Dreamsequence 31.10.009

The room was dimly-lit. There were groups of people buzzing; floating amidst them was you.

I sat, at the bar covered in leather, and scribbled onto paper—in my own circle of brighter, clearer light. Feigning indifference, brushing away the attraction, tagging your mobile form in my periphery. Hearing every word, but letting none of the words' meanings register on my down-turned face.

I remained invisible in my ring of light—though I kept mentally flexing, pushing my circle outwards, testing my boundaries.

My pulsation must have caught your eye. The others continued their syncopated movements and took no notice, but you strode fluidly across the dimly-lit room. My circle of light shrank at your approach.

You sat down across from me—

(The others were still dancing, but were stuck—their moves seemed inhibited, somehow. Upon closer inspection, I realized that their movements were looped—like the sounds of a broken record: skipping, jerking, scratching.)

—You sat down, and I lifted my head. I stared straight into your eyes.

I showed no fear.

The sternness in my expression turned your eyes bright, and you smiled, baring your inhumanly-sized teeth at me.

You had perfect gums;

I was afraid.

You gazed up at me from underneath your eyebrows, and reached inside my circle of light—and it was extinguished. The din of the surrounding orange-lit room washed over me—the others were again moving freely, albeit awkwardly; you had a secret, and they knew it; they were chanting something I could not understand—but I shut my ears to it, focusing my being on you.

I kept my eyes trained on your face, as the smile there faded to complacency. I watched the rest of you in my vision's periphery. With your left hand and outstretched pointer finger, you drew—in blue blood—two parallel vertical lines, and an upswinging arc underneath. A smiley face.

But I was watching your lips, not your hand, as you bled your mark as close as inhumanly possible to the edge of my paper and its scrawlings.

"You know, God wants you to be happy—" your meaning implicit in every last syllable.

I could not move, but I spoke instead—

"You think I'm not happy?"—and laughed.

Doubt settled briefly in the furrows between your eyebrows, but took flight again as the muscles smoothed over.

(They knew you had a secret.)

You touched my hand, and an orange fit went through me. My skin buzzed, and my vocal chords were blistering, burning—paralyzed by the assault of electricity. Yet I felt no pain. All that registered in my brain was a sharp intake of air, bitter epinephrine flooding my system, coolness against my face.

Your face wavered before me, like a still pond disturbed by the plunk of a stone. Though your touch and your blue gaze remained, the room dissolved—and everything went black; I felt myself rising; I fell deeply into sleep—and from sleep, into wakefulness.

* * *

Green light now fills my vision.

The clock reads 4:47 a.m.

I came to cut you up, I came to knock you down; I came around to tear your little world apart.

I have been over and under it, honey-- I've been subject to its subjectivity, and I've learned to live through, rise above, and overcome. You're gonna be crushed when it ends.

That's also part of the problem: you see things in black and white, with clear beginnings and clearer endings-- yet your vision could not be more clouded. Yeah, you're sweet, maybe even smart, but you are naïve as all hell. It's always ultimatums with you; when he's not around, the world has no color. Life has no meaning without him. He's your fucking inhaler, your wheelchair, your pacemaker. Yet you don't seem to realize that your lungs, your legs, and your heart all worked in perfect synchronicity before you fell prey to his charms. What the hell is wrong with you?

Yeah, I guess I've learned the hard way-- and it looks like you're going to have to, too. It may be that I just can't stand seeing such weakness and impurity of spirit because it reminds me of something I once was. It makes me no better than you, but for some reason, I still feel as though I am; why you, and not I.

Even without my third-party doses of neurotransmitters, I have learned to control my emotions. I can set all thoughts of him to the side until we both have the time to address one another-- and I can function, sweetheart, in his absence. I am a person, not a parasite. I have drive, I am imperfect yet whole; I am growing, I am learning, I am being and becoming.

It's really gonna break your heart.

Delete 4/24/09

Back-space.
Error.
Please try again.

Here we are at Ten, old friend.
We always come back to this comfort;
and now we corrupt—time to reinvent.

Have no doubt—
there's a ghost in the machine
(and these vast archives are now a haunt);
as much as Authorities
would have you believe,

some trace remains of you and me.

But the data will never be whole.

We are now a virus, love:
we are corrupted,
and corrupt alike;

we race like fires through wires,
and we decimate
we decimate
we decimate.

In powers of Ten, we decimate.
A virus is not alive.

Flake, my Flake 7/6/09

Fuckflakes in a dark place—
I could feed my fish with you.

To entrust to you my grief and love—
glassy sores overcrusting amber silver honeycomb marrow:
you spread a message
of communicable autoimmune chaos
through every fragile vibrating cell in this hate-filled body
of toxic contradictions and
caustic abnormalities
I curse as my ownfucking Home.

