The Heart Opens Through The Backbone

aka how to turn desire into story

The words are broken now so what else to do with them but swirl them around in this glass. Drink them down or toss them into the yard in a muted splash. Rinse my face in them. Pull back my shoulder blades with letters like a bow. The crunch of my sternum and clavicle is a new sentence. There is a language here, roiling out of the soil. Rolling out of the body of this place. A creaking shell left where wildfires raced unchecked through the psyche of the people. Will it hold? Will this poisonous palace still stand after the infernos have torn out every load bearing wall and beam?

You go to the mountains next. They do not call you. You call you. You leave the ocean because She tells you to. No, the dreams call you. You dream of a woman who will, for an exchange of energy, listen to your story of horrors and abuse, listen of brutality and war, all while you prepare a dish for her to eat. Anything you like. She will sit and listen till the dish is finished. She alone will eat the food, silently watching you. She won’t break eye contact until she pushes the empty plate away.

And then your story becomes hers. She will eat your trauma and transmogrify it inside the vessel of her earthen body, will dream your shattered heart back into the proper place in the astral realms of sleep. All the splintered stars, all the pulp of your cardia rewoven on the loom of night. Spangled again, like a flowered arch in the sky reworked and pinned back in place. She redreams the story of your keening into a form of justice that no longer smells like burning rubber but plumeria in the dark garden, into the sound of a mother laughing.

What is the story? What is the purpose to you, Rebecca? There must be some reason you are this strange thing. Cotton candy tender and snarling. All air and idealism and spittle. Where is your blood? Where is your reason? What do you want to magic into being? Since all the words are in pieces on the floor—that bone china has been ground to dust under countless heels—will you at last insufflate this powder? You’ve rinsed the letters, washed until pitch turned amber, plunged and plunged into blue water, darted through the blood of your second devouring mouth as it runs and runs and runs in time with the moon. Even the vibration of your nerves like a metronome has taken the dye, has a hue.

Power under such pressure will go liquid, like supercooled water does. Shake me. I dare you. I am ready to spread my crazed lattices into planar fingers into a new neuronal net for the future. Don’t you see my coffee cup isn’t making concentric rings anymore?

So, the woman eats the whole plateful. She shits and shits and drinks and drinks. She can digest everything. The microplastics and antifreeze. The yellow 6. The crackle of high electric lines in the wind. The bubble of saliva on the edge of the apoplectic dictator’s lip. The stone. The scowl. Absolutely everything churns through like kitchari, like congee—easy. Flint and phloem. Seed Oils. Titanium. The sound of a child’s femur shattering. Cotton roots, the accent of your lover from Peru, the tip of an audio jack, jerked out of the speaker stack. Everything.

The three-dimensional reality on this planet is the world of manifestation, instant reinforcement of one’s internal stories and state. But the dreams. Those sing like canaries in a coal mine, sing like fairies on the frontline, sing like cherries soaked in strychnine. What good is any of this? I can scream and sing this to the ether forever, but it will still never be nihilism. Nihilism is only a broken heart. No reverberates and cannot be moved without lifting it back into the light. And this too is a lie. No is a wall. Is a plum tree. Is a buttress root in the water, rotting. No. Is. The Path into Destiny and also All the Lies You’ve Ever told. Can’t we all take this base material and make something that hollers like a stuck pig? Can’t we?

All these stories. All the Arabian melodies swirling like Georgian polkas into Scythian whining … you are covered with as many hairs as you need to feel into the world around you. You want to taste the way that air moves? Do not become numb. Say Yes to every spoonful of grit that sleep airplanes around your eyelids. Let the cement of it crust and calcify even your shoulders. You want dreams to come into real life, to collapse even your spine, collapse even reality…

Remember the gunshot. Remember the sled in the snowy field. Remember crawling down a tube that led to a heap of mashed potatoes under a glass porthole looking out on a starfield you didn’t recognize. I found you beautiful in that dream. Potato in your beard. I left you for dead when the gendarme arrived. Ran like my hair was on fire. Which it turns out it was. Air fed and sun fired, I became the cannon and plaice, scales tipped and tumbling through the air like an imploding stained glass window.

