Garden of Sand

In a garden made of sand, I died today.

I have been dead all the day long.

There is lethargy to a non-soul which is overwhelmingly melancholy. Time non-existent. No needs to forgo. All sits seemingly peaceful here in the void of life destroyed. There is no noise. No breeze. Sleeping in my destiny…

No! Wait! That is not correct. I am not sleeping. I was simply never there, and the way I feel now I do not even care.

Then a voice breaks the silence, "What happened to you there?"

I reply that I am a non-truth. The River Lethe just a myth. For a moment I believe I may go home, then I realize no such place exists.

The voice extends from a handsome man's face. He is the Prince of the Rider tarot. I know him. His expression is comforting to me even though it is distorted. Within the reflection of his iris I see that somehow I truly have died.

"Go home!" I spew, "Before it is too late!" At the mouth of the River there is a cave, and within the cave an enormous gate. It holds back the water so that the desert does not flood. It opens only to allow new death to pass through. Then it closes again so that the desert does dry, and all sound is removed. My friend stands between the metal cage doors. His eyes the same stormy dark blue as the river moving ferociously upstream. He is gone. The sky so beautiful draped n a passionate Prussian blue beneath an immaculate bright and glowing full moon charged however by an oppressive sun beating down. Burning. Reflecting and refracting. Everywhere are glaring glass grains. Glass shattering into even smaller pieces of salty sand granules.

Oh dear. Oh no. I do not like this oblivion foretold. I look around, but see only sand in time’s folds. I realize if I have died than my fate may blossom in this horrid, arid land. I feel as though I must walk through, though, if I am to be reunited with the young woman I supposedly am.

I do not remember much about her. She was a stranger, even when at hand. I can see a distant stare reflected in the glass grains. It is blinding, it is. The full face of the sun on infinite millions of grains of sand. I hear a voice say she used to be quite some fun.

I wonder now. What is fun?

Is that a concept similar to love?

Looking out onto the barren land I wonder where it is that I am. A rose envisioned lay gently on the sand. Before I connect it to any greater a thought, it began to mold, and then to rot. The putrid stench filled my body until in convulsions I began to vomit. I searched for my heart beat to lull me to sleep, but heard only silence; Infinite, endless, deafening silence.

"What did you do with your soul?" The man asked, though I knew he was not my friend. No, sitting with dark glasses was a thing I might call the Devil or some random demon. "It seems, my dear, to be missing and that takes some of my fun away here. Now, where did you hide it? Where did you place your soul? Come on now.” He seethed.

"I think my lover took it while he was dying. If that is possible. Really, I am not lying."

And I did have a remembrance of my soul seeming to shatter within an explosion of sound as a bullet hit his forehead, but for some reason I felt it more than him. Everything split open. I heard screaming. Everything muted and distant. Reverberations of echoes of machinery and waves. Everything spinning so slowly at first, and then much too quickly. Deep space and time ripping apart. The folds of my mind opening into a winding tunnel. Filling with warm, salty fluid. My heart beating so loudly it would have been deafening, except that it wasn't my heart and it wasn't my death. It was my lover's. I suddenly remember seeing him on the floor of his apartment. A single bullet in the center of his forehead.

"He did it himself. Why blame you?"

My friend is at the gate again. The doors opened, but no water is moving. It sits in a pool at first so refreshing, then putrid. It is filled with algae and there are insects and instead of aromatic beauty only toxicity as hazardous chemicals fly in the air all around. The smells of bodily waste and curdled organs. It is poison. There is no air to breathe. He says softly he loved me before the river was polluted. The gate closes. I felt as though I was burning alive, and truly I was -

Then - Nothing.

Nothing is as painful as feeling every single thing. My soul and my lovers kept moving in and out with psychic thrusts very deep. So deep. A labyrinth to eternity within the warm skin on skin shared in sleep.

Today I witnessed death all alone. I sat at a stranger's. My friend sat at home. My lover did show me a suicide ride. A true test of will in the art of survival. An illusion if I use it.

