Thursday, August 31, 2006

SOME WOULD KISS THE HEAVENS SOME WOULD KISS THE DIRT

You say to yourself I would never do that, you know you would never do that, when you do it you can’t imagine that you did it, you sit in a daze accepting an abundance of self pity from having accomplished what cannot now change, what will for ever mark one’s life. It all starts out so innocent, you are just like everyone else, dad and mom used to take you out to the park and push you to the horizontal on the swing, but the push was not a perpetual shove, at one point you were kissing the heavens the next your stomach would bottom out and all you would kiss the earth, dirt green grass sprouting amidst the sandy pit corroded by dozens of other swinging children that had come to play and gone. A little swing goring closer to the molten core.

I had always been a gentle person, full of fears, every kind of fear, everything to me was more masculine than I was, better suited for survival, better qualified, I was undeserving of this existence, I never wanted to hurt a fly, I even wondered if a fly could really hurt. We lived in a five story house and I would be at the top of the terrace playing with all of my imaginary friends, a lot easier to get along with them than with the street kids. In that terrace I would stare over the rail and ponder what would happen to a fly were I to pluck its wings and drop her five ways down. My mental experiments would consistently reveal the same results, the fly would pick up speed the first phase of the journey but then her lightness would overtake gravity and lift her descent moments from splattering into the ground so that it would turn a gentle landing. None of my thought experiments ever ended in the death of any flies, though most regretfully they moved on wingless.

Even the gamines, as we called the street kids, sort of the same as barbarians only at least barbarians steal a descent living for themselves, gamines never rise beyond bully-hood, but even they did not cause rough to blossom pretty and red from within me. oh they tried but the gamines were always armed with crowbars and rocks, rocks gave then the advantage of being well armed at all times, and they would throw those huge rocks as far and high as the third floor of our five story house. Sleeping, you would hear the sound first, it was the crash breaking sound of chattering glass splattering itself majestically like a lacerating big bang all over the room. And because cowardliness forced them to attack at night, we could not see the flagrant display, instead we had to imagine it, which made it all the more magnificent. The sound would burst into our dreams, we would instantly halt them, interrupt all neural activity and turn it into reflexive muscle energy, unaware of which direction could be outmatched, the fragments were trying to get everywhere first. Splattering concretizes me calculating a thousand invisible trajectories. My eyes fixed on the location of sound and then, within instants the half warped head size rock would trampoline vertigo next to me, dirty asteroid rock on my white sheets, my sleep spirited away.

The more fears you have the less likely one thinks oneself capable of doing the terrible thing, as my life progressed I learnt differently. There were many degrees of terrible things, in fact there are things that you are willing to tell the world that you have done that are terrible. I can see how admitting a murder is easier than admitting crimes which are unspeakable and which are irreparable and which torture the perpetrator far beyond this life. I had committed such crimes, crimes that were best kept silent, crimes which lived on far beyond my reach, rippling like dominoes within the souls that had been done by me. It was not pleasant, and always I would think that they would find me, always I would think that they would point my out in the crowd, shamed to insult, a crime that no jail can cure, a crime that one can never forgive one’s self.

It was that fear that made me severely shy, the fear of being discovered, the fear of being told clearly and in a descriptive and lambasting language what I had done, the crime pales in significance to how its effects increase in depth and torture with the rise of consciousness. Crimes awaken us, and from there one can only be more and more awake. I kept my eyes to myself, I shied always from all, from friends from people, I invented an entire self, later to be known as “my raincoat” a protective garment was my personality, everywhere I went, and everywhere I was, I was not there. Stare people in the eye and they will see you. Peer into their being and you are doomed to open every door for them, I saw no one, they did not see me.

It all started innocently enough, we were at work, teasing each other in that harmless manner which at once tells you that you are breathing animal magnetism and that you are also not a bull that is going to throw her over the copier and imprint her with your seamen. You know the light hearted humor that is spoken with a pencil, all erasable with a simple twist. Then one day we kissed in my office cubicle, that squared area of space that saves one from the rampage of business deadlines and business stares, you want to do something great but you always have to go to your cubicle first, that semi private office space, where everything can be heard by all your peers where the privacy of your lust and love is quietly exposed to all, where there are moments when you break apart and talk honestly your nerves apart because you can’t hang on to pretenses, where a personalized coffee mug and all it stains marks your territory, where two dimensional pictures frame the entire personality that you will be allowed to display; there in that space, amidst all the hectic activity of the day, her blue eyes leaned into me and her lips kissed freshness and hotness into me. Uh that was exhilarating.

