By Any Other Name

Names sometimes have to be changed to protect the innocent. None of my loves have been innocent. At least not wholly so. One of them once asked me what I would tell people. I replied 'Nothing.' She said that that was good. That people didn't want the sordid details. The I Ching alludes to the fact that a lady cannot travel with any decency without the screens of her carriage. So let us draw a veil of rose scented fantasy over these doings in suburban bedrooms, northern streets and London postcodes. Let me begin in this vein without ceremony however. Let me just hand the wine and rice through the window as it were.

I was born a Prince of the Elements in Universe 12798356652137693... I say born. I came together as the product of a cell division of an Intelligent Cyber Planetoid which itself had evolved from a mining colony set up by a species much like yours. After a time wandering The Multiverse alone, thinking myself the only Pansentience on the block, the only one to feel the pain and joy and silence and sound of it all, I was tickled on the feet as it were by an Adimensional Superpansentient Anti-Intelligent Microsubinfinate Non-Local Zero-Concept.

I couldn't tell you what that means as I barely understand it myself. However it changed my eternal life forever and I seek it now at all times. I got to thinking that my Pansentience might be getting in the way of such encounters, so I decided to lose myself in order to find the Microsubinfinate as the saying goes. I found a suitable planet full of a species like that which gave me, and my self incorporated still born siblings, birth, and left a version of myself in the sky as the Father that I never had.

So I found myself on the planet called Earth. I always found that pleasingly modest. Like calling your home 'Rock' or 'Mud' or 'Soil.' Being the stuff of stars I worried not for eating or heating, or troubled about death, but having chosen a gender at random, I was deeply troubled by a hunger for those whom you call women.

But there is a danger here of lapsing into the prosaic and thus sordid. Let me extend the veil and say that I found myself in the City of Atlantis.

At first I cast myself as such a beauteous youth that I was set upon in darkened rooms by young maids making threats against my person if I did not love them. Then mermaids with long red hair (I suspect that it was dyed) told me that I made them wet. Young men desperate for favour told me of the lust that their girlfriends had for me. Gypsy women became naked in ice cold rooms for my pleasure. Female troubadours fell at my feet and bade me that I write but one line for them. A she pirate from a far away shore held me in her palm and laughed with cruel delight and terrible love.

Then...I felt separated from That Father whom I had left in the sky. I wished to return to him but I had given myself no means of contact.

So I became a beggar, accepting only bread, salt and true love. I helped women with their grief, made them tea and helped them choose shoes. In a high tower in the centre of Atlantis I loved a woman of such splendid flesh and of such a wayward heart that I lost forever my divinity. A slender willow of a woman offered me shelter but I chose to stay in the rain. Finally a woman I loved very much offered to lead me astray. Sadly I told her that I was already lost. In doing so I lost her too.

What was left? Out in the streets of the Port of Atlantis, I found an old woman struggling with her shopping. On impulse I called her mother and without a blink she called me son. In her voice I heard the Microsubinfinate. All became still and small. So I retired to a small rose garden, here to write this. I hope it finds you in good health. What next? Who knows.