An intrusion none the less. If he is dead, I do not miss him. At least not yet. My friend sits staring wondering what is true. Wondering why, he too, chose abuse. In this Garden of Torture we all get what we ordered.

I think I am sleeping in death's small, rocking chair. I'm creaking and squeaking and it bothers the living, but I try not to care. Where am I, I wonder?

It feels like death. As though I have died, but not entirely disappeared. He means me no harm, though, so I must be sitting in someone else's death. All of this must be some sort of accident. I rock back and forth, moving more and more slowly, growing more and more tired.

Then suddenly a creature that seemed very much like the reaper screams out an order, "Get up! Move!” And a man rather similar to what I'd describe as the Devil says, "For not was I with you when the river flowed forward!"

I remembered the river not moving, and the distant stare of a man almost dead, numb and detached with a bullet in his head, whispering with indifference a wish of death.

The Devil lashes out for being so naive, "You chose not to notice you little love child you!"

They tell me I must return home, though they argue over my value before leaving me alone. Not quite alive and not quite dead, I've no where to go and no way to get there.

Sitting with not much else to do, I quietly sang a song like a nursery rhyme. It goes: Isn't that better a game to play? Denial of power when every one's the same. Denial of power keeps the Garden displayed. Only it is in another language and sounds like a fairy angel singing ever so gently into the wind.

Princes and Princesses on the board of an ancient game. Some are golden. Others black coal. See if good intentions are good for you too. See if abuse is the player you'd choose.

Who knows what you would do if the choice was in you. For a brief bit in time do walk in the Garden, or the Garden will choose when your walk is regarded a necessary view of your own self abuse. And we all do have the right to choose by whom we shall be abused, and when we will abuse truth.

Laughter again filled the eye of the storm. Rocking back & forth in lunacy keeping cold bodies warm.

With nowhere else to be I was held in Da'ath. An invisible point within the Tree of Life. It is a void where all reverses, surrounded by a labyrinth - the abyss - the spiral of origin and exit; the actual life force.

A tree grew deeply rooted, solid and strong out of the sand and within the blackened branches there hung the remnants of a man.

The air smelled of aromatic hyacinth and narcissus as the moon rose it shone down like a cinnamon spotlight as the tree filled with flowering fruit.

The tree. Do you think it is the Tree of Life or the Tree of Knowledge, or is simply a hang man's limb? Is it the connected dots of the Sephiroth? Or is it the duality of have/have not created once upon a time? The serpent enticed with fresh fruit laced in shame.

Is it the Tree of Life? Or the Tree of Knowledge? Or simply a hang man's limb? And really, what is the difference?

When the body dies, the soul must transcend. It must die the death of the body and the mind, and then escape as body breaks down and rots; as synapses stop shooting electric signals; as the chakras become unbalanced and dark; as the blood dries into a sticky murk; and organs fill with deep rooted lesions - not only can the soul get lost, it may also grow tired and give up. It collapses within the body, it is owned by one of the desert's traders. Originally, I thought it was the Devil or something, but since there is no immediate G-d here, it is not possible for there to be a Devil. All exists as it was originally created. It is part of the cosmos. It is part of creation. It is the exact opposite version of the story of: in the beginning…

In the Garden all is born of death, and that transcends the philosophies of modern thought and actuality. It transcends everything. It is all. All is one. One grain of sand makes up millions of reflections into all.

I should be that man, yet instead I watch. I enjoy watching him suffer, for he was a bad person. I do not know who he is, but I am sure if he is there, then he must have been unclean and unpleasant. I am a flower in the Resurrection, so as opposed to rotting, I am sturdy. I am lovely. I will not hang in judgment. Da'ath does not welcome me, but I do not care. No one is welcome here.

Awaken so suddenly into a new day. Sunlight filtering through the beveled stained glass of my bedroom window. Fragrant pink and blush toned roses freshly cut from my garden reaching out from a small vase of perfectly clean water in reach by my bed. Sandy footprints disintegrating into the start of the day.