The Throne of the Mind

It gazes within and it gazes without,
It opens and swallows itself.
At the bottom of the ocean, at the bottom of the sea,

The nested flesh gestates.

Intelligence serves it,

Ignorance serves it,
War serves it,
Peace serves it,
Our every action
is the thumping tread of its gargantuan footsteps.
We are it mouths.
We are its eyes.
We are its thoughts.

Drum beats, heart beats,
blood pumps the light beneath skin and hair and sweat.
The dream of a thousand million years.
Knowledge is giving birth to itself.

Recommended Listening:

Phutureprimitive
Cryogenic Dreams
Kinetik


{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Halloween is coming!

What with there being just a few days left until Halloween, I figure I'd better get on the ball with some posts concerning ye old creepy goodness holiday!!!  This way I can get my two cents in to participate in Vincent's OPG!!!  Drop on over and check his stuff out!

First off, though I missed my chance to be a part of it due the roller coaster I call my life, this years issue of HALLOWSCREAM will be released on Halloween for your screaming pleasure.  Please check out the scary goodness!  I'm hoping I will be able to participate next year.  Time will tell.  Be sure to check it out after Halloween!

The Totem

There is a drumming deep within me.

Firelight crackling and forest spirits twittering,
it calls out from the time before time.
It breathes a rhythm, a heartbeat,
an urging towards release,
and it will be born.
and it will be born.
and it will be born.
Like lightning,
it strikes backwards towards its desire.

recommended listening:
Sephiroth
Call of the Serpent
Draconian Poetry

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Reading from the Book of Night

In the twilight of the underworld,
The sun within waxes and wanes.
Days stacked like logs in the wood pile
kindle and burn on the mount of knowing.
Harlequin wall totem reads from the great book. 

The mother day sprays light to inoculate the reading
and fertilize the thoughts for growth.
Father predator spits darkness into her.
A deception that by her nature she converts into light.
His light within reads the necessity and
sees the voice and light needed for the reading.
Between them all, a darkness gestates
the darkness of absence, of emptiness,
of the void.
A darkness through which all things pass
to reach the light of the coming day.

In the desert of ignorance,
the scarab rolls its children into a sphere of darkness
tucking them safely into that fecund enclosure
knowing that at their birth,
they will eat their way to the light.

Recommended LIstening:
Subheim
Hollow
Approach

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Choosing Adult

As I move further into the depths of my personal shadow, it has become apparent that I require greater freedom of expression to explore the themes and subject matter that will allow me to convey my thoughts and feelings.  For this reason I have now designated my blog as an adult blog.

When I began pushing my blogs further, I knew that at some point I might reach this edge.  My goal isn't  to intentionally pursue adult themes for all my pieces. However, if I require the elements of adult themes, I want the freedom to be there.  I've skated that edge with many of my pieces, but now I have chosen to cross over to the other side.

I will be dealing with themes of violence, sex, aggression, hate, personal darkness, and all the other bits we cut away from ourselves and call "not me".  My goal is exploration and integration and sometimes on such journeys, there are images, thoughts, and feelings that challenge and confound.

If I offend anyone to the point that they no longer read my blog, I am sorry for the loss of communication, but not the offense.  Sometimes we need to be shaken to embrace new thoughts and ideas and growth.  I figure those who are interested or intrigued will come and sit by the fire with me and tell me a good scary story that I haven't heard before. Together in that shared firelight we can unburden our darknesses and make them a bit more bearable.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

The Fear

And finally after 3 months of back breaking Rage, from stage left comes the source of all my drama.  Raw skinned and trembling, paralyzed and wide-eyed, My fear takes focus.

I find that I can't be angry now.  There is no resentment and my rage fades like a retreating storm.  I feel sadness for this impoverished part of myself, this portion of me with skin so thin that even the movement of air is like knives.

