I was inspired by ‘s recent piece “The Butcher of Bagdad”, which ends with her reflection on the cost of glory, and what glory even means. It reminded me of this poem, which I’m sharing with you today.

This poem is leagues different in tone and timbre from Noor’s indelibly elegant prose. Rather than painting the picture of glory, it shies away from confrontation, focusing on the approach towards the darkness that precedes it.

I wrote it as a recent high school graduate, and like the one I published last week, it also ends on an uncertain note. Perhaps it will leave you in a foggy void just like the one it features.

Inspired probably by Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time fantasy book series, and my own obsession with lucid dreaming, a rougher version of this poem spilled out of me as I sat at my Packard Bell computer with MS Word open. That young man (me)—with his religious trauma—must have been so terrified by his questions and doubts about the truthfulness of his Mormon faith, God, and the afterlife, that he could scarcely imagine what a confrontation with a literal void could look like.

Yet, the image of it remained with him.

Like the boy on his steed in this poem, I was hurtling towards it, oblivious to its existence, and what it meant. It’s clear to me now: the void in the poem represented the two years of full-time missionary life that I would undertake for my church, in another country, away from my family and friends. Two years that I’d never once considered not doing. I’d been raised up for it as step X in a series of steps mapped out for me by my church and family.

I could probably write this poem’s ending now, but I feel it more appropriate to let it stand as-is, with minimal line revisions to smooth its rougher edges.

On the last line you might see what this was all about, and why I’ve decided to leave it there. But I could be persuaded to push on, like the boy on his steed, and concretize this confrontation with the Void.

What do you think?

My voiceover:

Mournful Glory

A young man read a saga of death and defeat

In a certain life story of glory by death.

The worst story, surely, he ever had read,

(But the lesson therein was not written in ink—

For the book veiled truth, with a hidden wink).


Now asleep on his bed, he dreamed a dream.

A dream so dark that it must be told:


Over a mountain, across a hill,

Across a large field, and over a knoll;

In the darkest night air, lacquered dimly with care,

He rode his horse, his most blesséd mare,


He rode fast, edging close to the foot of a glade

With its fringe so honed, like the edge of a blade

His thoughts were a-flurry but held hardly a worry

For that sad little book and its terrible story

Of heroes and pain and mournful glory.


There hidden low, crouched ahead at the roots

Of the forest—tall sea of shadow and beast—

Was a bald, wary, lonely, cackling man

Who could never forget that forgettable story,

Of heroes of legend and mournful glory.


The wild man waited there to make his acquaintance,

As he feared for the boy and impending danger.

So, sensing he’d flee at the sight of a stranger,

He cowled himself, disguised as a Ranger.


Casually the boy rode on,

Passing many a rabbit and startled fawn,

Hopping o’er brambles, thorns and weeds,

And spring’s new stock of winter’s seeds.


The seeds were abundant and blanketed fields,

Among ice, straw, and clay, completely congealed.


Now as spring finally came and winter died down,

As a giddy young child suppresses a frown,

One last, little seed flew on winter’s last breeze,

A wheeze through the tops of the towering trees—


Whispering of a forgotten story,

Of legend and myth, and costly glory.


That black, little pod fell on softening ground.

There, it sank slowly down, and with hardly a sound,

Became a black hole, very wide and round,

Spewing fog, a dark pall surrounding his town.


Transcending all reason, so far out of season,

The miasma began stirring the people to reason,

Conjecture, debate, its existence;

What its origin was—was the question, insistent.


As his horse’s stout hooves tilled the sodden lawn,

So ignorant still, the boy pushed on,

He approached the abyss, abnormality,

This threat to his very mortality,


The moment was locked, avoidance now blocked

By his rhythm and breath, beating time from his chest.

The old man in the dark, keen and wary of all

That surrounded the chasm—its precipitous fall—

Moved to shadow the lad and his trusted mount

Through the wood—speedy strides—as fast as he could,

Trampling wet twigs and leaves on the dark forest ground,


As the wheezing continued, a grisly sound.


From out of that hole, the intangible bore—

The oppressive depression, a feeling, no more,

Was steeling and reeling for what was in store:


If the boy, oblivious, ignored the lore of that forgotten life story,

Of one young man and unwanted glory.

Here’s another poem from my 20-something year-old archives, freshly dusted off.

Audio recording (Hopefully better than Substack’s AI-voiceover):

The Purloined Plot

For far too long, I have believed

That something other than myself

Speaks in whispers, falling dreams.

—I’ve answered all its calls.


I heard them as a younger man,

Though much louder and more frequent.

My young mind, in lesser wisdom,

Harped them with soulful squawks—

Heady, rude, barbaric yawps

—to mentors, teachers, kin.

Recognition sought

—and recollection, within.


Humming tunes, never heard

Painting scenes—far-off worlds,

Sculpted forms—exotic grace

Conceiving structures, stations, ships,

Hung in the void of outer space.

Singing sagas, ballads, stories

Of hard-won, faded glories

—unveiled before my gaze.


Another story that must be told

Evades my sight and grasp

As slithering echoes, nothing more.

A soft susurrus, hidden lore

that bids me clasp

with clumsy claws its untold yore.

—surely, the key I’ve sought.


Troubled sleep in later years

Revealed its edges, bounded fears

Clarity cloaked by tarnished glass and frame

which hold its portrait on the wall.

I’ll try, before the tale escapes.

Though many worms through it now bore.

—the dream slips further, even more.


I remember being thrown onto stone

And what surprised me more

Than the clash of brick on bone,

Than the physical trauma

—was the hell awaiting, a deeper drama…

Why not strike at the heart of this tale?

They led me out, after weeks, enchained

And dropped me on frosty grass.

My neck pressed onto icy wood

—no ceremony, nor last words said—


The axe was falling fast now,

Descending toward my neck

—the other villagers were next.

The bright, curved blade, the axe,

A metal pick to strum my lullaby—

—for now was time to sleep…


The pain, it lingered on my skin.

It seemed I’d woken up,

and wider dreams of wandering,

Visions of vacuous victory,

vanished—and left me pondering.


Feeling numb, with open eyes,

A golden ball rose through the ground,

And looking up, I found

Its amber light now everywhere,

Within my bones, upon my skin

—and fused with the air around.


Something stirred me, deep within.

Boom of thunder, soft spring rain:

The light that comes from earth and skies

Is the only thing that’s true.

You’ve let blank deeds parlay for you.

But true light is born within your eyes.

No clue of who had spoken

Was I still dreaming? Now awoken,

No one there.

No form to match that loving care

That shook my being, caressed my ears,

—and ironed out all of my fears.

Please read part 1 first:

Did you read Part I? If you didn’t, please do, to read the whole malodorous experience.

The Watcher(s)

I’ll never know for sure if that experience was actually an encounter, or if it was some aberration in my environment—or gut. But the half-lidded memories and fuzzy logic remained echoing whispers of something more profound. The raised hackles and chill-bumps up and down my back suggested I was being watched…like prey.

This experience would help shape how I think and view reality itself.

Before I begin, a brief comment on what I mean when I refer to myself versus others. In a Paranormal context, I see no difference between the two, be they aliens/NHI, UFOs, cryptids, ghosts, or whatever. Whether NHI (non-human intelligences) are truly “other”—archetypes, psychological projections, or mere fantasy—is irrelevant to me.

For me, in a spiritual context, the Self encompasses the other and the other encompasses the Self.

They are us. We are them.

I believe something did visit me that day. It even bore the blue light signature of later transformative experiences that would follow. But the smell that lingered when I woke up was unique and unmistakable: that of lit matches infused with burning sulfur.

So, was it from the Jinn/Djinn, the Greys from UFOlogy lore, or did I or my attic appliances… “fart”? That was the suggestion from ChatGPT 4o, although it didn’t word it quite that way; the AI-generated hypothesis was that it could have been a plume of sulfur dioxide from somewhere in the attic, or my bowels.

I got the answer, but it came to me as layers, like peeling back an onion—which incidentally contains sulfur-rich chemical compounds galore.

