If it looks like a tornado isn't moving, that means it's coming towards you

I so rarely dream. Especially when I'm exhausted from so much work, yet they are piling up.

The sense of foreboding told me it was a nightmare. My little sister had passed out in my arms, and then she called me on the phone from California a second later. I asked her to check the weather for me, I knew something was up. She laughed it off and I asked again, something was coming, I could feel it. I walked over to the window while I waited, and saw what it was. The length of Manhattan was a writhing mass of partial tornados, forming and unforming, at least four where solid, pulsing and spiraling through the cityscape. almost above the building I watched from, a cloud began to twist in on itself, and I knew I had moments, barely even minutes. Wrenching my siblings from their disparate activities in different rooms, I gathered the four of us into a closet in the center of the apartment. My older brother dragged his feet, annoyed at my intensity, but clamored in with us. This closet had no door, and my littlest brother, the tallest of us now was exposed in that opening to potential debris, traveling at hundreds of miles an hour, and my fear of his vulnerability to the impending storm brought me out of my dream state, my mouth dry, my lips cracked.

As I lay there awake, my body hummed in the night. I've felt this before, a vibrating in my sacrum, the sound of roaring waves in my ears, but this time the energy poured upwards from the soles of my feet. They were so active they felt hot, vibrating up through my pelvis and pooling in my thoracic spine. The energy splashed out along the muscular columns that framed the groove of my axis, fanned out in the space between my shoulder blades. I could clearly distinguish a conductive quality in the radiating of my sacral and solar plexuses, and there was a hint of a tingling response in the base of my skull. What reminded me of elementary particles pinged and ricocheted underneath my eyelids at rapid speed and I was out of breath and almost numb from the vibrating in my body. I didn't want to chase away these bizarre sensations, but I was so thirsty finally I rolled myself over and reached for the glass of water at the table by my bed as the waves of sensation slowly subsided.

In class earlier that day I had felt like one of those radical particles, or filled with them maybe. I bounced and pinged around the room until it was time to focus. We spent a portion of the lesson discussing Joints - the relationship between bones. In the roundnesses of our rotating parts I felt a familiar slippery freedom, a space of infinite possibilities, but was introduced to their containers for the first time - Sockets, the concavities that help give those possibilities a sense of direction, a vehicle for expressing that potency in the material plane. I learned that I am not just a million possible paths, but that I am my own vehicle, and those possibilities are there to be responsive to what I stumble across on the path I happen to be traveling down.

I have always had this system of checks and balances and I never knew it was there. I keep finding myself deeper and deeper in the labyrinth. The labyrinth is me. I am both the virgin and the minotaur, I now that much, but I do not know what will happen when they finally meet.





In English, the term labyrinth is generally synonymous with maze. As a result of the long history of unicursal representation of the mythological Labyrinth, however, many contemporary scholars and enthusiasts observe a distinction between the two. In this specialized usage maze refers to a complex branching multicursal puzzle with choices of path and direction, while a unicursal labyrinth has only a single path to the center.


Many [New World] Indians who make the labyrinth regard it as a sacred symbol, a beneficial ancestor, a deity. In this they may be preserving its original meaning: the ultimate ancestor, here evoked by two continuous lines joining its twelve primary joints.

when meaning shifts, meaninglessness follows.

  

  

Combusting rage and sexual tension as a power source, blind to everything but conquering inefficiency, filled with steam, purpose. Equal parts fuel and intoxication.

'Do you even cry?' He asked at the bar later.

Feet pounding on pavement, my feet. Screaming at the muscular man that just got out of his graffiti covered box truck. Not one of ours. Blocking my trucks. In my way.

'He doesn't like a single thing about you.' He told me. I grinned my Cheshire grin, remained as still as possible and disappeared from the bar as soon as I could. Descend into the subway station, radiating the kind of stillness that signals a building storm. Silence on the train.

Handsome work partner, all silver hair and tanned skin sprawled out next to me on the forklift, melting under my hands as I pressed my fingertips into the sinew of his back, chasing the emotional tightness down his spine. Stories hang from his lip like his cigarette, wry, sometimes silly memories from being locked up mixed with ashes picked up by the wind. They swirl around us like snow, like lost time, remains of the fire as it dies down. Silver hair catching the afternoon light.

Some of them love me, and some of them hate me, but I can't bring myself to care, feet too busy pounding the pavement, barking at the truck drivers, using my body as a physical barrier to modulate traffic. My presence spills down the street like sunshine bursting from behind a cloud, as big as the buildings, it smells like fumes and tastes like ashes.

A cold rage takes over me towards the end. It followed me offsite, startling me and my work partner while grabbing coffee. 'It must be from the barbeque I had for lunch...' I tell him, thoughtful. This isn't my normal foghorn power, it's cold and nasty and reeks of low energy.

'Dumbass.' I said to someone I love dearly when they missed the corner of a box with the forklift. Shut myself down immediately in secret horror. No one else saw my mother come out of me in that moment, but the awareness filled me with the stone cold weight of shame. That was always her word. Not mine.

'See you never.' I told him as I left, since I never know when I will see him. He wrapped me in the deepest, sweetest embrace, and I was barely aware of my arms struggling to pull him into me.

Not mine.

Sitting at the bar letting the beer kill the burn in my belly, the one that could eat a man alive, no one would know since I radiate stillness, seem sturdy and dependable as a stone, but I'm starting to wonder if, instead of wielding it, it will eventually wield me.



"They are mantic creatures like the Sphinx with whom they have much in common, knowing both the past and the future. Their song takes effect at midday, in a windless calm. The end of that song is death."

siren                    

Meaning "device that makes a warning sound" (on an ambulance, etc.) first recorded 1879, in reference to steamboats, perhaps from similar use of the French word. Figurative sense of "one who sings sweetly and charms" is recorded from 1580s. The classical descriptions of them were mangled in medieval translations and glosses, resulting in odd notions of what they looked like.

 

noun

1. Classical Mythology. one of several sea nymphs, part woman and part bird, who lure mariners to destruction by their seductive singing.

2. a seductively beautiful or charming woman, especially one who beguiles men

3. an acoustical instrument for producing musical tones, consisting essentially of a disk pierced with holes arranged equidistantly in a circle, rotated over a jet or stream of compressed air, steam, or the like, so that the stream is alternately interrupted and allowed to pass. 4. an implement of this kind used as a whistle, fog signal, or warning device.