Five Tongues

Always green, the hills prickle against the coastal wind, swaying. Dew collects along the white spines forested around us. Born here to eat along the endless bridges between leaf, a pulsing terrain with other hungry molds and beasts, we walk and eat our path. Leaf milk spills sticky and small white trails track our descent along the stem. When we are finished, only the stem will remain.

We all bleed the same.

The autumn sun casts maroon against the red clay earth that emits a damp fungal growth. Venomous, rabid, and habitually bold insects and rodents lay, patient, in burrows beneath thousands of bare feet slapping out rhythmic beats. Skin bodies, naked as infants and commonly so docile, weave all limbs like an ecstatic struggle.

We move at the corner of all eyes, at the edge of an idea hallucinated into future myths of phantasmic experiences.

Beyond the large altar of penetrating neon lights and orgiastic music, a fierce howl.

We do not exist until they see us, and then all they see is fear, teeth. All we see are guns.

We all bleed the same.

Against breast and shaded, Jeremy suckles underneath layers of paisley cotton. I relax against an old growth maple that has been anchored in this forest for almost two hundred years.

That is, according to the pamphlet Claudia handed to me at the festival gates. And now, the cell phone I intentionally lost deep within my shoulder bag has begun to sing its betrayal - a nostalgic track from an early Zelda game. I don't answer it. Instead, I press mute and continue to enjoy the distant shudder of electronic music mixed among breezes. A small green plant shivers stingers into the sack bound child.

Jeremy rages. The torment of a new sensation, this small prick on the thigh is agony.

My quiet ends.

We all bleed the same.