Broken Soul - by ۩
Broken Soul
by ۩
I was sitting full-lotus around a fire that was whispering symbols in a tipi in the desert listening to the wind howl when I closed my eyes and left. There is a latch that clings to our souls that I know how to undo with a bit of focus. The method is there waiting to be learned intuitively. Passing through the loudest possible explosions of atomic blasts from within, I ride an eternal detachment through an organic tube twisting out of control.
Then it all falls into place with a fold and comes back one piece at a time, almost looking like a cartoon but obviously much more sophisticated. I am in the body of a person walking through a forest in the dead of night. The moon through the dancing silhouette of the canopy is somewhere in between the color of bone, chelated metal and duplicates a shining. Three echoes sag beneath it elliptically rainbow—like mirrored teardrops or breasts. The atmospheric friction eats a meteorite with a fiery streak.
My new eyes move back down now to the darkness that surrounds me. Everything everywhere glows gold with a palpable symbolic indication that is flowing omni-directionally from and through. Sung by the insects in an echo-location sequence. I wouldn’t be able to see these hands without eyes so wide you could stick your tongue in and bend the lens. There’s a light-blue neuro-electricity coming out of my skin and touching the surrounding electromagnetic layers and rippling off into the sea of air.
Above me, there is an owl watching. It hoots, and I can see the patterns illuminate and scatter off of any reflective material in these woods. Absorbed by the decay. In the flash of that moment, I could feel in my hands what it was saying to me. I could see it seeing me, saying hello to the vagabond, or transient, currently occupying this sector of the abyss.
Walking further now along a game trail through the ruffling of fallen leaves and low level plants. It can be seen both by the moonlight and the reflection of the bug songs reacting with the electric night. I don’t know where I am going, not that it matters. What seems random in the moment may reveal the secrets of time in a resonant memory uploaded to a genetic server rolling its eyes at matter.
An intense and nauseating sickness is rising inside of me as I attempt to gracefully make my way through the not-so dark. The serotonin in my stomach screams, “INCOMING!”. Overtaking every sense, every intuition, and every thought—I keel over to the side of the trail and explode a torrent of projectile vomit that from the sound alone I can tell launched over a few feet away and came out fluidly, instantly, and powerfully, carrying out and away everything I ever was on every layer. Feeling reborn a thousand times and gagging with a choke.
The hum and vibration of a swarm of a million bees escaping their hyper-spatial hive overtakes me, and I glow crystalline moments of partitioned awareness that branch off into the eyes of consciousness. My heart is juiced and bioluminescent honey spews from my core. Lying down in a patch of clover looking up through the tears, wiping my mouth with my sweatshirt sleeve, hundreds of ladybugs crawl onto me, and I don’t even notice them—I am orbiting a star and twitching with a moan.
This mouth, acidic and bitter, reminds me of how I got here, who I am, and what I am doing.
I get up into the flowing golden symbol darkness, again feeling lighter than a red helium balloon and rising. The ladybugs all take flight right on cue. There’s almost a magnetic pull guiding me to follow in this direction. I am now passing through an open meadow on the peak of a mountain. I can see at least thirty miles in both directions. To the valley and to the sea. All the sleeping people—their dreams are dancing a perfect synchronization spiraling outward and down.
Stopping to press my palms together with eyes closed to glow a lunar mudra, a bobcat a bit larger than a full-grown German Shepherd emerges from the grass and sits down next to me gazing out. Looking like an Egyptian depiction, it purrs a low frequency for me. I can feel it soothing the wormhole reaction inside my solar plexus
spinning. It licks its lips as I pet its head looking into its eyes, and we both disappear back to wherever it is we were going before crossing paths and forming a dimensional knot in the night.
Further along the trail, I find myself at the edge of a cliff. My old leather boots kick dust and small rocks off of the edge and, even in the stillness of the night, I hear nothing down there. Nothing but wind. The moon shines a synthesized sound like the motion of the dispersion of dust and keeps rhythm with a percussive tap of bones or glass vials clinking in stretched-out slow motion.