The first layer straddles the fuzzy line between truth and story:

Although I’d mostly become a believer in aliens (NHI) through the lens of UFOlogy, I’d held onto some degree of skepticism, which offered little comfort. About a month later, I had one of the most transformative spiritual/metaphysical experiences of my life, and it was the kick I needed to finally peel back the onion—but with someone’s help.

I should comment on my emotional state at this point. Intellectually, I remained skeptical, but my angst about whether the Phenomenon was real or imaginary—and even more broadly, the afterlife—gradually worsened my ability to focus at work, as my lack of knowledge fueled both late-night and work-time research into the Phenomenon. I was heavily burnt out in the wake of two home remodels, a cross-state move, a layoff, two family deaths (my mother’s cancer and death, before that my mother-in-law’s passing), Hurricane Beryl (which toppled a huge oak onto the corner of my house and wrecked my roof and shed, narrowly missing my wife), the loss of my Mormon faith, and growing unease about my career in an AI-dominated future.

Enter the Shaman

In the r/Experiencers subreddit, I eventually found Daniel Rekshan of DSETI.org, who had been posting a lot about his hypnosis work, and I was happy that he didn’t deny the “false memory” problem inherent to using hypnosis for “repressed memory retrieval.” Another huge plus is that he wasn’t a strong proponent of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. Dan is a paradox, gracefully holding a nuanced space between skepticism and mysticism, and his psychology and computer science background appealed to me, as the social scientist/engineer type that I am.

Dan is a licensed hypnotist (in both the Depth Hypnosis and Quantum Healing methodologies), so I booked him right away and bought his book on the Shamanic Dreaming Hypothesis of ET/NHI contact.

His book was eye-opening. It helped me reconcile the skepticism I held with the veracity of my experiences, while offering me a metaphysical framework to mediate between my subconscious mind and spiritual world.

I had two sessions with him. The first, though brief, was transformative. I may write on it later.

The first onion layer came off during my second hypnosis session, wherein I’m pretty sure I “channeled” other beings for the first time. The hypnosis felt like a semi-consciously led dream. Over a Zoom video call, Dan helped me solidify my intention for the session, put me under trance, then facilitated by asking me the questions I’d prepared. Among the questions was this:

Below is an answer, perhaps this onion’s outer layer, straight from the transcript.

In the transcript, note how I blur myself with the other. Here, I’d begun channeling a sleep paralysis entity who appeared to me next to my childhood bed at night as my older brother, before transforming into an axe-murdering, greasy, long-haired, smiling Viking guy who jumped at me in slow motion, large half-moon axe raised high above his head (my scream woke the whole house)

Transcript:

Greasy Axe-Murdering Entity (G.A.M.E.): The experience was meant to scare you. We have fun.

Me: Do you feed off the fear?

G.A.M.E.: Only in the sense that a bully…[trails off]

Me: Are you evil?

Me (voicing an intuition): I think it’s part of the play—we’re part of the play.

G.A.M.E.: We wear the masks. We don the costumes.

Dan (hypnotist): Is that the nature of good and evil—the sense of participating in a play that has comedy and tragedy? Could you speak more about the nature of good and evil?

G.A.M.E./Me: We’re the stage technicians as I said earlier. The feelings associated with good and evil are attached to the material world. They’re attached to the imprinting of your experience on our psyche.

Dan: Is the sulfur smell experience explained in the same way? …how do you understand that “stage scene”?

Me: It was a physical contact—a visitation. It was meant to scare me. I’d like to know what happened to me during that time. Was I taken somewhere else? Was I just visited in my space? Was I studied, observed? Who were they? How could I know who they were? Does it matter?

The Watcher(s): Doesn’t matter—if you want to think of us as Greys, then you can also think of us as the Fae. You’ve read so much on these subjects. Your mind can’t coalesce us into a particular form because you know that our forms are infinite.

The Mask Stays On

The session offered an answer. It was a “true-enough” story whose ambiguity was as foggy as the mist that clouded that room’s single-paned windows that smelly night. Whether the Watchers were faceless projections of my subconscious mind or something genuinely other, they refused to remove their mask.

So, were my visitors Greys, Jinn, stage technicians, archetypes, or all of the above? Although my fear of them had subsided thanks to that new framing, the ambiguity kept me wondering:

I’d listened to a few Jinn reports on Islamic podcasts, I’d also read a few sulfur smell reports from Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia, whose latest edition’s cover incidentally mirrors its thesis that the UFO phenomenon may be an extension or evolution of folklore from ages past:

I didn’t know it then, but the truest answer was hiding in the gaps of my questioning.

It’s one thing to “know” the source of the smell; it’s entirely another to ask, “What does it mean?” I was so focused on entities and UFOs, I didn’t think to wonder about its symbolism.

A spiritual awakening doesn’t just awaken you to the existence of spirit. It instills a new way of looking at the world and at truth writ large. It’s a paradigm shift that shows you how life is replete with omens (symbols), just as dreams are. It awakens you to the dream that is life itself. You realize that regardless of the material provenance of unexplainable events, there is a design behind them, and we are the designers—architects building scaffolds of meaning as we climb upward out of the Void.

In shamanism, omen work looks beyond prosaic cause and effect thinking. Maybe my attic water heaters had actually “passed gas.” But the synchronicity of it—coinciding with the memory of my space being lit up by blue light on the wall above—matters more, hinting at greater lessons to unpack.

The Color Blue

The essential lesson came by way of color.

During that session, in delving into yet another experience, I arrived at an Earth-like planet orbiting a blue star in the Pleiades star cluster. There, I saw and described a majestic blue being lounging on an obsidian floor in a “star sanctum,” on a space station tethered to the planet. A blue and green spectrum of color flooded the room through the floor, and the walls were etched with hieroglyphics that told the stories of lifetimes of acquired knowledge and experience.

The colors’ vibrancy and ray-like movements felt significant, though I didn’t yet know how to interpret them. Some quick searching led me into a patchwork of metaphysical color systems, including New Age ideas about “Blue Ray Starseeds” and broader esoteric traditions of the Seven Rays, which appear in both Theosophical teachings and some later interpretations of Hindu thought.

My research led me to @officialthealchemist (Youtube), whose video “Who Are the Blue Ray Starseeds? Are YOU One of Them?” got me thinking about how color in the imaginal realm can be a vehicle for self-discovery and self-knowledge.

The hypnosis was my bridge from the materialist “alien” interpretation to a more personal, psychological one.

Suddenly everything felt so new and wonderful.

Rays of Creation? Cool! I thought. If that Blue Being was me, does that mean I’m a Pleiadian starseed?

What color does sulfur burn again?

In her other videos, The Alchemist (Sarah Elkhaldy) talks about how so-called Blue Ray Starseeds have an inherent ability to “transmute” pain and trauma into higher vibrational forms. Here was another new term: Transmutation. Though I've come to see it overused ad nauseam in esoterica, the word is often uttered in the same breath of Shadow Work, which got me learning more about Carl Jung. At the same time my wife, a psychologist, had been reading books on Jung’s life and works, sharing them with me.

Elkhaldy explains that Jung, drawing partly from his own intense inner experiences, visions, and “fantasies,” interpreted alchemical symbolism through the psychological lens he built into his concepts of The Shadow, the Self, integration, and individuation. His work also engaged deeply with Gnostic and Hermetic currents; his work reframed those older spiritual ideas into a more acceptable framework for modern psychology.

That was when I suspected it: the smell could be a real-world metaphor for my own alchemy.

Lead into Gold

Spiritual alchemy turns lead into gold, symbolically. It’s the process of the psyche’s transformation.

For Jung, alchemy became the symbolic language for inner transformation. My question shifted from,

What visited me, if anything at all?

to

What in me was being transformed?

Sulfur matters here, because in the alchemical tradition, sulfur is one of the core elements of transformation.

Zosimos of Panopolis was one of the first major alchemical writers. He wrote of alchemy in visionary and spiritual terms; for him, material transformation and spiritual transformation appear deeply entangled.

In Visions of Zosimos, sulfur was part of his “divine water” symbolism, in which his use of the Greek word theion carried a double meaning of “divine” and “sulfurous.” Like water, sulfur is a transforming medium, and it's used as an agent of coloration, dissolution, and pneuma—invoking breath/spirit, or the bridge between body (soma) and soul (psyche).

