by James True
Why would Dr. Ford give justice to Kavanaugh? She regards him as one of the guys that made it. It causes acid to form in her wound. She feels wholly justified making his world feel like hers. This is the essence of the equality movement. It’s okay as long as we suffer together. Her testimony is credible because she recalls her trauma. A drunk man took her when she was too young to stop him. This is the meaning of “forced from behind.” She wasn’t surprised by his stealth – she was surprised by the violation. Her trust was raped at the top of the staircase as she was thrown into the bedroom. Ford said she couldn’t tell if it was Kavanaugh because it wasn’t Kavanaugh.
Anger is a natural reaction to injustice. Both parties are credible. Dr. Ford was sexually assaulted a long ago. Kavanaugh wasn’t her perpetrator. The assailant in all of this is Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic Senator from California. She took Dr. Ford as her victim and forced her up the steps of the capital. She told a ten-year-old Ford to say it was all “cerebral” and “collegiate.” Trauma is a somatic experience, and justice was robbed yet again by a committee of politicians. I was falsely accused a few years ago and walked through this same gauntlet. I have seen firsthand how trauma justifies victims to act in ways where no one has justice. Ford thinks if she can’t have justice, why should Kavanaugh. Trauma is a dripping acid, and our government failed both of them just like they always have.
Feinstein repeated Dr. Ford’s trauma by raping her trust on camera. Feinstein was completely sober when she did it. She planned it for weeks. She pushed the girl up the steps of the capital and sensationalized her trauma for the cameras. She turned Ford’s real story into a lie and reduced it to a spectacle. She forced a political story into her head and demanded it looks cerebral. Ford trusted the wrong person again. These sharks surround us. Sharks will never be sorry. We are lucky if they kill us quickly. The worst thing that could happen is for them to bleed us from our bellies in the water. An alcoholic predator raped Dr. Ford. Her trauma is a reverberating regression. It is the opposite of time travel. Pain makes us selfish because it has to. The worst thing we can do is call Dr. Ford a liar. She is a survivor who still hasn’t been rescued. Kavanaugh’s daughter, age ten said, “let’s pray for her.” Let that girl be our representative. We are empathic creatures swimming in a tank of sharks like Feinstein. Ford will never know justice now. She has been given dopamine instead. Her truth will skip this lifetime because of it.
Blind empathy is an insult. Discerned empathy is genuine compassion. Until we learn this, false accusations will continue. Our government failed us again in that hearing. Our representatives are killing us one-by-one for the sport. It is trauma to force us to watch it. They are filling the beach with more-and-more bottles, and we are giving them money to keep doing it to us. I know how we can get rid of these sharks. We don’t even need a bigger boat. We have everything we need right in front of us. We must decentralize and disempower those who treat women like this. We have to stop pretending the government is doing the best it can. Dianne Feinstein is not failing our country by accident. She is here to gut you like she did Dr. Ford. She will only keep throwing more bottles. We need to stop reading her. We need to turn and meet ourselves face-to-face. We need to go back to using our empathy. This can never happen with a partisan statement on camera. Everything the shark says is a lie — every single word.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The First Supper
INSIDE THE STONE castle, there was a large dining hall. In the center sat a large square black onyx cube. A round table of ash wood was built around it. On this cube, inside this ring, a man named Saturn would eat one of his children. But, he would not rip his child’s head off like in the famous painting. Saturn merely licked his fingers from the job. He would chop his son up into bite-sized pieces in front of his family with a cleaver. Saturn gave no warning as all of his children sat for dinner. Saturn called his precious son Tiamat over as his voice demanded the room. Young Tiamat obeyed as he approached his father’s throne. Saturn cupped his son’s neck like a fresh sapling tree and proclaimed, “My sweet, fresh, Tiamat, I have prepared your destiny. Tonight you will feed your brothers and sisters. You will prepare us a meal so memorable; my name will live forever.” Tiamat gulped at the honor and asked innocently, “Father, what shall I prepare us that could be so memorable?” Saturn pulled his son’s face into his. He gazed into the soft pores of his boy’s skin as if to see the blood flow. He quietly shoved a three-pronged fork deep into his gut. He captured every last photon bouncing off the cornea as Tiamat fell into the abyss of his father’s madness. Saturn ripped his instrument to the left and then the right. He ejected his trident as fast as it entered. Tiamat’s shock agreed with the ceremony as his intestines spilled from his belly like a scooped pumpkin. Saturn pulled his son’s carcass onto the top of the cube for everyone to witness. Tiamat was gargling spent blood, and his arms and feet were still convulsing. Saturn pinned his supple neck to the table like a fresh goose and chopped his child to bits with the cleaver. The butcher gave all of his children an ultimatum, “Eat, or perish.”
