The Quintessential Voodoo Cowboy

I walk across the burgeoning desert of my own consciousness as it breaks apart and shifts beneath my feet, leaving little breadcrumbs dancing across the browned lawn of rock and scree beneath my heels. I am alone. There are dust-devils dancing on the wind, playing their havoc games helter-skelter with little mind for mortal woes. Tortoises are trudging on their way, dragging their great bellies along the ground as they go, little walking worlds with wizened faces and unknowable thoughts. I tip my hat to them, and trudge onward. I hold my own world, though here it’s inside out. That’s what makes this place. It’s outside-in. All those pouring sensations shoved in a grinder and blitzed down to spiritual matter and thought-stuffs. The inverted tortoise shell. The desert on the interior.

Some call this place Void. That’s one name. One road of many which a cowboy can walk. And walk I do. Sometimes in many directions at once.

The desert is circular in every sense. A great orb that is impossible to escape with logic alone. That’s where it traps me. The ground bulges and threatens to burst and swallow me up in blackness and negation, so I deny its ability to do so. I insist upon a linear world. A hexagonal chessboard made of equal parts and joined facets. One great obsidian jewel, all at once denying its chosen shape. My coat swishes in the wind as I traverse the glassy and reflective facet I find myself upon, and as my boots press down on it, slapping loud and clear, I think myself transported to some place safe. Somewhere ordered and calm.

Oh, but nightmares await after staring too long across the void, for it stares back into you. I see the craven reflection of my dream-form, my boots, my long coat, my wide-brimmed hat, tall and magely. A fastened shirt of an eastern style, silk and tightly drawn up to the top of my neck. And beyond that, no face. Six searing blue pupils set into vestigial darkness. The Voodoo Cowboy.

The glass cracks evenly into a million little hexagons, and there are new reflections in each of them, forcing me to look. See the visage walking on, pointlessly towards another identical facet. It questions. It laughs.

And one questions what it was that tore at the void. Is it the tap of my heel? Or is it something outside? Or is it that too much order throws the reflections into sharp relief?

Before long, it does not seem to matter. The reflections peel themselves off the glass and emerge as shadowy wraiths, hungry and eager. My six eyes flash. The wraiths converge and tear at me, tattering my clothes in seconds. My fingers pluck for the tools at my belt, and pull golden streamers of sigils from their holsters. I whip them through the air, and the wraiths burn at their touch, pulling away, unable to bear the constructive sparkling of the written word. Known Truths. That is their fear, and I use it. A faceless grin comes over me as they tear apart.

They limp away, and I show no fear, though the ghastly revenants have wounded me. Their venom is tribulation. That is their way. They attack from without, infect, and harry. They would see me stumble and lie helpless against the glass before coming back to tear flesh from the visage. Insidious, as all monsters of the mind are, upon reflection.

A great eye watches from above. An empty glass with mere darkness beyond. Their Eye. They would have me, if I stayed in the void. There are no cures to this place. No plants or sacred stones, no external magic or hoodoo to do the healing I need. Void is a place to end chaos, but it is poison itself, when too long is spent in the realm.

My six eyes gleam, and shut. I fall inward.

I am a great jungled psyche. Delirious, I tear my way through the green cleft of organic sensations. The grand and grotesque Id at the base of my skull. I arrive in this place, and I feel the melange of upper and lower spaces melding together. My visage burns with holy fury, emotive and certain. Here among the pale white roots of titanic trees and the cyan thrush of fungal weeds I gather together a perfumery, plucking sensations from their stems and mashing their petals and fibres together into a bitter elixir. I shudder at the wraith-venom pooling in my veins, and pluck a long, bone scalpel from my belt. I press its needlepoint to my skin and etch an opening in the hexaemeric language, pull another bandage of sigils from my bandoleer and stain it with the potion. I wrap it around the fresh wound, and lie back as I feel the antitoxin doing its work. Bright, hopeful thoughts fill me up. Half-remembered sensations dredged up from the chaotic moil. They collide into new stories and revitalising epiphanies. Illogic. Will and wisdom are far removed from the ordered hexagonal jewel that is Void.

There is light pooling in the wound. It enters my bloodstream, tingling and cold. Moonlight. Soft, happy, brilliant. It gushes into every other system in my body and drives away the demons where they lurk, whispering dark nothings and lies into my collective being. Some parts of me have already given in. The organisms in my stomach and my kidneys ache from the feel of mortality. They cease to be anything more than human, and suffer human pain. They become barren, swept moors filled with dark gases and black waters.

But stories cure them, just in time. Moonlight falls upon the swamped participles that are my composite and regenerate them, clearing the waters, seeding the lands with fresh hopes and air. The magic of it runs its course, and I sleep in a wreathe of moonlight, hat tipped over my eyes.

When I am wakeful and healed, I leave the Melange, snapping the clinging tendrils of the subconscious with a few brisk motions. This place may seem tranquil, but it is just as dangerous as the last. I could lose myself in its psychotropic mnemonia, and just as well dream forever of burbling and quixotic worlds. I pull myself back, because Melange is not all I am. There are other lands to walk, and I am never about one place. We split ourselves up so that we have somewhere to travel to. That is the nature of cowboys and wanderers.

I stand at the stone face of the gorge, and begin my ascent. The air thins and becomes warmer. The stone cuts into my fingers as I climb, though it gives way beneath me easily, and at times I stroll vertically, and there is no struggle in it. There are wind-carved pillars of stone expanding outward in all directions, and I find myself cresting one in the baking sun, the wind whipping at my clothes. I hoist myself up, stand a moment, and then sit cross-legged, observing the canyons and gullies that lay out before me. Every shadow gleams with purple light. Kangaroos play leapfrog with one another down below. It is like surveying a great stone forest with branches made bare, so that I might observe all the happenings between them. Caravans kicking up dust on the horizon. Long-tailed hawks sailing on the wind like kites.

There is no end to this story. There is no destination to sate the wanderlust that keeps my legs kicking and my brain thumping on its grand engine schemes. There are voyages west, there are voyages within, and once in a while, there are adventures to be had on the sharp-edged world that exists beyond the mind. I welcome them all. Mine is a restless existence. There will always be another frontier.