( VIII to XVI or the final forms)
a series of
or fragments from
experiences in that liminal, oneiric space
of dream debris, or signals rising from
‘periods of a sepulchral life’
that which followed the great conjunction.
:
“the two creatures that gave you life, I have taken from you.” – Baron Samedi, Loa of the dead
‘then the hermit will appear, marking your disappearance’
VIII
“And there were songs, spirited by rain,
that year end coldness, the way
nothing lasts forever.”
There’s a woman on the bus
carrying a dog
she’s a musician
the dog is like a wolf
light in its eyes
wet and loving and sentimental
I touch its face gently
stroke its white fur
Its head, tilted, gazing
The musician nods at me
The bus brings me through these stations
The dog curled in my spirit, she is my wolf medicine
She follows me where I have to be on the eighth night onwards
_
These are the grey worlds,
fog, glaucoma, a sifting through post-life places:
How many are meant to move through here?
I am perhaps a shadow, lit by an occluded sun
a wandering species
like the imps and Chinese boys and strangers, small in stature, that moved through these stations with me, hungry, giving me food, stealing offerings from the dead
they are servants perhaps
from a temporary premise
a ghost-time
IX
The old room is drained of colour
where the children used to play
where the Japanese soldiers died
The priest prepares the white book for me
“Who are you?” He demands
he speaks to a shape behind me
a golem, a totem, fluid and faceless
The priest asks me
if I had come from one of the islands
I recall tanks and trucks stuck in mud
a colourless clay earth
aircraft and smoke overhead
a boy there spoke to me of oxygen
given to a woman
given to mother
we hurry to find her
there is too much wasteland to cover
tents and barracks and airfields far away
something had followed me back from that place
The priest would not open the white book until this wraith is gone
(Twice, the book had appeared
:part I, stanza 3:
:part 9, stanza 2:
Thrice, if one would count the extract of part X or the tenth dream)
“somewhere along vague lost corridors
a magazine like grimoire of torn images
dangle from my hand like shreds”
Editors note: The book(s) would eventually morph into screens, handheld or stored in back tech
Occult devices given to me throughout the stations from slender beings in skin tight suits
They appear as police figures. Disrupting times when I guarded places of death:
“of burial mound
of soil on concrete, beige torn fabric
stretched like a cross
as if growing from dried sand in funereal space”- part X, stanza 2
—
The way continues,
stations merge, de-form, reveal, re-condition themselves
into modes of narration involving accidents where:
“I’m waiting for an ambulance on darkened city streets
red alert and blackness
a storm like presence”
&
“The accident on the road
unearths the debris
buried beneath the seats
the old woman and young man are not harmed
upright again, the bus continues its journey” – part XIII stanza 1
(Editors note: This exegesis has become fragmented – disembodied from its original structure. A reassessments of its organs, its living quarters, becoming new orders. This genesis develops its own pattern, its own way of birthing meaning.
(I am a shadow, surely, of satellite lights cast across the statue of my death posture)
XI
I follow the long and aged man
smoke emerging from our mouths
a cycle of offering and receiving
mind altered by transcendental air
I do not tend towards the crowd at supermarkets
I divert, but into the hands of Chinese boys
They corner me by the trash can
they lead me astray with false tech
palms open, lying
posing as false powers of justice
The elongated man (who is also a beggar, a man with no home)
says,
“you don’t yet know your way around here”
i’m shown women with soft skirts
i’m sent to the place of food and lanterns
(Poet/Priest note: Perhaps through the stations I consume the food offerings meant for ancestors. Perhaps I am an ancestor. Taking what I need for my quest through this desert, this wilderness, this world of spirits. And I’m making The Way for the one who will come after me. Who was made before me, on that mountain where I entered future lifetimes.)
XII
i’m chasing a place in the city untouched by death
my heart invited to corridors of freedom
I descend from high architecture
I’m given red meat from banquets
sweetness of sacrificial sauces
I remember objects for children from long ago
fields touched by day light and special weather
XIII
I stand on the balcony of a motel corridor
I cannot make out the scene (or city or village or field or sea) before me
a large man stands behind me
I make a gesture of surrender
he is authority or doctor
or one who may arrest me
but I am not taken away
there is a bonfire in the corridor
might be furniture, books,
unknown gordion artefacts burning
the whole mass is levitating
a voice nearly comes from the fire
a voice from another place wants to talk to me
but it doesn’t
( I am to be patient, The Holy Man said through the screen outside these station of Nacht. It is enough now, that you have written all these for the exiles.)
