Iron Ink Books – Independent Publishing • Omaha, Nebraska

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November 24th, 2021

Seeing In Dreams Is The Only Color For Me

Before I woke I was in it. I had come out of delirium and into dream, going through the deep recesses of my unconscious.

Scenes in the mind were brought forth pointing me towards something sacred, something hidden in the darkest part of my being. I did not have to consult a shaman. I did not have to take ayahuasca or LSD. It was there, pouring out from my pineal gland into another existence.

I was here on the corner of 50th and Chicago in Omaha. But I wasn’t, really. I was somewhere else. A tall building in a foreign land. Why I was here I do not know. The reason escapes me. It did even then as I stood in a large open room thousands of feet off the ground floor where normally there would be a cubicle maze, but there wasn’t. It was open with desks in manicured rows about the place and on each desk there were large white computers domed in shape that seemed to be swallowing the person who occupied it like a giant helmet.

All of these computers seemed to be doing something but what it was I haven’t a clue. Perhaps they were sucking the imagination from those that occupied them. And I had a feeling that every floor in the building would look much the same.

As I made my way through this room someone with me recognized that something was off. This place wasn’t what it appeared to be. They were hiding something here. Whomever they were. Those who keeps secrets. Those who withhold the truth. That they. How this person knew I couldn’t say, but I could sense it too. There was something off about it. This friend stranger and I got out of there and soon we were in a bathroom down the hall.

The bathroom was a big white room with employees in white shirts and ties and slicked black hair and they all looked the same going in and out one after the next in an endless stream and my friend and I stood off to the the side where there was a large grated vent on the wall, one the size of a door, and we stood there and waited until an alarm went off and every single one of these drones had emptied out of the stalls and left the room. Then my friend removed the door and we entered.

It was a long narrow corridor like a catacomb, the walls dark and dank with a faint light down at the far end of the thing that seemed miles and miles away. We headed towards it. Soon an echoing became known as we made our way. A distorted ballroom music as if The Caretaker were somewhere in there and the closer we came towards it the more distinct it became, more defined and beautiful though it still crackled and popped. Sand in the grooves of my mind. We passed a dark figure sitting crouched against the wall, mumbling an incantation. Meaningless words to most though meaningful in their madness. We moved on.

Further and further down the long hallway. Soon more of these figures appeared. One after the next. Each of them with their own bent ways. The more we passed, the more we recognized these abnormalities. These quarks. Some talking to themselves. Others moving their limbs like contortionists. One of them was licking the walls. Another had three hands. And then we were there, at the entrance to where the light came in and the music played in beautiful lilts and the threshold opened up into a cathedral like space, walls of stale concrete and large pillars in rows along them. Above us the light passed through pale glass and there was no way of knowing if it came from the sun or from the false lighting of the building.

At the center of this great room there was a grouping of the most fantastical creatures I had ever seen. All of them dancing to the music that seemed to be emanating from their being. And I knew right then that they had been banished here. Not only because of how they looked, but by what lied within them. What they were capable of.

They were grotesque flowers that bloomed with real beauty.

Real truth. They could not deceive who and what they were. It would be impossible. They could not hide their existence, their form. They did not resemble anything human. No simian-like features. Not one of them could be recognizable walking down Dodge towards downtown. Or sitting at a table outside Blue Line coffee smoking a cigarette and reading a novel by Murakami. Some of them held a physical shape like the small round headed thing without a face that felt the pain of others and could heal with its embrace. Or the one that could create worlds with sound coming from a giant hole in its body like cymatics from a Tibetan prayer bowel.

Then there were others that held no form, really, though they were visible. One a phantasmagoric phantom with a rainbow like body that resembled two connected optic nerve tails that trailed off into a single unit. A beautiful thing that I would later see in a vision in which it became hardened and grey like the stone walls around us by way of insults from those who looked upon it without curiosity or wonder like an idea that gets killed before it is born. And I stood among these creatures and observed them.

They became known and seen by me. And I to them. They had accepted me into their fold and knew they could trust me. I was not there to harm them. To destroy them. But to observe. To share what I had seen. To tell everyone what lies in the darkest parts of us. What is not out there, but in here. Right here. Beneath the workings of the thing.

What happened next I don’t remember.

I don’t remember what they all looked like or why they had been shoved down into the bowels of mediocrity.

I don’t know why dream tigers become docile house cats, languid and lazy. I don’t know if there was anything to do about it, only that it be known that they were there, waiting. Existing. Being. That they are there should anyone seek them out.

When I woke up I was covered in sweat. My blanket and pillow soaked through. The body working without ever taking a step. My mind infinite existences, waiting for my eyes to close and finally see.

 

 

December 15th, 2021

Love Is All That Ever Is, Will Be, Can Be

It’s a slow burn until it’s over. And then it seems to have happened all of a sudden…

 

December 8th, 2021

A Bibliophile With A Syncopated Footstep Walks Into A Midwest City

I take the needle in hand and push it through the pages. I grab the needle from the other side and pull the thread through, watching all the while as it sews the experiences of my life together…

 

December 1st, 2021

Christmas Time Is Here, There, And Everywhere

It’s December now and winter hasn’t quite crept in yet. But it’s on the way. I’m sure of it. As sure as the trees lay undressed in the midwest and little lights go up all over town, along rain gutters, around license plates…

 

 

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