A MOTHER’S PURE JOY
When you get pure joy out of ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’ or ‘seeing’, that’s when you realize how big and unexplainable some things are and being a mom is one of those things.
What I love about being a mom is that my son has enhanced my life in so many ways. He’s my pride & pure joy.
Addi!
We started off slow, this relationship we have. A little bit here and a little there, and you were intregued by me, my wiles, my soft carress and the way you felt when I was here. It didn't really take as long as you think. As a matter of fact, you were mine from the moment we met. You see, I have always wanted you, to possess you, your heart, your soul your life. I am cunning, I am baffling, patient beyond the measure of time, and I know how to win your favor each and every time. My love will take you to heights of pleasure you will never experience again, and it's not really love I give, just an empty promise of a better existence, of not having to feel like an outcast, unloved and misunderstood, of feeling alone and empty, unaccepted and unacceptable. For I am that reliefe from the mundane everyday struggle of trying to fit in in a world that will never accept you as you are, I exist in that place, and you will seek me out. I will make you feel whole again, fill that empty void where like a black hole, everything else will cease to exist, it's only ever just you and I. I will be your lover, your hubby, your children or your wife, I will be your best friend and soon I will be the only thing left in your life. I will take these others and cast them all aside, I will be the only thing that matters in this life. Eventually you will do my will, even denounce your God, forsaking everything except me. Your car, your home, all that you've obtained, you will sell and barter and throw it all away. Soon we will be as one, no matter where we are, and rest assured your life is forefit to my whims. You will be my subject, my slave and you will do whatever it takes to keep me alive, because without me you will also surely die. You will rob, you will steal, you will lie and cheat and kill, I am now your God, your Higher Power, and I own your will. I own your soul, your moral code is laughable, I own your life now and you will sell your body on the streets of where you now dwell in squalor. I will haunt your mind and terrorize your dreams, for I'm the epitome of nightmare, I'm the silence in your screams.
My name is Addiction, call me Addi for short. There is no escaping me once we are introduced. I live inside of you, a pariah embedded in your brain. And now you know the depths of your insanity which is merely my playground. I will twist you I will bend you and I'll break your heart to bits, I will tear you from the inside, corrode you to the bone. And in the end, I will still be your only friend. The only one left around, the only one who cares, but not about you. I'm just in it to destroy you so that I may survive. You will never know of the other lives you have helped to destroy, they gave up on you long ago and have moved on with thier lives. Your children you've abandoned, left them defensless, alone and scared, and rest assured because of that they will also seek me out, and they will know me as you do. There is no escape from me, don't bother to try. I am you and you are me, forever entertwined.
✧
"I don't like the dark. It's scary," the little girl wisphered, clinging to her brother.
He wrapped his arms around her tighter, resting his chin on her small head. "You can't see the stars unless it's dark."
She nodded, slowly.
"So don't think of the dark as something scary but rather something beautiful."
Hush Baby Hush
She rocks me to sleep in her arms every night. She holds me and sways and coos hush baby hush. You’re safe, she says. You’re safe as you’ll ever be.
I look into her eyes and can’t speak words. I cry like a newborn because it’s what I am when she holds me and sways and coos hush baby hush. And I don’t feel safe, at night, with this creature, human in form I think. She’s all I’ve ever known.
I used to fight back and claw at her eyes, but her grip is strong. So strong that I’ve grown to full form and still can’t get out of her arms. Let me go, I say. I’m a woman, let me go.
But she holds me and sways and coos hush baby hush. So I’ve taken to closing my eyes and dreaming of my dimension twin. The me from another world. I imagine her eating daisies and swinging from willows and playing the harmonica with a blade of grass. She is free, exposed, filthy as swine. She lives as she pleases, she fucks as she pleases.
She doesn’t like when I dream. She puts her mouth over my head and takes my thoughts, takes my breath. She slips inside of my body and moves my arms, punches my fists. She stumbles and falls and crawls, all while screaming I hate you to the walls of the hallow room.
And once her pain has become my own, she ejects herself from my body, lifeless now, and swaddles me in cotton, takes me in her arms, and sways and coos hush baby hush. She never looks at me as she rocks, squeezing tighter until I nearly suffocate from the pressure. But she never grants me the mercy of death. She needs me to stay hidden.
When she is done with me, she puts me back in my cage for the next time the world crumbles. Its crumbling is chronic. And when she walks toward the door and I try my words and say meekly, mother, please let me go, she turns and coos hush baby hush.
The Firebird
The kids at school called him “Lurch.” The worst part was, she saw it. He was a tall kid, all arms and legs, who walked on his toes with a forward lean, as though there was a forever wind against his sail. He was growing so fast. She couldn’t afford to keep buying clothes at the rate he was growing, so his sleeves and cuffs were going to have to ride up for awhile, but what was she to do? Her clothes were not nearly new either.
They weren’t beating him up yet, but that would probably come. He was one of those gentle kids who was so easy for the others to pick on. All he had going for him was that his height was somewhat imposing. What would she do if they did start beating him up? Again? A single mother in a strange town? God knows she would do or give anything to make the child happy, but he seldom was, following her lead. And he was still such a good boy despite all that! He did all that she asked, which was quite a bit, while asking for nothing in return. He wore the shirts with the too short sleeves, and the high-water pants without complaint. His grades were good. He helped around the house. There was only the one thing she had ever seen him want, and he never even asked her for that.
