The Light Society - Ch 5
CHAPTER 5: Just Beyond the Sun through Dark Glass
"Just Beyond"
There was a long silence as the group watched Black swirl and sing, his fit body moving as if toward the sun through dark glass. They watched his pale arms like wands. He seemed to howl at the booming shore, threading out a language like a hoop of honeyed light, a stream running in a gorge toward the sea, beckoning the errant darkness, hoping to publish wildly his dreadful imagination. “These are words that visit me in moments of prophecy!” he exclaimed.
“Moving to flutes, made from human bones, playing to the wolves
and the wild horses loping in the night. Moving to the zebra skin drums"
Black was a very healthy man, pulsing and malevolent with dusty black hair and silky skin more like stone than flesh, like cities adrift. His song became a nightmare and spoke of blood bats and headless children. There seemed a wild pandemic reality inside his skull where the sky had been washed.
“Maybe,” said White, “we should go off to sleep again and let the lightning flavor our dreams. Do not mind Black. He has a vocabulary of suspense without kindness or fondness or pettiness of phrase that couldn’t possibly make sense to anyone at all.”
"Just Beyond"
“White, I don’t believe he is wasting words,” said Green, holding Yellow in his arms.
“No, you are right,” said White. “Always draw the next breath to avoid bursting out laughing. Lets all go outside for shelter from the glass. Side by side we shall sit naked hideously on the shore and share our most spectacular light which vibrates by becoming continuous amongst the snatches of sleep.”
“I can not sleep yet,” said Yellow too Green in his embrace. “Come with me,” she said. “I have a dull ache to make consecutive thought impossible. I want to share my throat with you.”
"Still moving to the zebra skin drums. The lizard takes longer in his ultimate subtlety,” said Black, naked and drunk, skating on spider’s legs, describing elephants and fish. “There is no rest. We are flying down for gold in the new finery on a violet painted dead man’s horse, into the dancehalls with the residue of ancient laughter echoing in the eyes and teeth of every being,” he continued, sucking at the thin air his breath a rooty smell, riding beyond the scarlet rim.
“From your mouth a flurry of rabid birds, stones and trees and bones,” said Yellow.
“Into the rain and the night the wheeling flock flies!” Black shouted. “Listen to them, today even more predatory. All the rituals include the letting of blood, the mortar of the soul. I shall let my blood hang from the ceiling.” Black took a knife from the table and cut his hand open and danced in circles to a wild ecstasy letting his electric red light upon their faces shouting:
We struck our roots
In the graves of men
We struck our roots
In the graves of men
Outside it was wet and windy and Black fell to the floor flat and senseless. He was like a naked shell-less tortoise steeped in gore. All hid their eyes as White placed a green quilt over him. “At least,” she said, “he has a great collection of pipes. I shall take him to the dying man’s room.”
“There is in him nobility as clear as day and yet he is astray, a fleck of white foam, a powder monkey emperor, with telescopes for eyes” said Blue.
“The less we let our mad minds roam,” sighed Indigo.
“He was not trying to escape,” said Orange.
“Why of course he was,” said Indigo. “He was being lightning.”
“Sometimes, a little wildness can be brilliant,” said Green.
“I’m still not quite sure about the outburst of song,” said Yellow.
“Never perfection’s harmless drudge,” spoke White, “or a young boy being rulered behind the black glass walls.
“Just before we could conceive great frenzy there was the writhing serpents carrying the three pronged spears,” said Red with a grin focusing his eyes to Violet.
“Maybe another imaginary morning of purple gates opening to the reddening dawn,” Violet said.
White continued, “When he was young watching from the watch tower in the sky he observed three garden sisters drying their green hair in the sun, hands clutching at foliage.”
“And who is the man with the three pronged spear who sings the sleep producing song?” asked Orange.
“He is the one who ravished the fleeing forest, who for pleasure digs up the buried wealth in the bowels of the earth,” spoke White.
“He delights in the slaughter, in the down dragging numbness. In his silvery greed he only allowed some of his eyes to sleep before his hair turned to leaves,” said Black from deep within his toiling mind to the seven mouths, the seven channels filled with golden dust.
In the room there had been a paternal replacement, a shift in the minute particulars of father and daughter and son, and in all of mother Earth’s stones. Similar to the suspense after a death in the marketplace.
“Kindness is in our power,” said Yellow, “fondness is not.”
“We must first invent, then embellish,” said White. “In a tavern or in a brothel, all is a shoreless sea of great unyielding certainty where the wandering bird falls with weary wings.”
Suddenly, Violet shouted, “I who pursue you am no enemy! I am a female awakened after long burial responding to the art of self medication.”
Red, upon reviewing her slender horns, replied to her outburst of sound, “Loosen your robes of many hues feeding water to the clouds and throw behind you your bones.”
The drama of playtime
