but, if you pay attention, nothing is trivial.

Rolling out from the last stop in Montauk, NY, after a week off the grid. I feel my disconnect in a vastly physical way. Everything is cash only, and all I have is a useless piece of plastic, on a stretch of island without an ATM. I sacrificed my phone in my rush to assist a struggling black Labrador treading water and ropes just offshore at the beach, but even before, there is no reception out here, I had started leaving it in the rented house since it served me no purpose. half the weight of my backpack is an obsolete laptop, as there was no internet for me to connect to. useless pieces of plastic and circuitry that connected me to the future, but there is no future out here. Only yesterday.

The six of us, most of the Art Department for a Sci Fi film we had just finished shooting, had escaped the frustration and endless hours of working through futility and miscommunication to a house that was filled with the sleepy crust of childhood, of summers swimming and brown at grandma's house. We made meals together, we explored the local tourist haunts, the fishing boats, poked a beached jellyfish and had lots of ice cream and dollar beers. We napped on the beach, and we napped when we came home, wrung out with exhaustion from the sunshine and salt water, we played board games and read and jumped on the trampoline. We filmed everything, we secretly interviewed the locals (indigenous mermaids), and became zombies, camera pointed at the mirror, while we painted each other with lotion and flour, some of us choked and sputtered a fine ketchup blood, and for a brief moment, the outside world simply didn't matter.

It was like the mystical land of Brigadoon, or Avalon, where the worlds had started to drift apart, and time passed differently. At a bar full of pink cheeked fishermen, we learned how proudly, morally defiant the indigenous people were of things like cell phone usage, and of the tourists that define the economic structure of the island itself. The intentional separation from connectivity permeates the island's locals, a state of mind that directly manifests into reality, one that I hadn't realized I was in, until I boarded this train without a ticket and find myself struggling to maintain the here and now as the train hurtles me back into the future, where I came from. I have no idea how many emails and texts I've received from this past week, the voice-mails that wait for me, the state of my world when I return to it, and I'm walking straight into gig after labor intensive gig, but I can only count the seconds by the shadows of trees rolling across my skin, the minutes through the sleepy blinking of my puppy, sprawled across from me in a sunspot, in a red bag, in my heart. I can do nothing, I am trapped like a still frame, in my helplessness, trusting that everything is alright ahead of me, and in the five days that passed without me... but the clinging awareness of the duality of time, and the precious awareness we gave to our play hasn't dissipated yet. It feels almost like I acquired the ability to choose the speed at which I perceive reality, like a camera lens, to shift the focus of my gaze at will, rather than being required to point my attention at things by someone else's order of importance. I AM a time machine. Time and space and the world wheel around MY center of gravity, like my limbs as I shift yoga poses around my core, from Downward Facing Dog to Warrior 1, before exploding into Warrior 2. Thou art God.

The world is the same as I left it, but completely new and different. We all move through time at different paces, meeting up with college friends and family members brings us back, we step out of time briefly to a gap toothed reality that is still present, depending on who's eyes we are looking through. Coming back to the city, it looks like how I always pictured Paris, the city of layers, nuances and reflections of the future and past colliding, constantly shifting depending on the time of day, the way the light hits it, who looks at it, and where they were in time when it moved them. We try to see time as a straight line, because it's simple and easier to pretend we understand, but Einstein's relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty suggest we already know better. Time travel is a matter of definition. We do it constantly, we just haven't redefined our concept of time to match what we instinctively know. An artist I chatted with recently described a finished portrait as a lie, because we are such different things depending on whose eyes are holding us - I have been/am daughter, granddaughter, sister, lover, friend, ex girlfriend, coworker, steamroller, confidant, boss... and everyone I encounter sees me completely differently, so a single freeze frame, a time, a specific context, an expression captured is a fragment, a glimpse, a joke compared to the entirety of who we are as a complete person constantly moving forward in time.

