Hermit
The universe begins with a knock at the door. Time, as it has rolled, silently, startles electric. The hut which we birth ourselves into amps up. Panic rattles in the shades. The kitchenware, the rug on the floor, all things vibrate with imagination. The lone resident quakes within his world. A hermit, nestled in the swampwoods, is surely surprised by this delivery. Back to back stages of paranoia rush through him. Hyper anxiety. Minutes, which revolve through mental eternities. Courage is built up through skin scratching and whispered mumbling.
A reaching out. A pulling back of the shades, slightly. Furtive eyes scan for signs of danger. The deliverer has disappeared.
Trees stare back through the bubbling mist. They hiss nasty cricket chatter back and forth amongst themselves. Belly rumbling gurgle dances make anxiety messes inside of ulcerated intestines. “How could someone have found this address?” A thought without words, noises, audible. “There is not even an address to be found…”
Courage escalates to extend no more than a forearm outside of agoraphobia. The package is pulled inside. It is placed upon the coffee table and stared at.
Once upon a time the masking tape would have ripped screaming screeches through the air. Microscopic bits of cardboard would have gone squirting like scalped blood. But the hermit’s no child nomore… He no longer favors surprises. He no longer waits with rabies for the pinstripe blue, skimpy Docker wearing Santa to sleigh ride scrape his wrinkling balls across the pavement, towards his neighborhood row of mail post chimney towers. He no longer craves to hear that tune of a luncheon’s lurching church bells ringing harmony bass around the watchdogs’ sounding trumpet brigade. It’s been a long time since he’s watched a mustached postal worker pull a parcel from his American Eagled mail bag while whistling prickly church hymns served crispy. That Rolodex clicking of addresses, matching names to postage labels, used to amp him up, waiting for that sudden stop, and the long, square smile of the mail man’s face, rolling around its shoulder blades, with box cutter precision aiming a “joy-to-the-glory-of-my-work” glare upwards, into the boy’s living room window, directly into his glass partitioned, expectant face, with a baritone barreling groan announcing, from a white, picket-tooth mouth, “Son, I got you’s a something’ you’sa gonna like!”
No, the hermit’s no child nomore. He’s an adult. And men have fearful worries and doubtful revelations regarding unexpected deliveries. Because Hook’s always on the lookout for a foreign hero. And bills, problems, and responsibility don’t exist within the realm of innocence.
He dreads opening the package. The damn passive aggressive tactics of it anger him. Why’s it resting so softly sweet and silent like that? No facial features expressing tells of what’s beneath the surface. Like a gingerbread colored house of possibilities it waits, patiently and ominously, dressed in a blasé brown, non-expression of corrugation and packing stickers, thrice squared, and playing the part of cubical dimensions so perfectly. So straight and cool. Spartan like. Any anxiety it may have regarding the possibility of never being opened is untraceable. It appears as though it could sit there for all of eternity, in that meditative pose, never betraying itself.
Unknown inside make the mind question endless possibilities. Dream it, you could have it; sleep it, you may awake inside of it; die and there it is. Behind the surface lie death and the abomination. A bill of grand proportion. A pornography of the cheap kind. Maybe yur mam’s head wrapped in bubble tape. What’s the point? Throw it back to the bushes. Pretend it never happened. Let it rot on the doorstep for all we care…
A bomb? A late birthday gift from an acquaintance who perhaps truly loved me? Someone tracked me down all the way out here? Most likely a punishment campaign come to screw holes through the skulls of all hermits for not participating in the social game…
All this hypothesizing only makes me hungrier. Let’s just get it over with… Hangnails shiver. The hermit knows that he’s inevitably going to do it… It’s delivery sealed that fate – made it impossible for him to leave it alone – fixed It on the center of his skull. There is no choice. Too strong a competitor… He was defeated at the bell… or the knock… or whatever… He must give in.
A handful of shaking knuckles pull at the tape. Regret screeches past the point of no return. A dose of giving in floods his brain. Each breath rasps like crinkled parchment. Frogs croak murmur anecdotes of warning around the periphery of his hut. The flaps are lifted. A pool of packing peanuts spring like released ectoplasm. The floor is littered. The hermit dives his fingers deeper to grace upon something metallic. Warm yet cold. Confetti waterfalls as he lifts the innards out.
Another box… A smaller, very polished, metallic, white box. Time shines brighter when you touch your fingerprints on its sides. An aura of significance engulfs the moment. So slick, so cold, so otherworldly. Like the ass of a freshly baptized baby alien. Hypnotic. Contracted surrender is synced. Rolling hills of Mercury @madness climb the hermit’s fingers. He is driven rapidly insane. But what difference does it make in a solo world? When the population of a universe is one, craziness is just reality. Everything is imaginary every day to the hermit. Thoughts are the only company this side of your life. Reflections are even hard to come by. Rippled puddles of swamp water and memories within dreams. Makes a man forget that he’s not his surroundings. Makes a man forget that he’s just a man. Not a god. Not the one true and only holy God of my love.
A shivering hangnail reaches up and flips a switch. Something carved into the edge of the edge of perfection is triggered. The box responds. The patient one is speaking. The cubical Ghandi is stretching to reveal its secret innards. A well concealed lid rises an all-consuming welcome.
A blinding shower of disco ball rain spews porridge thick illumination into the room. Hail Marys cross the hermit’s chest. The future is a sudden fear prompt for next week’s campfire. Brace yourself because suddenly we know we’ve crossed too far across the line of what is and is not okay.
