"with words like machetes; they cut to the marrow."

and everything became clear once more. the sky, the sun, the moon, the desert. all became lucid as the day after a hard rain. i sat on the bench near the park, tossing bread scraps to passing geese, and lifted myself above the mountains, beyond the trees and the woods and the passing birds, high above the clouds that sat, single-file, in the azure, as if nothing held them from becoming one with the hovering space above. i kept climbing, beyond the stars, the coal-colored midnight, past the shooting suns and the motionless mountains of the brightest planets. i came upon the peak of olympus mons and stopped cold in the tracks i'd created. black, black, comets too cold. their tails, they whip and dissolve. and the shining divides, they cast side to side, forfeit patterns of beauty and flair.i stood there, steady and collected, wondering how i'd transcended what i'd believed to be all that was. volcanoes erupted and pyramids rose from the red rock ground all at once. stifle that conscience, bearer of ill-will, make the case for silence. egotism will outshine the sun in the fiercest of battles. cynical cynic. master of minds and mirrors. you have not the slightest idea of what you discuss. farcical. idealistic/idolatry/infidel. a terrible speaker and the children know it, and smell it, seeps off of you like warm sap. technicoloristic and unable to hide it/disguise it. and your rhythm is far-off.

Gideon and the Star

I don't know yet what this will become...

A silver flask sits at the edge of a nightstand in a stylish, high-end hotel near the west side of town. Gideon Nebuls tries to relax in a brown chair on his balcony. His room is on the 4th floor. It's late afternoon and the sun has just begun its nighttime routine while the rain continues to fall from the mottled sky. Gideon listens to droplets beat away at the balcony overhang as he watches the people below move about like ants in a farm. 
He tries to relax.
The phone rings from across the room. Gideon, legs full of anxiety, gets up out of his chair to answer it. It rings two more times before he finally picks up the receiver.
"Good evening, Mr. Nebuls," says the concierge at the 1st floor front-desk, "I hope you're enjoying your stay."
"I am, Yes. Thank you." Gideon replies. His voice is low and coarse.
"Very good, sir. I just wanted to check in. There is a Mr. Conners on the line. Shall I put him through?"
Gideon thought for a moment. Mr. Conners? He couldn't recall the name. He was never one to take a call of someone whose name or number he didn't recognize and, yet, at the same time he always hated when people left voice messages. But what did it matter? It was, after all, his last night on Earth.
"Go ahead. Put him through." He told the concierge. 
"Very good, sir. Have a good night." There was a brief pause while the line switched between the front desk and Mr. Conners line.
"Hello?" Gideon asked. His tone had now shifted from tired to curious.
"Mr. Nebuls? Hello. My name is Mr. Conners. You don't know me and we've never met, but I know that in approximately 12 hours from now you will be boarding a ship that you will be a passenger on for the next 4 years. I know that to you, however, it will only seem like mere minutes. Mr. Nebuls I am calling to tell you that terrible things are about to happen. Things that have been building and building behind the scenes, behind what you call your world and within everything you see and feel. Things, Mr. Nebuls, things are going to get very bad. I'm calling to warn you, Mr. Nebuls, that the mission you have signed up for, the mission you've been preparing for the past year, is not going to succeed. You will not reach your destination and your entire crew will die. Do you understand this, Mr. Nebuls?"
Gideon tries to adjust himself to the words he's hearing, 
"Is this a joke?" he responds, uneasily. 
"I can assure you, Mr. Nebuls, that this is no joke. I need you to comprehend what I'm saying. I know this is difficult for you but you need to listen to me. Terrible things will happen whether you're on this planet or not."
"This plane- How do you know this?! I don-" The phone goes to dial tone before he can finish. Gideon looks at the phone, at the receiver, and back again. He hangs up the phone and picks it back up to dial the front desk. The concierge comes across the phone.
"Hi. This is Gideon Nebuls," he began, tense and excited, "I'm in room 1138. Listen, I just received a call from a Mr. Conners. I don't know who this person is but is there any way you can trace that call? You know, find the number he was on?" 
The concierge was taken aback. "Um, I'm sorry, sir?" he asked back.
"Can you find the number that just called me?!" Gideon became more heated.
There was a pause. Only the sound of Gideon's breathing came over the phone. "Mr. Nebuls," the concierge began, "Sir I'm looking at your phone records and the last call you received was two nights ago. There have been no new calls today."

A revisiting (Part II) "a beginning with no end"

Stars collide in the midnight sky

And form matter transcended from dust.

I could not discern between fabrics of time

And space befitting of us.

Though suns when they shine may be bright for some time

They play on illusion of sight.

When bodies black out they leave us to doubt

With old photographs of light.

The moon hangs low beneath blankets of black

Sprinkled softly with points of white.

And I think to myself while the stars still implode

How I could ever reach such heights.

 

 

Sleep could not have come sooner for him, although he wished at once that it had kept its distance from him. In his dreams, his nightmares, he found himself frightened the most. Even when the days dragged on and his body gave way to fatigue he would wish for protection from the unconscious state that worried him so. It was both savior and sacrifice at the same time. Sleep. The sandman's realm. The place where anything can become real and false all together. Imagination meets fear and curiosity in the chambers of slumber. For the man, however, it was more a prison, a punishment if you will, than it was a relief. And when he closes his eyes the terror grips at him even more.

 

Space is vast. You can tell just by gazing into the night sky. It contains billions upon billions of stars within billions of galaxies. Particles and molecules of dust and matter, hydrogen gas forming together with specks of cosmic material forging itself to newborn nebulas in the white hot genesis of the universe. The cosmos has existed for billions of years. We have existed from merely a handful of years. And in his conscience he is existing within seconds of himself and finding within what no man should ever see.

 

Awake. Suddenly. Alert. Floating. Through the blackness and the vacuum of space he floated there. It must have been days now, weeks even. The concept of time was lost to him lost to an environment where every hour, every minute, is darkness save for the faint glimmer of a distant star. No, time does not exist out here. Only the memory of time. Time lost and never regained. He mourns time, mourns the absence, the map it creates through the sharp and vague, the net it weaves through the firsts and lasts, the people he once knew and those he will never meet. The loves. The losses. Charting the ups and downs like a master cartographer. He mourns those now. For when you exist in total darkness, and a complete void, what purpose does time continue to serve?

 

 

I had dreamed once, long ago, before the darkness came to be. To remember it is a sweet release from the blackness I have come to know to well. I think of it often. In this dream, hard as it may be to believe, I am engaged in a most epic conflict with the sun itself! But I suppose that is what makes dreams, the unbelievable.