Saturn was the first cannibal. He wanted his memory to outlive the sun. He would place himself as the dark ruler. He sacrificed every one of his sons to the trauma. Tiamat was only one survivor at the first supper. All of the children ate his pulverized body after his chunks were dumped into a stew. Saturn watched each child drink the bloody broth from like animals. Every piece of bone – every chewy string of tendon was swallowed. As they finished, Saturn demand they lick their fingers. He commanded each of them into a dancing orbit around the table. Each child began a march to the sound of their virgin trauma.
Saturn was the first elite. The first to decide his name was more important than his blood. Words are psychic tombstones, and his was immortalized in a black stone. A hexagon cloud mounts a maelstrom on the ringed planet. It spins the giant like a giant dreidel in its hex. Trauma is a phenomenon of vibration. We reverberate when we are hollow. We retreat underneath the flat crevice of our own feet. That time is over. Someone is whistling. We all agreed to a new era. A new gear has engaged the transmission. We are bodies again – not heads in jars. May our children spin around themselves slower than we did; if that’s all we can do, then we must.
The meaning of fire and ice is the alchemy of proportion. Love is perfectly warm. It neither burns nor pierces. It wraps itself around what chooses to be still. The spinning of trauma stops the effects of love’s absorption. We are told to keep spinning and spinning around a table. Each of us, with our eyes closed, each other on the black altar. We are ruled by the bloodlines of cannibals.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I Married an Alter
IF I KNEW then what I know now, I might still be with her. I might have tried another tactic after the last three hundred failed so miserably. I learned last week that I was married to an alter. Her mother was a twin from Nazi Germany. She was a child through the war and programmed by a family through wartime. I don’t know the exact details of the trauma’s origin. Their family line was traced back to the Black Forest when pagans walked naked in daylight. When I met her mother, she did not say, “Hello, I am an alter.” I am as thick as I am clueless when I love someone. I decided long ago my wife must have been sociopathic. Now I have returned to the dusty chalkboard to erase that diagnosis. I scribe the word, “ALTER” under the white line of her equation. I will have to rethink everything now about her — about both of them.
My math is etched on both sides of a swinging easel on the middle of a lit stage. The empty audience chamber around me is as black as flat depression. There is no curtain or backstage. I stand where I used to, on a platform floating in flat white-noise like a scratchy wool blanket on the cheeks. I remember yelling up into the darkness. I was calling her name like a whalesong through the crushing water. I can barely handle being back in this place again. I spent three years locked inside this unsolved puzzle – I wanted my wife back. But there were two of her, and I was only loved by one of them
. I made her six dragons of bamboo to court her dark side.
Readers ask how I know so much about alters. I dismiss this question as a nice compliment. Last week, a missing piece was discovered. My body began to unravel. I fasted as I traveled. My body grew slow as a turtle, and my mind joined the creepy pace. The truth comes to us like swift pain. This pain was like childbirth as I transformed myself into involuntary labor. There is no pretending you sit behind the wheel once it starts. You are strapped to the front of the hood like an ornament. The identity of you is voided as you become action. My body dissolved itself like a cocooned caterpillar.
The truth was sprouting from my back like giant black wings. It ripped me open from my soft paper basket. It took me down through the bamboo reeds of a river. I see the truth. It's a monarch blinking from the branch. Now that I am years away, I scratch the answer in the silt bottom of a river with my toe. I am away from that reptile. I am outside and safe and whole again. But I was married to an alter.
