The chair isn’t there anymore. All that cracks are my arthritic knees as, helpless, I sink to the floor. I inherited this house, using for myself the bedroom she died in. But it is this place, where her chair rocked the tectonic fractures in the unstable bedrock of our family, nearby ashtray piled high, her drinking glass sat… smudged with the rune-stains of her scarlet lipstick… that I know she comes to me.
“Witch!”
“Mongrel!”
“Traitor!”
Tears overflow my eyes as I clench these tremoring hands into claws, determined to see tonight’s visitation through, as I have every other. I cough, mucous-mustard between my fingers, from tobacco smoke heavy in the ductwork, between the ceiling and the roof where leaves the color of death skitter like symbolic scorpions. “What is it now, Mommy?” I use the name she’d always
insisted on. She couldn’t stand ‘Mom’. She even had my father call her ‘Mommy’. “I’m tired. I’m sick. Let’s get this over with early, okay?”
Back and forth on splintered runners. Behind the drape beside where she sits, invisible, even the moonlight creaks. There are lines in the moon’s face from a beastly universe, ringed with a halo not unlike the poisonous smoke of tar and nicotine.
I creep the walker forward a few feet. I can’t walk as well as I used to, and I’ve certainly lost the ability and the will to run. I don’t use my wheelchair in the dark.
“What’s it going to be, old lady? Witch? Mongrel? Traitor? I’m at your service.” I say it but can’t manage the snarl as I once did.
Out of the living room’s far corner, near the brick fireplace, comes a softly distant, “Forgive me.”
ESSAY II: CRADLE NARRATIVE
There are no trivial nightmares, only inconsequential dreamers. Irrelevant troglodytes view cognitive symbology as trivial, wasting any intra-psychic source they’ve been born with, psychodynamic within… gradually disintegrating into stagnant repression.
Archaic gods spin roulette wheels; eyes flutter into R.E.M. states. Closer inspection reveals mandalas of intricate fantasies, naked unto visionary, parallel with sacred and profane enigmas. We experience here the synthesis of action/reaction, fighting its garbled curses, bleeding until we see ourselves gruesomely altered in mirrors relentlessly cruel.
I do not speak. I hear nothing, ice picks in perfect vertical plunge through the ear drums. Lightning flashes, no thunder follows. The air is a hollow, indigo static.
These lips are sealed with barbed wire, cavity of my mouth filled with unanchored teeth. But there are too many to be mine. They are saliva-slick and stink the palate with ancient foodstuffs of questionable origin.
In hypnogogue, half asleep/half awake, God enters my room and sits on the edge of my bed. Satan crawls from the closet and squats on my chest until I begin to suffocate. My mother’s spirit stands mutely by the doorway, left hand clenched, keeping prisoner the thunder that lightning died giving birth to. In her eyes are dolls of my father and brother.
Dreams and nightmares gauntlet the globe, harnessing every sleeper to a smoky stimulus. I am pathologically hysterical. The sublime state in which I, unwittingly, descend at midnights’ my prose becomes the loopy purple of unpremeditated distortion.
(I want to scream. I want to ask the Creator for forgiveness. But what’s that? God. The lightning, or my mother?)
There is no morphine in my dreams. No spells of vertigo. No dulled metal implements waiting in darkened corners for me to lean on as a saint to hold me up for salvation. The mind reaches back, harvesting more terrors legendary to children. Morbidity pursues even beyond repression. Mortality kinks the plastic gristle until the outward pretense of inviolate sanity is spliced on an unbalanced altar.
For the ancient Greeks the god of sleep was called Hypnos. His brother, Thanatos, was the god of death.
On the horizon, frenzied gods dance poses of extinction. Some bend into graceful orchids—only paper origami if you look too closely. Others spread legs to birth out deformed species of crucified surrender, the terrifying glory of their eyes the entrapment for subconscious dementia.
Idiosyncratic twilight is everywhere.
Why am I so vulnerable?
R.D. Laing, a British psychiatrist, noted for his studies of schizophrenia, said that what appeared to be symptoms of psychosis might be attempts by an individual to adjust to life within an ‘insane family’.
“Heresy” comes from a Greek root word which means ‘to choose’. If I have chosen to become a heretic in order to find salvation and security in places some would consider forbidden, then So Be It. I learned early that I would never be prom queen. With an accused pederast for a father, the reincarnation of a burned witch for a mother, and an older brother… I am insufficiently healed to venture revealing more… my life choices were likely to be few and barbaric.
This is my matrix, ranting/bingeing on collective delusions from the battlefield of my shadows and of those whom I loved, even as I hated and feared them.