“You are on the outside looking in on me on the inside looking in on me”
XIV
I have no shoes
nothing to clothe my back
I bring no belongings
only a desire to seek her out on the streets
an urgent questing
It is night
I trod quickly but carefully
on grass and rocks and sand
I step over foliage, knowing somehow it hides the vipers pit
I reach black roads and (like that creature in Eden)
I begin to crawl on my belly
I find a long black nail
sticking out from tarmac
I remove it, I don’t think I keep it
I know It shall not puncture my flesh
the red numbers are counting down
the cars might come to crush me
I slither faster
I avoid another black nail
( the poisoned snares are about me O Lord but you are at my Right hand)
I climb into a house
Island boys help me through a window and my existence ends there
I do not go further into the house
I do not find the woman I seek
I am led elsewhere
There are disabled peoples in wheelchairs
led by men and volunteers into a building
I catch up to the front of the throng
I hold glass doors open
We enter cluttered rooms where there are tables with wires and metal and nuts and bolts
Other men emerge, with half eaten burnt bread melting with cheese
There’s chalk on the table and a man I once knew places his bread on the table
I dust off the chalk for him
(Or he does it himself but with my hand)
I’m holding on to what’s inside me
I am finding a way to let it go
I climb monuments on cold but sunlit lands
I climb structures and edifices of stone and granite and changeless time
There are remains of half eaten food in plastic containers
black cake and red meat
I’m nearing a state where
I’ll defecate on this ziggurat
I can see the far fields from here
Green and windy, an open horizon
fluid leaks from my body
XV
It’s getting more pronounced
this searching for the woman, my mother
(I am a man in one realm trying to reach the other)
a girl is plucking pin point scabs from my hairless scalp
black dots removed by fingernails
she is with another man. They sell insurance or watches.
cheap goods sold at luxury prices. False values.
I’m talking with two gay men. The alpha reduces the beta, who goes quiet
the alpha drones on and I drone out, ultimately leaving them in their seats
water leaks from a pipe in the ceiling of a shop
water ruining papers and perishable goods
I’m buying a hot coffee but the man is taking too long
he is making coffee for the customer before me
there is an impatience as he keeps mixing milk into powder into boiling fluid
cakes are toppled over in plastic bags
these bags are not mine, these desserts are not mine
I take on the burden of delivering the lost food
I am diverted from my path to the woman, to mother
She is waiting in a clinic, in her wheel chair
I am burdened with seven to nine paper cups of coffee
It is not my duty to carry these packages, to deliver them
The bag goes missing. I abandon the obligation, I let go of that which is not relevant to my way
There is distress, I am late, the woman in the wheelchair is waiting
I reach the clinic but the pharmacy is on the fifth floor
I take a lift after moving through sections with glass walls
I know this place as the library
The lift is a glass sphere
It moves out of the building, along train tracks raised above the streets
It takes me in the wrong direction
I see an open van parked wrongly on the streets
its produce, spilled onto sidewalks, a woman huddles next to overturned boxes, she looks up at me
I see other people watching me in the sphere going by
I’m speeding along turns, moving forward in this future world (when I long to move upwards)
I’m anxious. mother is waiting. But also she is not.
She is where I want to be, but her journeys end is not yet my destination.
my vehicle is not suited for the world she is in
this is not yet my time
XVI the last station – The Tower
by mid nocturne
a dividing line has been bridged
(a stone in the heart removed by a man behind the rattan screen)
two women in tight black tactical suits prepare handheld stealth tech
devices from the future, from interstellar space
(They are programming someone, or something. They might be living pillars or a species of psyche. I am a stratagem room, they are my officers. Sister systems to my station.)
by mid daylight
I’m passing through the yellow halls of buddhic funeral tents
vacant, uncluttered, cleansed
a woman sits at the head of platform
a place to rest the body ( with no body)
(I am perhaps the body, moving through the last neighbourhood on this quest)
an interconnected tentage leads me to a larger ritual hall on a field.
And there, overhanging this world i’m in
is a great chandelier
like a planet orbiting from above
crystal light forms and diamond sutras
a complex presence, a metaphysical fruit or advanced temple satellite
hovering above me in its silence, its magnitude, its stillness
Its meaning and strangeness and mystery is lost to me
a place of waiting (or a place waiting for me)
yet to be revealed through future stations of night or
the eyes of days that shall see the unseen
–
Epilogue or editors end stake:
“I cannot be the compass to my own forays
the magnetism from beyond will have to be.”
There had been other instances in the mansions of dream
an outmoded lover carrying a box full of broken walls and ceilings and floors
kissing me with wet lips while I lean away, no longer seeking her hand. “Things have changed.”she said. I have become the bride herself, led to an other altar. My left hand had become black, but healed via ferocious sounds sold to me by a woman. Always a woman, populating, inhabiting, handmaids of creation. My postures in darkness had changed. Symbols and forms redacting. Unconscious gestures that cast away unknown attempts on my life. I wake before day break, and open my lips, emerging from secret tombs, uttering to the pre-dawn light.
Irving Paul Pereira 