"The Librarian"

#0163. You will find yourself in a hallway of light. The Librarian roots through the stacks of it and finds what you are looking for. Is this it? she asks you. It is. But you are unsure because the light is so disorienting. It is, you say, unsure of yourself. She does not give you the book. You are too indecisive. That can be fatal, here, she whispers without a hint of menace. You thank her for the warning and continue to teeter on your heels.

"The Ancient Things That Build Under Our Feet"

#0164. The Earth is full of ancient things that predate your ancestors. Under the rock and into the layers of steam and magma, the ancient things are rebuilding what we took from them. To our eyes, they are grotesque and hard to fathom. We are equally frustrating to them. Why do I feel so foreign on my own world? I have their eyes bolted into my sockets. In every mirror I see my reflection as a virus and a weed.

"Stories"

#0165. The stories are not true, you know that. But they hold sway because they activate what is dormant in your cells. Alice fed the cattle and the cattle grew weary and the cattle died and she devoured them. From them, from their desiccated remains in the great fields and prairies come the stories you know so well. They are embedded in you. Written on your bones. You cannot help but respond. You are a clockwork machine to her. Your motions are predetermined, each and every one of them. Your will is a myth. 

"Climbing Ever Inward"

#0166. My idea has been to climb ever inward. Beneath the cuticle. Under the fur. Damaging myself in bloody chunks to avoid paying the deposit. I want to be made of glass. Beautiful and azure hued glass. Smoky like you would find in a department store display case. So I do the damage inward. I build doorways and windows inside and I climb inward. Through cobwebs and debris I falter and I stumble. The rooms get ever more unpleasant and inhospitable. I am nowhere near the core and there is this dungeon. I want to whisper but my words come out as howls.

"More Things From Under Our Feet And They Have Pitchforks"

#0167. The Devils live under our feet and under our terrible cellars. I have broken down walls to find them. Pickax in hand. Jackhammer rabbit heart. Jackhammer collision retribution. The debris is stumbling. I am the debris. Shattered bits. Glorified activity. Procedural release. The Devils are the first born, I suppose. I worried about disbelief and the loss of my Angels. Now I am afraid of who I have turned away at the cellar door.

"The Mausoleum"

#0168. Where are the fissures and how do we find them? Do you see the mausoleum overhead in your dreams? It comes down as a great vessel. The stars give us our gravestones. They build what is needed in bricks of light and mortar of gravity. Lying, thieving, terrible kings make the way under the earth. The mausoleum is there stepping stone. They take up their crown before the descent. I am building you a picture of the universe.

"Believe in Me"

#0169. I am losing myself to myself, subsumed by it, drowning in it. My eyes sting. My chest aches. My stomach is a wriggling mess. Believe in me, she says to me, but I struggle to do that. I struggle to believe in anything. I hate what I have become, I tell her. The streetlamp gives her the appearance of something ethereal. She wants me to believe what she is saying. But I barely believe that she is there at all.

"Four Panes"

#0170. The siren song clarion call call out shout in through the four panes and from the four panes we derive our clarity we derive our purpose. All of this, Alice, has been about purpose. All of this, Alice, has been about meaning. This place is grim. But four panes show all the access of the universe. You drive forward face in like melting glass face out and scattered to the wind on seasick turbines. Four panes. She repeats it. Counts them out. One. Two. Three. Four. This is your hub. This, she says, is the launchpad to a universe of reason.

"The Tower Risen"

#0171. Alice is the name she wants you to use when she feels gentle and kind. You see the Cleopatra rimmed black of her eyes and the soft bat of her eyelashes and you feel her sweetness. But she walls herself up in fortresses of stone and riveted iron. From the battlements she watches. Her protective self, her enforcer self, the warrior goddess come to life in her tower. She is Artemis in the tower. Artemis the huntress. Artemis the soldier. Artemis the shield maiden.

"The Giants, the Dwarfs, and the Devils"

#0172. We begin to number the layers the things underground. Our horrors are ancient and born of the Earth itself. The Heart of the World pulsates with torrents of fire and as it does, the bones of the Earth are melted into heaps of biomorphic matter. The matter is infused with the World's Heart and from it spring Giants and from it spring Dwarfs and from it spring Devils. The spawn of the Earth are the monsters beneath its service. They move together in unison and upset the Earth from its precarious matter. If compliance is not found satisfactory, we will be cast into the waters.

"To Soften the Darkness"

#0173. When I get the courage. When I finally get the courage. Twenty one hundred. Then I will have the courage. I will look deep into the Eye and I will say to it, I have the courage, now. And the charcoal will smolder. And I will breathe it in deeply.

"The Path in the Wood"

#0174. This is my autobiography, I tell her. She is uninterested in my details. Her pretty eyes do not look in my direction. I explain the path in the wood. She does not listen. The path, I tell her, is the treacherous route to self-fulfillment or to death. She knows, she mutters, staring at her painted nails. Please look at me, I say to her. Please validate what I am saying, I beg. She looks up with a profound sadness on her face. The path does not matter, she says, quietly. No matter what you do, it leads to the exact same place.

"I Dream of Fishes"

#0175. I dream of fishes sometimes and my dreams of fishes correspond to the pregnancies of women I know and women I love. Each dream of fishes lets me know that a new life will be added to the orbit of my own. They occur, of course, with less frequency as the years progress. But it is a fail free divination. When I feel like my beliefs teeter on insanity, the dream of fishes reminds me that I am tethered to a broader world, connected to the universe in ways unseen. It is a fail free divination and so there must be something beyond our mundane senses.

"Devils"

#0176. The Devils speak to one another. They speak of their own insatiable hunger for evil. They speak of their desire to spark mortals into conflict. They speak of destruction. And they speak of the leverage that money can provide them. They slink from the Earth into the first world and they sit on our shoulders and they pull our reins as if we are their horses. We are forever in their thrall. None of us are exempt from the influence they exert.

"Hidden Memorials Scattered and Broken in the Wood"

#0177. He is not marked properly in a memorial field. His life lie forgotten in the midst of the wood. He cannot spin in his grave. His remains are pulverized and scattered. The memories are grown over with weeds and crabgrass. He cannot mourn the forgetting. The positive about being dead, one would say if they could, is that there is not a single thing that can bother you ever again.

"Locked Doors"

#0178. Parts of it are locked up and sequestered. The divisions are arbitrary and only glass and wood divide the chambers in any case. But when the trapped ones open wide, the burst is monumental. You see this wherever you go. Locked doors. Cages holding back the damage. Lying in wait. Trap doors.

"The Deadliness of Water"

#0179. I stand next to the bank and wonder if I can survive the pull of the rushing water. I step a foot over the edge and totter. My heart races as my balance slips. I can imagine how the cold water will feel in my lungs. I think about this all the time. The deadliness of water. The monsters of the fathoms hold me back. The Sea is my fear made manifest. The River is my fear congealed and murderous.

"The Icy and Digital Reaches of Heaven"

#0180. The Second World as split in two. We have known this since our birth. The dichotomy is built into our souls and etched on our bones. We know. There is the icy and digital reaches of where the Heavenly tourists reside and wait out their time. Icy expanse. Clouds and vapor. The wings there are diamond and sapphire. The Angels there are benevolent. And still they terrify us. Despite their command we are very very afraid.