I return to the city a tourist, curious about my own culture for the first time in a long while. The people and places that I have tuned out in anger or embarrassment or in a sense of being disconnected from their reason d'etre, the weight of digging into those reasons seemed so overwhelming, so I brushed past everyone on my way to work. But there is so much for me to learn from how individuals in my immediate local reason with their reality. Looking past southern or jersey accents, and what seem like mundane choices evolved from feelings of having limited options, generations and economic boundaries... there exists so much more meaning to be derived than I was ever aware of.

and he tells me that maybe we used to be flint.

Once, during an exploratory meeting with another creative type, as we were discussing a potential partnership of sorts and researching warehouses for rent, I nonchalantly pulled out a painting I had done recently on a piece of wood and handed it over in lieu of a description of my work.  The painting was on a small square of 3/4'' plywood, taken from the shop I was working in, one of a million pieces of scrap used to shim up height variance in the building of platforms. 

In the dry spells between busy seasons, in the industrial district of Greenpoint (Brooklyn) one could almost see the comical tumbleweeds blow past, gray-green metaphorical shadows against the acidic spray paint colors shaming the walls around me, it was like the wild west, lonely and desolate and sometimes blisteringly hot. In the blinding, scraping nothingness of boredom, my awareness to the things I was blindly stacking and re-stacking, to keep busy, to avoid censure, suddenly shifted focus and I saw music, frozen into the surfaces around me, and emotive eyes, pure poetry looking up at me out of the rich textural grain from the massive amounts of sturdy sheets of wood being tossed into the dumpster every day. Little, practically worthless bits of wood, that I smuggled a handful of home like a bandit with a bag of diamonds became resonant and full of depth, after layers of varnish and the backsides of each, supple and soft from ruthless sanding, because the world is beautiful, and we have no respect for it, like Pocahontas mistaking corn for gold, like our own bodies, strong and resonant and capable, but we move through life too full of fear to express its full power, so we forget how to see it, or what it even looks like - the shape and texture of our uniquely human motive power. Those worthless bits of refuse were like the shining pieces of my soul, that were getting whittled away from the disregard, from disrespect, from the fact that in those old movies the sheriff is always dirty, and the law is often opposite of justice. Those pieces that I salvaged, that I could take home and buff away the splinters and the lies from, barely needed a hint of paint to be sodden with purpose and a potent extension of self. 

The other creative type, a carpenter with whom I was sharing this recent excavation of my soul with, could have had no idea how much that painting on that piece of wood meant to me. What it represented. So many people look at artwork face on, and it doesn't penetrate any of our other senses. The barriers of visual art keep us from reaching deeper into the craftsmanship, the meticulous care with which some of us strive to make a piece complete, and something about the remove makes me fiercely angry, because it is perpetually inaccessible. What is the point of any kind of expression, if it cannot truly breach the boundaries of perception? Why are we so afraid to touch each other, or to let ourselves be examined in return? Are we afraid of what others will see?

He took it from me, looked, appraised its visual appeal with his eyes, then rolled it around in his knowing, work-roughed hands. He flipped it over and felt the back, he looked at all sides of it, found value in it and acknowledged that as he handed it back to me. It was a moment, but it was my entire life, my soul and body's yearning to be handled and explored so specifically, respectfully as a whole, the front and the back, the hard and the soft parts. To be explored and witnessed, and accepted for what is there... by hands as sensitive and conscious as eyeballs. All the blemishes and scratches, down to the roots and the core, the structure underneath the shine, witnessed and accepted as valuable simply because I exist. 

He will never know what that meant to me, and my interactions with him are random and a bit strained due to the odd consistency of life (full of lumpy weird bits)... but I learned something about myself in those few seconds, like a sudden burst of clarity. There was no emotional exchange, yet the depth of sharing from myself that was given without fear or expectation, based on my innate knowledge that the product I had created was of value... became the most intimate exchange I've ever experienced. Like a caress to my deepest principles. He would never remember that tiny moment, but I saw it, and it meant something.