Cradle statistics: should have been too tender of years to remember but chalk it up to the phantom limbs of Post Traumatic Stress. Visions in indigo of the woolly AND the Bully and the bombs in the belly of the bully… the vampire under the bed AND the skinny/pimpled/yet sharply-fanged brother wolf who waited in my closet with a sweaty naked body awaiting his opportunity for bloody cuddles. Floggings at home and stonings in the schoolyard. The conscience becomes a casualty of a failed search for sanctuary… longing to die transforming the fragile young psyche onto a zombie island afloat in lonely Flying Dutchman seas. Seeing entire rooms full of ghosts jostling for elbow room as I suffer blackouts while struggling against the viral kisses from night’s chancred lips.
Ban no dream narrative. It’s an initiation and lightning. It’s the evangelist of all that shrieks or murmurs the drama of its bleeding dictum with morning. It’s the only place we may all return from, setting aside the psychogenesis of routine madness.
Horror dominates the globe, the ironworks and gauze of its countless guises fanatic of dogmatic anticipation. We think our strongest emotion is love… or hate. I counter that it’s an obsession with suspense—from the fear of the daily grind’s sudden and violent termination of an innocent bystander to night’s fully lustful promise of the great cosmic blowout. This may be the source of its greatest attraction: vicarious annihilation, subversively experienced, then discarded (insofar as it concerns the consciousness). We expel and exorcise some of our own demons by sampling those of other eclipsed hardcases.
One day our universe will reach entropy, energy used up. Nothing more will happen as it enters infinite slumber. Will it dream? If so, will the content consist of a disordered cosmology, not unlike the nightmares we confess? Will it dream of falling, wherever it is that universes fall to?
At last my mother opens her fist. I cringe. The thunder really is as loud as I remember. But it’s gone quickly.
At least for tonight.
360
Ester sat on the floor, slowly banging the back of her head against the wall. Every Sunday she sat a few inches down from where she’d been the previous Sunday. The dents in the drywall showed around the room, creating a sort of growth chart—for the inhibited type—marking a history of her abuse.
The usual rhythm. Mother Time walked to the bedroom next to Ester’s, coming up the hall with whatever book she’d read all night. Cruelty, loneliness, bereavement, between lovers, madness. Things simply cutting too close to home for Ester to understand why the woman devoured material reminding her of her own tragic situation. It was a Sunday night thing, pages of panic and emotional chaos her Mass, taking communion with her shadow.
Ester convinced herself to sit perfectly still. She wouldn’t go out the window, or hide in her closet or under her bed. If she could just freeze all action, perhaps he wouldn’t come. Time possessed no reality on its own. It only had a presence when connected to action. If Ester didn’t act, Time would be a non-entity. Otherwise he would come, making Ester the
non-entity.
She couldn’t will herself to be a static element; she was incapable of subduing Time. Now she heard Father Archangel in the hall, only a little softer than she’d heard her mother turning tonight’s book pages with a frosty forefinger, grinding teeth, blinking away non-existent tears.
The doorknob turned His face appeared, glowing like a lamp.
“Hello, Sweetheart. Can’t sleep?” What he always said.
In his hand he held a plain black lunch box. The same one he took Monday through Saturday while working atop the city’s tallest and newest cloud-fucking sky-scrapers. (Angels didn’t fear heights.) Inside the lunch box—as for every Sunday—was a vial of holy water, tube of greasy jelly, razor blade, pages torn from a Bible, and a box of matches. On Monday there would be the thinnest shaving of Ester’s hidden/forbidden flesh on his sandwich. We consumed in increments what we loved, like sacrament, thus always keeping them close until, bit by bit, we and they began to be created in the same image.
“How can I help?” he asked.
Always she replied, hard as stone, “Brush me with your wings, Daddy.”
In the basement cool and moist were rows of stones, hollowed out, icy. Soon Ester’s stone would rest there. As did Ester’s mother’s and her mother’s mother’s.
Not the wings but only a single feather lay between each pair of stones. The wings had ascended back to heaven, accompanying the archangel wearing them.
Deep in the earth was their basement, deep enough to hold stone wombs for hundreds of generations. (Angels had no fear of depths.)
Ester wasn’t in the basement. She lived with her daughter, Sarah, and with Sarah’s husband, Grigor. A thin trail of blood led down the hall to their daughter Rebecca’s room.
What did Rebecca carve into herself this Sunday? Last week it was “belle indifference.” Her body was a scarred, hysterical scripture.
Even higher had the city’s balconies risen. A kennel was built on top of each, filled with wheezing black dogs. If it continued the trend upward, the poor things would eventually suffocate.
