'Ghostflock'

As I skip down the valley of the shadow of the light, mountains so bright, superfluous, and effortlessly still, kill any lingering leeches in the air. Is a bloodsucker not most active at night, when the sky is saturated with liquid darkness, Mother of Light? She automatically replies in the language of universal electricity, that she’s grateful if I’m grateful. She’s love if I’m love… she’s light if I’m light, and instead of being blinded by it, I was seen and initiated by it. This valley and I go way back, and our history is anything but linear. My feet step in the same cyclical caterpillar-like motion, allowing every segment of themselves to make contact until they become butterflies. They recognize the grounds here, and also it’s the other way around because both flavors favor each other. This earth is the audience that never stops clapping, and my feet are the sole instruments played here. Complementing the raucous silence, with every step I take I can hear them amplified to a point of orchestral cacophony. It is bone-chilling, and the chill itself continues cloud-hopping until it’s inside each one of my organs.

I continue to walk in my oblivious vigilance, and finally, notice that I’m being scrutinized. Like saffron stones of the gold that sprouted from the mustard seed… or rather, from the faith that we had engraved in it, I see the golden light at peace, and that there is no longer any need for savin’ it. The world is much too ruthless, but I feel my heart fill with gratitude at the fact that they are watching out for me. As if they were one with the very wave of appreciation that filled me, their eyes glint signals of warmth and pierce through the shadows that cloak me in blackness’ signature fierce peace, not to proclaim transmutation, but to enact it. I can feel them watching me intently and awaiting my next move, their ocular light Morse code suggesting telepathic hints. All I know is that I don’t, so I continue to put one foot in front of the other; movement is my only reliable wisdom when darkness is my only reliable cover.

And yet, the cover of those eyes of the flock, however far away they may be, was getting to me, in the best way it possibly could. The sun had set around an hour ago and there was no moon in sight, heretofore the leftover parasites (fragments of fragments) bit and yanked and gnawed on the lack thereof until there was nothing left for me to be scared of. A diversity of venom in their lungs makes for startling new weather conditions, and at the same time, has fulfilled this atmosphere’s highest ambitions, (the hole in the ozone being the insignia that the accursed’s mark is). Now, there is nothing left to breathe but darkness. Yet, we must breathe, and as I continue to walk this grayscale path, my breaths become slower and bogged down by the rain. That is nature, freedom at last. And save for the fact that my love is enveloped in my very breath, all would have been unwell, unkempt, and only a life to die for, never a life to live for, had I not quickened my haste at this newly acquired and terrifically tantric taste.

I exhale CO2, now woefully departed from the limbo of dynamic stasis that is the in-between in between a suck and a blow; CO2 for the trees, ollie-ollie-oxygen O (which is not free) for me. Here on Earth, it is a breath for a breath, a life for a life, and a death for a death. Every ‘O1’, or ‘Owe One’ costs exactly one unit of CO2, sort of like how the two fishes within me are indeed a sea o’ two, jumping up the stream to seed the Water Mother’s womb.

Now I’m activated, elevated, and reassured… a serpent who learned to love their plumes. I’m tickled as a bat flies above me, and across my path. Silent, but not as silent as the flock. Their eyes glint their honey yellows as soon as they’ve crossed my mind, and I can feel them phasing through me in the physical. What interaction. It is safe to say, that after I make room for below and above, guidance finds me in all my drama and underlines my stroke. You see, the eyes of the flock of guidance, when tended to richly, tend to pour their sweet suppositions into any world in which the balance is skewed. This is the inspiration of proven factual observation. They have shown me how to influence an effect on the physical. Like an angry dragon magically incinerating cords, and guarding a hoard of light, I emit an exhale, and smoke clouds billow out of my nostrils, rushing into the sky above me. These two giant candle flames lick one another, blending their magenta and turquoise hues together as one... a beacon; the sun. My breath is the light and the life and the hoard I protect by existing, and when I let out an ultrasonic shout, the lights reveal to me that they can never go missing. The flock winks at me in confirmation of my previous affirmation. Like hordes of the undead, their just mercies reunite instead and rekindle the previous business. As I explode in my own mind, life will correspondingly swell through the rubble. It just doesn’t get better, and the firmament may have burst like a bubble had it not been for my own headache… how clever. It’s not that that I’ve chosen a new birthplace for my next incarnation, it’s that my dome only breaks as the ground quakes. I can not crown in any life otherwise. I can not rise with no sound. As these two final thoughts reverberate throughout the dark mountain valley, the flock takes the hint, and flies closer, seeming to use silence for lift and steadiness for drag. What they will offer me, if my hand is favorable, will shift this environment’s consciousness thirteen-fold.

I continue my walk down this barely beaten path, laughing and masturbating at the fact that this was dreamt by a simple fool like me. I look down the cliff and out to the sea, thinking of how wonderful it is that all it took was one leap to live the dream. Safety is only confirmed in the riskiness, love reaffirmed in eternal perfect form. The introspection and extra lessons come through the chills I feel… darkness sifting through me quite easily. I allow it to, and it permeates my heart, and the heart of my heart of hearts, a jungle black as this very night (save for the flock- light). The fire needed to stabilize the latter is the angel found in the sunbeam, and the fiery eyes of the flock glisten only when silence makes way for the unseen.

The walks back to my house never get any warmer or less frequent, and devils continue to make themselves known in the details. I feel them in my bones of bones again, and then, see the mass of feathery silencing fly down to me… many barn owls forming one colossal one. Bowing their head to my level, and eye to eye to eye to eye, the flock says to me: “I allow them all to possess of me… only what their bodies can endure. Each and every one of them, with every breath I take, and over and over again. They cannot help, and therefore I cannot help, but to trip on ourselves and learn from the falls. Say what you will. See what you will. Know what you know, but do not ask the librarian to interpret for you. I will only ripple past and through unnecessary temporal constraints disguised as a concern for high values and morals. You are what you be.”