Eyes locked with a Cyclops dressed in Armani gear and high tops

Sometimes I wish I could just walk away from everything and busk my way through the underbelly of this city, living from handcrafted latte to latte, rich and thick as a meal, food for my soul and nothing else, my hands and body emanating ambiance, tapping, striking into the collective mood, and inspiring random emotional resonance in the rush of faces and days. A playlist for our lives.

Working so steady, the days repeating themselves, so painfully bland, 9 to 5, I miss being lost in the semi emotional trance of genius, walking at some brink in my brain that accesses a higher self, dips into some collective emotional truth that leaves me when the work is finished, and I am shocked by what I have created. It's a similar other, higher self that walks in my feet when I dance, rolling and riding the waves of my sexuality and the air is heavy with sound, and I am unable to stop until the music finally releases me.

I want to live in this state all the time.

Hold me like a conversation

Door clicks shut. The instructor's voice cuts through the chatter, as rhythmic, pulsing music washes over the room, baptizing it, transforming the space and our bodies into a sacred space, a port in which to dock our souls, a respite from the pace of the city and our own obsessive feelings of inadequacy. We coalesce on our mats, torsos flowing, cascading over folded thighs, arms reaching and resting in supplication or prayer, stretching the skin of our ribs long and deliciously free. Something about sinking back, hips to heels, sinking into the floor in child's pose, and for the next hour of flowing and rippling, rooting and growing into our musculature and the sophisticated architecture of our bones becomes one liquid blur, like sinking into a hot bath and feeling your whole body yawn, open and loose. Turning our constant ingestion of information inwards, to listen to the silent screaming of our joints and the subtle relocation of ligaments and tendons wrapping muscle around bone, I could feel my soul sinking more deeply in. It finally made a commitment to itself, filling and expanding the space like my breathe filling my lungs, wrapping itself more truly in the crevasses and the wrinkles, getting lost in the striated cords of muscle fiber, impossible to know where inner self ends and physical self begins.

Like parallel existences overlapping in space, sometimes sinking into one's self like this feels like greeting a childhood friend from a hazy past, or a sibling you haven't been in contact with, with a strong sense of having lived a shared experience, but from two different points of view. Disparate, disconnected, but intimately knowledgeable about each other. 

But this time, it was different.

It was myself. I was me. And I was moving through space with gravity, with weight, not the lightness and noncommittal lack of being that is refracted light and projections, smoke and mirrors... but a solid connection between brain and body, material and immaterial. I am not a ghost any more.

The instructor closed the class with a quote:

'you must let go of the life you planned to live, to live the life that is waiting for you.'

Let go. I dare you.

amen.

Reaching a fever pitch

With no way to comprehend and assimilate the unnecessary battle scars I sustain in my daily fight for sustenance and respect, knowledge and self worth, I can feel the rips in the fabric of my spiritual being, and am overwhelmed by my soul's inability to bleed the white hot pain away. So I will wear the scars of my soul on my flesh, rendered in beautiful forms out of metaphors dark and rich as the cultural history I have awoken them from.

It amazes me what comes out of us when faced with the various circumstances of daily interactions, and even more so, the blinding animal tendencies we show in the face of reason and logic, every motion and thought rooted to animal needs, the scavenger, the pack animal that wants to fit in, the small of mind and body that fill their lack of presence with useless, abusive chatter to scare off the predators and competent alike. I have seen the wolf in our blood. I do not possess an inner bull, with a fearless relationship to moving matter, nor the desire of the wolf to be in a group and protect its ideals and roles with my life, it is with the crafty, shape-shifting  coercive creature of fables and fairy tales that I have found a resemblance, a similarity in our methodology of self protection.

