Predation

Well past midnight, the air hung thick and warm. Darkness fluttered under my wings. I was flying just to feel the breeze. Gliding, suspended on a bed of flowing humidity, I closed my eyes. My naked body felt like a dart sliding through the night, comforted in blankets of frail moonlight. My arms felt taut and strong, my back arched but relaxed, my fingers raking and stirring the night into gentle turbulences.

I felt myself decelerating first, rapidly as though the air were warped, and then I felt the thick strands on my face and my body. The strands were strong like cable but soft and I was already entangled in them as the web recoiled.

Disoriented, I could not tell which way was up, nor, as I struggled, could I release myself from the net. I flailed my arms and twisted my thorax wildly, but the coils just wound themselves around me and gently tightened.

My heart drummed and filled my muscles with blood. My arms throbbed as the tension of the web began to pull my limbs away from my body and separated my legs until I laid as though stretched on a rack. I became aware immediately of my breathing, quick and irregular, as adrenaline coursed through my body. My limb was swollen and erect, on the verge of bursting. I could feeling it throbbing with the rhythm of my heart. The drumming shook my body as I dangled, wrapped in the tight strands.

I was shaking, it was not my heart; something was coming closer. Above my head, I strained. She was coming--her long elegant legs walked weightlessly across the web, her eyes full of famine. My lower back convulsed, my groin swelled painfully.

She stood above me and placed the ball of her pointed foot on my sternum. She pressed down, crushing my lungs; I couldn't breathe, I couldn't scream. Her eyes were empty and black, and I could see my naked body reflected in them. I looked like meat.

She hesitated for a moment, drinking my fear, salivating, anticipating her delight at the deliciousness of my body. She saw it. I wanted to hide it, but I couldn't move. It was massive now and reached up like a blood red beacon in the night.

She lowered herself down until her terrifying jaws hung just above my groin. She released the pressure on my chest and I took in a bottomless gasp. Before I could exhale, she plunged in, her jaws sinking into my flesh and the pumping blood running across my upper thigh and buttocks. The venom ran through me instantly--my fingers began to go numb and my arms quivered. My eyes rolled back into my skull and white foam formed at the corners of my mouth.

The suction was gentle at first, as I felt the warm blood leaving me and sliding into her stomach, but she began to drink quickly and greedily. She pulled from deep inside my pelvis--my muscles squeezed and my back twisted as a I tried to wrestle it away from her. She had swallowed it whole and I could feel my body going cold.

The death rattle rose up from my constricted anus, building until it filled my whole thorax. It hung on my lips for a moment as a cold shiver and then I released it as a great gasp. My organs flooded out of me in a great bloody burst, covering her face in a gush of my last warmth.

I coughed and felt as though I shriveled inside my body, shrinking to nothing, leaving behind my cavernous flesh. I was nothing more, then, but a wisp of smoke, rising. But as I did, I felt her wrapping my body, over and over again, in its funeral shroud of silk.

Dawn's Herald

They came into your cell in the night. Their grip took you by either arm and pulled you, effortlessly, out of the cot, out the cell. In delirium, your feet seemed to dangle and float a few inches from the hallway floor as they sped you through the chamber.

After what felt only a moment, you stopped spinning. The feeling of the cold floor on your feet made your skin constrict--tiles of a polished obsidian glass. The room held a thick velvet curtain across the far wall and it was unlighted, but for the meager ray of early morning's Venus shining through the skylight. You saw not my body, for it was concealed behind the curtain, but felt my immediacy.

Quietly but forcefully I commanded you to remove your clothes and kneel, sitting on your heels, with your forehead placed on the floor. In the shock and fatigue of early waking, you removed your smock revealing the labyrinth of gypsy ink markings blanketing your skin.

I called out, "Your body is a whithering flower. When you reach for the Morning Star you remind Him only of your putrid mortality. You offend Him in His boundless misery; your very existence is heresy. Will you recant, creature of failing flesh, will you repent before the Light Bringer, or will you simply continue to shiver and whimper?"

I stepped out from the curtain, my face veiled behind cloth of cobwebs. Wrapped in the crook of my arm, hung a massive coil of silk rope. With your forehead pressed to the cold floor, you felt me standing above you, gently gathering your hair. With the chord, I tied it back with a firm knot. The slack draped down your backbone and through your crevasse, reaching your ankles, which I bound together tightly. As I pulled the chord taut, your head lifted slowly from the floor, pulled by the root of your hair. The copper skin of your throat stretched and exposed itself as your head rolled farther back. Soon you sitting erect on your heels, held perfectly by the tension of the chord. Your eyes rolled back and you could see only the skylight and the Dawn's Herald.

