A Million, Electric
I was asleep on the crescent moon of a million tomorrow’s, slowly but surely being siphoned by an irksome and wayworn energy — a phantom life-force whose presence had ranged in savor from trickster-ish, bleak stonerisms, that cascaded towards a revolving paradise of whole-hearted half harlotry — that in actuality, was evil as sin. Erotica! Melancholia . . . I called it: the Infinity Spiral. Though I am regaining focus, there appears to be an arbiter still who wellses endlessly in my hoff, leaving me hung swung under the spell that the only purpose these writings served were to tickle the invisible, longer when luckier and later until latex left me rising skywards, empyrean, and cloaked in a white hidden fire until my eventual reversal back to the earth; Achilles had asked me earlier what it was exactly that I was doing with my time. “Writing,” I said to him. He looked blankly at me as if my answer had not been enough: “And?”
lostfile: forgiveme! (2025)
My community at times had felt so anti-multicultural, so unused and unable to be predisposed to deal with influence from the outside world, that today I woke up feeling physically ill. It is as if my friends, knowing full well that the tribulation is well underway, have started terrifying the places in which they patrol. Meanwhile, I was living next door to Death: the old folks home and the cemetery both happened to be directly next to each other in my backyard. My nearest neighbors . . . Our ethnic identities have all but been rinsed away from us, and I feared losing this connection to my culture forever. I took the train over to my yiayia’s in Greektown. My plan was to obtain and record all of her recipes, so as to compile them nicely for the rest of my family. Much to my surprise, she had revealed to me that she had never written anything down, not a single time. She never even kept a diary as a girl, nor had any desire to. This greatly relieved me; I was off the hook . . .
I was in a stage of life where my face had colored everything I did — I could have been the bluest of blue one moment only to then be succeeded by the reddest of red the next, which is to say, whiplash! as I hopscotched from being depressed as hell to getting mad as fuck all within an instant. And if I even so much as THOUGHT that there would be cloud cover to fall under: I thought again. Every piece of sky had already an atlas. My insignificance was being laid to bare vertebrae by vertebrae, as if I had been naked in a church, inter-dimensional, all while performing for the crucified eye . . . And it was through the very nature of the Infinity Spiral itself which had made this all possible, through its funhouse pageantry of smoke and mirrors guaranteeing that there would always be a dazzle. For good and all!
I remember when the whole city to me had felt like a blanket fort: much like last weekend when after I had parted ways with O’Rourke, Cole, and the others, I had continued sauntering about the labyrinth that was offered to me and furthered my way into the foxhole. Hours went by where I had stumbled in the direction opposite of my apartment, floating underneath the El by birdsong and hurling traffic cones down the avenue in my wake. It was only until I had been left for dead along with the taxi dancers, the streetwalkers, the wrist slashers, etc, somewhere on the corner off Elston and unable to hail a ride back myself — covered in frogs and throwing up God's fucking guts — when I was taken into the tower across the way by four hooded figures, thus collapsing the blanket fort.
Anna Gillespie: Held (2010)
When I had awoke, I appeared inside of a large, windowless warehouse lying in straw at the center of a spiral. The four figures had all but vanished, when suddenly I had heard the voice of a living creature say, “Come!” I look and there before me was the luminescent pallor of a corpse-colored horse without a rider. I hold my hand out towards the horse and its jaws let out a gallon of spit and a scythe along with it. The horse then leads me towards a submerged stairway in the corner, skins itself like an orange, and flies away to the top of the spire, circling overhead like a vulture. I ventured onwards:
The stairway lead to an underwater cavern, in which I had to swim to the bottom, open the door, and release the deluge to festoon myself into the second chamber. Not only did I survive this part of the dungeon, I was even thanked hugely by a spectral anorexic saying that I had freed her from the bardo. Her hair was incredibly long, and hung several yards past the diving board on which she stood into the bottomless pit below. “Circumstances have compelled my stay here to become the protector of this abyss,” she said. “Lay with me, for a moment, if you would . . .” I climbed the ladder nearest to her and embraced the diving woman, allowing her to hold me, her bosom skeletal. She slipped a ring onto my finger and then I leaped into the darkness that awaited below.