Backed into a corner, I met the fox in my being, his sharp teeth grazing my tongue as I talk my way out, tail swinging, to continue building my life. If only the fuzzy redness of my anger and the iron taste of my inflamed pride didn't give me away, sending the dogs baying after me, tongues wagging. Sometimes I wish I was invisible, but my anger is often so palpable, it is it's own living creature with its own sharp, brazen tongue, and there is only so much an angry red creature can do to go unnoticed. More and more I find the fox in the place I am meant to be standing, and am torn in my logical self with right and wrong and good and bad, and deals are being made and allegiances forged by the fox while I wrestle with what I believe. It is lonely, the circumstances I find myself in, I have not even recognized the quick talking and fierce person filling my shoes and swinging my hips, an abrasive and bitter individual that I have little control over. With nothing and no one I can trust, no support, back up, or kind words to fill the gaping holes in my being, not even the momentary comfort of body contact to suggest I am not wholly and completely alone, all I have to rely on is the toothy grin of this clever creature, trusting instincts that cannot come from an logical place of rules and expectations, but have been lurking in the recesses of my fleshy human form, some deep secret memory of being rooted to the earth, and have been called forth into action with flashing and intelligent eyes.

strange fruit.

I decided to let it go. All the anger, all the helplessness and frustration. I converted the back file room of the shop into a printmaking studio and will spend most of a week hand carving linoleum blocks and printing over 200 holiday cards for businesses and clients that work with my shop. I shut out the world and found something that has been in hibernation, taking in experiences and contemplating how to utilize them in the most powerful way. My body and brain are tingling awake, and finding dimension in what seemed previously like a flat world.

In perfect tandem with the solar eclipse, helplessness is being eclipsed out of my life.

I am reborn.

the river tasted me once, spit me back out, so i'm not afraid of her.

The devil? He exists. I've seen him. He lives in the shadows, and fills the holes in our being caused by self doubt. He lived in the words that found me on the playground, whispers from my peers that fell from the lips of their parents, the PTA, who saw we didn't go to church, didn't follow the rules, didn't attend bake sales or fundraisers. Satan worshipers they called us. But he also followed me home at the end of every day, as I trudged as slowly as I could through the thickness of trees in my lush little town, past houses, each one with a different personality to be considered, until the foreboding of turning the corner into my own neighborhood. Often, as I was growing up, I awoke in the middle of the night to the devil standing in my doorway with my light on, watching me as I slept. In the guise of Stepfather, my voice had no meaning, for the devil distracted my mother with lust and laziness, and my fear and words and needs were insignificant to the soul she traded for the ease of darkness, and the wickedness of idleness. As I grew into my voice, and my strength, I would have killed him, beaten his now fragile drug infused bones to a puddle of hate, with no remorse, but it didn't matter how hard I tried to protect my family, the greed and hunger for an easy life was still a flame in the remnants of my mother's soul. She slept with the devil to acquire things without the effort that honest people earned with the hard work of their bodies. She gave away one of her children for an afternoon, traded the innocence of my little brother, as well as her own body for a piece of my Stepfather's inheritance money before it was lost in drug trafficking and prostitutes. The devil drives a peacock blue 350Z and carries a duffel bag full of money.

I did not get a chance to kill him, and he changed his form to fit my evolving insecurities. Donning small, sweet breasts and a sassy upturned nose, he inflicted a pain so close to my heart I mistook it for the fire of being in love, and I lost myself in the urgency of feeling that ransacked my body for three years, the scar tissue building up so fast it obscured everything important in my life. 'Worthless', she screamed at me, so many times those three horrible, lost years, I had that word for breakfast everyday, I drank it from her lips when we fucked in the shadows and I believed it. Nothing fans the flames of abuse like honest intentions. My goodness and trust were the knives she used to flay me open to the spine like the center attraction at a pig roast, skin charred, and the devil invited everyone to grab a plastic fork and cheap off-brand barbeque sauce to sample the texture and flavor of my beauty and innocence and moral integrity.