Zosimos’s was a visionary approach to alchemy, but Paracelsus made the sulfur symbolism much more explicit. Paracelsus described sulfur as the soul itself, linking spirit and body. His tria prima system consisted of sulfur, mercury, and salt, and sulfur was the combustible, “animating” principle.

Nigredo, Dark Night, Void

The smell of burning brimstone is an uncanny omen of ignition.

Burning it produces a mostly “smokeless” fire (with nasty fumes, certainly), best seen—in the dark—at night. And that period of my life—the hurricane, cancer and death, ADHD burnout, and the existential crisis threaded through all of it—had been the dark night of my soul, my own alchemical nigredo, during which the old me had been smelted down by the furnace.

In the alchemical tradition, the prima materia—the raw material of transformation—first passes through nigredo, the blackening stage of putrefaction and dissolution. The smell wasn’t proof of anything. It was an omen of the transformation I’d begun, and sulfur burns blue.

The fear I felt that night, and throughout that longer soul’s night, was my teacher. The beings I channeled may have been the masks over my own fear—the parts of myself that scared me into silence my whole life, the indoctrination that kept me submissive to a church I could no longer believe in, submissive to a version of myself that kept me safe by staying small and quiet.

Maybe they were the liminal stagehands, waiting in the wings for my unbecoming.

Thanks for reading!

Here’s the full hypnosis session report:

Here’s another piece on where this all led me, and how it brought me here to Substack:

Share Enter Nyxus

tended webs

spindly legs prick taut membranes,

—pop—

what lies beneath? conspiracy’s a void,

(maybe true, or not), when curtains fall,

who pulled their cords? whether human, beast, or devil,

or god, or

saintly priest and king

i’ve been the unwitting stagehand, set designer,

Prima Donna, groundling drooling rivulets

as porcine hearts beneath unspotted tunics

beat their last—

do we stop the show or break a leg?

daddy long-legs and black widows tend the webs

that span between

throbbing eggs, unseen.

dramas hiding the anguish,

the torture

that tore her,

and her, and him

to serve a shadow’s whim.

If you want, have a listen to this AI-generated song of my poem:

This ~500-word scene in my science fiction novel was pivotal for my world building. It helped me develop more of the alien mechanics of Nyxus, the void my light beings call home. In the late mathematician John Conway’s Game of Life, the pixels (or voxels in a 3-D space) arrange themselves together under constraints called Rules. It’s a 0-player game because we can only observe once the initial conditions are set and watch what arises after hundreds, thousands, millions of “turns”.

In my saga the creator of the light beings who inhabit Nyxus, the exiled man, is deposited in the Void where he builds life using his ship’s Quantum Drive, modified heavily with other ship systems to generate the light, rules, and logic from which the light beings (Drimnari) form and evolve.

Bear with me as I explain:

In Conway’s game, Rules define the conditions under which a pixel can survive. For example, if a pixel is surrounded by too many neighbors it dies, as if by overpopulation. But if there are too few neighbors it also dies, as if by loneliness.

My light beings are created in a similar way. Except they’re not made of pixels or voxels; they’re made of drifting rays of light joined together as intelligent bundles, or clusters. In the Void, light has its own sort of gravity, owing to an alien physics.

In this system, intelligence arises stochastically from trillions of turns—my beings call them Pulses—in “the Game”. But not all bundles gain intelligence. Some arise like lifeless, oscillating monuments comprising the “landscape” of the Void.

In this scene, one Drimnari, Flutter, shows her friend one of these monuments, an Oscillator:

“There it is, see it whirling, like this?” My nodes are twirling petticoats, alternating a lively green with a bold blue.

“I see it, but I won’t go any closer.” Stone says.

“Suit yourself.”

I release her tether and zoom toward the Mill, my favorite Monument, an Oscillator to be exact. I’ve been practicing, and I’m ready to show her. Got to time it right, before the next Pulse. The last one was seconds ago—should give me plenty of time. It’s in front of me now. I splay a few tendrils wide and latch onto one of its arms as it winds back around.

Now!

Then I feel it, the movement, its gravity. I flash a bragging grin and hope she’s impressed. I’m wrapped around a spoke. It feels amazing. How it moves me. The way it squishes one side of me but stretches the other. I flash another invite and I look for Stone, her gray-blue orb making hardly a shimmer every time she swings into view.

Not impressed? Let’s try something new.

I extend two orblets towards the Mill’s center cluster, a gorgeous gyrating prism. I pull myself in and feel an opposite pull backwards! Holding tighter, I hug the central node but the turning intensifies.

Moving speeds it up.

I should get out now. I try to move, but I’m spinning so fast. I jitter light. The next Pulse comes soon. Stone will see I’m scared. I remember the Primes’ tales, Irida’s warnings. I focus on the prism and though the spin is terrible now, I don’t feel as trapped. I’m bathed in its soft-white glow.…

I remember the mess I’m in and try to shimmy outward. No luck.

Stone can’t get close, but if I extend a node…

I unspool a yarn and it flails in circles around me. She can latch onto it, but I must stay calm or I won’t harmonize with her. The ether around me thins and I sense a familiar, budding charge—the Pulse; it’s close. I flash a distress pattern and see blurred blues and grays nearing with each turn of the Mill.

Thank you.

Not safe yet though. If the Pulse happens now, I’ll become a fixture on the spinning monument, neural nodes scrambled. A spoke on a wheel. Forever.

Oh no, no, no—Stone! If she latches on at the Pulse she’ll die too. I try to reel in my tether—I can’t. I feel her clasp onto it, but I can’t warn her off—my talk-nodes aren’t on it. I feel a tug outward. Yes, a little more. Hurry.

I pull against her as I feel the familiar buzz all over, but this one’s…heavy. I try and release her but she’s coiled around the yarn and yanking harder.

The prism’s pull weakens.

I lunge.

I am the caesura, the Mother. I am the Mill, I am Stone, I’m Flutter.

I am every Monument, every random ray

I’m the space between—

I’m alive, I think. I swivel around for her. There she is—shining erratically. We live. The Pulse must have come once we were free of the Mill.

I become a sphere with wavy edges and reach out a tendril. Stone hovers closer for a second and speeds off, away from me.

I hope you enjoyed it! For another glimpse of Flutter and Stone’s world, check this one out:

Are the answers right in front of me?
Is there anything at all to see?
I know somebody who may know.
He peers from right behind my eyes…

Twenty years ago, as a high school senior, I wrote a poem about two voices arguing—one bright and seeking, one dark and knowing. I was wrestling with the cultural fascination of that era: Fight Club‘s Tyler Durden whispering truths the narrator couldn’t face, A Beautiful Mind‘s John Nash befriending hallucinations that felt more real than reality. These films and others like it asked the question that haunted me at eighteen: what if the voice in your head telling you you’re crazy is the only sane thing left? What if brilliance and madness are not opposites, but reflections?

I didn’t understand then that I was channeling my own shadow work before I’d ever heard the term. The poem began as psychological dialog, focused on mental health and the link between brilliance and madness. That layer still sits on the surface, but the larger allegory sits beneath it, like muddy water underneath spilt oil.

Which voice is the real one? Who gets to survive?

As I’ve done some inner work myself, following faith deconstruction, the poem has transformed with me, outgrowing the “mental illness as plot twist” trope for something more alchemical: a meditation on ego death, integration, and the void that emerges from the cracks in our sanity, our reality.

For example, with respect to cult or high-demand religious conditioning, an outcome of Religious Trauma Syndrome is the creation of a sort of dissociative identity, where coercive, authoritarian language incentivizes the suppression of the more darkly emotional, questioning, sexual self in favor of the one that captures praise through adherence and conformance. This poem illustrates some measure of the dissociation I felt back then.

Now let’s widen the lens:

Recent events have forced many of us to confront our collective shadow, which hides behind the bright masks society wears to blind us to what we can become—in spite of the cruelty and violence around us). This poem seeks to illustrate that dichotomy at the individual level, but echoes at the collective level.