Right now I feel guilty for not trying hard enough. As her husband I want her to have the meat from my hunt. I have finally gutted the answer. Its tender clean ribs are ready for the freezer. Its shiny ten-point carcass was my trophy after half a decade of hunting. I still have its puncture wounds in my belly. It tenderized me with its push for violence. I remember the night of bear mace followed by her telling me how cute my eyes looked all swollen. I was her little red raccoon. I remember her pulling me inside her vulva on a picnic table after a punch in the face. I remember two claws gouging my scrotum minutes after a sweet giggle. I remember the shame of me constantly staying, and the shackles of loyalty turned foolish. I was spun in the torture of reverberating horror from a medieval village. Finally, on my shoulders, I carry home the warm body of an answer.
A fork in her heart was jabbed centuries ago, and it still bleeds. The hot bile leaks from one side of the wound while the sweet milk gushes from the other. It was selfish to marry the sugar without the acid. The torture of two bodies in one sweater. We had a refrigerator magnet that said, “Two peas in a pod.” Those two peas were her and him. I tried to stay, but he would not let me. I wanted to tell her, but she refused to believe. I blamed her for him. I begged him for her. I was trapped inside the triangle of the alter. Her passenger is her animus. They love each other too much to stop the spin.
I remember the way she ate chocolate. She was meticulous, poised, and non-indulgent. I remember how straight her back was when I sat her at the dinner table. I remember how soft she made her footsteps. I remember how she nibbled on peppered green beans. I know now why her face was so dedicated when she pruned in a mirror. I see her far more completely than I have ever seen her before. She gave all of her attention to detail. She became enraged when I exposed her feelings. She spun me in her program like a sewing spider. She could not understand why I was complaining. This had been her life since she was four. She was offended at my displays of self-protection. The pain of it all made me too selfish to see. I failed my wife. It took me three years to learn that she was an alter. This awareness makes my brain heal. It’s been stuck in a loop, trying to process someone kind doing something evil. There is no confusion anymore.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
American Rapture
WE ARE EXPERIENCING an American Rapture. It’s no longer accurate to pretend this is about Democrat or Republican. Both parties have failed on purpose. Both said nothing about the truth of JFK. Neither stood up for the truth of 9/11. We have watched red and blue Manchurians bomb nations like a Pied Piper for refugees. Truth erodes without justice. I scroll through angry reactions to Kavanaugh’s confirmation and see a trauma army being armed and activated. Today’s siren is man-vs-woman. Equality is oppression wrapped in a rainbow. Hate is a trebuchet of flaming boulders. When you hate someone, you show them your power. When you love someone, you show them their own. This is a war now between self-hate and self-love – communism versus supremacy. We must tear down this wall. We must build up that wall.
Three brown boys, Jum, Muhammed, and Khalil, clung to the high ridge of a talon-shaped outcrop overlooking the Dead Sea. The boys boulder up like Billy goats in Velcro crampons. Jum crouched like a crab and kicked his way into a cave with his heal. He tucks himself inside the stone blowhole down into nature’s bank vault. Three boys wrap six hands around seven clay jars. Inside was the Gospel According to Thomas. His words scribed their spiraling secret curled up like a sleeping leaf of tobacco. Thomas scribed a different meaning to the Cross. Your shoulders and spine are the Christ. A church rampant with pedophilia hides his words in a decrepit catacomb. The church never wants you to see the truth. A library burned, and a library concealed share the same motive. Each turn wisdom into a Molotov cocktail. Man’s ignorance grows into a hunger. We are gaping for knowledge like blind birds with our mouths open. The pious pretend there’s nothing they can do now but pray. Or did they say, “prey?”
Thomas tells you your bones have always been the antenna. Thomas wants you to find the Christ in three dimensions. There is a trinity of strings inside you. Your mind, your heart and your gut strike chords in major, minor, augmented or diminished. Put down the binoculars and pick up the stethoscope. Place its chilly steel disc against your bashful skin and listen. This is the sound of a universe. Be as God to your earful kingdom. You are Lord of your body. Every cell is following your commandments. Your heart is an emperor’s drummer with his eyes watching for your cue. You are the maestro of intuition, morals, and reason. Your pelvis wants you here seated. Your throne aches for the rule of someone just like you with no exceptions.