But she saw him looking at that one thing. She saw him at the store, reaching out a gentle hand to touch it. He had touched it lovingly, as a woman touches her baby. That was how she’d known. Seeing it had brought a tear to her eye. She vowed then and there that he would have it. She knew a way.
~
The man behind the counter at the second hand store would only give her $200 for her $2,000 engagement ring. Benjamin had given her that ring directly after her pregnancy, and directly before his accident. The ring was all she had left of him, but Benjamin wouldn’t mind it; back then he wouldn't have minded, and certainly not now.
She took the money for the ring from the clerk and immediately set it back on the countertop. There would be missed meals in his future, but she would give her boy this. The rest of the money she had gotten from Adam. She didn’t love Adam, and he did not love her, but there were times when Adam needed a woman, even a pear shaped woman like her, so she gave herself to him during those times. In return he helped her with bills, and such. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement that wasn’t so terrible. Adam hopped on her quickly and hopped off as fast, like a rabbit, as though he was afraid someone might see him on top of her. She had stopped dressing up for Adam, stopped trying to be pretty for him, but he did not seem to notice either way. It was not prostitution, she told herself. They were just friends helping each other, only they weren’t friends in any of the other ways that people were friends. Still, it was not prostitution. She was not a prostitute. She would marry Adam if he were to ask, but he wouldn’t ask.
It was a bright red Gibson Firebird. It's fret board was worn. The paint was scratched up pretty badly, and the neck had been repaired. There was a name scratched on the back that she couldn’t make out; the name of another boy with another dream, no doubt. She knew from her research that the Firebird was a really good guitar, even if it was old. The man behind the counter threw the amp and pickups in “cheap.” Even so, it had not been easy to take the money out of her purse, knowing what she'd had to do to get it.
~
But all of that was only memories these many years later. She had not been with Adam in ages, and no one called her boy “Lurch” anymore. He was rich now, that son of hers was. He wore only the most stylish clothes as he climbed from the backs of the limosines, or down the steps of the jet planes, and those stylish clothes always with a tailor-made fit. The way the quiet, defenseless boy had turned out was a miracle, is what it was!
And he still played the old Firebird that had cost her so much, the one whose sounds she knew so well. That old guitar never failed to break her down to prayer whenever it's soulful wail sang from out her radio.
The zebras and the lions.
The prey, the praise,
they Praise for days,
For days to amaze,
At the wide open haze,
That shows them their ways,
And where they can graze,
With summers bright rays.
And long scary stays,
In the predators maze,
With their cold hearted gaze,
and the prey, they bay,
For they did not praise,
for the predators gaze,
That now will cause lays,
from they prey that praise.
Elsewhere
“I don’t know why we must do this. It is without sense. They have been doing so well, mostly, for a time anyway, at least since the flood.”
“Surely, you jest?”
“Certainly there were some low points, particularly in recent views – “
“Some?”
“Yes, some. But they were overshadowed by the high points! Think of when the tomes of scientific and mathematical knowledge that we had buried amongst the billions of cells in every human brain were finally accessed, analyzed, synthesized, and shared in more palatable form for the many.”
“For the few.”
“Okay, fine, but they did it and they are still attempting to make the information readily accessible by the many."
“Only insofar as it is externally stored and accessible by pressing a button. They prefer not to think but rather just assume what information appears before them on one of their machines is truth. They are actually using less of those billions of cells than in previous epochs when, in the opinion of those of this time, knowledge was limited. It may have been limited, and buried under layers of superstition and plain ignorance, but those with knowledge, were truly knowledgeable. Their own brains were the machines and they used them with infinite more skill than the present time. Now, knowledge, no information, is merely accessible.”
“Hmmm. Well, what about art, language, and literature? And, let us not forget the explosion of the industrial revolution…?”
“What of them? Did any of those developments help them not repeat the lessons ostensibly learned by their earliest ancestors? Every time we observe, they are living the same lives over and over again, only differing in the accoutrements, not the substance.
“Did any of this supposed progress actually help them advance inherently as a species? Has it taught them to use their brains to form words of peace rather than to produce weapons of war – with marked and continued success? Has any period of one hundred rotations around the sun actually passed without a life being ended for reasons that within 10 or 20 rotations were no longer meaningful to those taking the life, nor those left behind by the ones who lost it? Indeed, within 50 rotations, are not most of the perpetrators deceased and have not those left behind forgotten, or do they not even insist that whatever travesties occurred never happened?
“And is not history written by those with the pen, that is, those who prey upon the weak with the power of the sword, the gun, the bomb, the atom? And do they not write it as they, the few, wish it to be remembered, not as it really was for the many, that is to say, as we see it from our vantage point?
“Thusly, they damn themselves to constantly living with the results of selfish greed and ambition, rather than making way for…life as we know it.
“Sadly, with all the progress you praise, they are moving ever closer to wiping out all memory of their existence. Nothing will remember them. Not even us.”
“Do we have to let the free will experiment continue? Can’t we try another flood? There are good ones worth saving and giving another opportunity to be.”
“We have offered more than enough time and opportunity. Let them live or die as they will. It is no longer of our concern. The universe is infinite. We will start anew. Elsewhere.”
