Tag Archives: prose

.Dreams

I dont fall in love with people. Not in the present tense, at least. I fall in love with absence – and the wonder and infinite possibilities that come with it.

Theres hardly much passion left to the flesh. I lust after it, but I suppose that could be anyone. Thats too easy and its all been done a million times over.

You see, the outside world is terribly boring and it has its limits, but in my mind….

….. she goes on and on forever.

When we meet, hardly anything goes right but at night alone, the Earth rattles when I close my eyes. So I’ve been awake for days.

Months.

Years.

I don’t even remember.

I don’t even care.

I fall in love with memories of women long gone. Memories that I’ve conveniently twisted to suit my needs.

Ideas, dreams, fantasies….these are my tempestuous lovers.

But they are all mine.

Perhaps because these things can be controlled and changed when I need them to change. They leave when I need them to be gone and when I’m desperate, they crawl out of the trees and tie ropes around my neck for me.

In my dreams, she can stay safe. She climbs into my chest and closes my torso like a child hiding in a cabinet from a monster. She waits til the footsteps slowly fade away, and when its safe again, she climbs out of my body and lays next to it but she never lets go. She holds me like a snail holds its shell.

But only in dreams – because there is no salvation to me in real life. I am not her shell, I am her anchor.

And I make her sick

She screams at the top of her lungs but I just don’t go away.

It’s 1:30pm

Im sitting on the floor spinning an old hair tie that she left here months ago between my fingers.

And I’m smiling.

I’m smiling because shes gone, so I can finally fall in love with her again.

In dreams.

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.Autassassinophilia

I don’t remember the drive, but I remember the feeling of being driven somewhere.

I dont remember looking out across the river, but I remember her smashing my head against the rocks.

I remember being dragged towards the black water.

And I remember waking up with her arms wrapped around my waist. My dried blood strategically burried underneath her fingernails.
Crying and apologizing.
Not for what happened, but sorry that she couldn’t finish.
And I spattered an apology through my torn lips as well.
For the latter.

Fuck you, (name removed)
Now I have to start all over.

What a tedious task it is to find such women that lack just the right amount of chemical compounds in their pretty little minds.

Because any less of a lover would be much too unimpressive, and not as horribly alluring. And anything beyond this type of psychosis would be too far gone.

What a strange burden is it when you have the unfortunate capacity to intelectualize such a thing.
But I truely find it hard to conceive a more passionate type of rapture than to fall victim to one another’s relentless talons. The same ones that retract and bring you great warmth you by day, rip you limb from limb at night.

These are the singular types of encounters that could only happen once in a lifetime since, through their insufferable dismantling, either one of us dies, or all essential pieces needed to properly comprehend such endeavors again die along with it.

And then we are too far gone.

But tonight we both know exactly what it is we’re doing.

She arrives at 7p.m.
And I know she brings a knife.

…and my mouth waters.

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. Wolves

My past is a wolf tied to an old oak out back. Emaciated and starving.

And it knows shes here….

It’s senses are now just as sharp and desperate as its fangs and I can hear it howling from the garden. It knows when she shivers in the middle of the night, and the hunger digs through its body relentlessly.
Occasionally,  I sneak out and feed its hollowed body – just enough to keep it alive. But my hands have become raw, bloody and chewed. So I try my best to hide them under her body at night, but the flickering lights from the storm outside expose the blackened blood as evidence of all the things she does not deserve. All the things about me that would slowly disgrace her from the inside out.
At times, for our own wellbeing, I starve the wolf for weeks at a time, but its wimpers cut deep under my skin and it wakes me from a dead sleep. I watch the worn mutt suffer outside my window. Harrowed and weakening; I feel the same way.
I crawl back to my bed and I feel her quiver when my lips brush just below her ear, and I tell her that everything will be fine…
And I smile, because it feels good knowing that I can still cut it free from its ropes if I ever stop giving a fuck.

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. Negative Space

Take particular notice to the silence and stillness of others. It is these non-actions that expose the true colors of anothers soul.  Not the things that they tell you, but the things they cant seem to. Not what they do, but things that have never been considered. It is the negative spaces of a person that paint the greatest picture. The silence, unintentionally placed, exposes a divergence. It proves true capabilities or complete lack thereof.
Once you present these lack of details to the canvas of another’s life, an entirely different picture emerges. The blank spaces where hands never reached out, or the identical silences before “I’m sorry” and “I love you” as if equally embarassed or ashamed of both. When applied to the canvas, these blank areas create something a bit more sinister. Like the whites of a wolf’s eyes right before striking, just moments before all the blood.