A rapture is a rising in the air to be with Christ. So rapture yourself now in the glory of your posture. Be straight, tall and thick as you plow through life’s soil. Our bodies are antenna receiving the golden signal. God is the symphony of brass elephants and drumming gorillas. We are corrupted from the squawking of walkie-talkies in the trees. Inside our trinity, we may know the difference. Your mind may be fooled by ideas. The body may be numbed by trauma. The intuition can be neutered by shame. We are broken horses on the beach grazing in the hypnotic tide. It’s never too late to break free for our children. Let’s run for them now. Every colt and filly receives the energy from our surge. Let’s bolt from the blinders covering our long skulls. We were slipped into metal caskets and trained for the starting gates to open. We race each other around the track in an endless circle. A thoroughbred has no freedom. His balls are shaved for television. His mane is crimped, and his hooves are polished with car wax. He grows weary of the trouble from his muddy footprints as he keeps pretending not to be pretending. Untie yourself. Place your center inside your body’s triad and activate.
Men. Why do we not avenge our fathers? Why do we insist it’s sufficient to hoist up a flag of outrage? We are at the carnival with a heavy mallet. We are slamming it into the target and seeing whose beef scores the biggest stuffed animal. We got the blue bear but hoped for the pink tiger. The only solace is a bumper-car to ram each other into oblivion from electric rat-tails sparking from the ceiling. A theme park always has high walls and security. We are gelded at the neck as they seal our heads in mason jars. Communism is a theme park for the spirit. This resistance is the tantrum of a spoiled child. He had too many fantasies before he got here and the spun cotton candy is stuck in his eyelids. His belly is bloated as we drag him by his kicking heels back to the car. We will not let this place take another body. We will destroy this cabal.
Make your body great again. Give supremacy its place on the altar. The angry zombies clawing at the door are trauma, fear, and surrender. They are not our enemy; they are an obstacle. We run into the battlefield like a platoon of medics. Save as many as you can in triage. We only have so much time left. Shine your light into each eyeball and look for dilation in the pupils. Snap your fingers to test if their listening. Place your firm hand gently on their shoulder. Tell them it’s time to wake up now. Tell them the rapture is here. Wipe their foreheads with a wet sponge and let the
m know they are worthy. Tell them to stand up in their Cross or be eaten by a machine. Red October is the death of communism. Red wave is the rush and gush of liquid blood pouring back into our vessels and sailing us into our supremacy.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Abortion comes with Flowers
WE SEND FLOWERS after a miscarriage. We send nothing after an abortion. Only one of these actions is congruent with our empathic nature. Both events are biologically identical. It is a trauma to have an abortion. Abortion is not a function of reproduction. We must at least admit this is part of our body and that we are participating in self-mutilation. Our political system weaponizes unclaimed trauma. We make armies of broken women who are told it was no big deal. They even go so far as to celebrate it. They are angry when we discuss it. If it is no different to expel a fetus as it is to cut hair then why are many so angry to talk about it? A discussion so trivial should not be such a threat. The only way to diagnose pain is to find where it is tender. This requires a prodding of the thoughts that reveal the exact condition. We can diagnose ourselves when we watch our projection.
She smuggled a bottle of wine and cheese into the hotel lobby after the concert. We were sharing a room with friends who were long ago asleep. We were still vibrating from the music. We were tipsy and giddy in Queen City. I held her arm while she tinkled in the middle of a park. I wondered how she could be so elegant while she did that. I juggled jokes between her giggles as we watched strangers in a city we had never seen before. Wine is a turned grape. It’s a new life after death. It is a liquid resurrection. When wine touched her lips, she shifted. The juice unloaded her cup as she spilled pain and guilt she bore in barrels from her abortion when she was twenty. She called it “the” abortion. But it was her abortion. Here was a woman I wanted to know turned into a woman I wanted to take care of bawling in my lap on New Year’s morning.