House of Discovery

When I build a house, it will have many secret passageways that only a few people will know how to find. Doors hidden behind bookcases and narrow tunnels between bedrooms. There would be tiny compartments underneath the floorboards — covered by Venetian rugs — and in them I would keep exotic trinkets and artifacts from long forgotten civilizations.

I'd also incorporate dumbwaiters and various chutes where visiting children could whisk their toys into various other realms and dimensions.

Fires would burn in each of the parlors and living rooms. Warm-stoned mantles and a fluffy cat to sprawl in front of it — such would be a common sight in my house, never failing to influence a smile on the faces of all who peak inside the various upstairs rooms.

You could find me very often in my study, working diligently at my mahogany desk and always eager for the interruption of a long-missed visitor. You would come in and peruse the hard-bound folios of my personal library and ask me about my latest projects, the exploits of ongoing expeditions around the globe. I would invite you to the terrace where we would enjoy a cup of tea, all while admiring the peacocks traversing the lawn below — or the changing shades of yellow and green foliage on the distant mountains.

Before building the house, I would bless the ground, doing my best to calm the spirits of those who had settled and wandered there before me. I would welcome them to haunt the stairwells, to make funny faces at people as they gazed on the looking glass in the washing rooms.

And once I had journeyed on from this earthly station, I would hope to have my remains carried down to the glen below the ridge, left to bask in the open meadow where the sun hits at morning, resting in the matronly evening shadow of my former home.

The grandchildren would tell stories to their grandchildren of the benevolent lord who once took them on candlelit adventures through the network of hidden portals, an entire labyrinth — a second residence — within the walls of the hillside manor. Visitors and subsequent residents would be discovering new treasures and secrets for generations to come.

My little sun chip

Hey, I've noticed you around. But, no, wait! Not in that creepy-vibe manner of speaking. Let me start over.

I like you.

You've got a real style about you that always makes me feel like a charmed, sly observer, admiring how you move about the different spaces you inhabit — rugged, urban, domestic or otherwise. I don't suppose you've ever really watched yourself in the third person. Has anyone ever described to you your sprightly gait (as I shall like to call it)?

There's a real bounce to your step, but very light. Mmmhhmmm (that means "yes?")? It's as if each step you take is an exuberant leap (in miniature, of course), followed by a gentle parachute landing (your cute little skirts come in handy). Repeat that several times in fast forward and you have an idea — maybe — of what I'm talking about.

Just visiting

This place has ambiance you can't deny. There are little details in the spacing and placement of things. To be honest, they don't all make a lot of sense when you think about it.

And when I think about it, these chairs are uncomfortable. And that pizza isn't really settling well.

Another Veemas miracle!

I have seen the light. And it's iridescent.

I was nearing sleep, just last night, my thoughts a stone's throw from a wide chasm of nothingness. Numb. Defeated.

Turning in my bed, my closed eyes sensed the faintest of glowing, slowly intensifying like the nearing sunrise through a glass darkly. A pulsing energy emerged from within my hands and feet. But I dared not move, frozen suddenly and completely in a moment of suspicious fear.

My mind's eye drew the outline of a snowman, an image that soon grew in clarity and seemed to burn like a cattle brand on the inside of my eyelids.

The image, a mere outline in red, morphed a pair of red outlined eyes. And from the eyes there drew a nose, and from the nose a smiling mouth. And then the picture on my brain began to melt as if in sunlight, until all that remained was a smiling effigy. I chuckled.

I opened my eyes and saw a glowing from the crack between the closet doors at the other end of my room. My orbs widened like a child's as I watched a fantastic orgy of red, orange, yellow and green light that crept like swirling tendrils from behind the narrow opening. These tendrils stretched to the floor in front of my cluttered dresser, digging into the carpet like roots in soil. From there, almost immediately, an unshapely blueness began to sprout. It became like a translucent indigo pod. All the colors of the rainbow surged and boiled like water within this pod.

And then it spoke, addressing me in a new name (one I'm sure I had never heard but understood with a sense of recognition that I can only liken to instinct).

"Hello, (my name)," it said. "Happy Veemas."

The pod burst in a brilliant display of color from which I had to turn away. And there he was, Mr. Sneezlebums, legendary patron of Veemas, in all his purple glory.

Note: Veemas, or V-mas, occurs every year on June 25, half of X-mas, or Christmas, which (as you know) is recognized each year on December 25. Public schools discontinued teaching and celebrating the pagan holiday of Veemas mostly during the late 1960s. For more information, research the landmark 1966 Supreme Court case, Bailey v. the State of Indiana.