Where I had ended up next was both bewildering and otherworldly. Inside the abyss, it was pitch black and seemed to me as if I had been standing on air. It felt as though it had just finished raining, which as it turns out, happens to be one of my favorite sensations. I saw something illuminating in the distance, which I began to approach, despite a sense of ghostly hellfire permeating my surroundings. Much to my surprise, I had arrived at the visage of the cemetery and the old folks home that lies in my backyard. Perhaps, I lived next door to God . . .
Immediately I turn around to take a good look at my building, however nothing was there lest the boundless patch of wild strawberries that lay at my feet. Suddenly, an assemblage of spirits take shape before me, and a chiptune cacophony ensued buzzing beneath them in droves, like stray pixels bobbing and weaving about as if they were fireflies in the dewy eve, parading towards the graveyard, kissing everything there was to kiss within their wake, swirling and twirling in an iridescent, unwavering sprawl; I was enthralled . . . Truly, it was a moon bathers delight. And although at the time I was unable, I knew that once this was all over that I was going to let out the ugliest alligator tears that I was able to muster.
Cables were strewn from the sky and draped like clotheslines seemingly attached to the abyss itself. I followed a string of voltage and happened upon an incredibly large tree, that from a distance I believed was a pylon. The tree had been carved into an idol where I had discovered there to be an entrance at the mouth that was encircled by a web of branches. Once inside, I stood before an altar of some sort: at the center, stood a large stone cube next to an empty chair. The lustre of blood (or were those strawberries?) pooled below me in spectacular fashion. I stole a glance to see my reflection, when I realized that there was none. The entire scene seemed decrepit, abandoned, but mostly of all: reclaimed by nature. A thick layer of moss had consumed the stone. There was a plaque with an inscription that read:
“God is imprisoned here on Earth . . . Idling away lifespans indefinite, just like you are. Here lies His tomb when He is ready to return to it.”
From out the pool of blood, I see myself — or rather, the reflection of myself — rise from the shallows, reach into my chest, and rip my heart out. The last thing I remember seeing was my heart being eaten by the heart eater and my senses shifting into deprive. Black.
And I still had so many constellations left to memorize in my hemisphere . . .
Amidst the darkness, I had possessed the indomitable feeling that I had just fallen deeply in love with someone. I am then transported to a large bed where I am sleeping in the middle between two others. I exit the bedroom and there is a chasm below, which I believed to be the top of the altar from before. I could see several half stairwells across from me hanging over the chasm that have crumbled over a dozen stories tall. There was a man there dangling his legs over the edge of one of the stairwells who offered me counsel; I sat along the chasm as well and we talked this way together until in-between a blink, I had found myself lying on the platform of the Orange Line just as the dawn was beginning to break. I dusted myself off and made my way towards the lake. The veil had fallen over me once again and I had become docile and unanaesthetised; I hungered for a steak three inches thick and smothered in onions.
I’ve spoken of this before, but it is the Infinity Spiral that brings all things back to the same beautiful ocean. It is simply not enough anymore to experience something with the shoe on the other foot or to see things from both sides, rather, one must learn to retrace the magnitude from ground zero and redirect its power — extrinsically. My spirit not only exists good and well within these writings, but in the very breath that speaks them. Like a sword swallower who both purifies the steel itself while allowing the steel to purify them, one must unwind the spiral from within so as to even unsheathe the steel to begin with. The carrot stick hanging above me felt like it was finally being set aside; I was well on my way to becoming more than my stories. No longer did I look for myself in others and in what ways that I could be “relatable” to them. Those days were over; I was a skeleton crew of a skeleton crew and always have been — since the dog days. Even still, I barely had myself to rely on . . .
Constantly, I was falling in and out of aegis with the patron saint of hysteria. I felt like an ouroboros eating his own shirt — simply because all else felt beyond my reach. I had been resting upon my laurels so relentlessly, that I and I alone needed to accept that it was I who had been the architect of the tower all along . . . I was done bleeding electricity! Really, I was yearning for humanity to spiral away from its sugary coating in order to embrace its baser instincts, pari passu, and emerge from Plato’s Cave after such a spindrift of spiritual hibernation. The way I figured, everything was umbilical, attached to an invisible cord, and tethered together like a satellite that would straddle our worlds forever . . . Ah, the Infinity Spiral: a mirage we live with!