In the Eyes of the Devil


Have you ever loved someone who was mired in the pits of Hell?
And when you reached down to pull them out, did they look you square in the eye, grip your wrist & drag you in with them?
There is so much God in the eyes of the Devil.
His were blue and they were beautiful to me.

You see, before I met the man who was my master, I felt the only way I would know real love was by pinning myself through the throat to my high school walls like a lonely poem.

I imagined the world passing by would squeeze grief through the punctuation & at least make a little puddle in that cave I had dug beneath my good grades.
With my ear to the floor I could hear something beautiful underneath the stones. But, I snapped my finger nails digging for it.
So, I sat there waiting, hoping computer clicks and poetic drips would drop by drop erode a hole through it.
And one day he was there, as teachers tend to be.
He taught me the codes to hack my underworld and could really hear what I was saying.
He watched over me as I went and knocked on Mama Ayahuasca’s doors to infinity.
I mean what would you do if someone handed you the psychosomatic jackhammer of mantra meditation?
Hell, I got to work and it was fucking amazing. I was incandescent as bit by bit I actually began to break through the base to the core of me.
He was my friend, like a father. He was my cul-de-sac guru.
I gave it to him, bag and baggage.

You know, at first there doesn’t seem to be a suitable metaphor for the way a scared and needy young man can blindly love a cunning and charismatic maniac.
But, of the things he taught me, you see, he gave himself away.

He taught me the art of fly swatting.
You see a fly, though disgusting, is a magnificent creature in the way it perceives time. Perhaps by its being so small and by the quantity of light its brain can process, it pretty much sees the world in what to us is slow motion.
So when you go to swat it,
it sees your big stupid hand encroaching like a bulldozer
and just steps right out of the way.
But, if you move
very

very


very slowly,
it won’t be able to tell you are moving,
until you’re just an inch away.
Then, you wait
until it is cleaning its wings
and then abuse begins with cutting the little strings that lead you home and tie you to your friends. Then come the daily doses of moldy weed, hypnotism, and a line that goes a little something like this:

“Kenjimoto. There’s only one rule. Never lie to me and look me in the eyes. If you have to lie, look down. If you lie to me and look me in the eyes, I will know, and I will burn a fucking hole through you and destroy you.”

There came a time when I realized I was lost inside a jungle made of smog in my little cave I dug beneath my good grades. And in that place where my little puddle should have been, there stood an oil rig. As I followed the pipes, they led me to a straw stuffed into my master’s mouth. He sucked me down again, again, and told me that I owed it to him.

I wanted it. I didn’t want it. I wanted it. I didn’t want it. I wanted it. I didn’t want it….

I could fill this story with a lifetime of words, but the only one I needed was the only one I never said. Stop.
For him the word “therapist” already had its pronoun built into the equation. Stop. He knew it. Stop.

In this kind of Hell, the only way is through. Stop.
To pull the stake from my throat, fall to the floor and watch the poem land beside me. Stop.

He was a gift: the perfect example of the kind of person I will never be. Stop.

Have you ever fallen in love with yourself while you were mired in the pits of hell?
And when you reached in to pull yourself out, did you smile and say “What took you so long?”
There is so much God in the eyes of humanity.
Mine are brown, and they are beautiful to me.