I thought I had put some distance between me and the devil, but I glimpsed him the other day, lurking in the eyes of my coworkers in the shop, in the poisonous words that have suddenly poured slick and stinging from the one person who had my back, whom I shared my triumphs and accumulating dreams with, as well as my fears and insecurities. It doesn't matter what I do, good or bad, if I have to defend myself from verbal abuse, or I fight for someone to get a raise, or take on responsibilities I won't get paid for, simply because it needs to be done, the guys in the shop will whisper over the table at the lunches I have been ostracized from about how all of those things merely prove that I am the reason seasonal workers have been let go in the past, that I am the reason people who don't work get addressed by the bosses for not working, that raises are withheld as well as handed out because of me, that failed crops and plagues are dictated by my whims, that anything I receive: respect, accolades, raises, authority are born solely from the whiteness of my skin, rather than my competence  rather than my own strength and ability. And I watch smart, capable people choose ignorance over growth, to spit the devil's rime rather than recognize the truth and beauty of the people around them. It doesn't matter if I have no awareness of things that are happening that I get blamed for, but they are still my fault, and every gesture I make with good and honest intentions gets twisted by these people I use to love, into cruel, evil shadows of themselves. The only way to protect myself is to become a ghost again, when I have been trying so hard to become real.

All of these occurances feed off of the depth of my insecurities, my need for validation, my earnest desire to see people treated fairly and getting what they deserve, good intentions and open, honest conversations, and the more of myself I give away, in love or in fear, the more I fan the flames of hellfire that scorch the souls of my feet and stumble on my path. I am a different person than I was three days ago. I can no longer blame my childhood for the setbacks and confusion of my adult self, or use it as an excuse for my lack of awareness of the darkness that waits in the shadows of every action of my physical being, of every word that falls unguarded from my mouth to be twisted and misunderstood and used against me. I am solely responsible for what I give away of myself, and what I allow to dog me. Self doubt and insecurity are the doorways that open to the devil, and the only way to escape is to eradicate all self doubts and insecurity. The only way to survive, is to wholly, without question, trust your instincts, trust your intuition, and ignore your fears. YOU HAVE TO TRUST YOURSELF COMPLETELY AND WITHOUT QUESTION. Yourself and no one else.

Then the devil will be blind.

Hug me up.

Empty his pockets and Wreck his days.

Misconception is such a funny thing. Having someone's best interests at heart is an oxymoron, because in the end, we all see what is best for our own selves via someone else, and we view others through the goggles of our own perception. Some people's Rose is a little more blood red, other's, a vintage dusty pink, and the shade of our glasses cannot but tint every reaction we have to the world around us with self serving emotions. Not suggesting that is necessarily a bad thing, merely something to be considered as we encounter mentors and spiritual guides as we navigate the channels of our lives.

One of the most profound subtleties I've started to become aware of, is the legends in which we associate with, and how we drape these associations around ourselves, almost unaware of the stereotypes that cling to us in our views of the 'self'. The Jamaican Man who drives the company truck, has revealed to me recently a hint of the VooDoo Man, and as I have increasingly learned to unwind our discussions for the half truths and leading statements designed to tease out secrets... I am stunned by the intensity of spells he weaves with conversation, the cloak and dagger of familiarity and pretended disinterest so artful, so natural to a human being who may or may not even care about the messages and truths he tricks from his victims, but apparently plays the game out of force of habit and to combat boredom in his own life. Him being a Sagittarius, half horse and half human, I find it fitting that his speech is a half breed of truth and lies, that as the driver he is part of a much larger symbiotic being, literally a vehicle for transporting heavy equipment from the waist down, and that he bets heavily on horse racing, with a past he vaguely refers to as related to training horses in Jamaica. He often shares his lunch with me, with oxtail and whole snapper, and the most seductive jerk pork this side of heaven. But sometimes, as adventurous a soul as I am, even I have qualms with chicken feet and cow hooves as a main source of protein. As another layer into the hoodoo in him, he is quick to offer up bizarre remedies, a common one being to save a horse (and recently babies, to mine and my partner's horror) from colic, is to urinate into a bottle and force it down the affected creature's throat and force it to walk. Aside from medicinal wisdom, he often has very sharp, earthy comments about the interaction between men and women, and always relates it to strong sexual imagery that could just as easily be applied to any type of animal, so rooted in the animal world of male and female dynamics, is this man's perception of the world.

