Imago

I'll throw the images out and you can accompany me on the djembe. If we luck out, we can get a pan-flute playing in theb ackground softly. Wait, scratch the pan-flute. Get a clarinet's bass warbling to remind us that as fun as this is, it's all make-believe, and although we assure ourselves there is a reason to get up in the morning, there might as well not be. Don't clap when it's done: snap vociferously.

I see soldiers in half-combat fatigues putting up the new billboard for Tetley's Tea: swaying on the branches, the demoniac red squirrel eyes, red orbs in the green maelstrom. Scarves on the utility pole wrapped around in maypole agony. And where are you, my May Queen in drag? Where are the asphalt serenades, electric interference waves on the instinctively vibrating storm sewers--shots ringing out as they are slammed back into the bar bench and into esophaguses across the asphalt plate floating on a dirty snowball around a fusion plant. I write on wilting yellow roses because it gives me a three-second lead on the world and an opportunity to fuck with causality. May Queen is distilling seawater on the seashore cliffs pealing ringing bells across the Indian Ocean, wailing for Davey Jones' locker. Rheumy bums smiling angular smiles with moon-crater faces--overcoming boundaries and wishing well and hunting through dumpsters, just getting enough luck. Wily contractors dance naked on the rooftops before they are shamed off by the great desert fox using his magic carpet. The moon is now a spiral, and the triangles fractal inwards to the land of inner sight--nobody would mistake this for drug imagery. May Queen waves a feather in the Pride march and thirty old queens mind-grope the idea of her. Scary what the domain of the cloud-mind achieves. Scary piles of occluding bullshit. Losing the strumming pattern, and losing the beat of elemental images. Which are endless, which are repertoire, which are the meal tickets, which are humming arcing electricity, which are the windows on the world from a blind alley, fusion problem solved and handed on a silver platter, five minutes to fame and inevitable mental illness. Swiss cheese brain fights much like fencing matches. Don't touch the plush toys or shiny clockwork--you'll get pregnant.

Consider: "I recall and audience member asking Joseph Campbell, that great student of myth. "Do you believe in God?" "Which one?," he responded, "there have been hundreds of thousands, you know." Immediately, we were transported to a different plane. From the questioner's urgency to fix the god, to define the concept and thereby lessen the psychic distress, we had been reminded that not only are the immortal Ones mortal, but that the God-imagos wax and wane like the moon, except their cycles may be more millennial than monthly."