Category: Organic Behavior

I awoke like Rip van Winkel coming back as Britney parts his beard. Sexy is back in the forest.

The minuet of solitude surrendering to the beat one more time, one more time.

He crouched on the fringes of the village, watching the fire play on the faces – tracing the patterns that he would soon make across those happy faces.

That kinship lost in the eternity spent on the other side of the wall, he licked century-old crumbs flaked on his lips, hungry — wonton.

That beard remembered those sexy times when it was kept and groomed. Women would line up to touch it. These stripes of honor have turned to lines of loneliness.

Somewhere deep in his grumble he knew dainty fingers would no longer tingle those whiskers, too foreign to the touch, too coarse with age — the knowledge of the stars; the micro- and the macro- and the mega- and the meta-dimensions.

Dancing to the flickering of the neurons ignited by psylocybin. Dark light. Dark light. Burning bright. That lick of the flicker. He could taste their sweat, their passion, their blood in the cracks of his teeth.

A moment came and went before him, he refused to act, to not act. He let it pass. It would circle back.

He ballerina spiraled his cigarette butt out. Each puff dragged him toward fate. But, that smoke held a mystery. There was comfort in that darkness.

Through the haze a figure appeared, circling in closer with each exhalation. Contouring and dissipating, redefining memories born and long-forgotten in his mind.

I can’t tell if this cat that I’m talking to is real. This fractal tabby is an asshole, but he’s right.

I’m reminded of younger days, when the world span faster and days took less time to pass, when the stars teased the sun as it set on the other side of this blank expanse of empty mountain ranges and barren rivers, before all these dancing smiling faces and the lingering oils of maidens sustaining the last threads of ancient whiskers.

The little girl asked, “How old are you?” I replied, “I am forever.” I have been there. I will be here. Forever. That is my curse. Forever, I will be a child. I am Peter trapped in Wonderland. Please help me, Wendy. Wendy? Wendy…

“It’s Britney, bitch.”

This piece was created by Chase Springer and Alexander Tague through an exquisite corpse type game where they passed lines back and forth between each other. Alexander started it and Chase ended it. We’ll hit you one more time, baby…

I am a Peter Pan who has been asked to show people how to grow up. At first I laugh and fly away. But then, I realize that as a man-child, I offer one insight that they’ve lost and another that they wish they could have. I might skirt upon this precipice, as Peter does upon the mouth of the croc. But forever we will all be slaves to the tick tock, tick tock.

I woke up thirsty and drained. I peeled my lips apart and struggled to ask for something to drink. Only a rustle came out. It was then that I noticed the wetness around me. Felt the sweat of our embrace. I pulled you even closer, hoping to absorb the moisture. Hoping to absorb you.

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been in the darkness. There was no time there. There was nothing at all. It was the waiting room for where dust is made into people. I felt like the gods didn’t know where to put me. And they certainly didn’t want to talk to me. The gods have been quiet for a long time. Their voices reduced to raspy leaves.

But if this was a waiting room, it was awfully empty. Whatever I was waiting for apparently wasn’t very popular. When I came back Ariom said he could smell the death lingering on me. I smelled like transition, the musk inside a leaf pile, a freshly fallen death trading the greens of life for the deep reds and oranges and peaceful yellows of Fall.

I’d awoken from my hibernation, but I was trapped in this arboreal estuary. That small death was frightening, but beautiful. Erupting like the tops of trees. Bursting into bloom with a kaleidoscope of petals. Fertilizing my breath with gusts of pollen. Ripening me into a fruit. Dropping me to the ground to become a tree again.

 ******

My days as a cup-holder made me well suited to be a table. In the time it takes to yell “timber” I was transformed from something to rest in to something to rest on. My inner rings of age became outer rings of not-using-a-coaster.

I worked hard to make that leaf pile before I dove into it. I landed as a bird onto my own branches, scurried down them as a squirrel, hit the ground like a lion, and dove into that pile like a child.

******

Ants produce a chemical beacon when they die. Broadcasting their death, the other ants come to carry them away and deposit them in the pile of discarded workers.

******

I slowly untwisted myself from the pile of death that we had become. I wiped the chemical secretions from my forehead and brushed the leaves off my back. Someone gave me lemonade to bring summer back into my throat. I struggled to remember where I had just come from. At first, I wasn’t even sure what had taken me there. I felt like a van Winkle waking from a “nap”. Perhaps if I worked backwards, I would figure out how to proceed. Everyone around me would have to stare at me for a while longer until I sorted this out. I fixated on the repeating triangles of the geodesic dome above me, held you again, and dug my neural roots back into the alkaline soil.

I remember a portal opening up…

My eyes were open at first as I passed the pipe between us. Each hit making it harder to see. Harder to move. Harder to be. The colors shimmered out of hiding, slowly at first, like munchkins showing me the way to the golden road. They danced and sang to me. We played together until we were called home by our mothers.

One by one, the shapes collided into a rainbow aperture. They shuttered open. In a flash I was inside. I shot down a teleportal lens. With a snap I was frozen in time.

There was an immense feeling of emptiness. Loneliness. Yet, there was a peace in the emptiness, a comfort in the nothingness. The lack of exposure promised endless possibilities. Like quantum photos, the negatives become positive and the meaning rests somewhere in that silver substrate, submerged in a bath of chemical development. Photosynthesis. Absorbing light in a dark room. Choosing the perfect filters to expose a captured moment.

I don’t know how long I had been there. My memory was piecing back together like the fractal puzzle I’d entered. They asked me if I was okay when I came back. Apparently, I’d been writhing.

Tied up or going somewhere.

Victoria deeply regretted her decision to stay sober that evening.