Yesterday I became aware of it for the first time, when listening to him describe how he tricked information out of someone, and watching his eyes rove along my collarbone and shoulder, down the the line of my snake tattoo and the blooming definition of my bicep, in the rhythm of casting a spell, a glance so strong it was practically a caress. There is something unsettling about his eyes, not in a negative way, but a lack of commitment to color maybe, and a jellied quality, like sunlight must travel deep through its clear surface to interact with the milky brownish color. When he smiles a true, wicked smile, you can see a good couple of inches of pink gums above his teeth, like a horse, in fact. In the sunlight, his glance as strong as  touch on my skin, he told me some of the secrets to the spells he casts, with a variation on his favorite tales from the Ghetto, and his own personal legend was laid bare before me, illuminated like the brassy greenish color of his eyes in the powerful afternoon light.

The time of the traveling salesman seems like something from wizard of oz, from the great depression, but I met one this past week. I'd encountered the owner of this global company before, have wandered empty Louisiana streets in the dead of night and drunk absinthe in the sulfuric aftermath of flaming sugar cubes on top of our glasses, and stripped off my boots to crawl around under aluminum structures to lubricate joints with airplane wax alongside him, this quiet, gentle giant of a man. Like the Jamaican Man, he too is a spinner of tales, but with very different tactics. While there is a gossipy Grandmother feel to Jamaican Man, the Traveling Salesman resonates with a Grandfather to the World persona, is like Oz himself, and in direct opposition to the control of others sought through petty human jealousy and guilt of the Jamaican Man in his VooDoo incarnation, the Traveling Salesman must inherently believe his tales, to convince others of the truth of his product as a direct validation of the truth of himself. He lives out of a suitcase, in a constant attempt to outrun responsibilities he has created, delving into emotional dramas and nuances of human relationships, protected by the image of the Grandfather, packing up and leaving before his vulnerabilities threaten to rise to the surface and expose him for what he really is. His whispering voice and sage like stories cannot veil his carpenter's hands or the strength of his sudden bursts of laughter, and in my recent conversations with him, I could distinguish the bias in his tone, an imperialism in some of his references, and with a blinding flash, I saw the death of the Grandfather he tried to depict, as it flickered out of existence leaving only the Traveling Salesman in its ashes, I felt myself become a matter of profits and not individuality, felt myself being played to distract me from my own visions of the future, in a desperate attempt to fortify his Emerald City with an offer of smoked green glasses. He does not see the world like the Jamaican man, as a separation between male and female, and ultimately as an earthy animal existence - but rather as a separation between animal and intellectual forces, and I felt it rather sharply when he tried to artfully, disdainfully suggest that I should be involved in work that was less animal, brutal, 'hairy' than what I am proudly involved in. Comments I barely noticed before, but struck me so fiercely in their destructive nature, I realized the underlying cords of much of this man's projection of self.

Discussing the disdainful tone towards my work with my shadow brother, us both possessing a little of what the other needs, just as often as I get locked into the image of the intellectual, he gets placed in the role of the brute and brawn, and people in life divorce him from the potential to develop a role that is in the region of possessing brains, we are the cowardly lion and the scarecrow, me searching for the courage to understand my own strength as I have always existed so easily in an intellectual plane, but never tested my body's limits and him, respectively, scared of admitting he has the ability to comprehend and synthesize, crippled by his own powerful fear of failure and a lifetime of being classified as the workhorse by society. Rising up from the working class as we both have, carrying our families on our backs from childhood, we are self made men, respect self made men, and agree when approached by the homeless, the junkies, we know every man can choose to make it , to build something, I so strongly believe we are all possessed of the power to define our reality, that I respect humanity enough to never give in to the feeling of pity, to never place myself so far above another man to look down on him and pity his poor existence, or to denounce where I am in life, like I haven't fought and earned every piece of what I have become, like it was a gift someone else bestowed on me, rather than something that I have built with the sweat and blood and tears of my own being and am wholly deserving of. A christian man, the Traveling Salesman, who often gets involved in reaching out to the homeless, will smile and joke with the beggar and junkie alike, he feels pity for their station in life, and shame tainted gratitude for his own in comparison, a successful businessman who, instead of taking pride in his accomplishments or relationships can only talk about his stained suits and empty wallet, broken love affairs and the time he cannot spend with his grandchildren in his constant running away from his own reality, as it dogs him around the world. His happiness then can only come in sharp, momentary, bittersweet bursts, before it is consumed by the shame of experiencing so animal a reaction to the world around him. So sharply looking down upon his own earthy nature, separating himself from eating animal flesh, as well as his own animal needs gives him a basis to look down upon the working man who lives within the context of his animality, a prison is created in the Traveling Salesman's mind, crucified by needs he so desperately fights to rise above as weakness, an intellectual inconsistency. He feels shame for the very things that make us human.