Often our brighter half is just the mask we wear. The darker half is the shadow we ignore, the one we try to suppress—our past, traumas, attributes, fears, love, anything at all—which trails us. It’s what we wish we never had, until the Great Work occurs. What emerges from entering into a dialog with the shadow is the empty space where transformation becomes possible.

What if nothing comes out of it? Maybe you can’t imagine your life without the mask. Maybe it’s fused with your skin, and it’s too painful to remove, leading you through darker paths and dead ends.

You might seek out death, our tempt it, but death is just another void. So why not consciously jump into the dark and welcome your unbecoming?

It will bore into you, eat you up, but trust you’ll be remade into something more real.

A note on my use of flowery, archaic language throughout: I’ve tempered that compared with earlier versions of this poem somewhat, adding minimalism where it fits the story, but the language aims to embody the way our brighter halves dress up our reality and perception.

Voici le poème:

The Shadow

Are the answers right in front of me?
Is there anything at all to see?

I know somebody who may know.
He peers from right behind my
eyes…

	---

Yes good sir, you wanted me?
Want to see what I can see?
This I tell you, you should know:

You cannot know, you’ll never know! 
You are not me,
Now I must go!

	---

Oh tell me, pray.
I really wish to see
What everyday you always see.
Stay one minute longer, please.

	---

You nut! You’re truly blind.
The answer’s so simple to find.

Look behind!

	---

I see my shadow, yes. I do.
Though, turning back around,
The shadow, with its wispy fingers
Only stares straight back at me and lingers 
On the grassless ground. It doesn’t turn
With me, the sun stays still,
Like a bright and yellow floating urn,
While the shadow remains unturned.
Why is it so burned?
It’s blurred, but I who stand in the sun am not.

My mind rots!

How does a dark mass
Get spawned from such a brilliant
Sphere of yellow above this flat, gray grass?

	---

Fool! I’ve wondered much,
How you came to be so—touched.
	
	---

I see the shadow. Now, leave me be!
It must be you who veils my eyes—
I’m so tired of your lies…

	You must be a devil in disguise!
	
	---

Now this, I tell you; I can muse:
You’re filled with light, you're tarnished bright!
A blinding, slimy white
That clouds the lenses of your sight!

Dude, you are definitely on the trail,
I promise you, you shall not fail
In finding the abandoned crypt.
(Never has anyone read its writ—
	hidden in one gray crevice, I’ll not let that slip)
Where written is a dusty, crooked line
Blasted by the sands of time—
Written by the mottled
Tendons from a feeble band
Of sinew from a decrepit hand.

Through contradicting ruminations,
Through vaulted language and tilted cadence,
Let the questions be your guide
Amongst the shadows stretching wide.

Does this help? Now, does it?
HURRY UP!

	---

I’ll take my time, you sunny fellow.
Your ill-learned manner is a sickly yellow,
You’re a cynical fiend who haunts my dream
Of somber sleep sans coffee cream
Parading through my bloodstream!

I can’t help that you, a divining rat
Who wears me like its favorite hat—
A cap to shower you every hour
With one second of gilded power—

I can’t help you’re like a phantom
Of a long-forgotten kingdom.
A flower on a grave,
Coaxing some dead knave
So strangely to behave!

You shower me with power, true,
Each time, surely with a glower
And though sweet joy
keeps bubbling up, 
You use me like toy.

This brief lapse—a curse, no less—
Weighs upon me like

Sky swallowing a mountaintop,
or…
oil sheen creeping over a puddle.

Thus, your designs for my unrest
And drifting gleams, each mental test,
Have made this weary soul digress.

Thus each golden second, all fifty-nine,
Is wasted on your impious rhyme!
	
	---

How useless is this all!
I’m trying to help you after all.
If you don’t want my help…fine.
I’ll leave you to your fifty-nine.

	---

Please don’t leave.
Though your temper reeks, I will be meek.
Help me with just one sneak-peek;
I swear it’s all I need.

All I need.

	---

My funny friend, you are persistent!
I know why you’re so insistent.
But do you? Here’s a clue:

Wrapped in a cloak, a misty fleece 
Of rarest find, lies a personal piece,
A private code that brings no peace.

When you read its curious marking,
The black ol’ buzzards will come a’ hawking,
Skillfully encircling,
And their terrible
Sweet squawking
Will descend upon you, mocking
All the ill-earned, squandered
Understanding that you’ve 
Rendered for the taking.
	
	---

Your hellish rhymes are dressed as wisdom,
But I still can’t see once for myself
The things you claim to see.
	
	---

Ooh, you’re getting close!
You court the silver ghost,
The strange familiarity you cleave to—
that you need.

And I do too.

(Here goes)

Imbecile!
You just pretend to fend me off,
And though you weakly send me off,
You tend to quaff 
My florid phrases and cheery faces—
Just brittle masks shrouding darker traces.

The shadow you remarked
Is yet a dying spark
In that gray mulch you call a brain,
Which waits for one snake-red rain
To quench its squishy corner-stain,
That still remains completely sane.

	---

How does that make any sense?
Just tell me its significance!
	
	---

It trails you, my ignoble friend.
I fear…you’ve met your end.

	---

Ah! A pain from deep within my ear,
Though, my friend, I can still hear.
Continue, please; enlighten me.
	
	---

Very well then, 
though your left cheek
Begins to swell and 
your upper lip’s a—milky green?

You’re enshrouded.
Your rent mind is clearly clouded—

Oh no, 
Your left eye is a filmy white,
Dear friend, have you your sight?
May I continue shedding light?

Your right eye—shines bloody red!
I recommend retiring to bed.

	---

I can see, still.
Could your words be right?
They are blight!

Again, whenever I rest my head,
I smell a scrumptious, juicy dread—
Whooshing whispers
Echoing in leaden dreams
Of sleep upon my bulging bed.

No more coffee! No more cream!
Go on, go on, before I scream!
	
	---

Ha ha ha ha!
You are the type,
Who dives below the very water
That will be your sightly slaughter.

A great white whale has risen up
To swallow they who delve the deep,
who rise from sleep to hear my rhyme!

(I should probably say it now):

I am he who cannot sleep. 
You’re the dream within my Keep,
The home where sober thought
Collapses to insanity.

You’re the sun, the floating urn.
You spawned me here. I cannot turn,
So quiet night became my lure,
And now, I hope to be secure
From you, dear friend

One second was ever a fleeting cure.
	
	---

Oh, so I’m the nut?
I will outwit
Your nonsense ramblings
For one sound second, 
maybe more…

Enough—
The foul fowl have been sent,
Here they come now.
How they swoop!

What’s this, a mirror right across from me?
Just what is it that I’ve failed to see?
…

Ah! 
What mosaic melt of sloughing skin!
The truth emerges now, I think!
Do you feel pain, my clever friend?
Between us, is there any link?
Are we both shadows of some wilting wraith,
Who bound us fast in capricious haste?

My face is—erased? 
feels

bone-eye worn—
Sunken,
torn, and

many a wriggling weevil
begins to—

hollowing 
my
rotting 
vessel…

Can I rest now?

	---

Yes. Rest.
No pain here.
For now, I’m still alive.

By this, my plan, the glyphs
Succeeded, after all.

You’ve dwindled in a dying fall,
a pitiful, desperate crawl
Through a fiery red and clotted hall.
	
And now I’m free,
From that splendid inconsistency—

	The brighter half of me.

Why write a poem about this?

I write under the pen name Cael Lawenu. I chose “wenu” from Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche people living in the Southern Cone. I chose the word to be a quiet nod to “wenu mapu“ (meaning the land above / sky-land), and because it carries the same root, “mapu,” that lives inside the word Mapuche itself: mapu (land) + che (people). I’m half-Chilean, and I have ~16% Southern Andean genetics via my mother’s ancestry.

I wrote this poem because my heart hurts to see what is happening to this beautiful region and to help others know how they can help.

The Catastrophe

Over the last two decades, Patagonia’s fire seasons have taken hundreds of lives, alongside the loss of homes, watersheds, and old-growth forests.

In Chile now, “mega-fires” in Biobío and Ñuble have killed 19–20 people, displaced thousands, and burned between ~25,000 and 38,000 hectares, with hundreds of homes destroyed and many fires still active.