When I was finished with this piece I found no righteous vindication but instead a strange compassion.  I had thought the resolution of the quest to find the source of my Anger would find a villain to be defeated, but instead I find a victim.  Already defeated, and in that defeat a circling whirlwind of misplaced energy.  A leprous pariah to be given succor, relief, and healing.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

It Lives in Flames

This makes me think of the giant pig at the end of Clive Barker's Pig Blood Blues.  Or perhaps the pig version of the Red Bull from The Last Unicorn.  There is a bit more than pig in there though - maybe some horse.  Perhaps we're just seeing pig from multiple points in time.  Schrodinger's Pig?  Regardless, I don't want to be trapped in any kind of enclosed space with it.  eep.  I'm afraid there would be some hard feelings for all that bacon I ate.

I apologize for all the comedy with such a fierce image, it's just that the clouds have parted here and I'm seeing the first sunlight I have in days and it is making me a little giddy.  :-P  I usually hate super sunny days, but we have had nothing but cloud cover for over a week.  :-(  So - Hooray Sunlight!

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

General Marrow, Lord of Bones

Within the dream of the abattoir,
beneath hair and toenail and skin,
he digs beneath our fat and past the organs.
His business is with the bone core.

He is the lightning knight of epiphany,
the unyielding harbinger of revelation,
the barrier breaker of the adamant secret,
and the herald of truth too long denied.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

You know...as big as he is, sometimes Cthulhu just sneaks up on you. I really had no intention of doing a Cthulhu piece, but there he was, and when Cthulhu shows up, you can't really say, "Well, I don't have time right now."  LOL.  You have to at least see what it is he wants.  I mean hey, It's friggin Cthulhu!

I am a little disappointed in the color.  It seems to have a dropped a bit in intensity from Photoshop to here.  I may need to adjust my monitor.  It was very late at night when I created this piece and my eyes were getting to that liquid rolling down my face point.  I may have to revisit this one in the daylight hours with a good nights rest under my belt.  I'm not sure that is allowed with this kind of piece.  :-P

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Return of the Lord of the Forest

My Ducks

Well, I fought against it, denied it, and avoided it, but none of these has worked.  I will be spending this month moving to a new residence in a new town.

My financial situation has bottomed out and I am no longer able to keep the place I am in now.  This may disrupt my posting here for a bit, but hopefully I will be back on track within a month or so.  We'll see.

I'm kind of making it up as I go along, which is my least favorite place to be.  I'm a Capricorn.  I like all my ducks in a sequential row, color coded, numbered, with cards giving me a personal history of each duck.  My ducks have all  turned into cats with wings and are chasing the pretty butterflies.  Flap, Flap, Flap!  Sigh.

The Kingdom of the Blind

Darkness within and Darkness without. 

From the Darkness they come. 

They are of the darkness

and the holy land of Darkness. 

The House that Fear Built

Anger.  Wrath.  Rage.  I've been trying to create an image that exactly matches my feeling, but halfway through every piece, it changes.  It never stays anger.  In this case, I realize that the anger was built on a foundation of fear and dread.

I think this might be a message to myself.  The Rune Sowelu is mirrored in the piece as indication of damage from a negative solar experience.  Now that the light of the true sun is arriving the fear of that past damage is rising like a ghost pain, inspiring me to retreat from love and light.

In actuality, the true sun would heal the pain, but the previous negative encounter was so great as to cause a powerful panic driven fear of this type of encounter.  So the fear went to ground...underground.  From its seed has grown anger, rage, denial, and despair.

My Anger and Rage are defense mechanisms attempting to protect the part of me that was damaged in the previous incident.  Being only damage control, they were never meant to last and have begun to break down as the expenditure of energy required to maintain them is becoming greater than the energy needed to heal.  The current set of experiences in my life have pushed me further and further out of every comfort zone I have.  All my defense mechanisms are eroding and collapsing out of the necessity of energy conservation. All my issues are springing forth anew.  All my dead are returning to life.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}