Battle Song Of The Storyteller

I am a storyteller and I will finish the tale I am telling.

The gods have chosen me as its speaker.

My story has weight and value. It is worth more than a chest of gold, more than a pair of magic boots, more than a cool laser gun that goes pyoo pyoo pyoo, more than a ride on the back of a surfboard unicorn. My story’s merit cannot be measured. All that matters is that it matters.

It matters to me. This is my story. This is my jam. One of many that live inside my heart. My heart is a bell: I ring it and you listen to its mighty peal. My heart is a geode: I crack the stone with the heavy hammer of my effort and you are captivated by the crystal within. My heart is a heart: bloody and pulsing and an engine of life driven by the drum-beat of one story after the next, and then, and then, and then.

(And then.)

I am the story’s master.

I am the story’s partner.

I am the story’s slave.

No part of the story may hide from me. I know this story like I know the back of my hand. Like the back of my hand as it strikes the gum out of my enemy’s mouth. Like the back of my hand as it gently caresses the cheek of my lover, who may be a man, who may be a woman, or who may be some hermaphroditic moon-person whose body is a hundred quivering pseudopods and dripping orifices.

I know this story like I know a moon-person’s pseudopods and orifices.

I control the measure of this tale. I pull the levers. I thumb-punch the buttons. I have all the keycards and access codes, all the blueprints and treasure maps. I can keep them close. Or I can throw them into a campfire and laugh as they crackle and burn and turn to char.

I see all the pieces of the story. The characters dance when I say dance. They fight, they fuck, they forgive.

I laugh.

I set the tempo. I control the pace. I make the mood. I state my case. I speak my heart.

I control it.

It controls me.

I do this because I must. Because my soul is an ungoverned stagecoach, the horses galloping toward the cliff’s edge. My fingers yearn to put words on a page — the itch and desire lives in the hinge of each knuckle. My tongue wants to touch the roof of my mouth, my lips want to form the grunts and clicks and susurrations of this myth, this memoir, this comedy, this drama, this dramedy — I am driven to do it, obsessed with its shape, compelled to know what can never be known. Drama is my lord. Conflict my lady.

I am story’s whelp. Its cur. Its sub. Its bitch.

Story is loa. Story is spirit, ghost, god. It rides me like I am its goddamn and god-chosen horse.

No one owns my story but me. But my story owns all who hear its telling.

My story is a cardboard box that could be anything.

My story is a knife slipped between your ribs.

My story is the sweet juice of an overripe fruit flowing over your lips. Down your chin.

My story is a spaceship burning up as it punches through the hot intangible shell of a planet’s atmosphere, a glacial shelf cracking and sliding into the ocean, a gorilla on bath salts loose in a preschool.

My story is nipples and tongues, fire and ice, tits and ass, heaven and hell, this and that.

My story is a blasphemous ululation that forms chaos into order and breaks order into chaos.

My story is want, need, fear, hope, hate, truths, lies, coffee, whiskey, earth, space, diamonds, death, life, fluids, flux capacitors, cats, fire, sugar, pancakes, batteries, floodwaters, twist-ties, flavored lubricants, throat songs, scrambled eggs, severed heads, newborn babies, hungry goats, lusty satyrs, worms in the dirt, birds in the sky, clouds that become rabbits, rabbits that become were-rabbits, were-rabbits that sit down at a breakfast nook and point guns at our hearts and demand that we tell them a story, story within story, story creating another story, story spinning into the pieces of a hundred other tiny little stories —

I don’t know what the fuck my story is.

But I know that it is more than ink on a page.

It’s blood. And spit. And sweat. And milk.

The story is whatever I want it to be.

Anything at all. Open season. Empty page. Tabula rasa. Solve-for-X.

I am a storyteller and I swim in possibilities.

I am a storyteller and I command the ideas to get in line and march as I say.

I am a storyteller and the audience belongs to me as much as I belong to them.

I am a storyteller and I will nail this narrative to the wall.

I am a storyteller and I will write the tits off this motherfucker.

I am a storyteller and this is my sexy party, yo.

I am a storyteller and I am the story told.

I am a storyteller and I will finish the tale I am telling.