Last minute spectacle driven anxiety: “Why not had I seen myself possible in Corporate?” “Where now is the woman I should have married?” “Is this how I die?”
No use resisting. A solitary life of repeating existence is a second nothing. The contentment gained through placate confinement is a self-conceived mirage. This hermitage experiment has gone on for too long and turned out to be nothing but what everything else is: a handful of more nothing. No stories are written with pointless pens. No photographs have been painted here. Static sitting. Mumbling with imaginary friends too lazy to be materialized. Twiddling, plumb thumb fumbling monotony sessions of calendar riding. The lone dog lonely life of a beard wearing, tinkling escapist, bored of the righteous, with no remedy pill provided. A wish for suicide repressed.
So hot is that box. The hermit’s fingerprints can no longer be traced within the school system. His eyes are swirling hypnotically, his chin creeping over the hot slick edge. His secret fatalism is becoming his possessor. Rationality fades incomprehensible. His face pivots and blindness enters his life. The bright light cascades across his face, pinpricking his pupils with bleach. His retinas scald.
Like a dumb waiter he drops, searching for further purgation. A birthing breed of angel vision blooms in the ashes of his cataracts. The secret world within unfolds as his inner light ignites. Aztec patterns shock electric at all sides. Wallpaper trappings of crying cherub limelight sing organic smile symphonies of tears and Incan stucco into cluster groupings of Sephiroth Argus eyeballs. Hallucinating mind frames stare into Mozart paradigms of ‘Ode to Joy’ perception processions while brain hemispheres synch worldly pleasures. Colliding emotions explode into sacred Renaissance sustenance, tickling thoughts like a chimney sweeping feather duster of forget-me-nots and lilac pansy posies breaking their bosoms apart with sacral chakra springtime morning espresso shots. All the Templar hidden holy grails clink and clack around his head during the last supper’s engagement party, becoming ritualistic first of the season dinner motifs, ringing supper bells, pin drop crispy, around Grecian Olympia ribbon dance twirling songs a’spire sparkler popping into peaking discussions filled fat with Romanticized Latin. Fortune spun blindly by Alyosha driven epilepsy, sightlessly revelating Mahler compositions of Chopinion Nocturne Moonlit Bachian Sonatas, fills the Dionysian spaces between Kolob and Celestia with the Polaris enchanted teeth of Apollo stretching a future kissing eagle feather, falling mini whirlwinds through a cumulus rain cloud bursting into cheekfulls of manna gumdrops glistening cane sugar over Aaron’s staff a’ rapping Exodus dream beats into pied piping fairy tale nursery rhymes black butterfly kissing the roof bound fiddler, who passes a raven beak sonnet higher sunwards towards Gandalf the Gray, while blowing wisp o’ the wind hot totties into Edgar Allen’s brain fabric to drip rainbow juice admirations upwards, and round wards, and back around again, forever, through an eternal sunrise, grace encrusted and crowned with diamond blossom sewing needles whipping gospel pages through satin purple bed sheets of the straight Magdalene’s wish plateaus – which smile, still virginized, upon God’s holy headrest as all around, omnipotent, the true master beams, with an Oxford written scarlet degree of truth be told tarot readings feeding the creation map of all that is, supremely and fault free, to the typewriter’s ticking word worthy surveillance of string theory seppukus – honor bound with violent roses, hand delivered tightly by the master lodging masons, who work not as slaves, but as heroes, and saints, together, forever with hearts beating tapestries, paint bursting with berry oil and wine, belly laughing into the chorus of love, with crystallized euphoria delivering the message of a stardust twinkled Palace of Versailles.
Tiny dot pull me forward! The bliss, ecstatically chanting, rings the hermit’s ears, organically dropping, passing faster through paradise trees, with glistening knowledge shining behind white flame swords, nudity, and unobserved animals defying evolution. Must be, oh yes, holding me from, till the perfect moment, when the serpentine suspense has collided into itself, and my form has disintegrated into fullness – your face, yours, the the, of every hour, beyond eleventh, the twelfth, and zero: the none and all, Omega to Alpha, Hello – there you are, my father, my mother, my whole, myself in perfection, the truth, G, everything I ever imagined you to be, I cannot believe my luck, being alive right now, for this releasing of glory is grand beyond words!
A stereo shattering voice, thunder clap clear, tears symphony strings around each rung of the hermit’s vibrato enchanted inner ear. Harmony mixed smoothie reliefs staccato collage him into the middle of a bubble bath excitement pool. The voice pulsates the universe’s purest electricity into and out of each of his orifices. The energy pours through like acid, filling him with jazz and math, popping his hair from its follicle docks, transfiguring it into swarms of squiggling fiber optic cords, ringing the alarm bells of a successful dosage achieved, snapping release through splintering bone, and unraveling his Christmas sweater into a Hare Krishna cloud of euphoria.
The box becomes larger than the cabin. It becomes his world. It bursts his smile through his cheeks as his cheeks eviscerate into sparks. His limbs become Mudra reichs, and his tongue becomes a rainbow. His brain becomes ocean currents. His mind becomes an Ohm. He seeps into his surroundings and abandons his name. The lid closes on his past.
God smiles upon his child. The voice says, “Sleep now into wakefulness; and never doubt your own imagination.”