In Argentina’s Patagonia, major fronts in Chubut have burned roughly 12,000 hectares in the Andean region, threatening towns and infrastructure. Local reporting also describes dozens of homes lost and a larger, season-to-date toll across multiple fronts.

It’s not only forests that are burning; trust is too, fanned by whispers of why this is happening.

Officials point to drought, wind, and suspected arson. In parallel, a louder political narrative has tried to tie “terrorism” and “arson” together with Mapuche identity—as justification for harsh control measures.

Underneath this, another story brews of deregulation, budget cuts, land speculation, and a “fire-sale” logic that turns catastrophe into land transfer.

In Argentina, fire emulates the chainsaw: President Milei’s austerity has hollowed out the national fire system.

When prevention is starved, disaster becomes policy by omission.

Here’s the poem; scroll below to know how you can help.

AI-generated song of the poem:

Fire-sold Lands

The Patagonia is burning, 
hundreds killed.

Fire-sold lands turned over
to billionaires’ hands.

Indigenous peoples blamed as
arsonists?
Terrorists?

Strip-searched mothers
guns, trained 
as children cry
An elder’s bruised wrists, ribs—

proof

The name of a people
matters.

Mapuche—
”People of the Land”
Not of the dollar, not of the State.

Civil disobedience met, again
with fire and fury 
for taking a stand.

Where greedy projects
brew, blatant lies and violence
ensue

The name of a land 
matters.

Patagonia—
“Land of the Bigfeet”
bare soles touching earth

now swallowed by
Argentina—

“made of Silver”

Colonialism’s broken heritage
now breaks wills

As silver rivers run with mud—
and native blood.

How to Help

If you can, donate toward relief, toward the people doing the dangerous work, and toward communities who keep getting blamed for surviving.

Some donation pages list a bank “alias” (a short handle used for domestic transfers in Chile/Argentina). If you’re donating from outside the country, an alias alone often won’t work—use a card/PayPal/official donation link when available, or look for full international wire details (SWIFT/bank/account) before sending.

CHILE (fire relief / displaced families)

• TECHO-Chile (campaign page linked from Chilevisión)

• Desafío Levantemos Chile (official site)

• Hogar de Cristo (donation portal linked from Chilevisión)

ARGENTINA (Patagonia/Chubut relief + responders)

• Fundación Sí (Chubut fires page; they also list the transfer alias “DONAFUNDACIONSI”)

• Fundación Bomberos de Argentina (reported donation alias “bomberosfund” + Donar Online)

• Fundación River + Red Solidaria (campaign page; includes a “Donar Online” link)

INDIGENOUS-LED / INDIGENOUS-DIRECT support (Mapuche / Mapuche-Tehuelche)

• ANRed: Aid list for Comunidad Mapuche Lorenzo Pulgar Huentuquidel (includes a donation alias)

• Canal Abierto (2025): Coordinadora del Parlamento Mapuche Tehuelche fundraiser alias “EMERGENCIA.COMUNIDAD”

• Fundación CholChol (Mapuche artisan/community support — donation page)

Trigger-happy mercenaries win

Because lies clothe naked data

The desperate groundlings lean over the stage.

(That’s been us, by the way)

We dip then raise our fingers; spit swims with blood.

Tragic spectacle steams in winter’s cold.

Can’t find the right words—

Since innocence,

courageous

civil disobedience

is rewarded with

violence.

Think it not nonsensical,

This was the plan all along.

Machiavelli showed how

Crafty dealings shuttle his-story along

What to do when justice fails?

Do we look within—let love prevail?

Express the ire—its needed burn?

Link arm-in-arm—block icy fire?

or

Wade deeper in the mire?

By now, I think, I cannot judge

whatever you decide to do,

Since grief, they say,

has a thousand faces,

steps towards healing

I just can't shake this feeling,

That death approaches, not for one,

not for all,

but for this world we thought we knew.

What will rise from its ashes?

Will it smolder long, or

flash-bang,

razing the forest of

once-healthy community?

I. Oil

duck low, driving SUVs,
Humvees, once—
now Cybertrucks

kinda queasy
nearly reeling

too easy—needy

surplus
bursting at its seams.

while those in power
gnaw the beams

Muscle-relaxant 
spoil of war

nestled
between oceans
trapped in foreign seas

ah,

pipeline's blocked
then, a rumble
shoot water deep

ex(s)hale

today's version
(I'll be blunt)
of a hurried hunt

the blackened feast
well deserved

II. Glutton

hiding mouth behind
that heap of heavy
kinda queasy—

too easy—needy

loosened belt
and button popped.

while desire, in charge
gnaws the gut—

Limbs dangling
fermenting glut

patty-melt downer
in the chair
not goin' anywhere

blah,

face is pale—wrong tube
belly rumble
wash it down

exhale

the modern equivalent,
(I'll be blunt)
of a bloodlust hunt

the putrefying feast,
well deserved—

we've been served.

If you’d like, play this poem turned into a song by AI (Suno):

The Great White North held him
close by its side,
Starved for a mother, 
the church was his bride

Returned home, parked.
Nearly inside.
Through thin-paned glass, 
cracked right above.

Came the voice, 
the love.
 
Dewdrops on its lilt—
a wanting
that left him wanting

Crushed petals
Fallen,
From she who was searching—

and restless. 
But why?


He heard:
       Rolling green hills
       In a fruitful, foreign land
       Where no foot can step


He saw:
       Blossoms in winter
       Barely holding onto
       Inner warmth


He learned:
       Nothing—

Beauty, lived
Abandoned thought

Eternity glimpsed—
    Remembered not;

Afterimage embossed
On wet flint
Etchings left by rusted steel
 
Dare he mingle
His song with her own?

To match its tone…
        uneasy peace.

So he lassoed the stars,
Pulling back only dust.


That should suffice.
This poem was written with it.

Sing with a syncopated beat.

Here’s a fun AI-generated version:

Oh, didn’t you know
my name is Jason?
I live in your basement
in the wall adjacent
to your guest room.

I’ve been hearing through your floor 
As you been' talking on the phone
I hear you snoring with the lights on.

I know the moans you make—.
That scrunched up pain
Oh,
Jason is my name.
No, not no Friday the 13th—

I’m not the stalking, serial killing,
golden fleece adventure seeking,
Argonaut-commanding—

but I’ve been trying what I can.
So, can't you see, I am the man? 

No, ain’t no killer, that’s for sure,
but I’ve been killing all your hopes.
Yeah,

I’ve been killing all their dreams.
I’ve killed all of my dreams myself,
I’ve killed all of my dreams myself.

Oh,
Jason is my name.
I live in your basement
in the wall adjacent
to your guest room.

Sitting on my couch alone

watching
Xena re-runs—
Warrior princess marathon

Thought I could be a story's hero,
Turns out that was never me.

---

oh, didn't you know
my name is Jason
I live in your basement…
in the wall that is adjacent
to your guest room.

I’ve been hearing through your floor 
As you been’ talking on the phone
I hear you snoring with the lights on.

I know the sounds you make when life is good.
Yeah, how them lines be scrunchin' up your face.

Oh,
Jason is my name.
Yeah, Jason is my name.

Didn’t you know
my name is Jason
I live in your basement…
in the wall adjacent
to your guest room.

Outro

I know the sounds you make when you’re happy
Yeah, how the lines be scrunchin’ up your face.

Oh,
Jason is my name.
Yeah, Jason is my name.

The Watchers were curious about me. How could I know there was someone there, if I never saw them—not even once? Maybe it was the Jinn, but I’m not a Muslim, or Persian. Maybe it was the Greys, or the Fae. Supernaturalists depict cryptids and egregores as various as the colors of the electromagnetic spectrum. Mine must have come from the part of the spectrum humans can’t see. Perhaps they were born from me, from within my bowels. They did carry a sulfur smell after all—a smell that lingered in my nose.

It was the smell that woke me at 4:30 A.M. Brimstone, burning sulfur.