But the Traveling Salesman believes he is better than the brute, and wraps himself in Jesus to hide from his body's own animal tendencies, just as once, a long time ago, he made the choice to severe himself from the workbench, from the wood and tools, from the brutality of the shop, and lose himself in the cerebral world of building empires with  numbers and contracts and clever tales... that when the animal in him does lash out, thrashing in his blood and his memory, it shows itself in a negative light, because he feels such disrespect for it. The ego is there, the coercive undertones, without any true respect for what I want from life or the direction I am heading, and with a Judas Kiss in the searing afternoon light, I could see through his pretended ambivalent tone to the sneaky, imperial root of his words and his essence. He is the very thing he pretends not to be.

There is another, shifty eyed creature whom I haven't been able to shed light on yet, but he is somehow spawned from the Traveling Salesman, and the more I understand the Traveling Salesman, the more I begin to see the foundations of some of the other tricky beings playing larger roles in my life. My rosy goggles of perception have sustained similar scuffs as my literal glasses, wearing away at the subtle shades of poisonous cadmium, singed from the flame of the welder and darkened around the edges by my interactions with the many shades of human, from the brute force of animal instinct, to the snide superiority of intelligentsia.

Deep in my secret heart, I start to see a pattern in my broken sexual history, that maybe my own fear of that animal nature has found a way to decimate every interaction I have fumbled through and shut down in the midst of. Maybe watching with a child's eyes, I learned an intense disrespect for that part of my biology. Equally terrified and mesmerized by pregnancy, creating and raising children being equal parts intuitive impulses and cognitive responsibility, I dashed away tears and shortness of breath as I rode the train the other day, on my way to a baby shower for my shadow brother. The shower took place on the rooftop of where we work together, symbols overlapping and colliding like atoms, giving rise to new elements, and as the afternoon sun shifted into twilight I saw whispers of another powerful disparity between the personas we choose to associate with and their manifestation in reality. Young and fertile and feminine as a living Venus of Willendorf, in flowing coral against warm brown, gold dusted skin, this young wife and soon to be mother was herself the shadow side of the warehouse we work in, in glaring contrast to the intellectual child born of the woman who runs it, a labor of love for a shifty eyed creature living at odds with his intellectual and brutal selves, trapped painfully and disdainfully within the same body as he attempts to achieve the power of creation. I wonder if this kind of struggle can dry up the womb, by undervaluing our base nature, we further separate ourselves from the very things that brought us into existence. The young mother to be lost her first child, and her body was slammed with another pregnancy in the tide of grief following, she has existed in a suspended state of pregnancy, a year and a half of nurturing life inside of her, and the birth of this child will be such a profound and welcome gift in a family dense and dark skinned as flourless chocolate cake. The woman who's business we danced and celebrated life on top of has too, draped herself with the mother principle, has claimed some of her workers as 'mother', stemming from the imperial 'motherland' from which our country was loosely born from hundreds of years ago.

As she surveyed the baby shower preparations the day prior, from cameras that link directly to her phone, she issued a clipped and sneaky 'big mother is always watching' comment as we drank beer and watched each other across a table surrounded by fairy lights and trellis with Adam and Eve without the hope of conception, and the Snakeoil Salesman convincing us all to taste, the garden closing us in and winding up around us towards a full, ironic harvest moon.