Off the 101, past the dense barricade of hollywood, through the threshold of the fluorescent tunnel, you'll see an LED CRUCIFIX towering over the hollywood dell. If you follow its glare across the winding side streets, you can find willetta. It means “Protected One” in German. Steps with mosaics of mary of guadalupe and candy colored gems point towards a jade side gate, leading to a garden path. Through it's gates,  is an impossible garden, with lush leaves that fan out like elephant ears, bamboo trees, birds of paradise and majestic palms. This garden extends back further than the eye can see, down a narrow path dotted with purple trumpet flowers and canary flowers, seeming to belong to the tropics of South America. The wilting fingers of leaves point to a koi pond, guarded by a statue of a Goddess. There are stone lions and wooden shrines. Cheeky ceramic gnomes and tall grass. A turquoise villa stands watching this garden, alone. 

Vines swim across it's roof and weave through it's wooden beams. 

The upstairs inhabitant is an elderly woman, with pink hair like finely spun cotton candy and a dark gruff voice. She speaks in soliloquies and smokes on the patio. She tends to the garden, sometimes planting four feet tall opium, which she smokes, on a tibetan daybed. She collects religious paintings of golden haired saints, fabric from India and Thailand,  and makes jewelry. She lives with a copper colored sausage dog and a six foot burly black man, almost 30 years her junior. Sometimes they fuck or argue at 4am, much to the irritation of the lower tenant.

Below them, a red wooden dragon hangs from an entryway, protecting the lower tenant from the city smog. Inside, the walls were lined with wooden unicorns and sacred hearts, ceramic horses and pink neon lights. The air is thick and fragrant, from the pungent repetitive burning of frankincense and posh candles. There are celtic knot coasters and colorful champagne flutes, vases painted with dancing cupids containing bright roses.The tv is concealed behind a handwoven mexican tapestry of mythological animals, and cowskin rugs cover the wooden floor. From the walls, gold framed hunting prints peer at portraits of bombshells, hung beside drawings of sphinxs and leonie woman convening with deer. It is cluttered with notes from friends on hotel stationary and polaroids. There are piles of books on heaven and sex and lost mysteries. Emerald shells, russian dolls, wicker purses, prayer boxes and egyptian artifacts. Mirrored trays holding rhubarb perfume from france and opals, citrine and amethyst. 

A bedroom is concealed behind curtains with dancing pink jaguars, where golden cherubs hang above a gothic bed, fit for a church. It is plump with egyptian cotton clouds.  Closets burst with fur and lace and linen, feathered boas, tutus, cowboy boots and brightly colored lingerie. The lower tenant stays up late and wakes up early, because she is afraid of betraying the Sun. She needs to feel the groves of the canyons in her heels every day, and tries to send messages to hawks and raven and deer and trees. She has no lover, as she bores of them quite quickly, and much prefers holding her breath for a mythological man who lives in her head.

Heart Memory

It wasnt a mind memory, but a heart memory. 

When you touched my chest, you sunk through all of me.

It felt like the memory ricocheted back into forgotten realms, echoed into lost dimensions. Like catching the tail end of a prophetic dream. I don’t really “trust the science” but I could feel the atoms between us melding, their opposite forms touching- even when they are far apart. Revolving, dancing, dividing and intertwining in invisible waves.

 Now I know you exist, I don’t think I’ll recover. You made your bed and mine sat empty. Wild things don’t know patience, and most days I am more wolf than woman.

 But I waited, when it was not my nature.  I ached with psychic amputation, mobilized a century long coma. I delved into mysteries and propelled myself into spiritual speculation.  Thrashing like a fire eating itself. Stuck like a sick dog, killing time by a window that never passed. 

This grief is pranging me open. Some parts belong to my dad, some belong to my country, but most is ancient love lost. It’s pranging me open, and I let it because it keeps me in my heart. 

Sometimes i think about object permanence, and how most of our lives are etch a sketched into our subconscious before we can speak. Sown into some primordial fabric, its finely stitched patterns determined by what we first absorb. I think of you leaving Chelsea and Westminstor, holding me in your hands in awe. Carrying this strange tiny porcelain alive thing, snug in your chest. I wonder if your feelings beat through me, when you had imposter syndrom, woven into an unexpected valve of neverending love. I wonder if I felt the age old fear prophetic people have- that fear of being crazy. 

You were a child, with a child, who stayed a child. Exactly how it should be.

You were my first love and my first enemy. I was a baby with a grown up face and a lot of questions. I attribute you to my giggles and my fits of rage. My insatiable curiosity that veers on voyeurism. My appetite for variety and adventure. You were, to me, immortal. A soothsaying disciplinarian, with hands as big as plates. Your steps could traverse seven of mine, and you could make items sprout at random in thrift stores. You taught me to read, and it felt like remembering. I inherited your intensity, irreverent passion and unquenched thirst for God. You made your daughter a seeker.

When I was bullied, rather than intervene, you walked me right up to my nemesis and watched me confront her myself. You prepared me for standing up for myself, a skill that I subsequently took too far. Some people are afraid of rage. But not you or I. We approach battle as if it is a primitive art, commanding full use of the tongue. Clamoring hard-to-hear truth and clever witticisms, flailing mad and wild like boisterous beasts.