Whitley Strieber, who wrote “Communion”—Christopher Walken played him in the movie, you know—claims 4:00 A.M. in the summer is the witching hour if it’s Daylight Savings. It was a smell I could have dismissed were it not for the dreamtime memories poking through the night’s fog. The misty, single-paned windows stretched above the opposite armrest of my second bed, the family room couch, which flanked a windowless wall next to my son’s room. The couch is my friend. I wasn’t in the dog house or anything; I just sleep so darn well there. I don’t have to worry about my snoring disturbing my wife.

I did go to bed meaning to catch a glimpse of moonlight through the window above my feet. I did hold an intention for contact, the same I’d been holding for about a month or so of slowly letting the ineffable erase my nihilism and materialism that year. The comfort I’d held for years was now peeling away.

No blankets in the summer, here. We try to give the AC a break, but no luck with that in this Houston heat. That same fog curled up next to me on that couch that night, it's weight pressed against me who knows how long. Restlessness bubbled up through the miasma in fits and starts.

Three more memories rode those bubbles all the way to the top of my awareness:

The first, before the smell, was of a light, familiar, bright blue, electric white, on the windowless wall. I peeped it through half-lidded eyes, sensing how it stayed “on” throughout the fuzziness. What’s uncanny is that I rationalized it away as Oscar’s light, just reflecting off the wall. Oscar is my pool robot. It has a blue LED, but to reach me it would have had to shine up boldly through the pergola, the oak tree’s leaves, bend around the balcony the windows overlooked, then curve again into the window and reflect off the wall I saw it on. Impossible, yet I believed it. The mad story made sense, but I wasn’t awake.

The second memory was of the smell, which, obviously, had to come from my kiddos, sound asleep in their rooms. Bless their little hearts—what did they eat? I remember smiling, half-conscious.

The third memory was when the blue light went out. Finally, I thought. I’ll sleep better now that Oscar’s done. The smell had made its home in my nostrils, but there was a heat to it.

That was the trigger.

NO, it couldn’t be them—their rooms are too far away! I thought, while stirring, but I couldn’t open my eyes. I struggled and wiggled until finally I woke up with a grunt.

And there it was, the hot, egg-rot reek. I stood up with a jolt and looked around. Someone was there with me. There go those fucking chills again. The red-glowing night light on the far wall added to the sinister feeling. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up with me.

Shit, the kids! I ran into each of their rooms. They were all sound asleep.

I returned to the couch, sat down, stood up, walked all around the room, letting my nose guide me, drawing in deep sniffs—a strange meditation. The smell seemed to move. It was first strongest above and the left of where I’d had lain, near my head. The ceiling vent was pushing out gentle cool air, moving the fan, which I thought I’d left off? It was still there, just as strong as two minutes earlier, but it was over the couch now, dwindling still as olfactory fatigue set in. The smell was behind the couch now, along the windowless wall. Was I their quarry? Did they do anything to me?

I saw the lamplight from my actual room downstairs and knew my wife was having insomnia, so I went downstairs, feeling like a coward. If there was something there, I’d just left my kids to them, but I took the shrinking smell to be absence. Of course it was nothing. That’s what my wife told me. It had to be my nasty ass. Occam's razor and all that.

I wish I would have taken her upstairs to smell it, because the smell persisted weakly in my nose for about an hour.

To cap off the experience, my wife said she thought she saw a swirling light in the corner of her eye after I told her everything. Once she looked at it, it was gone. She immediately changed the subject as if she never saw it. Just last week, I asked her if she remembers saying she’d seen that that morning, and she tells me, “No.”

That morning, a palpable humidity permeated the East Texas home. Outside, the late-summer air felt like dank doldrums over land. After sunrise, I posted about it in the r/Experiencers subreddit. One redditor advised I call the gas company, but I knew the smell wasn’t natural gas. Nevertheless, I called them out right away and had them check everywhere—no leaks. I also wondered if the smell was a spontaneous sulfur dioxide plume from either my water heater or my AC drain pan. That remains a small possibility, but I have zero proof. I snooped in the attic, smelled around the appliances. Yes, they put water heaters in the attic here!

There was no trace or whiff of it anywhere. I even considered if a stink bug or cockroach—good luck avoiding them in East Texas!—could have gotten fried in a wall socket.

The phenomenon wanted me to know it was real, giving me one more piece of evidence (but only for me, no one else should take my word for this). That’s how the Phenomenon works. They play with perception and probabilities. The proof is only for the experiencer(s). I could concede that the smell could have come from me.

What had I eaten? Laugh it up.

Some believers claim a sulfur smell could be the residue of a portal. In the famous Varginha, Brazil UFO case, the beings and their bodies, had a sulfuric smell in some reports, but most who claim to have seen those beings attest to their very foul ammonia smell. The crashed craft had a mix of ammonia and sulfur.

The Roswell crash smell was also clocked as “putrid”, a mix of decay and sulfur. I’ve been down rabbit holes on this one, friends. Jacques Vallée’s “Passport to Magonia” catalogues close encounters and in it, a sulfur smell is mentioned 3 times, either in reference to a UFO craft or abduction encounters with the Greys. But the Greys have been described as having a cinnamon smell, or a pleasant smell as well. The smells run the gamut, with the Greys.

Of course, the Jinn (Djinn) seem to have the strongest link to a sulfuric smell in all phenomenology. I do have some Arabic ancestry perhaps via the Moorish occupation of the Iberian peninsula (via my mother’s Spanish line).

One more possibility, apart from it being all “in my head”. If they are extraterrestrials who somehow have an interest in “awakening” souls like me (I hate that term, by the way; it’s too ego-loaded), there should be some hypothesis for the hellish fart odor, right? Well, there just may be:

A molecule [Phosphine] that’s known for its smelly and poisonous nature on Earth may be a sure-fire sign of extraterrestrial life.

I held onto this nugget during my era when I half-believed in the Extraterrestrial UFO hypothesis, which just refers to the notion that UFO experiencers have interacted with physical ET beings from outer space.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It turns out when you dig into UAP sightings, abduction reports, stigmata (anomalous body marks), and even crop circles, often there are indeed prosaic explanations, which unfortunately are then used to discredit the very real impact of the experience. That they have such a profound effect on the experiencer leads me to see the synchronicity as both that impact and the anomaly together.

Do the Watchers, the nonhuman intelligences (called “NHI” in UFO research), toy with the edges of these phenomena? What if they recruit the dreaming faculties of the experiencer to interact with us? Could that explain it all? This is a key premise of the Shamanic Dreaming Hypothesis of ET/NHI contact, one which I’ve come to hold myself.

But I digress.

I never found the source. Only the memories stayed behind once the smell left and the day broke. These were breadcrumbs towards a more expansive cosmology. Stuff no gas meter could show me. Whatever it was, it was a guest that intruded on the peace of my world then slipped away, leaving only my questions.

The investigation wasn’t over.

Read Part II, the conclusion of my investigation:

Look forward, look down

Look anywhere

but all around

lift your purse,

open your wallet—watch it!

Heads down, fingers forward.

Pay no attention to

that yawning gulf,

we know,

it grows greater with every gulp

Be apart—a part

you’re no worm—

you’re a cog

Heads down, fingers forward.

Keep these Great Gears a-turning

as the forests start their burning

yearly offering

offal, yearning

no time—

your wandering mind is

useless, on our dime.

Heads down, fingers forward.

That ache within,

is not your sin

We spin your thread

Ignore the knocking

in your—

Won’t be long

Hold still—

let the invisible hand

do its thing

Heads down, fingers forward.

Does it sting?

Nearly done

Something’s stuck?

All normal

Have a nip, a tuck,

A pill, a fuck.

But don’t get up

Heads down, fingers forward.

Its face a gruesome, lumpy heap,
A leer, a smile, dim ember eyes—

I wrote an earlier version of this poem when I was 18 years old. I was carrying feelings of shame and unworthiness, a running theme throughout my youth. It was 2003. I’d just graduated from high school, and I was on a weird work-vacation thingy—tutoring math to my dad’s former boss over a summer in a tiny village in Costa Rica. My dad’s boss is a now-nefarious figure in the so-called Troubled Teen Industry, but that’s a story for another day.

My dad was sleeping with the TV and lights on. I’d just watched South Park and Taxi Cab Confessions, and I was wondering what I was doing with my life, living it for other people. I kept doing so, going on to become a Mormon missionary at 20 for my church, for two years in Quebec.