—'twould be death.
You are bright.
Why will you not love?

Your lungs are flushed raw.
Moist copper arises to glisten over your
as-yet-unused larynx; glossed epiglottis
so underused—

But as you run, the telling wind and its surplus diseases
carry away your sins, your infections,
your misexpressed infidelities.

Why will you not love?

Flake, who are you?

And why have we both come



(again)



to this heightened hilltop-peak—
to speak, although we do not speak;
to see with these rheumy useless eyes
and touch with glassblistered fingers and lips—
white precancerous fiberglass tears
and heart soul-skin
bone-skull
rips—

and Flake, where is your mother? Flake, my flake,
who are you
to be so unloved?

Fear seeks you out, strikes poison in you
(toe-to-head)
as the fishes nibble.

Round, glassy
eyes.

Fear seeks you out again,
strikes you with more than poison—
and so too do I seek you out:
you, striking—
in me—
more than fancy.

And how long will we be dancing?
These sores must surely rupture.

Fuckflakes in a bad place;
Fuckflake's in a bad way.

Someone else penned these memoirs 9/3/09

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 willful force 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.

You Forgot It In People

It's an experience I must have somehow forgotten, for how can you long for a feeling without ever having experienced it?

All I want is for someone to listen to Sleater-Kinney with me. To lie on the floor, the two of us in each other's presence with the music playing between us. Each of us experiencing something new in each song; lyrics we hadn't really paid attention to or riffs we'd never taken the time to notice before.

And quite possibly, it may be dark. The lights could be dim, or extinguished entirely-- or there could be sun spilling in through the window, light overflowing frame's confine and skin illuminated in washes of subtle golden tones. Notes mixing with eddying particles of dust in the air; vibrations of some new life form felt through the intertwining of fibers and fingers in the carpet.

Complete parallel comfort in the same tiny space. Mutual appreciation for the same things; appreciation heightened by presence and coupling. A simplistic marriage of spent time.

No registration of temperature or of knots in the back. No such trivialities as seconds. The basal kind of joy we used to experience as kids-- when our imagination and its fantasies were sufficient companionship.

There is a bit of that wonder gone from this world. We miss it when we remember, and we remember all the same.

Even as I write I forget these feelings. Perhaps we lost these bits of ourselves when we began putting them to paper-- and now, look: no longer is there any paper. Like that, we realize how our lives have slipped by. Simple things like daydreaming are forgotten; wonderment is forgotten, and yet we keep on writing.

We keep on pushing pencils. Then we graduate to pens, and change from standard print to cursive.

Next come the mechanical pencils, and we lose standard print and cursive both: opting first for a sloppy-yet-individualistic mixture of the two, and then the complete elimination of said.

Now it's keys and fonts, and none of the expressiveness of shape and movement. The letters all have their space, not one runs into the other.

And we've lost track of ourselves; we've begun to lose track of our lives. On occasion--whether it be by accident or by some small will of our former selves-- we look back, telling ourselves it's to gauge just how far we've come, but all the while knowing deep-down that we miss something.

Before too long, we've forgotten what we miss. We miss what we've forgotten.

And every day with the forward step. Every day with the riff, the beat, the tempo: measure by measure, til the song has ended. With no appreciation for the greater entity, the selfless giving and combination of all these parts which lose their importance to something larger.

And we have to hit the back button, start the track over again, because we realize-- suddenly-- that we have no idea what just happened. In all our efforts to know by heart the lines and notes and rhythms and tempos with which we've become all too familiar, we have lost all meaning in the greater song.

And we have to hit the back button, start the track over again...
And we have to hit the back button, start the track
... ... ... ... hit the back button, start the track
(because we realize)
And we have to hit the back button, start
(... have no idea what just...)


Hit the back button: start the track
... over again.

Ghosts

it's the ghosts
again.

they haunt and they wail
and they've come back
again

to traipse around in yesterday's sheets
of white death-weave
again.

they lurk in shadows which should not exist;
vacant hallways echo
with ache and lament.

corridors stretch and grow longer,
they are colder, now--
they are narrower.
light no longer holds any value;
taistes of dust and tyme-wave cause
a ruckus in the soul,

vibrating clanking cantankerous racket;

the heart lub-flubs: its palpitations
no longer of any consequence.
futile, futile fuck of a thing
you are, you are,
Mine Love.

phantom echoes--
neuron-fire flurries--
and light-show pictures of faded sepia
rain down in havoc-spells of fury.

bleak pall-shadows taking over:
and mem'ry comes, a-rushing
in cold soulless gusts
to tear at faded harlequin-print;
to tear at baseboard, to tear at plaster;
et mens, et corpus, et cor.

knock-knock on the door.
let them in? raise the dead?
it's the ghosts--
the ghosts are here
to frequent their haunt
(to take me back)
again.