Somewhere, sometime, I am back in that tipi around the fire listening and watching Marco sing our way through the ceremony. It’s like some kind of distant memory now. That was the waypoint that led me here to this body. To this cliff. To this moment. Under an almost-full moon swirling around in the soup of the stars blinking their reminders. I can’t believe how in just a hundred or two hundred twists and turns this planet makes how strange things could get. Blown out of proportion and insane. Corrupted by a greedy concept. Destroy to recreate. I get lost imagining the billions of years of weird that has had an opportunity to expand the recrystallized gimmick of the observed universe.
No. This isn’t real. I have surfed and bailed on these waves long enough to know better now. I’ve had enough. For years. This whole situation I can smell reeking from its current and future cancerous demise leaking into me. My little capillary. The tumors are sprouting on the dandelions of the nervous souls glowing. It takes meditation to figure out how to cut the cords to the leech that feeds on the blood of a soul-sucking boredom. The lack of ideas is the fuel that it feasts to expand. It projects an invisible electric fence of fear in the form of numbered documents and deadlines. I can’t even laugh at it anymore. Not even up here and this high.
And so this is where I wind up. Out in the desolation of a perfectly symbiotic piece of, well, mostly undisturbed land in resonant bodies all reacting to the same intuitive desire. Here I am tonight. Feeling the atmosphere chill goose bumps down to my withered bones. It gets colder in the stillness. I rock back and forth involuntarily from the pressure of my beating heart pushing on the inner vasoconstricted walls of whoever it is that this is.
I take a deep breath and stand up feeling phantom wings sprout the feather weightlessness lifting my rise. There is some kind of tree growing out of the side of this cliff. I am not sure what kind it is, but judging by the way it is thriving particularly so well in this spot, I am guessing it must love the big air pockets the roots get from the continual erosion. It grows up and out over the tremendous fall that nothing without wings could survive.
Something about it is calling to me. I can’t remember the last time I even climbed a tree, which is something I used to love to do more than anything. Just being up there, above everything. I feel the cold bark dig into the spirals of my hands and fingerprints as I put my weight and faith onto the tree and make my way up, putting one foot on one slippery branch at a time. There are spiders that have probably lived their whole lives up here wondering what it is that I am doing. I cast a peaceful, nonthreatening vibe apologetically to my proximity.
Slowly, with Ganesha grace, I make my way to the farthest branch that reaches as far as it can out and above the cliff. I let go of my last support branch that I was holding onto for security. It is just me and my balance keeping me on this tree. I inch myself closer as the branch begins to bend. This is the very farthest anyone could ever possibly go and live to tell about it. Only a bird or a centipede could make it any closer. I am watching the tiptops of trees for miles swirl around in a rainbow dance of accelerated consciousness. There is a pattern in the way they move, and I decode and follow it to stay perfectly balanced. I raise my arms up from my sides with the phantom wings. A galactic wind blows through my invisible feathers giving way for lift, but I remain.
All of the golden symbols that had invaded my altered perception in the night flip like a switch in that instant. Void of color but shining a liquid quicksilver now. There’s my reflection in the mirror of consciousness itself that drips its gravitational pull trickling into all. This human body begins to melt. Dripping droplets of quicksilver from disfigured boots not clinging to the branch. I am every drop falling down now through the darkness. Feeling every one that splits and merges. The body has completely dissolved into the metallic silver energetic serum slipping away. Getting caught in the high winds. Hundreds, now thousands of observation points scattered and raining down gaining speed in a crescendo of butterflies and death. In each silver drop is the fast- forward reminder that all of this has already happened. The roar of wind shaping every single one of me. Looking out in all directions, about to splash on the jagged cliffs below—
I open my eyes and gaze into the Celtic knots forming in the fire in the tipi. Marco is dolphin-headed on the other side singing ultrasonic cymatics silently. Underneath the surface of the soft statue of windows that I am is an automatic process that collects.
“What is fluid cannot break,” he was saying to me in the mind.
*Originally published in Silver: An Eclectic Anthology of Poetry & Prose
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