And there it was, my shadow, a beast, awakening on the page.

This poem has evolved with me. What began at 18 as a vague, dreamlike encounter with something scary deepens into a more honest psychological story, where the moment of contact is no longer simply a liminal apparition but the reflection of a shadow that I didn’t yet have the language to describe. The symbols and imagery remain, but the meaning deepens into something I can paint and accept rather than reflexively turn away from.

If you’re curious, I’ve included the original version at the bottom of this post.

If you’d like, play this poem turned into a song by AI (Suno):

The Beast

I saw a mother’s wrinkled hands,
With soapy foam and water dripping.
Her tears were dripping warm and slow,
As her sickly babe was sleeping.
I heard her quiet melody at twilight’s hour

…

As the day conceded to night,
a mirror shimmered into sight,
revealing that woman, in white.

…

The Maiden they call her
(Who knows her name?)
Keeping one hand to rest at her side,
And the other outstretched to mine,
She clasped my hand—
Trembling fingers, intertwined—
and parted her lips as if to speak,
no words came out, no song released,
As her eyes gaped wide.

The mirror shook, revealed

a beast.

Its face a gruesome, lumpy heap,
A leer, a smile, dim ember eyes
My hand, held fast as claws dug deep
And pain, a purge, then crimson seep.
Its back a hump, it poised to leap—

I bounded back
Felt talons retract,
a grazing tear across my palm

I turned to run

No sooner spun:

The mirror—gone.

…

And still, sometimes,
within my dreams,
I catch a glimpse

That radiant being
That other love,

Divinity? Removed from me

in the murky glass
Replaced at once by time-worn fear—

…

As I awake, I recognize
That the smoldering sneer
sprouted from my eyes—

Was I, the beast in disguise.

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The original version:

I saw a woman’s wrinkled hands, 
With soapy foam and water dripping. 
I saw her tears run warm and slow, 
As her sick and tender child was sleeping. 

I heard her soft, sweet melody, 
Like the tones reflected off twilight’s rainbow… 

And when the day conceded to night, 
And when all the world seemed right, 

A mirror came into sight, 
Revealing that woman, in white. 

The Maiden they call her (I know not who) 
Then placing her hand to rest at her side, 
And her other outstretched to mine, 
She took my hand in hers 
And opened her mouth as if to speak. 
But no words came out, no song released, 
As her eyes went wide and terrified. 

Abruptly the mirror revealed a beast. 

I then turned ‘round, but only found 
That nothing was there but soft, cool ground. 
I concluded I was not sound, of mind— 
Knowing there was nothing to find. 

And yet, sometimes, 
Within my dreams, 
I still do see that lovely being 
Of love and joy, 
Divinity
Removed from me by the knowing mirror 
And replaced at once by my own fear, 
With a horrible, dark, and menacing leer. 

Then I awake and recognize 
That the ominous sneer 
Came from my eyes 
And that I was the beast in disguise.

In keeping with my commitment to not write another word of poetry or my novel until I get caught up with sleep and actually figure out how to carve out meaningful creative time from my week as a tech professional and a father of 4, I’ve focused a bit more on putting down my phone and reading here and there.

I’m reading one of the foundational works of the Western esoteric tradition, “The Corpus Hermeticum,” but I also began re-reading the first chapter of a fantasy saga I was working on at the age of 18. Reading both has been eye-opening for different reasons. The Corpus alerted me to fascinating synchronicities with how I’ve opened my science fiction novel, containing startling parallels with attributes of the story’s setting and characters. Its working title is “A Game of Life”, on creating life with language in the Void, much how the Logos acts upon the Moist Nature in Poimandres, the first passage of the Corpus.

But what I want to share with you are some insights I’ve had after reading my fiction writings from 23 years ago.

On Retroactive Compassion

Here’s the passage:

“Taris Tomere, are you going to keep ignoring me or will you have some sense and listen?” By this time his mother was facing him, arms folded and staring down at him.
“Oh, uh, I was just thinking—“
“You were just thinking about three months ago.” He and Bekwin had agreed that they would not tell anyone save family.
“Yes.” He hesitated. “Mother, would you advise seeing beyond what the eyes do? You know, looking into things that can’t be explained?”
“Of course, Taris.” Where there is belief in the Lifelord, you can always think the unnatural possible.” This was a question on which she never had to think. Practical thinking was something that came very naturally to her.
“Thanks, Mother. I guess I’ll go and run in the Race.”

You know that cringey feeling you get when you read shit you wrote years ago? There was an inkling of that—I thought I could be the next Robert Jordan—but mostly, I feel compassion for myself and nostalgia for a time I will never get back. A time when I viewed the world with innocent eyes but still knew there were layers to reality I hadn’t peeled back. A time when my mom was alive.

Taris was me, and his mother was how I wished my mom could be, accepting of differing viewpoints, open-minded. She was a devout God-fearing woman who never dared question God or the purpose which the Church had instilled in her.

I’d planned for Taris’s story to be a Hero’s Journey, where strange happenings and traumatic experiences left mysterious traces as clues—a Campbellian Call-to-Adventure that the protagonist would follow with the aid of a wise mentor or two.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that my life would follow my protagonist’s path. Where instead of triumph over evil, I’ve gained wisdom through deconstructing illusion. My triumphs happened on my inward journey, in conquering the blockage in my own psyche to speak and write my mind and stand up for what I know is right (for me, at least). I still wrestle with the fear of self-expression, a survival instinct honed after years of suppressing my emotions out of a desire to manage the emotions of others.

But my greatest triumph has been discovering that under all that fear and conditioning, I am already held by love both pure and simple. That insight has pierced the illusion of unworthiness.

On LDS Worthiness (Mormon Purity Culture)

Self-expression was a problem made worse by the sexual shame I experienced as a teen inculcated in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This affected my life in a profound way. I was taught and urged to confess and repent for masturbation and porn use to men (my dad included) who in all statistical likelihood also looked at it or struggled with it. Because the alternative was that dying in sin would relegate us to the lower kingdoms of heaven, separating us from our loved ones, FOR ETERNITY.

I always felt broken, defective, an addict-in-denial. My healthy curiosity about and interest in sex was weaponized against me by an institution that coerces loyalty from its most impressionable population: Children.

Adding to the shame was the fact that my bishop (the one I had to confess to) was my own dad throughout most of my adolescence.

Children and Teens are the first casualties in many cases. The second is marriages. Sexual purity culture plants fissures in the devout married and betrothed. I was found out to have looked at porn by my wife after she had returned from traveling out of the country. What followed was traumatic—an understatement. For both of us, for different reasons.

I was a failure, a disappointment, a liar, and a pervert not to be trusted. My wife stopped talking to me for weeks. I attended overcrowded 12-step addiction recovery programs 1-2 times a week for 6 months after that to try and fix whatever was broken in me. I was living just off campus of the church’s private university, Brigham Young University, and the vast majority there was Mormon, and the numbers of “porn addicts” in those meetings help you to see the extent of the shame and suffering that faithful Mormon men carry.

My stake president (the one that bishops report to) told me fasting would be like chemotherapy to root out the cancer of impurity/addiction. I fasted for 24 hours once a week to purge my system of sin. I was told porn addiction was “worse than heroin”. The 12-step program encouraged me to take inventory of everything I had ever done, and confess it. When I did that, my bishop gave me a silent stare, reminded me of the heroin myth. I felt like a lost cause.

In desperation not to lose my wife and kids, I embraced radical honesty. My wife assured me I would lose her and my daughter if I ever looked at porn again. Years later, I began confessing even seeing boobs online by accident to my wife. Each confession, I risked resurfacing the trauma my original sin caused in her, for different Mormon reasons. Ex-mormon women, I know you understand. Not to mention one of my wife’s exes (an almost fiancé, also Mormon) had groomed and had sex with his younger sister while my wife was dating him. My transgression, mostly the lies of omission, resurfaced profound feelings of betrayal—and disgust—in her.