Take great heed in the lack of motion and language in others; Words that never reach the tongue cannot be tainted by sophisms or lies and what lacks movement naturally can not elude.

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. Poltergeist

She wears makeup like an old house wears bars and wooden boards covering its windows. And similarly,  these smashed-berry and ash colored adornments are applied by external means, because her hands no longer work in tandem with her mind. Her body no longer matches her internal intentions,  and even when she bleeds -and she does quite often – the crimson slips off and splashes away like water on oil and only serves to make all the messes that follow her like hungry dogs even more desirous. Thier mouths foam and thier teeth grit.

Houses dont close their own doors or stain red thier own carpets. These happenings are caused only by the most unfortunate inhabitants….

The car was silent and pitch black most of the ride home until a small flame suddenly splashed atop of her lighter just infront of a crooked cigarette. The amber glow lit up her face just enough to see that her eyeliner was running and smeared as if to show that just like a weathered old home, the boards covering those windows that alluded to her soul has been tampered with. As if someone had broken in and trespassed beyond her locks and rusty fences and warning signs and smashed her insides like disgraced fine china and smashed holes through all the walls, so that everything spilled out into everything else creating an indistinguishable mess. Now which body part shows tenderness? Could it be lips or fists? And what, now, is love without a pit of guilt in her stomach? And faith…is it the kind she prays with or the kind the world preys upon? And a voice inside her tells her that this whole place should be burnt to the ground.

…In the distance you could hear bad lucks stomach growl and it’s mouth water.

She left for good the other day, but I saw her last night by the tree out back. Only it wasn’t her. Perhaps the frayed fabric between dreams and waking life had snapped and let one bleed into the other disgracefully. She was moving as if tangled in some sort of wind, but the air was absent of all currents and there was not a breath within miles. Not even mine. I walked over in silence to show her I hadnt moved a muscle since she left, that my heart had been collecting dust along side the broken furniture and useless, faded old books on the floor of the old house behind those eyes – Behind her eyelashes that resembled iron bars. But the second my fingers seemingly touched her face, I became unbearably confused and withdrew out of fear that I could be lost in that delirium forever, and she dismantled and reappeared elsewhere across the yard. 

I guess every ghost story begins with something lost. In fact, a very basic definition of a ghost could be the return of something that was supposed to be gone forever. So thats where ill re-start this story:

A body. Not the traditional cadaver, this one still had quite a number of breaths still in it. (Though I was trying my hardest to take those away) A body with its warm back pressed against the contrasting, cold dirt in this very yard. Under a different light, maybe our bodies resembled some type of resurrection ceremony,  only time and a little more illumination would prove something much more debauched.  The placement of our hands were contained solely to the vital organs and all my main arteries were, just below the skin, dressed up with her pretty little hands grasping and clawing at each of them. Warm violet blood made its anticipated escape from my chest and spilled back into the dust where we came from, If you believe those types of things.

Just as vandals on the streets not far from here mark buildings as thier own with aerosol cans only to be washed away by mid-day,  so have I tried desperately to claim the charming woodwork of her body as my own. To bend the bars covering her incredible eyes and build my miserable estate back there. To sweep the floors of years of forgotten, broken things and to stumble incidently upon my heart covered in dust and soot and place it next to hers, in the attic where I could finally put a bright candle and chase away the pitch black of an entire life. 

This is not a ghost story in sense of rattling chains or floating tea-pots. But, rather, a haunting of every conceivable sense. An immense teething sensation – a displeasure from deep in my gut that keeps me up at night, knowing that her endearing old house is now miles from my own and perhaps still in immediate danger of arson.  She was not the true ghost in this encounter, even as haunted as her old home had become over the years. She was the very impetus that brought forth the return of something inside me that had been laying seemingly dead and decayed for a lifetime. She was the poltergeist that startled me by rattling my heart and then dispersing into thin air leaving me terrified and alone….

and if only this haunting would never cease….