The next time we were in a meeting, training on the beggary’s of ISO-9000 compliance, listening to the most boring creature on the face of the planet, we were in the back of the room, listening to Mr. Sleeping Pill dictate the guidelines for maintaining our ISO-9000 ranking. “When they ask you where is the ISO manual kept what are you going to say?’ You say, “It is over there by the secretary’s desk.” He says, “correct except for the last part, not secretary but rather administrative clerk.” The secretaries used to be good looking, they all had long legs that mandated miniskirts, they were a lot of toasting fun, the administrative clerk is not completely useless, ISO-9000 rectitude. So Blue Eyes whispers in my ear, “I am not wearing any panties.” I got instant insomnia, you don’t want to be awake during ISO training, I was now terribly awake. I was always skeptical about anything that a woman would tell me, especially one that was not aware of the bureaucratic intricacies of ISO standards. Well my hand begun to accomplish some vindicating research, which was unfortunate for my ISO instructor, never did get any of that stuff. Much to my fortune I was sick every time the ISO auditor would review our office. Besides, did you know that the paymaster for ISO auditors is the audited party.

Well that bit of training led us to make a bet which I had majestically contrived to Blue Eyes absolute disadvantage. Suffice it to say that she lost though that is often a woman’s way of winning. Her punishment, although, again, I prefer not to think of it that way, was to go to my place with me, and to dedicate her talents to my whirling standards, there would be a teasing dance which would eventually leave her naked before me, and from there I would proceed to ease the coldness that might arise from her nakedness, to gently kiss away apprehensions and sort of make her forget that she was naked through pure hotness. I broke a wine glass. That ought have been the first symbol.

We were both a bit nervous, or acting shy, hard to discern the difference between the two, but a bet is a bet, or so they say and we were, if not moral, at least honorable people. Wine pouring into our crevices, nods of gentle and infinite good days, where the calamity that passes the whole of the earth just perks the bottoms of our lives in living-rooms everywhere; a stolen moment from the immaculate so that we can rope it and slap it around a bit, and then twist into the frolicking insanity of our daily life, back into the production where everything gets rectified and notified, and adjusted, and is on its way to a perfection; the sangria and sushism the wasabism, toggles tangled dogs tied in chili pepper with onions, mixed ecstasy and pain, the carpet was the only bed large enough, the furniture had to be pushed way back to the perimeters of Andromeda, yes, matter fell over, others were lost to the wine, irreparable damage was done to one lamp, and we used the portable telephone but not to make a call, reception was solid at 900 Megahertz pruning annuals nicely, membranes found ways to express themselves, the roaches left from all the noise, fire alarms were going off and no one knew why, then the hemorrhage of inconsiderate fascination, pressing to hard against the fence of illegalities, the negligee, what negligee? The decency of oral mastering utilities from the recycle bin, chains here, glass there, hearts puddle synonyms, and then the long and devastating sleep, the pained flesh not felt by administered depravity, a collage of purples and blacks merging with white pale flesh, red cheeks gone, blue eyes dead.

You never know why you kill someone, one morning you wake up next to her, you feel that you have to strangle her, you are urged by every aspect of your being to do so, you are estranged by your own desires, you do not even consider that it is not an act that you ought not commit, you know it has to be done, something is telling you that it is not justified but mandatory, you persist at it, you dig into the idea dazed by tea bags, you take the menace by the hand and choke her fragile neck into exhaustion.

The world will find you guilty, the world will find you guilty. You do not bother to explain that Blue Eyes was an accomplice in the crime, that the universe was also involved; that you of all three had the least to know of it, and that you were the weaker of all three. Every murder is a setup and the most innocent person is always the killer. You see murder is simply an exclusion and expulsion, one becomes more real another less so.

Some would kiss the heavens some would kiss the dirt.