We are all lofty judges with our bleached white linens accusing angrily those who have trespassed against the moral order of a well-filed world as long as the gremlins of desire aren’t yapping at our heals pulling us into things we never would have done ourselves, or so we tell our groggy faces in the morning when we meticulously run our eyes over our own visage trying to uncover the mystery of who that person is staring back at me at three a.m. Is it a man? Is it a child? Is it something tame or something wild? Does the breathing fit the frame of this space and time? Is the soul too old or too young? Does it wish to go back to the womb from which it sprung?
She screams “I am not inequity! I am but a lowly personage. A small. Dagger. Rests between my lips. To strike. To slice. To pull from within themselves something that they never knew before. Who knew that I temptress would be tempted myself to fall away from idle play to fill in these seats with memories of who that child standing there at 23 could or would be, if he just stopped? STOPPED! Stopped running from the world he could see if he remained blind for but a moment to what his comrades say will save him from his yesterdays.”
His yesterdays echo like water walls in the smallest cave you never saw. His mind is a vessel for an insane compendium of lies and truths in blue and red hues all waiting for queues from a larger mass that dangles below in branches and stems, walking sometimes, sitting othertimes, as too large ears to hear clearly dangle awkwardly on either side of it, taking a world in that he has never seen in an auditory capacity of reality. He lives there: on the mossy brain. It grows and seeks sustenance, but he desires to remain in it’s never-cracked shell. Some call it Hell. He calls it “well”, to not need a doctor (or rather, to not call upon a doctor) is a sure sign that one is not sick and that one has a complete control over the surrounding everything that encompasses all points of the compass, whatever magnetic world that it may be.
Lids open dawnlight to this place of forgot. And forget. And forgive the things he gave to them, all placed in pigs’ pens for the prodigal son to eat. To eat and eat and eat until he becomes sick. So sick. He throws himself into the vile bile of a world held in vials and achingly-white trench coats. “He is to be recorded. Documented. Words. Say, ‘I love you father’.”
“I love you, my five-line wonder of staffs and clefs, of fallen men’s breadth of misty morning desires for something more than a pittance at fairs, scouring the earth for someone to tell them that life can be a sunrise, even if that sunrise is in her eyes: a moment’s surprise. Life is not a fair, for if it were it would be fare and would be fair. But what is not there in the air is under the furthermost of the ocean’s reckoning.”
Faces darken. “Say, ‘I love you mother’…”
“I love you my wondering wit of wicks willing to wilt when whispers widen to sharpen and hide in the cracks of backs not wanting to be realigned. I love you words that make sense less than the pauper’s perusal of 1930s stock market crash world.”
What do you do when it’s all cottonballs instead of snowflakes? All glued to construction paper in a third grade classroom never ventured to. It smells of glue and paint and children freshly made up to be little parents’ prisms of pertinence to their pretty perfect lives. They are the cornerstone of marriages, born in carriages they bring the tides in and out, making those strange giants laugh with a smile and cry with a pout and frozen with a shout of “I am not a child anymore!”
“Children of the wilderness are we, born with locks without keys. Looking for the chambers that will give flavor to a world bent on savoring delectable doors leading to something more than ‘here is your diploma, here is you car, here is your wife, here is your child, here is your divorce, here is your teenaged nightmare, here is your mid-life crisis, here is your depression, here is your dread of the dead pulling you out of bed holding onto your breath because there has never been something quite so frightful as death.”
Coats are criminals now, their teeth glaring in the blueberry-green light. “So tell us what you mean by narrating ‘blueberry-green light’ Blueberries are blue.”
“It is the making of a truth: blueberries begin their infancy in the green rooms of dormancy only to find their infancy in shades of ever-wakening blues. ‘I am blue! I am blue!’ they cry… and the old man sitting next to the river sighs over them singing softly soul’s lullaby “I’ve got the blues” and indeed he has them blues all wrapped up in chlorophyll crusts, not yet blue, but he sings “I’ve got the blues” as if it were true.”
They say “interesting” as if it really were something quite perplexing and unappetizing. Meat loaf will become lobster tails on Henry’s dinner menu. He will take his wife out tonight. Lawrence will dine on spiced chicken instead of boiled carrots. All this talk of things green that ought to be blue has somehow rusted him from the idea that vegetables save lives when you eat them instead of red things with legs and lesser souls meant for dinner plates and lunch bowls.
“And they won’t understand you, you know that? Prose’ rose is not a gentle flower, but a one with the insatiable ability to keep one writing late into the mornings paying no heed to warning from the gentle snorings arising from the watchmaker’s tick tick tock alarm clock. Waiting. Waiting to wake the world from a solemn slumberland.” These glasses have never been thicker on the thinker and his friend the tinker.
“And the eternal boy sits in a dawning 21st year without tears in eyes bright with darkened years: “I will say one word to summarize the cliff, the mountains, and the world. And it will be loose and context free. No prisons of irony for me.
"Thinking they, the ‘eyes taking in symbols’, ‘who are these shadows dancing around white walls and black towers of looping syllables and dotted. Punctuation spread like, butter?’
"The guards ask for sleeping hours. Hours of sweet release from life’s never ending lease. ‘I like guarding this light, this word, this façade-breaking meaning of causing ineptitude to stand back and say:
"‘simple words have nevermore been heard like rain drops singing, even through the pain.’
“This they pause and wait for something to tie it all together. Make it worthwhile. 'Pray, make it something to think about long after I have left this page'.
This random zanity
where the word "Assurance" or
"Mystery" ought to have been placed
instead another word has left the others erased.
this small quip, tricked flick of a three or two syllabled word (depending on how you pronounce it):
Limerick.”
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