Of Love and Water

Of Love & Water;

A New Chapter

Slammed into a moment of sheer physical poetry as the rain washed over me I became a gilded thing. As time collapsed the will to retrieve eluded me. So I stood in the rain. I waited hopeless as the water washed over in rushing tones,

ears: a thousand muted sounds in harmony

nose: ozone sweetened fresh pumping life, as carbon dioxide to oxygen

tongue: sweet and rusty

skin:trails of water in rivulets to cleanse

eyes:rain, sheets of gray, colors darkened in tones of watered depths, illuminessence in flashes of intermittent light and

thunderous applause.

all sensory, to restore me.

My mind has become one with this thing, my beauty is terrible to behold as my skin oozes pain. Cassandra calls me from my distant revery, and I run towards the familiar voice. She opens the door and warm light floods out.

“The war had ended,”she told me, quitely.

The radio in the background was a hum of excited voices clamoring for attention. I walked slowly and with jaded steps into the immaculate kitchen. Mindlessly, (the counters gleaming) in memories that couldn’t speak my trauma slid and shifted and pooled around me; soaking from bones and skin and clothes into residual pools of water that shone with promise. I stared at the puddles on the floor. As if in a trance of sorts, my mind muted the concerns of itself and absorbed the depravity, held it captive, pondered momentarily, and discarded.

It remained but, nonetheless it wouldn’t be long.

The phone rang

A familiar voice came through the line and I stood shivering, aware of my bones beneath the skin.

Allow me to digress.

Late October mid-twenties:

I met him that summer and an air of nonchalance hung heavy on my tongue, its permeance had made its way into every aspect of my life. The sun burned hot and the air hung heavy as if all life hung in the still of a stagnating and transparent waiting, getting through.

The light in his eyes spoke to my mind on levels that I couldn't comprehend in this half existence. I held his gaze and allowed my mind to run. I believed in him in that moment and in the silent transmutations that sometimes occur between humans we agreed to find a way and be closed in the alliance of a closer than friends friendship.

The next couple of years passed relatively uneventfully.I woke every morning and walked to work. I made my way and watched as the world continued to spiral into a purposeful and maddeningly orchestrated descent into regressives. I suppose we had known this was coming; we were just unaware to the extent that it would be allowed to become.

She, or It as I came to think of her, was an uneventful meeting, at first sight. Cool and careless,as if a breeze had just walked past me; one that would blow on by. After her entrance into my life things began to happen very quickly.

The men, the ones you used to pass on the street, became soldiers. They became canine, strange, and armored. Within four months we were met with demands for all of our identitites; physical, emotional, mental and sexual.

We refused. So the canine men came for us. For me, for him, they came for all of us that believed in individual human identities and freedom of choice.

They came while we were eating dinner. They came while we were bathing our children in our homes and preparing for bed. They came in groups of two, six, and ten. They came while we were resting in our beds and putting hours in at our jobs. They came in tanks and trucks.They came in tanks and trucks that carried metal racking systems encased in clear domes.They came singing and jovial, as if all was right with the world.

They caught me at a local diner joint where I liked to go for a lonely, lovely supper within the company of fellow diners. They came suddenly and without warning but not without a substantive amount of necessary prep work. The Human mind is a fragile and resilient thing indeed but atrocities to its humanities must be approached with care, timing and structure. This is something that they taught me. Although nothing can really prepare one for some things, people can be made to withstand many things.

They captured us in nets of gossamer and strung us up. The nets flew out of a mechanical arms the man had attached to an armored pack on his back, kind of like spiderman. Only the strings and webs of gossamer were not to save but to capture and harm.Once he had secured a person he had caught in the net, the being wielding the mechanical arm backpack strung ,tied ,and braided the net to a frame upon a waiting truck( or tank in some cases). Thereby securing the humans he had captured, we were subjected to the new indignity of being cocooned in the sticky webbing, and strung up onto the wire frames on the waiting trucks. In a fully mechanized process of whirring, hissing, and sputtering, clangs.

The sky grew dark. It became a uniform gray. I imagined it was the aura of human souls bleeding the sky and suffusing it with the iron clad will to survive.

I met her then. She my love, Cassandra. She was lovely and tearful as the cocoon spun around her that was set in motion by the toothy garbage man with hair sprouting from his ears. We were stuck in something like disbelief and a strange kind of mirth at the absurdity of it.

Her eyes were like orbs of blue, pools of incandescence and light as all that was visible of her was covered and buried by the lumpy bulbous cocoon. It wasn't as glamorous as it sounds, either. The cocoons were thick, hot, and heavy, dank with the stink of the canine men. As if they had created or marked it to bind us with as much misery as possible.

Upon being loaded, there was much sobbing, hysteria and protests but the strange once men turned soldiers merely poked prodded and harrumphed, struck and continued with bored abandon the cataloging and loading of humans as if they were no more than so much flesh.

I saw him, he was running across the pavement in a straight line. He stopped, seeing me, and I looked into golden eyes lit by love that seethed and rolled with unwanted knowledge. “It will be okay.” He said. He offered the canine soldier man his upturned wrists to be bound. “I am going with you.”

