coup de gr�ce
Saturday, Jul. 19, 2003 5:25 pm
The steps were taken slowly. Pushing circles under street lights and fire exit door ambience. Around buildings with art deco facades infected with late-blight, the monolithic structures that hide their heads in the sinking clouds. Artifical lights spelling out their skeletons against the bruise colored night sky.
Mumbling voices jumped out at me and wandered off into the ether. It had become difficult to determine where the voices were originating from. My head was swimming with words. A babble of partial births, caesarean reactions to maintaining hold on a conception of polyamourous intimacy of words. A womb of sentences and nonsequitors.
In a drunken stupor, I could imagine my head blown apart with a point blank 12 gauge round. The pump and click of a shot being chambered and then the crackling bass boom of buckshot spreading my physicality across a borded up window. Inside, like a canterbury egg, a mix of sugar sweet faux-yolk vocabulary. Thrown into the air in violent spontinanity.
Halation,
incite,
cathectic,
respristinate,
would drip into the sidewalk cracks and stain the trash strewn at my feet with viscosity highlighted in maroon properties.
Then I was back at a red light. Staring at the corner across the street. Two long stretches of sidewalk across from each other continued in my direction, bowing and curving off into the distance until the two met at a the point geometrics define as infinity.
That's where I was going.
3:48am; I am standing underneath fire escapes, an incandescant shotgun blast splattering a litter of words and eggshell across a borded up window. Illuminating the seculded spaces between the fingers of a sleeping building.
3:48am; I am alone, asleep at home, without dreams. An alarm clock will wake me up in the cuddle of a new dawn's mercy claws.
3:48am; I am half conscious in a stairwell outside. Turquoise lights blanket me. Wake up sore and hurt to a slow illumination.
Senses numbed, staring at a green light. Start walking into infinity, Moonless sky.
A demanding night asking for 9 million dreams, each one requiring my body to extract itself to a different location. The sidewalks turned to a thick mud, slowly sinking to my neck then back up again as though walking up and down flights of stairs.
Halo of smoke [saint of tabacco preaching down alleyways], bleeding off with mannerisms resembling a lethargic comet, into the vaccum that attached itself to my back. The space between my spine and it's turbulence.
Sobriety was stalking me from the shadows, somewhere between
acquiescence and forgetting, two words with tiny, complex systems of alleys running through them and little light at their feet.
Dream # 817: 5:30pm, thursday evening. I run into her at a record store. Been working all day, it's hot outside, sweaty, don't smell too good. She's still perfect looking, and it's when I catch her scent my very being starts starts to fall apart. Built up a complex system of checks and balances to ease and compartmentalize missing her. One brush of her sweetness under my nose begins to unravel, and with exacting precision, tear down the hundreds of flood gates and emergency devices I had constructed on the heads of cluster of pins and needles. A panic sets in. Realizing I had never built a fail safe device to counter the weakness for her very nature. Quickly and with much abruptness, I leave. Entering back under the hot sun, my crumbling defense structure leaving a trail behind me. She was the catching nail to my thread.
Snapped awake by a flashing and howling police car propelling itself at 60mph down a quickly deserting street. Steam vent comes into focus, it's hiss like a wounded and cornered animal.
Dream # 5,000, 349: The quintessence of her nature was struggle. I would watch her as she slept. In the small dark room, fall in love with her again each night and thinking,
Light a cigarette. A tap on my shoulder brings me to face the opposite direction. Lean on a wall, and watch nothing in particular. Confused and unbalanced, lacking direction. Pick the numbers 8 & 4 and turn those degrees. Start walking.
Pause midstep. Cigarette dangling from my lips. Hair just stopped caring an hour ago. Rewind, 3:48am. Standing underneath fire escapes, incandescant shotgun blast purging my head from the body. Rotate, zoom in on blood splattered on a borded up window. Scrye with the dripping words...
Dream # 2,010,918: Waiting for a train to go to the airport at 11:30pm on a humid monday night. Screeching and speeding forward. Standing alone in a long terminal hallway. See a face appear that makes me smile.
Wake up sweating and crying, wake up always before you hit the ground.
Nothing good ever happens at an airport.
Cupping my face, back against the window of a closed down store, rubbing my eyes and holding myself up. Look around the empty street. Blurred vision twisting the environment into shapes of ghosts with bioluminescence switching between red, yellow and green in an easily distinguised pattern. Foggy dots of yellow light run down the streets like dead men left to hang. The hiss of a wounded and trapped street corner threatens me to keep away.
A tap on my shoulder.
Turn to face what's behind me.
last five:
A Winter Letter - Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2007
almost but not quite - Wednesday, Mar. 22, 2006
rural times, blue skies. it feels so warm over my hair - Wednesday, Jun. 01, 2005
smiles and gone - Monday, Feb. 07, 2005
I caught my love in North Carolina - Monday, Nov. 29, 2004