My gloved hands grasped your wrist and bound it behind your back to the opposite calf so that your shoulder blades pressed together and shoulders rolled back into a tight contortion. You made no sound. I did not bind your throat, but instead removed my glove and placed my palm softly on the bowed curve of your elongated neck. My fingers wrapped gently around your throat. You feet and thighs were numb and the only sensation that remained was the sight of Venus and my waiting grasp on your windpipe.

My hand rested there, slack on your throat, for what seemed like hours. You knew in that moment I was concentrating on your pulse through my palm. This violation was unbearable: I could feel your heart beating, your warm blood. Naked and frightened, only now did you feel exposed. You fought welling tears and breathed deeply.

Almost imperceptibly, my grip began to constrict. All at once, you could feel your body again--the thick knots digging into your uncovered thigh, the dull tugging at the root of your hair. The tightening grasp thrilled you and I could feel your heart beating irregularly. On your knees with your back arched and eyes directed to heaven, I watched as you pulled in slow and labored breaths.

"Do not forget how fragile you are, tiny one. I hold your soul in the palm of my hand. I can squeeze it like ripe fruit."

Feeling each of your breaths running through my fingers, I clamped your throat shut, silencing your heavy wheezing. Your body was relaxed and your beautiful gypsy face grew to the color of blood in the light of the lone planet. I waited for only a moment, and then a cough, and I released your throat. You gasped, breathing in quickly and deeply, swooning in frightened ecstasy.

"Now, child, are you ready to beg for His forgiveness?"

An Adaptation of a Friend's Dream

...His features were always shadowed, even in a lighted room. She would frighten him. She had a need for self-destruction that he didn't understand. She was often drunk in abandon--thirsty for that feeling of plummet. Like a thick cord winding, taut, down her wing, he had seen it glow as she fell. Tattooed on the twisted meridian of her arm's Qi flow a testament of promises. The chord would glow phosphlorescence under ultraviolet light, illuminating an immeasurable scripture of Self--a dense river of words flowing down with a restrained turbelence. Each infinitesimal glyph formed a tiny knot, a unique pattern of twisted current. The knots of the thin filaments of her qi were each wrapped in dense Gordian complexity yet exhibited such staggering symmetry that the text formed a rhythmic string of pearls, each a tiny gazing ball difficult to focus his eyes upon. The flow of patterns etched, spiraling down her arm, was written in a primordial language--a strand of ethereal peptines cataloging her every thought, a genetic strand of her existential predestination. At the shores of this luminous coil, her body would wash itself like a throng of bathers in the Ganges. In its raging white intensity, it wound into the center of her heart, her Mt. Kailasa, her soul's summit, the abode of Lord Shiva. The flow of Qi emanated from Her radiance, each thick coil of luminosity just a strand of Her voluminous hair. He himself had wished, in those brief glimpses, that he could bathe also at the shores of her Ganges--it's glowing waters first brisk and invigorating as it tumbled from the high altitudes of her heart, and then, as it wound into the balmy jungles of her body, a warm slow pulsation. He would dream that he was walking along that mountain river, giving thanks for the bounty of Her body through which it flowed. Wrapped in blue mist, walking north, closer to Her origin. So far north that the night could muster only a few hours of twilight before giving way again to the sun in its elevated equinox...

Automata Does Not Externalize Technology

Is necessity the fundamental driving force of invention?  Think back to
your earliest memory of designing something.  Regardless of the form it
took-- a sketch, a schematic arrangement of models, a stack of legos-- the
design itself is what carried value for you, rather than its
implementation.  More than likely, you stopped at the implementation
level, were satisfied by a design you were proud of.

I remember thinking about mechanical linkages (idealized machines made out
of rods and joints) as a very young child (although I had no idea that
they were called 'linkages' until I had nearly finished my university
degree).  I would often draw machines and schematic diagrams to figure out
admissible physical movement.

This was a natural form of exploration for me, in which I tested the
freedom and constraints of physical space.  This exploration was only
mildly abstract, possibly as concrete as dancing, sports or other forms of
spatial exploration.  It was a reflection of my interaction and
interpretation of my physical world; it was a reflection of how my arms
and legs moved, a response to watching spiders and trains.

It is not necessity that is the mother of invention.  Our propensity for
design exists of a level of naturality which transcends immediate needs.
We communicate by manipulating our world, by design.  This leads me to
propose a replicator.  This meme is a symbol of design without necessity
whose only purpose is as a reflection of ourselves and our world-- a
technological self-portrait.  The meme is: Automata.

We should start with some examples:

Jacques de Vaucanson's Canard Digerateur ("The Shitting Duck")
http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v29/v29n4.riskin.html

The Clockwork Automata of Jaquet-Droz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1nxETblSi4

The former article comes from Jessica Riskin's book on the origins of
artificial life, of which I am sure there is a great deal to say, but I
will pass over this in silence.

