Gular
by Eric Patel ︎︎︎It was probably late spring.
In the morning idyll of a caldera, a dying wind softly thrummed and whirled itself upwards into a dust devil.
Turning in from the restless clamor of worldly striving and consumption, I found myself listening to a path of water emerge from a fig tree when an itch began to seethe inside my swollen ear.
Deep behind a dull throb permeating the scab wall, follicles prickled and fed themselves. Razed with an infernal urge to reach them, I succumbed into a degenerate but cathartic scratching frenzy. When my fingernails weren't enough, I tried to find some kind of relief in digging out the last of the rusty peeling mess with the jagged edges of a broken twig.
Warm, semiopaque honey soothingly oozed through my ear canal. Trickling past my tragus and off the edge of my lobe, it soiled the earth below with a vile odor. Ghost ants on a foraging run at high noon avoided the coagulating pus drops. Despite us, their odor memories had not led them astray, and somehow, beyond the well of becoming, they understood that home was not far. My spotted-belly ached. I felt delirious, a strange desire to sing.
Closing my eyes, I began composing a nomadic rhapsody in the key of the nearby stream. Soon the dark melodies unfurling my cold heart swelled to a fever pitch and my spirit suddenly passed through itself between tides of emotional arrhythmia and a dissonant vapor trail of words. Facing east, I watched three jute weavers in a shared gown made of a single smoking fungus appear on the pinnacle of the valley's mountain rim. An inner calm and subtle hint of a sly smile graced their ethereal presence. Levitating alongside a majestic band of doulas, fellaheen and fakirs, they came down on meandering goat paths as a dusky glint scintillated between the filigree of their burnished amulets and the cosmic clouds above.
Just before the hissing wound had time to sublimate, they poured one out in silence. They placed the pith of stillness in me and I placed the pith of stillness in them. And then they recited,
"To those who can't see, but can hear, can imagine, the magic fruit's seed outside, its skin inside, we share with all beings, the roots above, flowers below."
The faint scent of ozone and fallen figs wafted through them as they sang and danced in a glome around lovers tree, bending the fabric of reality until dawn.
That night, in a trance, they lived a thousand summers.
To those that betrayed the harvest to controllers, the fields can't hear you, for no one owns us,
To those ready to die with the eternal fire of creation, we adore you for slaying injustice,
In their left ears, unity unwritten, the dreamlike khyal of revolution, of maroon intuition, humble gestures, indigo secrets, and ancestral signs long forgotten in sun-kissed abyss, released and awakened in the breath of this life and the next,
In their right ears, sizzle, elegiac mist.