I could say “eat my dust,”
but we both know that will never happen,
how hollow that old chestnut sounds,
coming from me, as
as hollow as the
rotten, caved-in nurse log where I was
curled, in pulsing, hermaphroditic bliss with my
mate just this morning. Jealous?

You see, my plight is no
Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell could never.
There is no prize, no diamond, no conclusion,
save for the salt shaker, wielded by a zealous
gardener, or the moment I find myself
caught in the beak of a satisfied crow,
my limbless body waving like an earth-toned
surrender flag, my feelers retracting a
final time.

The labyrinth of dreams is only accessible on certain days of the year: the middle days between the signposts of firsts and lasts, of high and low holidays. It cannot be seen at noon or at midnight, not when the clock is striking at all.

Not everyone can find the doors, let alone walk through them. Not everyone is a wanderer. A dreamer must be untethered by intense relationships, unweighted by either pleasure or pain. A dreamer must be light as a feather and as easy to blow in the wind.

When the day is plain and the hour muddled, when the wanderer is abstracted and bored—the labyrinth doors may sigh and swing ajar, then, and a lone dreamer might turn a corner in reality and drift inside.

The lakebed—my closest and most inscrutable neighbor—is written as a dry memory. Doubtless it speaks and writes in its own language of waves: those undulations of existence that hint and
transcribe the grain of everything. Here, the accretions of sodium and silicon oscillate in biography: the abyssal geologic context and the mercurial inflection of anemology.

I am loved by this place. I am alone. Everyone else gives it wide clearance and symbolizes it into death and a solitude so vast it is considered personal and hideous; it must be insanity brought on
by ressentiment that has driven me into such a tangible signifier of bareness. But the arid atmosphere above the salt flats wicks every drop of water from my skin. It would kill me in time, just like the rest of the world, but as a neighbor I can sojourn in, without the noise of judgment or entitlement, I relish the evaporative caress of the Darsh Mandolla.

I wrote a song once about fixing my crown

after being knocked on my ass

literally flat on the ground. 

I invite you if you’ve yet to do just the same.

Cause when we pause for a minute

there is no fucking shame

in the abuse we survived or the guilt from the lie

or the advantage taken from us

ancestors of the cry 

at the hands of our family or worse

of ourselves.