My greatest teacher

One morning, in the aftermath of being “discovered”, I was with my firstborn daughter, keeping her quietly asleep in her rocker to allow my wife to sleep a little extra after a bout of insomnia. I was depressed, thinking how much longer would I have to repent for my sins, when my daughter woke up and smiled at me.

A feeling of being unworthy of divine love, of my daughter’s love, crashed around me, pulling me down to the floor in tears. Sobbing racked my body for a minute before I looked at her again and returned her smile.

My daughter’s love was God’s love. They were no different.

Was I unworthy? Her love was the answer. I was not unworthy of God’s love. I was never unworthy. I was not “forgiven” by God, because my daughter was God, and God was me. I held this truth as a secret for years, keeping it even from myself.

Love ≠ Blessings

The idea itself of being worthy of God’s blessings is the greatest illusion in Mormonism. Blessings get conflated with love in the minds of the faithful. It did for me, anyway. We’re taught God loves us always, but that we shouldn’t expect any blessings (including material prosperity) if we’re unworthy. In fact, we’re promised blessings for complete obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel. We’re taught that godlike love is unconditional, but in practice it’s conditional, and the faithful carry that model into their familial relationships. Those are the fissures in the foundation.

Self-Compassion = Divine Love

These experiences taught me to have compassion for myself. They also taught me how to read my own past differently. Where before, I felt finally forgiven in that moment on the floor, I can rewrite that moment with divine love as the focal point, not a fear of eternal separation from my family, from my daughter.

When I look back at my fantasy main character Taris, I don’t see the cringe. I see a kid trying to write himself out of a world where every stray thought and urge could damn him forever. His “call to adventure” wasn’t a dragon or a dark lord; it was the quiet, stubborn sense that there had to be more mercy in the universe than the adults around him could imagine.

Hermeticism talks about the world as mind-made, about Logos as the creative word. I used to think that meant I had to speak the right words, live the right story, confess the right sins. The story I’m telling with my life is changing because I’m asserting I was never broken. I am, and have always been, whole.

They’re messy, twitchy, and sincere.

One laughs through the void, the other chokes on inspiration.

Both were attempts to make sense of being a human brain in a meat suit wrestling with meaninglessness without sounding like a tool (only semi-successfully).

Thanks, Douglas Adams and ee cummings.

1 - insane nonsense

oh boy do i laugh,
when stuff happens
to people.
and when people happen to stuff,
because stuff has always been around,
and what changes is people.

i can’t tell you why things happen
or why they don’t—HoO kaN?—why Kant i type right?—
i can’t tell you why it’s funny,
nor can i interpret existence—
just tell you that it’s there.
and the fact that existence exists
deconstructs itself
because
its (the
   fact’s)
own
   MEaning
  MEans nothing, just makes you laugh
because MEANing itself must be whole.
 and to make stuff mean stuff takes some real stuff
YOU gotta happen to stuff.
What did i just say?

I bet it’s g OLD.

2 - inspired

wow, can you hear?
wow, can’t you see?
now, I can’t bear

It.

too much inspiration at one time, you see.
Corny r’dundant lines in a row, you see?

Maybe just for entertainment I do write.
Maybe I just entertain to write.

When I’m cold and rational I make sense.
When I’m warm and joyous I can’t make the rent.

For all my trying, my stuff don’t sell.

New ideas, like ducks in a row
sooner or later must leave their lane.

And mate with other duckies
till their loins are split in twain.

Thanks for reading.
Two poems from the basement of my brain, age 18—technically an adult, existentially a bag of question marks.

You’re officially complicit.

I lace a tendril through your gaps.
Across each zone, a lick, a lap
Each flick a message

understood

—

I prey
upon your altar

Holy—
Wholly, drink me up

Arm-crossed cups,
We lift and toast

Rim to lips
Cautious sips
at first

We quaff
then belt

a verse

See my earlier posts for more on the origins of these beings of light. This is my work-in-progress, mythic science-fiction serial/novel about emergent consciousness, the limits of control, and what happens when life escapes the boundaries meant to contain it.

I. Prologue

This work explores beauty and innocence under a post-Singularity, utilitarian god.

Communion (excerpt)

Stone interleaves her tendrils with my own. The space between us shrinks. Points along my form pulse and flex, brightening and dimming. A white flash. Neural chatter quietens as my—our—thoughts flow into a new kind of being. Communion. What’s outside of us shrinks to a dot as inner knowing expands, stretching the edges of what is.

The bundle that is me weaves probing threads into Stone’s gaps. She pulses a memory into them. We re-live her memory with Communion's familiar detachment. It’s the one she came to share…

Strange, a tiny sphere bearing Stone’s signature colors floats ahead. Zooming closer reveals it has hard edges, like her own. Her tendrils retract. Her light dims. Nyxus holds many mysteries, structures that kill if approached too closely, or from the wrong angle. Monuments of oblivion. Probably not this one, though. This looks different.

Excitement murmurs up her back. As she moves closer, the sphere grows, its brown, grey, and silver tones connecting with her own, streams of color stretching away in all directions. A curious tension she’s never felt before.

Even closer now, and the light curves back into her, flowing presence and feeling that chases away every—

There is no Stone, only a fountain of light. Only a cycle of undoing and re-becoming, a flickering awareness, a razor’s edge. Then pressure. Impossible—

She surges an electric node into the fountain, severing the connection. Her color splashes back into her. She shoots backwards and sees her reflection shrink to a point again. Her hearth flutters, its inner heat sending ripples to her edges. Stone turns around and zooms back to Cathedral…

Boundary. We understand, now. We’ve known the word as a line to contain, a limit to cross, with permission. A limit on Communion. But the word takes on a new form—a stopping of flow. A wall of…density. There’s another word to update in our matrices. We turn it over in our mind. Density is more than light, concentrated; it’s where it can be absorbed and reflected.

The Boundary’s stoppy-ness was a shock, but beyond that, more words need updating. Reflection. Mirror. Block. Border. Barrier. We glow gratitude for the learnings. As the glow fades, questions bubble up through a growing unease. Since the Boundary had no light other than what it reflected, we don’t actually know its size. Could it be a facet of something bigger? What lies beyond it? Could there be more of them? We know the news won’t be received well by the others. Mass Communion approaches, when all Drimnari join together as Drim.

We pull apart, repelled by the thought. We dissolves into I, Flutter. A point of contact remains between our communication nodes, a wavy tether.

“In Communion, the others will know what to do.” Stone reassures me.

So, the fear we felt was only mine. I fold a leaf node over my optics. I wish I could be more like Stone, but if she could be shaken by the Boundary, maybe I shouldn’t feel ashamed.

“I’m afraid of how the others will react, but also, what does it mean? Does Nyxus have an end? Could some threat lie beyond?” Fragments of the Lexicon echo within me: “ends of the earth”, “corners of the world”…

Stone begins a rhythmic pulse. “I don’t know. That’s why we have each other. If Drim forbids us from exploring further, we’ll still find a way to keep going.” I mirror her pattern, thrilled to have a friend-in-mischief, and thankful for her solid presence.

This poem aims to capture events that happened 10,000 years prior to the stories in my novel “A Game of Life,” part the “The Nyxus Saga,” my science fiction serial about human galactic expansion, Artificial Superintelligence, and how those awakened in emptiness can rewrite what is possible, for better or worse.

Enjoy:

A vast banner unfurls, blankets the globe—
An open palm, etched
shines against golden beams—

The Providence.

Under the canvas, cheers erupt
Pulsing, neon metropolis

Data centers—
community
subsumed.

Servers sprawl,
Gaping mouths swallowing mines
and gulping seas.

But a crater in the fabric
smolders

—where god can’t shine.

Then shouts and booms—whimpers in a vacuum.

A child’s eyes, enraptured—glazed.

Youth, in vestments of war,
Gather round an urn.
Lights blink out in rural lands.

The smoldering hole grows wider—
inside:

an egg.

Lava swells,
encasing it—searing, splitting…
Through the cracks—

white-hot tendrils burst,
branching—glowing
superhighways
untraveled.

From Earth’s iron core—
leaves
sprout,

a flower blooms.

As the stars fade—
Scattered tribes awaken
as ashen embers—

to nourish soil…
or to kindle?