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.The Protégé

I do not wish to undermine the gifts of the worlds most operatic songstresses, but at the moment I find even the most beckoning siren a bit lackluster. Since, in history, there was hardly ever a chord struck more pleasantly to me than these – which are delivered with unfathomable elligance from from her – whos head now lays softly on my chest. And from her lips flow wonderful, dancing syllables that float out like great flocks of doves. I close my eyes and watch them all, in my mind, manipulate the atmosphere above our heads. Each letter of her alphabet flaps its white wings and mocks gravity. Twisting and diving and then floating back towards the moonlight.

Maybe its due to her current proximity to such a vital and nonsensical organ as my heart that makes me mutter these things. Or perhaps due to her voice – which always covers me in such a strange nostalgia. Her voice being the most endearing accelerant to the inferno that is my imagination. If she could only see all the lives I’ve lead in my mind through her words. All the foreign lands I’ve conquered. All the kings I’ve slain….

I lay back and focus on her fingers which tap my ribs to an off-beat. Vibrating my veins like a string instrument. My very being now a grand piano at the fingers of the most astonishing protégé.

What a magnificent symphony has she made of me! I doubt cherubs could pluck away at their harps with such grace! Ha! She has made them all a fool! And look how Ive become the most blubbering concerto!

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. Lavender

I could sit and watch the lavender drip from the sky and watch roses cripple and sleep under endless layers beneath me. I could sow the bottom half of me into the soil and rust quietly.  I could count patterns of dying mammals and describe the hollowing of all sequoia and birch. My bones would slowly begin to splinter over millenia of dying land as I watch cities all fissure and fall back into heaven and the insects crawling about my limbs would evolve and then I would smash them all one by one.  My roots would turn and twist overcome this entire fucking world forever.

No god could shake me.
No history could fathom me.
And no earth could ever undo me.

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. Leviathan

I felt a pull from offshore – from where I watched the sun press back into the earth just moments ago. A beckoning that felt as if it had wrapped its cold fingers around the bottom of my ribcage and dragged my torso into the waves. I felt my father out there among the tide, and layers of him surfaced and crashed back into each other again and again and nothing could possibly stop it – nothing I could fathom.  Every wake breaking into my chest was a funeral.  And the trees behind me howled in the wind and the lights of the hotels flickered and there was people along the boardwalk crying and laughing and fucking –  but here under the waves, under the creaking oak of haunted ships,  and between the endless limbs of leviathan – was the quieting of everything eternally.

Excluding me.

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.X

I took myself out to lunch today before work as I usually do, and as I walked into the restaurant, I overheard a group of people snickering about “crazy, smelly old bum” who was sitting at one of the corner tables outside talking to himself. I placed my order with a young girl at the register who clearly wanted him kicked off the premises.

Maybe through a mixture of boredom and curiosity,  I chose my seat 2 tables down from the old tramp and I discovered that he wasn’t mumbling to himself at all. Rather, he was reading from a book that was slightly hidden in his filthy old backpack on the table in front of him. He was reading very well and in a strangely pleasant voice about an old man suffering alone on the bank of the Mississippi River – reminiscent of Siddhartha laying next to the river before Govinda stumbles upon him.

It was all actually quite warming and equally melancholy. I sat and ate quietly and tried to ignore the fact that hidden in the chapters he softly spoke was likely a very personalized cry for help. And even now I felt as if every laugh and joke and dirty look issued from the front of the restaurant was like another surge of water causing this old bums own river to overflow. Even I, being too late for work for any kind of discourse, paid for my meal and walked away in silence. But looking back over my shoulder, I could picture the river overwhelm him and drag his body away.

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.X

I guess its like reading the lyrics of a song without ever hearing it. It usually creates a jarring, unkempt mess unsuitable for any ear or tongue.

But once you hear it, once you lay down in a dark room with it and focus on its nuances and all the tedium that went into creating what is laying there next to you, telling you about the scar on thier stomach or that time up in the Georgia mountains a few summers ago, its often hard to distinguish anything else from it ever again. And even if you do ever run into that jarring mess of words, sounds and actions again, maybe at a party or a bar downtown, its quite difficult to read what they are saying now without hearing that same melody and those alluring nuances. Even after a few years worth of other unsuitable, bland melodies.

And I guess that’s what I’d consider love.  Not that im anyone to even utter a word on the subject,  but there is quite a few brilliant, complex symphonies that play out in my head when I see her occasionally and one day, I’d like for someone to hear something unmistakable like that when I speak.

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