I tried to respond but found I could not speak. It was also then that I realized my arms were spread wide like wings, hands still surging with a foreign energy. My legs stretched out stiff, and my feet likewise pulsed.

For what seemed like a small eternity, Mr. Sneezlebums spoke to me in a language I do not recall. He was imparting to me three gifts:

1. Insight: We are more than our eyes can see, part of an existence more expansive than the seeming confines of space and time. The things we do ripple infinitely in a manner that disrupts and affects every living and non-living thing.

2. Purpose: Mr. Sneezlebums breathed on the tip of his cane and touched it gently, first to my feet, then to my two hands. Then he took his cane and traced a circle in the air, a portal. Within the portal was a destination I do not remember. The journey to that place was not a straight path in the physical sense but nevertheless represented a definitive culmination of actions and interactions that would ripple in such a way as to arrive at the image before me. He charged me to follow that path, and I said, "I will." It was the only thing I was able to speak.

3. Glory: But it was not my own.

I experienced rapture, and then blackness...

My alarm rang this morning, but I must have slept through it. I'd overslept by about a half hour. It had been a pleasant visitation, but my thoughts already were reverting to anxiety of the pressing labors before me. I approached my dresser to get ready for work and stepped on something cold and hard.

I looked down and saw a small lump of coal. The bottom of my left foot was smeared black. Mr. Sneezlebums, I thought, what happened?

The symbol puzzled me. Actually, it still does. A coal, after all, is like deadness, expended carbon.

But I thought more along the same train of thought. I thought of the coal as once burning. I thought of the fire that once consumed the black object. I thought of the transformation. That fire, that life, did not fizzle and die but emerged and transcended the object into an intangible but real energy that will ripple to infinite. I also thought that after a million or billion years of incredible pressure and time, what now is a lump of coal could become a diamond. I'm still not sure.

All I know for certain (and I think it's good enough) is that we are special. Happy Veemas to all and to all a good night.

Lost Dogs

I woke up to a sharp feeling on the back of my bare shoulder the other morning. It was the sting from a senile old bee. I probably flicked him away in the immediate daze of my interrupted dream, but I saw him again later in the day.

I think he was making the same witless journey across my bed that my slumbering presence had obstructed earlier that morning. He was a fat orange specimen, and ancient I assume (much my distinguished elder in bee years), creeping awkwardly across the undulating folds of my comforter.

I prefer to call him senile because of another puzzling encounter with a bee I had had in that room while visiting home weeks earlier. I was sitting in my room when I began to hear a frantic buzzing sound, the recognizable noise of insect wings slamming into walls, of a bee attempting flight in confined quarters. It went on for several minutes above my head, probably inside some crack in the walls of my parents' log cabin. Eventually the creature emerged, its enormous (even larger than the old guy that stung me I think) body appearing to be weighed down by hanging dustballs, as if it has just sprung from bee prison. I flicked the lights on and off to trick the bee over to my bedroom windows, which I opened for the bee's release.

Maybe an hour later, however, I heard the same chainsaw-like buzzing from the same corner. And the same Jacob Marley bee began to careen around the room in its hindered phantom flight. I released it again, hoping it would finally learn its lesson.

I'm tempted to want to believe that the bastard that stung me was the same confused bee from before. When I was much younger I was playing with my older sister behind the old horse stable shed, an area of our property that we didn't often visit. I was underneath a mysterious tree. During the spring its bushy top blooms full in brilliant white flowers. But it's a gnarly skeleton of a tree, with these wicked dead vines hanging vertically from its own canopy like witch's hair.

I remember being under this tree when the scariest looking spider I have ever seen descended a branch. I remember it was the color of fossilized bone with pointy crab-like legs, probably as big in diameter as my young palm. I fled terrified. Years later I was near the same spot with our mutt of a dog. He was rustling like a good mutt in the tall grass. I remember seeing him squirm his head, his dog face in a grimace as if from an uncomfortable itch. I watched him scratch his ear, and would you believe it? Suddenly what had to be the same legendary white spider from years earlier was crawling across my poor dog's snout. I fled again, afraid for a few moments that the spider might sicken or kill the dog with a venomous bite.

I can't explain to you the strange respect I had for that curmudgeon of a bee. Something about watching it make its wearied rounds across its lifelong territory.

Later that night I went to a concert in an old theater building in Tacoma, Wash. The headlining band was an old Christian folk/country/alternative group, comprising three musicians who had begun their careers in separate musical groups long before this already ragtag trio. They are called The Lost Dogs, and what a fitting name. There were these three haggard men on stage, two of whom rested their old eyes behind sunglasses, singing their songs - none of which I recognized - telling old-fashioned stories of abandoned dreams and God knows what else. I'd noticed on their Web site the day before that they had just toured from some shows on the East Coast days earlier. They were an odd respectable presence, making the same rounds across the American landscape as they had probably been doing for decades.