You were my first love and my first enemy. My first God, my best friend, my worst teacher. As you explored alternate realms, so did I. I was enthralled by the same bizarre obsessions. Mythology and the holocaust. Magical cards and journeys into the subconscious. Stories, sugar and salt. Documentaries and cults. Health kicks. Dreams. Britpop. Sinead O Connor. Fits of giggles in the wrong places. 

I look at Gabe and Esther, and I think, how do these people exist? These lopsided, compassionate warriors, clumsy propagators of impossible hope. I look at them with such admiration and understanding, such gratitude, such joy. You have moved mountains for our ancestors. Unconditional love has happened between us all. 

You know, Gabe once said to me- “Dad, he’s a shaman. He’s so psychic. It’s so crazy”, and I thought about the years you had to exist before us, when the world was more rigid and less awake. I thought about your madness, as it has become my madness. Your psychic, your gifts. You see things others don’t and did it long before it was acceptable to discuss. Gabe and I held hands on a mountain top and cried. Esther said, if you died, she think she would too. 

You were my first love, my first God, my first best friend and my first enemy. There are armies in heaven shouting your name. There are wild beasts below, traversing your underworld, protecting your psyche. There are ancestors parallel, who champion your cause. You will surpass this, too.

Temptation binds me to the past, with unbreakable elastic. My pain is a public theatre that everyone can see. It is no doubt, entertaining. I am a holistic trainwreck, an honest monologue. The contemporary indigo child, a clubside whistleblower. I have been subject to pedestrian dismay since 15. Procuring outrage and disbelief like wildflowers. Why begin to care, now? What anyone thinks of me is none of my business. Even if I have to inadvertently feel it. I am an anomaly, a spectacle. I bet my name rolls and glides off the tongue.  Even if I am spiraling skywards, homeward bound to that invisible safety- I procure unremarkable moths- eating my light. Unremarkable mimics. 

Lightwork is just honesty. Honesty is not popular.

My definitions of love and friendship belong to wartime pagan ireland, where the slight of tongue would be fatal. I dish out what I expect. I require a cause, a mission, a purpose. Fetch the dragon tranquilizers so I can be like you. Numb me. Subdue my outrage. Box up my rage. Doll me up like a drag queen. Disguise me. Conceal me. Distract me. Make me an accessory. Show me non-chalance. Make me pornography. Calcify my heart. Teach me moral ambivalence, trite gossip and bordem. Asphyxiate me til I tune out. Drown me in your shallow waters, baptize me in your apathy. Teach me your backwards system, show me your charts of celebrities and moguls. Shoot my knee caps til I am kneeling before them.

Because I can’t and won’t.

I don't give a fuck.

my heart is erupting. I feel bouts of ancient pain surge up in my chest. Ancient pain that only can be alleivated by very ancient love. It’s like remembering how it felt to depart from God for the first time. I realize I have been around too many people since summer, have seldom the room to reacquaint with silent knowing, so I take some space. I collect English hunting prints and move around my furniture. I scavenge the internet as if I am locating something I lost or left behind. I find myself looking at maps of stargazes, deciphering an exit strategy for earth, or this realm, or this timeline- whatever.

He thinks about me the most when he is in transit. Leaving one place, anticipating another. The future reshuffles ahead of him according to his beliefs that day, shimmering with potential, occasionally glitching. I reckon it is the only time he is alone. I dizzy him, irritate him. He feels me, like a sin in his stomach,  persisting with the patterned endurance of a heartbeat. Like uncovering something sacred when you had only survived in a cool sarcophagus of the profane.  

The air retracts with gusts of symbols, metaphors and implication. It heaves a sigh, in a language only him and I understand.  The worst angel, the good enemy, the domino effect. 

I hope the truth reaches him, in a pocketed moment, away from the lul and hum of frequencial weaponry and distraction. I hope it is soft to him, and generous. I hope it paints me in an alright light. 

Intimacy is like taking psychedelics. It is an altered state, changes the fabric of worlds, unstitches poorly mended wounds, and pries you open. It is a rollercoaster, a celestial melding, a catastrophe, a four part theater rendition of what your parents couldn't solve. It is arguably, safer, to do with someone simple, or vapid.

I want to contain the part of myself that fucks everything up, that gets a rise out of shocking people. The part that prokes and prods at social niceties, the part that gets off on watching people squirm. The part that picks disorder over congruence, with a senseless appetite for irreverent mischief. I want to be kept in an emerald jewel box, or the turret of a castle, restrained like a wild horse. My hands tied behind my back with ribbon, punished like a rowdy princess. My multitudes, contained. Gagged. I don’t have any present shrieking opinions on politics, other than that we should nuke the moon.  

If we nuked the moon, maybe we wouldn't be able to lie to one another. Our impulses might overrule our proclivity to fashion individual brands, and the truth would catapult us into the right timelines. I wait for the stars to rearrange, for the white sun to win this war. For time to cease. I want to sink my teeth into the truth. It aches for my communion. I follow it's threads like a cobweb, making it's way to a subtle epicenter. I want to know if fate is real, if love can get stored up for you like an inheritance, and what you have to do to earn it. I want to know what bitches to trust, and why I feel like I have been sent from both the future and the past. Should I marry him, should I leave him. I am hungry for answers, so much so that I could swear that they are hungry for me. Everyday, our individual energetic imprints screech out of us like individually deranged songs, in a cellular hum, a stillness mismatching our squirming bodies. I know what will happen but never in what order. I understand everyone and no one understands me.

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