My interest is our propensity for design as a method of understanding and
communicating our world.  Clockwork automata are wonderful examples of
design which resolve no great necessity but instead are intended to
display (perhaps narcissistically) the mysteriousness of our own
complexity.  We build robots which resemble spiders, beetles, dogs, and
humans not only in physical reality but more so in our ideas and in our
literature.

Automata (whether clockwork or robots) provide a gazing pool, a clue to
the conundrum of our own nebulous existences.  It is essential in my
definition that automata are not built to serve any purpose; they are not
robot maids or mechanical laborers.  They are thought experiments just as
much as they are physical things (if not more so).

In positing automata, I am also positing the naturality of technology.
Often enough, modern technology is regarded as an anomaly or pathology, an
abomination of misapplied power.  But the meme of "Automata" is one which
regards technology as a fundamental human trait.  This distinction is
important; when people point to the evils of technology, they point to
"that," an external thing.  Automata does not externalize technology, it
regards it as a reflection/manifestation of a natural and tangible
property of human-ness.

Our reactions to our world conjure laughter, dance, weeping and myriad
other behaviors.  Design is one of those same behaviors, natural and
inevitable.  Clockwork automata provides a symbol for this internalization
of technology, where philosophical explorations eclipse necessities.

Radio Flyer Ascent

Covered in boils infected, convalescing in amidst new accomodations, I sleep irregularly, and with dreams disturbing.
With an obligation less real than sentiment, as an exam unschooled for, I escaped-- riding away.
The mind swims in sleep, swept along in a current of oneiroflux; faces and personas change. The fluidity of dream's evolution swept beneath me, leaving me not on the vehicle of swift propulsion that I embarked with, but instead on a child's red wagon.
At the top of a spur, the empty terrain swept out by league after jagged league, as if reaching from the horizontal to the vertical and achieving a culmination of precipices impenetrable.
The road threatened to squeeze into a precarious capillaries' breadth.
I felt as if I had reached my minds ability to sustain even the most granted physical laws. The earth snarled, unraveling from stolid rock to unpredictable fluid. I slipped and grasped something which was nothing. I hung for a moment and knew that if I stepped further into these lost hills, that gravity itself would rebel against me.
I awoke wondering where I was.
This dream trek was reassuring however, as I was granted a brief look at the vastness of the shifting desert that I would have to cross, in pious pilgrimage, the horizons of mental destitution that would have to be bridged, before I would arrive in the Nation of Madness. And so I can sigh in relief, knowing the great buffer that protects me from that spiral of delusion where the compass of the mind's orientability flips and spins.

North Beach Voices

North Beach voices:
an economy, of tongues-and-lungs
Bustling
Around neon
martinis, and bowls, of-frothy-Joe
Rhythms
Of the Blessed
Maniacs tearing, the new-world-out
From their
Mouthes and hearts...
Squeezing drops, of throat fluids, into
Gas Tanks

Of-dry-and-bright, run-down-Lives
We want some-city-grit
to taste some human-shit
To take Her streetlight sins
And bear this Bright Night's cross

Quarter to Twelve

Blue light bathing
in my underwear,
naked eyes, ghost-lit
in the dark
the screen and my
translucent heart
Too heavy to read
Too bright to sleep
typ-typing, dreaming
of peyote fields and
free life, sculpting
Lost man bursting

with dry dusty love.

The Night I Met a Clay Sprite

Empty white water basin
and a drain of old brass
steaming faucet running
satin sheets over my fingers...

The rich blast licks the teapot:
Unglazed clay, purple Yixing
Dark and dense, soft draw in my palm--
earthy skin erect, drinking the heat

She quivers in my hand--
rock salt strewn on her smooth torso.
Crystal grains roll along,
tickling her underbelly.

Almost too hot to touch now.
She shivers and begs.
My eyes whiten, widen,
breathing a heavy rhythm.

My grip with force, the salt
now soft beads of her stone sweat.
--excepts my firm flesh fingers.
friction now hungry madness.

Heat all the way up my arm
Spare hand wets the brush:
steaming bristles rounding her spout
teasing her on her rim.

Now frantic, she releases
flurry inaudible growls
to swallow the brush inside her.
I press, sweating, inside.

Now so fragile in my hand
fiendish brush fuck
climbing deeper
my fast wrist
her shiv'ring
convulsions
thumb
on
wa-
-ter
spout
Squeeze.

...

Once again just dead clay
rinsing under cold water,
I catch my breath and return
to the tea party.

Joshua Tree

Sitting rock
samadhi
sipping sun's
silent boom,
soaking vast
blue orb womb

Parch'd flora
frost bathing
vermillion--
shadow red
ev'ning gown
softly shed.

Cold prana
pulsing, sweeps
the wash's
dusty veins:
shrivel'd braid,
corpse of rain.