BlackDaze

BlackDaze

Dear Chris Cornell,

As much as I respect the passion of your eunuch style high pitched Soundgarden squeals, it is definitely not the ironic soundtrack I want in my head right now.

Can you please get out?

Your lyrics are too appropriate.

I can’t get out of the memory chain-mail of your lyrics, like I can’t get out of these handcuffs.

“How would I know…
that this could be my fate?

….
Cuz I fell on the BlackGaze, the BackDays, going all the way

Black Days”

Had to listen to it on my 12 hour drive back home, didn’t I?

I blame it on Mercury. I always do. Chris, he gave you those lyrics, like he gives them to all of us. And Mercury’s easy to blame it on. The god of trade. The Spice Trader. Denizen of the Dunes. The mischievous merchant. The trickster thief. The maudlin messenger. The slapstick satirist. I had a thing with Mercury. We were having our elicit but then sometimes too explicit affair. It would not stop. At least not in this lifetime. I’m pretty sure this relationship carried over from a few hundred other incarnations.

He is the god of pharmacopeia, plant medicines, and psychedelia.

He’s the one who says that all shamanic pursuits of expanding consciousness are worthy and thus you can break federal and state laws and travel, illegally, with the bag of mushrooms and other alchemical agents to alter your psyche, splayed, casually laid just behind the driver’s seat of your van.

It’s what happens when you’re ruled by Mercury, Astrologically. Foolish Pride. When you stare in the mirror, and you see the Puer Eternas there, the Eternal Youth, and not his 1 or 2 faces, but his 99 shapeshifting names, for you are Gemini Rising, and Mercury will slap your hand.

So Mercury likes to laugh at you, play at pun with your puppet strings, and joke at your expense.

Like when you’re in the supermarket and you hear that 80’s song by Human League or Pat Benatar or Eurythmics and it’s just screaming through the tinny speakers directly to you, at you, the radioracle. You change the lyrics, like you always did, growing up, when you’d make them ridiculous jokes and howl them with your 10 year old friends or tease your younger sister with them.

We’re only…

humans

of flesh and blood

born of breath and

guts of bread

and steaks

born and mirror-scorned

to make mistakes!!

Only Human

Or Pat Benatar, what happens when we aren’t so young anymore….

And our heartaches turn to heart attacks,

Are we still as strong enough

To confess that we were wrong

And True Love is never a Battlefield!!!”

Because Annie Lennox,

Some of them might want to use me, or abuse me

But they are just forgetting

That we are all just characters

In the tragicomedy

Of GodsDream

That’s Mercury. He’s put on his helmet of invisibility, slid between the clouds with his winged sandals, and landed himself in the DJ booth at the radio station. Held the DJ at hostage for a song, or two, and confessed that he’s just doing his job to be an arbiter of Fate and to make sure you got the message from your higher self.

And You are Here, Now. This alternate history map. And you pontificate how the word chafe must have been first enunciated to describe your current handcuffed experience, likely by a man in this verye state of WHY-oming, by some outlaw akin to Billy The Kid.

And this quote “criminal,” also used adjectival verbs such as pinching and choking and strangulating to elucidate the sensation of said handcuffs as blood seemed to flow less as arterial rivers and more as drought-encrusted mud.

And you give yourself the pleasure of staring at the storm clouds, the gods you likely won’t see for days upon days upon weeks? months? who knows—, when the handcuffs reach their final destination. You get the metaphor. The metaphor dragon-hugs you bear hugs you as its Dragon-Shape breathes you. There are always dragons in clouds: they flicker their taunting tongues at you. Puff the Magic dragon, marijuana smoke, and its consequences, riding in the back of the van.

Now riding in the back of a Wyoming Cop Car. And then Journey’s somehow in your noggin ricocheting like the lightning-clan seance through the thunder-chord cacophany, “Who’s Crying Now?” in your noggin, the “stormy nights, the wrongs, the rights,” and who determines these laws? Will Love survive, somehow, somewhere, in the middle of my jail cell?

And you see them up there behind the clouds, just as Plato described them: dancing, laughing, singing, respectively the three Sisters Fate weaving the web of your destiny with your Daimon—that never-incarnate mirror-self who agreed with you ever-forgetful flesh self to this holy moment, agreed to this right-now back in the time-before-time, in the space-beyond-space.

Blame it on Radiohead. Blame it on their Karma Police, another boomerang memory song a little too perfect for this moment.. And Blame it on the Black Star. Blame it on the Black Hole Sun. Blame it on the RadiOracle. Always Right. See Mercury is the one who gives us all the lLyrics in the world. He is the one who designed the Lyre from the turtle shell. He was caught, like me, by a police god of order, Apollo, stealing his sheep. But then with his cunning charades and coy charisma he fingertapped the first hang drum guitar tortoise shell, and strung some cat gut along its side, and suddenly serenaded a god who forgave him in exchange for his Instrument and its Emotion, for the Song and its Instruction.

So you can “Blame it on the Rain,” like Milli Vanilli, all those times you played the imposter game.

Blame it on Mercury Retrograde or some Mercury opposition in my astrology chart now. Like all good astrologers. When whatever catastrophe of travel or tech happens, it must be, it has to be…. Mercury Retrograding.

But Mercury, wise Hermes, doesn’t like to be blamed. He likes to be winked at with a sad serenade sung to him, as a sign of gratitude. Especially those sophisticated classica, guided by Hope, do you have Hope, like the one and only Bob Hope?

“Thanking…“.

Mercury….

“for all the memories

For all the sentimental verse”

…this God of scribes has gifted you.

And for all the times he handed you the Get Out of Jail Free card on a silver platter.

Dear Hermes, Oh Mercury! How many border crossings have you and your tortoise shell been the parasol of protection to umbrella me and our precious contraband, treasure drugs, and magic medicines in your cloak of invisibility?

Every planet rules a part of the body. Mercury rules the hands, and fingers. Now I would have time to count the ways. With my fingers clasped in handcuffs. Now that you have pulled the Go Directly to Jail card. Now that I remember just how often I should have counted my lucky stars with Madonna, to pray with her and Mercury’s… "heavenly body tonight.”

So Chris Cornell, will you pray that the Great Mother, our karaoke Madonna protect me?

Because I know you’re gonna make everything alright

I know you can make me the luckiest star, the luckiest by far

Protect me from the dissonance of hell, in this fated jail cell,

And plant me in your Soundgarden,

so together, you and me and Mercury will play and pray, for a...

Black Hole Sun,

To come and wash away

The Jailhouse of Pain

Black Hole Sun

I’m begging you

To come

And return me to the One