There is green that is darker than black. There is a boar that is hoarier than a north dakota dawn. There is elastic that stretches slower than a pitch drop. These are the truths of dreams. These are the secrets only visible from the bottom of the pond when you flip over to look up at the moon. Bubbles like small planets receding. And you fired from a gun into the dark. Fired from the sun, fired as a pot, a clay snake running around the edges of the world. I understand how the world lives on the back of a vast tortuga as she glides through the starry depths. This is truth too.

Do you feel the shingles of her, her scales and cherries and kitten mouths like tiny needled blue dwarves, her atom bombs, her empty Wendy’s cups, her single-use hands… one touch and they molt into tarry roads, madrone limbs peeling, the sooty rag tied around your face as you stumbled out of the smokey cul-de-sac? I will and can collapse the dream world into this place. The question is can I reverse it. Can I run this tape backwards?

“To dream: definition: To experience imaginary events while sleeping” Imagine that. I am imagining the author of this sentence, writing this definition down and not waking from his slumber. I am dreaming him, imagining his life. His small ginger cat, the caked dish it eats from washed at best once a week. The way his shoes form a small mountain near his front door. The imaginary marriage he has with his wife. And the kisses he leaves on his imaginary children’s foreheads at night before they drift off imagining the shores of Japan, wearing the coats of armadillos, and rolling into the sea like bowling balls. See the tracks they leave in the sand. How he turns the key to his imaginary car, drifts down an impossible road in a swirl of glittering dust, swipes his badge into work and slurps a coffee swarming with bitter visions. The cup never grows empty.

I grow empty. I grow empty fields, barren plates, vacant lottery tickets, stripped paint, strippers in fur trappers’ robes, a set of boots replaced over and over until they become not boots but gloves, never containing feet or hands, only willpower and swinging limbs. The skin of an ox embracing the vacancy of my foot. See how I empty the rock tumbler as it rumbles in the basement. See how the dog empties the rib cage of the calf. See how the particle accelerator empties the mysteries of one single atomic pathway, ensures every other one explodes like so many cards crammed into a hard sided box until, overcoming friction itself, fountain into a high-pressure puff that becomes the acacia, flowering. Find the emptiness and you ensure every cup will be full.

Break language and She will write you a new one.

Break that one and She will teach you how to use a hammer.

Break the hammer and She will make you into a trebuchet.

Learn to fear falling and she will pull every rug out from under you until you are suspended in midair.

Are you still hanging? Can you hear the sound of the saxophone? Put your foot down on the note it makes. It will hold your weight.

There is no other option than every option becoming reality. Becoming water. Becoming dust. Becoming a wail and a song. A solder, a soldier. This is the vibration I spoke of earlier. You can use it to hang your scaffolding. You can ford a river with it. You can fold it into an origami rabbit that grows fangs and begins to prey on the local tweens. What do you want to build? You are the instrument being played, in a melody only you can hear. The one where you are still asleep and completely out of control.

Only the subconscious speaks. Only the subconscious slings the lantern over the edge of the outhouse door. Can you feel the mud underfoot, half frozen and gritty? You are the channel. Of course you have no desires. You have been emptying for so long that you have forgotten what light even means. Air-full and expanding with the countless dreams of generations, you panic-search for a harepin to press into the equator of this bubble. Let the pressure out through the mind of your hands. Let the images and torque of the collapse of all images into the Now become your heartbeat.

Let that pulse bubble the dreams through your sternum, through your glass bladder, scuffed and scorched as it may be. You glass dragon, you garden garter, let the air run in stutters and pebbles and gutters and starts and stops until you begin to smell sewage. Keep putting your bare feet out in front of you like rudders.

Dowse whatever this tidal tug demands. Sift and scrape your way into your destiny. There are others waiting to hear this account. They don’t know what it’s like to bend like a steel reed. All they can see has at last snapped.

The body. The body she calls me. Attend. Go to the mountains. Write when the words run. Don’t fear the contortions. Don’t forget the new language is written in your bones, pounded into your cells.

But now sleep. Sleep.