A handsome man with a brown/black-haired child-- freckled, long eyelashes-- climbs the stairs to the upper level of the train. The child has a long curve of a scar running from just above and to the left of the whorl of his cowlick, and down to his left ear. The child speaks slowly, a little dumbly, asking "what's yesterdaaaaay, what's yesterdaaaaay," and exclaiming as we pass junkyards, "another train." The man is responding patiently, but I have to wonder what sadness or resignation this man might have in his life-- perhaps his son's personality was stolen from him, either in some accident or defect, requiring his head to be opened, the electric-gelled-fat pieces within rearranged, reordered, removed...
More than once, he has asked his father, "where are we going?" And his father usually answers, but sometimes the child has to ask twice, before the father deigns to respond to the question he has answered more times than I think anyone would ever care to count. Again: "what's yesterdaaay." The question is ignored. The father wants to move on, but his son is stuck in a loop where he cannot make memories, he doesn't remember that they're going three more stops, two, one to Downer's Grove to get french fries.
They disembark. One last time: "where are we going?" And they walk away from the train-- the man holding, gently, patiently, his son's hand in his right, and a sweat-out Starbucks cup filled with warm remnants of some tea mixture in his left. On his fourth finger there is the silver sheen of a ring.
The son stares blankly at his father's under armour-clad torso-- eye level-- and worries his lip, biting it, with his teeth and forefinger. Nervous habit. Dad is on his phone, sending a quick text to their rendezvous, or perhaps checking apps to find a place with french fries. The train pulls away.
Saturday, July 30, 2016
Thursday, July 28, 2016
Dreamsequence 03.09.009: Someone else penned these memoirs
I dreamt about you last night. Again (as it was in the past), like a specter, your composite particles assimilated, colluded, detoxified out of atmosphere and ether: to haunt me. And how I’ve missed these ghostly encounters—I really have.
We spoke no words.
We spoke color, line, shape, form.
We enveloped one another in passions unalike to any encounter we'd held in the past.
It was as if we were deaf; we touched, our breath was hot, our motions guided by some force or will of the upper realms. We communicated as if by telepathy, through the dilation and contraction of our pupils. We mashed our skulls together, irises like the lenses of kaleidoscopes—the great blacknesses inside each of us beckoning our attentions, longing to be beheld. And we were truly kaleidoscopic.
In the dream you were so real. I was so real; realer than I’ve felt in years, Prozac or no—I was real, and I have a non-fear (I say non-fear because fear is a feeling, and I do not have those anymore) that I may never again be as real as I once was. There is no soul inside me anymore. And I can not attribute that to you, nor to anyone else. Not even to myself. It is just simple, like everything else now. It is factual. It is solid and mundane. It is self-assuring.
In my thirty-second windows of hysteria, mania, breakdown—I feel a tinge of my former self. Yes, I say—this is how it’s meant to feel. But like a lucid dream, in which one’s recognition of said will invariably jinx the entire affair and return the dreamer to ignorance—of the blissful and unconscious variety or of the flat, conscious waking one—I can taste my own folly. I know this is not real; I know this is not as it once was, for that was Then, and this is all too Now.
None of what comes out of me feels like Me anymore. It’s all someone else’s doing. Someone else penned these memoirs.
We spoke no words.
We spoke color, line, shape, form.
We enveloped one another in passions unalike to any encounter we'd held in the past.
It was as if we were deaf; we touched, our breath was hot, our motions guided by some force or will of the upper realms. We communicated as if by telepathy, through the dilation and contraction of our pupils. We mashed our skulls together, irises like the lenses of kaleidoscopes—the great blacknesses inside each of us beckoning our attentions, longing to be beheld. And we were truly kaleidoscopic.
In the dream you were so real. I was so real; realer than I’ve felt in years, Prozac or no—I was real, and I have a non-fear (I say non-fear because fear is a feeling, and I do not have those anymore) that I may never again be as real as I once was. There is no soul inside me anymore. And I can not attribute that to you, nor to anyone else. Not even to myself. It is just simple, like everything else now. It is factual. It is solid and mundane. It is self-assuring.
In my thirty-second windows of hysteria, mania, breakdown—I feel a tinge of my former self. Yes, I say—this is how it’s meant to feel. But like a lucid dream, in which one’s recognition of said will invariably jinx the entire affair and return the dreamer to ignorance—of the blissful and unconscious variety or of the flat, conscious waking one—I can taste my own folly. I know this is not real; I know this is not as it once was, for that was Then, and this is all too Now.
None of what comes out of me feels like Me anymore. It’s all someone else’s doing. Someone else penned these memoirs.
Saturday, July 23, 2016
04.03.009 Miss Claire
I take my secrets by night, Miss Claire;
imbibe them when the backs are turned—
and I giggle at their foul play.
The world is asleep to our kind.
These are my secrets, Miss Claire;
two a night, each and every.
What dreams they hold—and what sadness
they bring in sleep, Miss Claire.
They are my secret powers against moonstare.
They are the lies and keys swallowed,
eaten;
they grind their way out of solidity.
They disappear without a trace,
Miss Claire.
They are my babies, my hopes to place.
I elect them individually, and gobble their heads—
so full of tiny, bright-shiny souls—
to fill the holes, the damnéd gaps
of inconsistency; what You, Miss Claire,
leave behind in me.
I spit on your grave, Miss Claire.
Haggard bitch; whore of Unholy Hell:
grace me no more with your vacuous, pressureless gaze.
Leave me, leave me be.
Nature abhors you, Miss Claire.
So do my secrets;
and the bottle is empty.
imbibe them when the backs are turned—
and I giggle at their foul play.
The world is asleep to our kind.
These are my secrets, Miss Claire;
two a night, each and every.
What dreams they hold—and what sadness
they bring in sleep, Miss Claire.
They are my secret powers against moonstare.
They are the lies and keys swallowed,
eaten;
they grind their way out of solidity.
They disappear without a trace,
Miss Claire.
They are my babies, my hopes to place.
I elect them individually, and gobble their heads—
so full of tiny, bright-shiny souls—
to fill the holes, the damnéd gaps
of inconsistency; what You, Miss Claire,
leave behind in me.
I spit on your grave, Miss Claire.
Haggard bitch; whore of Unholy Hell:
grace me no more with your vacuous, pressureless gaze.
Leave me, leave me be.
Nature abhors you, Miss Claire.
So do my secrets;
and the bottle is empty.
Monday, July 11, 2016
Demons 11.06.011
Endangering Old Squalor's home,
I go into the wood alone.
With fear to pierce
my neck, my skull:
blood runs in ribbons from my knees;
into the wood alone I go.
The trees whisper tricks and secrecies
of bugs and humdrum forest-lull.
The mist surrounds me fore and aft:
preceding dreams and the receding screams
as sanity, fleeting, drips trails behind me;
into the night I flee.
I go into the wood alone.
With fear to pierce
my neck, my skull:
blood runs in ribbons from my knees;
into the wood alone I go.
The trees whisper tricks and secrecies
of bugs and humdrum forest-lull.
The mist surrounds me fore and aft:
preceding dreams and the receding screams
as sanity, fleeting, drips trails behind me;
into the night I flee.
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