ra to some, a burning disk to others who did not have the assistance of abstract thought, of true superstition, of belief, that foul stream of thought which carves itself ever more painfully into the consciousness of man, entombing itself within a ravine of mind which grows to a gorge and finally into a canyon deeper and more persistent than anything else on the horizon, unable to close back up ever again to permanently scar the spirit, its contortions the amplification of what were once the tiniest deviations, wayward trickles turned to ponderous oxbows leading the flow slowly astray, seeming Omegas that sum up not a single one of the ten-thousand things.

Wu Noir: An Intentionally Literal Misunderstanding of a Kōan [Part 1]

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A monk asked Zhaozhou, a Chinese Chán (Zen) master, "Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?" Zhaozhou shouted, "Wu! (NOT!)"

The monk said, "Above to all the Buddhas, below to the crawling bugs, all have Buddha-nature. Why is it that the dog has not?"

The master said, "Because he has the nature of karmic delusions."

          -The "Wu" ("Mu" in Japanese)" Kōan

Smoke like seltzer bubbled incourteously from thin lips, a dread of time sideways elapsed silence askance, silence that bespoke the terror of a crime that yet again broke down the borderlines of the obscene. Napalm for headline writers. As they got over the initial horror and their coffee kicked down the bedraggled doors of their eyelids drooping with midnight malaise, that mute solemnity slowly mixed with the bellyaching from the bosses at their sullen henchmen bearing badges malingering with crests like Romans once inscribed on their shields, miniature cupric tokens of old authority, tarnished, but still shining uncertainly in the unmellowed light of a lamp, shade set askew, scattered blood torn like a slapdash zipper ripped through it. I light another cigarette, scattering ash on the virgin crime scene, not that she was a doll to begin with. The furniture is out of date, and, having been curdled by innumerable summer heat waves, bursting at the seams, brittle with age, if you tapped it just the right way it would genially explode into a cloud of fine dust like a nova's sloughed off outer shells, glad for an excuse to disintegrate. I exhale contorted parabolas of smoke that solve equations in their intersections unthought of by mathematicians until the end of time, but just sidle by, parting their genius with my lighter, gunmetal gray, Spartan simplicity, returned to its place beside a pocket watch passed down, what? Four generations, five? I dunno, it ticks, though not all that well, and if it gets passed down once more it'll be to some lowdown pickpocket on the "L", wouldn't have it any other way.

She was stretched out all seductive under the drapes, pin-needled hedgehog style underneath, thirty blades at least standing in like tent poles under the big top, price of admission... uncertain, but it won't do to just sneak a peak through the curtains, firstly it's impractical given the crowd of brain dead lackeys crowded around drooling, undergoing the slow lobotomy of public service, and secondly it would be ungentlemanly. I for one respect the privacy of a lady, either alive or exsanguinated. Overkill certainly, but a crime of passion? Hmm... unkempt amygdalas screeching out for revenge and a man who would obey their whining cries to placate their unthinking primal tantrum. Not the work of a drunk though he surely had a couple beers or fingers of whiskey after his nine-to-five like the rest of us. Precise, like acupuncture almost, spaced even, though I doubt the son-of-a-bitch bothered to align her chakras at all, common courtesy really, the bastard...

Bad Dog!

-Sir, I must apologize for my dog, she was never quite right after the Ford administration.

What? What did your dog do?

-What did she do? WHAT DID SHE DO? She's been completely insolent all evening and didn't even deign to recognize you after the second encore, she sniffed the air with... with a touch of disdain during the étude, if I were to put it lightly, and she specifically ignored the entire 1st movement of the Shostakovitch symphony you so gloriously conducted to perfection when she was, in fact, the one who requested that it be performed. She's been an absolute terror the entire evening and for God knows what mercurial reason.

Well, from what I saw she was a most dignified animal, and put the rest of the audience to utter shame. Why, I heard from the third clarinetist that during the oboe solo, which was a truly magnificent performance, yet was so subtly done that I felt its minute affectations would be lost on the masses, that he saw her visibly perk up out of her seat in rapt attention, her snout trained with expert grace towards the stage, moving back and forth wisely in time with the music even during the cadenza in which the oboist took nearly excessive liberties with the rubato... yes, nearly but not quite... anyhow... and then at the end of that movement she stood up on the balcony and uttered a most sonorous bark... I hesitate to call that sound a bark... which sounded more clearly and sincerely to my ear than any "bravo" I've ever heard from our own species. And all this as the rest of the audience, too uncultured and sycophantic to decide for themselves whether they enjoyed the movement or not, sat in sheepish silence twiddling their thumbs, but who soon found themselves resorting to a standing ovation which must have lasted thirty minutes after the third gloriously persuasive "bravo" shall I say, of this impeccably astute canine.

-Jesus Christ, I must doubly apologize, sir.

Walking

streets irrigate smoke

wafting over houses

soot lies thin

smells lightly roasted

fog breaks uniform

as eggs cracked

drops the mist

the ground absorbs

runoff carries soil

as if explaining

the burned house

stark and verdant

garden grows untended

at home a dead bird

waits nestled next to a potted plant

for the touch of mycelia

the tickling of ant's mandibles

and the sprouting of lime green moss

Hello, I'm Materialism!

(Knock, knock knock, knockknockknockknock)
"Yes?"
Hey man how ya' doing (puts card in hand) ain't gonna hurt ya' buddy, ain't gonna bite ya' heh heh heh, well see here what I'm doing is a contest there's about a hundred and fifty of us going around knocking on doors, see, there's a grand prize of a trip to the virgin islands, have you ever been to the virgin islands, buddy?
"No."
Well, I'll tell ya' it's pretty nice, very nice out there this time of year so that's why I'm going to win this thing, we're just going out trying to prove that we're going out there meeting people and I've just got to get you to prove it for me here, showing that I'm out there being the happy guy I am and spreading that out. (hands a second card, also not read)
"Uh yeah so you want any money from me?"
Naw dude, just going out there meeting people just showing were going out there spreading the love, just showing everybody how happy I am. And there's about to be a hundred and fifty more of us coming around knocking on your door, just to let you know.
"Well, I guarantee you I'm happier than you."
Not likely dude.
"Really... well I'm just not interested." (drops paper on the ground)
Thanks alot fuckface.
"You're calling me a fuckface, fuckface?"
Yeah, you want to step outside?
"So you want to fight me because you're an asshole? Jeesssus, go fuck yourself."
"Fuck you." (shambles up staircase to go bother someone else.)

A Zen Translation of The First Paragraph of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities

[Translator's Note: Some people must always use words! Ha!]

Times, what were they? I don't know. The best and the worst at once, writes this one man. It was the age of wisdom and the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way, all these words were also written by this same man and they all appear proper since there is indeed no distinction between any of the specified states. Everything was just the way it is, though some people who were high in the hierarchical ranking determined that only certain adjectival forms should be used to describe it, and that this was a thing which could have been for good or for evil, and again there is no distinction between those things. Maybe if he had given it more thought he wouldn't have written anything and just taken longer walks instead, but I don't know.