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My grandfather died with the closing/opening night of the rock opera. All that I ever got from him was his little crucifix that used to ride in the Dodge Dart with him and I. { Must we always discard these small register receipts, tell-tale ticking time bombs of steps retraced, only to find the boots soiled with nitroglycerin and a matchstick ready to raspberry the entire performance. } The last time I ever saw that was the evening of the opera. Carl { Lejouen, le jeun fils qui chantends le massacre. } threw it out into the audience and only the little boy on the cross knows where he is now. { I’d like to come home now, daddy! You said it wouldn’t take long…[ Almost there, there, sweety. Almost there, there. Ain’t nothin’ to worry a purty head ‘round. ]…you can’t tell me what to do no more, you can’t tell me what to do. } Together, they rest — a burden off my consciousness. You, old man, with eagle black eyes and turtle thin neck, you came out of your shell, and you grew up, you bastard, and look how far underground that got you. You must have been one of my best teachers. I will name my first manchild after you, you must have captured a part of me under siege. { My name is Stanley, she coughed and cooed. }
But you, dead like the rest of them, left me nothing of consequence behind. { Have I got an app for you, young man! } I don’t know your ideals, so I can’t carry them on my shoulders for you. The shoulders; the headrest. [ Did you expect to find it posteriorly? ] I remember a smile, and I remember a cough. I often echo the cough and it is then you scare me, then I hate you. We robbed each other as we went on, and what do you call an assassin who points to an assassin | Guilty! |, anyway, my friend?
I wrote in my journal to my next of kin about my mother. The one who bore me, flesh of flesh. I was in praise of her for not having an abortion — ‘My mother was a brave woman, and it is due to her bravery and her thoughtfulness that I am alive.’ { horseshitHomage: String, truthValue: Boolean } Chances are, she may have been a coward; too weak-willed to go through with the vacuum technique , prying fingers to drop a fetus. { The truth is that you were an outcome. Of a universe full of high ideals about itself, and the reputation to prove it, you were the magic outcome. Well, as it stands now, only what you’re able to remember and what others are capable of remembering about being with you. But they clearly have enough on their overflowing plates of attention already. } There may have been a death threat hanging above her head to have the child. No need to misname her either way. She didn’t kill me. [ Take the attention of an afternoon to create time. ] — { I heard a new story with the break of my first dawning, that will placate the belly with the amorphous and ambrosial sauce. }
I’m thankful. Period. { Hint, hint! }
Blue, we sit together, bathed in light, the light of the concerto — not alone, but along together. Could be worse, but it’s bad: nothing left to say: like a whip, the heavy raindrops snap against the window. Lightning showers the room in broken fluorescence like a tuned up T.V. set around midnight.
{ I used to masturbate to flickering static late at night, imagining into the pink noise glamorous dolled pin-ups licking their licks, beckoning for me with their intimacy. }
The face before me becomes clear again, her eyes are red. She touches the bay of her mouth; pulls it down. Thunder belches somewhere beneath a sun, elsewhere beneath a moon, but neither here. She strokes her collarbone with two fingers, any two, any two you like, it doesn’t matter. Her frown can’t dip any lower. The salt in my mouth is turning sour. She acts as if she’ll speak, but she holds it.
[ No white tube sock was safe. The carbon footprint from the starching alone would melt any planet to mercury. ]
Still.
[ And who were the figments of his fantasy? Dance about, sexily clad at best, bent and caressed at one pubescent whimsical fiction. ]
As the curtains blow in at us. Red in this black; black in this red. The screen jumps loose at another dole of lightning and shatters on the floor in a fit of rage. We didn’t hear or see it.
[ Every male eye spits rape at every passing short skirt. ]
Outside, in a line, the streelamps dim themselves until they disappear into the trees and the evening. They’d been beat, accept defeat, accept it like a man.
[ Of course, we’re aware. ]
The silver glass lies on the ground — I get up from the wick-her, conetnt to give her my back… only then can she speak, stil she waits a moment. The wallpaper is indeterminate in this haze. From my best recollection, I am in the child’s room. There are French soldiers. French sayings.
[ As one knows the bliss of seeing, the other the bliss of being seen, each with dreams of power. ]
“Parlez-vous Francais?” she asks.
[ … ]
“No, don’t speak a word.” She laughs. It doesn’t break the tension, it increases it. It rasps through my boiling drums, I slam my eyes shut. It kills the wind with its howl, chills the soldiers into forever solitary sedentary.
[ Wooing with writing, he wasn’t. ]
I glance at the alarm clock. It blinks 0:01; the power went off, silently without a rush.
“My dear, we have all the time in the world.”
This was written as a free-write in Mr. Berry’s English creative writing class. Jon Fairchild, Meryl Griff, Amy Harris, Hillary Windolf, and Jen Russell, I can’t remember anyone else. Mr. Berry would ask us to write straight for ten minutes. I will share others at some time. I think I will finish this one now. Remember, please, I haven’t free-written in eons.
And with the hot rush of eternity on an open, bleeding wound, she cast her eyes to the floor, rippling over the planks she turned back to me, dull in ignorance with those pitiful open sockets.
“We have all the time in the world, my dear.”
To think of the passage of time in hell, the flames aways touching your boot, the walks dripping of tomorrow.
You see — I have lost the imagery, the imagery is gone. Bring it back to me, I want so now there must be some way through furious scribbles on an open page to see, see the light of the inner mind help me to burst through this glaze as if on a donut, and you get to all seen where your fucking hands and mustache when you eat it and its no good. There is safety here to be anadnonded, KILL ME NOW! KILL ME NOW! I wish to go on not to stay here and just shit out these useless faster wordsdieDieDIEPie
Pie.
Fumes, helpless without a gas mask. Ammonia mind over settling dew drops of inherent psychoconscience. The fingertips are wet as we touch the pool — not we — I. It’s all me.
Get out of my life. { Thus spake, Karen, the sacred cow. }