And so it was that we humans became as bits in the landfills of the machine of other humans greed, waste, and want. We were transported in the trucks for some miles. The city lines became nonexistent as the terrain blended into nothingness. Eventually we pulled up to a warehouse area with rows and rows of white metal gleaming structures. The men driving the trucks pulled up, garage style doors opened and with a few adjustments clicks and pulls we went sailing into the warehouses on gleaming metal railings. There we were cataloged and housed.

Once inside the building, the cocoons began to glow with a light of their own dark energy. Orbs came and went busily about the warehouse meeting the cocoons with brightest glows and draining them to a barely lit facsimile before bobbing and weaving out of sight into an unseen area. We were being fed upon as fuel by the silky strands in the cocoons and our energy and flesh were consumed, regenerated, and ferried off into unknown points of origin for unknown utilitarian purposes.

Our lives became the type that grows transcendence. We found distractions from misery by conversation and mockery of our captors. We were in cocoons day and night, at times it felt as though nothing was left of us but our soul and tiny specks of mind that held the will to survive. We knew pain, for the feeding and eating of the silken strands was heavy and found all new ways to breed misery in the taking of our lives and flesh. And we knew torment. It pleased the canine men and their women to make games of tormenting us.

Did I fail to mention? The men/guards/tormentors had women. It would seem that the women were actually running the show. They were big women, voluptuous women, loud and overbearing women.

When they were bored, they would cut us down and beat us. They would find pleasure in taking from us what one should never know.

I loved them, him and her. As well I loved the others that were with us. We held each other close in mind, eye and physical presence. We comforted each other with stories, memories, and songs. I lay awake at night and gazed into his eyes and swore that I could smell the earth. In her eyes I saw the sky, moon, and stars.

We knew that eventually the greater forces would arrive to free us from this travesty, it was a matter of hanging in and holding on.

The day they came was surreal. We noticed that, although we hadn’t noticed for some time, that the canine men had gone. They came, they cut us down. Our muscles had atrophied, so the thereafter was a process of learning to move and function again before we could actually be moved.

They, the rescuers, told us that we were at war. That it wouldn’t be long. And that the front we were on was conquered. We were in a location now known as the territory of Sound. They told us that in a few days we would be moved further inland and out of the war zone, that it was only a matter of time before the Subhuman Particulates were cast out of dominance. As that is what they had come known to be called. They said it was a more human term for a humanity that perpetuated inhumanity on others.

They left us with provisions, maps and promises. One day, as the night alighted, and the sky was clear we decided as the group that was left to walk back inland and see what we could make and salvage of our lives, minds, and homes.

The nights were clear and cold. The stars were numberless and the adventure of our current state of transience left us feeling giddy and awed. We walked, danced and sang our way home. At the point of what used to be the city limits we parted ways. Cassandra and I decided to stay together. And he held my hand in both of his as he left, promising to return. He told me that he had things to do, enemies to dispose of, strings to tie and attachments to sever. He told me that he could never rest knowing the things that he knew.

We found out many things about what they were and where they came from. Each territory as they were now known had been monitored, prepped, and guided by teams of strategists for monetary gains and other toxic concerns. We who had been strung up were the chosen ones. The fittest, the most beautiful, the most sexual, the most sold. We learned about a humanity whose thirst and greed runs deeper than their will to live.That subjugation of humanity for profit can always be delivered with an acceptable bow.

We learned names, numbers, and dates. All written out in neat little fingerprinted rows with zero concerns for ever having accountability. We learned. And so it was that we found bonds deeper than family and ties stronger than friendships. Lessons learned and mistakes never to be repeated.

Slammed into a moment of sheer physical poetry as the rain washed over me I became a gilded thing. As time collapsed the will to retrieve eluded me. So I stood in the rain. I waited hopeless as the water washed over in rushing tones,

ears: a thousand muted sounds in harmony

nose: ozone sweetened fresh pumping life, as carbon dioxide to oxygen

tongue: sweet and rusty

skin:trails of water in rivulets to cleanse

eyes:rain, sheets of gray, colors darkened in tones of watered depths, illuminessence in flashes of intermittent light and

thunderous applause.

all sensory, to restore me.

My mind has become one with this thing, my beauty is terrible to behold as my skin oozes pain. Cassandra calls me from my distant revery, and I run towards the familiar voice. She opens the door and warm light floods out.

“The war had ended,”she told me, quitely.

The radio in the background was a hum of excited voices clamoring for attention. I walked slowly and with jaded steps into the immaculate kitchen. Mindlessly, (the counters gleaming) in memories that couldn’t speak my trauma slid and shifted and pooled around me; soaking from bones and skin and clothes into residual pools of water that shone with promise. I stared at the puddles on the floor. As if in a trance of sorts, my mind muted the concerns of itself and absorbed the depravity, held it captive, pondered momentarily, and discarded.

It remained but, nonetheless it wouldn’t be long.

The phone rang

A familiar voice came through the line and I stood shivering, aware of my bones beneath the skin.

It was him!!!!