We mourn the memory of lost dogs, but what does that mean to a dog? Have you ever noticed how even the tamest, most loyal of canines can wander away from home. The slightest whim or distraction - maybe a scent, perhaps the triggered dog thought of an old buried bone - and a dog wanders off. If you're lucky you or someone else finds the stinker strolling contentedly across a field on the other side of town, oblivious to the notion that it's actually "lost."

Who was anyone to tell these humble three gentlemen that their era had come and gone? That their legacy was a old tapestry, rapidly fading?

That bee was definitely senile, an ornery bumpkin with no reason or reasoning capacity to bother with the thought that it shouldn't sting me on its stubborn northern journey.

My parents began burning the wood of the old rotted tree house yesterday before I left, a cute little playhouse where my sister and I used to slide down from, where we played with plastic food toys. It was once a real tree house, with wallpaper, a flowerbed windowsill and fake domestic furnishing. What it was isn't really important anymore. It hasn't been an important place to me in probably close to 20 years. It's gone now. It collapsed this past winter during a windstorm, fell to the ground from between the two massive cedar trunks where it was once proudly perched.

I roasted two hot-dogs over the coals of the fire. Nothing ceremonial. I was too much in an frantic hurry to be on my way and get working on a piece of writing that was due this morning.

I suppose the memory of that little house will come back to me decades from now, maybe as some unrecognizable picture in my mind of a red mailbox in the middle of the woods, or a fraying tire swing. Perhaps I'll be wandering the trail of a park or going about my own rounds as a wizened old hermit. I'll come to those two cedar trees (which will outlast me no matter how long I live) and insist in some loony babble to my grandchildren or whoever is nearby about an old tree house that's missing from the spot or the picture in my mind.

Senility, I believe, may be the reward of old age. A transaction of our old ways for the new. Anxiety for blissful ignorance. Hurried commutes for meaningless wanderings. Repose. Long-deserved peace as a witless fool.

I wonder what became of that old spider. I'd like to interview him and write his life's story. That tree behind the old shed will always be its kingdom in my memory. A dark place of terrible knowledge for which I may have been the wiser to have experienced, had I been a brave little boy instead of a coward. Were I to venture there once more, would I find him again? Would he invite me to his lair for tea and crumpets? Or would he just spout some nonsense, bare his fangs and terrify me one last time?

Eyelashes

I have long eyelashes. The better to bat you with. It’s something I don’t get to appreciate as much as other people who can view my profile without the aide of mirrors. I think it’s supposed to make my eyes soft.

Close up, my eyelashes seem grotesquely insectoid, like centipede legs (or like the fraying of an 18th century English whore’s hairbrush). In the morning they split open like two crusty cocoons, my left eye slightly faster than my right. But every day my left eye squanders its birthright for a good rub. Thus it’s cursed with astigmatism. At least that’s the story passed around by the scholars.

During the summer the fleas slide down my eyelashes and plunge into my cereal. In the dead of winter my eyelashes form icicles that scratch the surface of my eyeballs when I sleep so that I wake up red-eyed and passersby think I’m strung out and homeless. I just let them wonder. Long eyelashes conceal my eyes as well as my mysterious intentions.

Green eyeballs and long eyelashes. They would have branded me a wizard were I born in medieval times.

David Bowie. Jack the Ripper. Merlin. The prophet Jonah. They all had long eyelashes and green eyes (so did Rip Van Winkle and possibly Rip Torn, but don’t quote me on that).

We see the world through a darker filter. The stars glow fainter. Fire appears to burn less dangerously. We share more traits with the feline than the ape and curl up when we sleep. And we’re selfish as hell (something only we would brag about).

Do you want to touch them? Did you know that touching my eyelashes grants you three wishes? Did you know that the Nazis destroyed long eyelashes in great organized bonfires?

The eyes are the windows to the soul, and my eyelashes are the blinds. Or the prison bars.

Or are they the tuft of wild brush at the edge of the watering hole? Peer through the tall grass. Gaze into the pool and ponder your own reflection. What do you see?

Puff

slow burn cancer stick
smoke blown cigarette
nicotine infected smile
yellow pearly marble wall

time dishonored sacred stone
feeble addict sitting home
lighted fuse in stoic mouth
dripping ashes all around

beautiful diffusing gas
incense rising past the trees
gray muzzled hoarsy throat
glossy aged eyes

front porch romantic night
moonbeams filtered light
moping full with sorrow songs
red orange burning spite

respite coming sleep or wake
pack of problems near
hold it in two fingers
and release the lungs