Grigor had a different lunchbox. In deep scarlet letters on a tan background it read “Have You Seen The Passion?” His wings were ever so silky but his hands were calloused. (Angels had no fear of falling nor dreaded dreaming myths.)
Fundamental fundament, blasting archangel archetypes.
Sarah never read. She sat before the television in the parental bedroom, swaying back and forth, humming to herself, wearing the autistic Madonna’s vacant smile. The television wasn’t turned on. She just liked the blank/black screen. She left her body to dance in there, a virgin for as long as she could pretend.
Used to be, in another age, boys were circumcised soon after they were born. In the present girl babies had hymens delicately broken, symbols of original sin. No males were raised as inheritors.
Ester read the Bible, page by severed page. She couldn’t understand its emphasis on bearing sons.
Violence: versus what? Victim behavior.
And where did the suns go, the sons go? To feed those black dogs whimpering death closer and closer to heaven.
The daughters of Cain wore temptress-tresses. They were flowing but never free.
Ester laid a palm against the master bedroom door. Sarah had thrown herself down the stairs and jumped from the roof so often as an adolescent, she was covered from head to foot in permanent blue-black bruise, the color of spaces between sky- screwers. Sarah couldn’t really dance. She’d paralyzed herself at age eleven… as Ester sat in the bedroom drawing pictures of human men. No wings, no desire—or so she hoped—for tiny gifts of dutiful daughters’ flesh.
Ester opened that door, staring at Sarah who didn’t notice her, unable to tear her gaze from the dark television screen. Did Sarah dance alone in her fantasy? With a man? One whose mother had hidden him, wrapped in calla lily leaves, in a tiny ark to flow far beyond the city?
“Transference,” Ester whispered. “You become as you should have been all along. My angel.”
Ester cracked Sarah’s skull with her own mother’s stone womb, retrieved from the basement. She took a kitchen knife to Rebecca’s room. Let her be meat for Azrael’s dogs.
The circle in this house was broken. Ester didn’t know if she could kill a Father Archangel. He was the least of her concerns.
Tonight, time had a presence of its own.
THE EYE
I saw the wolf.
Full moonlight stabbed through tiny, cross-shaped windows.
I saw the tiger. Stripes of flesh and blood were all black in the darkness.
I saw the full mouth.
It bore lines of destiny and an entirely ‘other’ geometry which spoke gateways of intoxication. And languid yet intimate needles in the brain… These and corpses who swam through counterfeit ceilings.
I saw the erection that tortured a rainbow. The colors ran like a ten year old chrysanthemum’s bloody split lip. I also saw scorpion undertakers. They lied to give this cock an alibi. As a result not even the rain was believed in the court of misshapened Pieta- fuckers.
I saw the eye.
It saw me. It always sees me now; I have nowhere to run. Although once I waited around the corner of Mars—and managed to hit it with a clipped clit dart nailed to my rosary, even though it only wounded the eye. It filmed over, silver, producing a mirror of me sitting forever on a back seat on the death train, drawing hexes on frosted windows with my finger.
SWALLOWS
He heard a roar in his head. This wasn’t a quiet earth, not anywhere where people lived. The brainpan’s cloister echoed thunder and dark pandemonium. Spirits of the dead haunted every planetary crack, crying to be bound and tortured just for a little S&M variety out of mortality’s boredom. For sensation. Numbness was a bitch.
Scratch deep the dulled groin. Tweeting the daily tweet. Computer screen lights up like heaven.
Burst. Power tools. Must have balls the size of outboard motors. So many nobodies who would never be missed. The vigor of adrenalin and improvisation. In your face gestalt runaway train pulled on an eighth grade teacher in the gymnasium, afterward each bloody body cavity stuffed with chalk, her skin powder white and motes clinging to staring hazel eyes. Flecks gathered in the open mouth like Assam leaves in a tea cup, describing her fate in detail. Her pancreas and liver steamed high on the wooden bleachers… One breast used for basket practice (although it couldn’t be dribbled) hung precariously on the basket’s rim, slowly dripping from the round rim. What site was this? What sights?
Not ohmydeglovedlove.com or dirtywetskin.edu…
The Internet had been, practically since its inception, a thing deviant with death, equating feverishly with spastic ganglion sex.
“Are you under 18?”
Fade. Blast. Dissolve. To some migrant workers’ camp. (Everglades?) Bodies hung from the trees, some swinging—strangled in Spanish moss. Butterflies unable to escape defective cocoons, still alive as far as the flies are concerned. Anyway, this was all the authorities were likely to find. Those left machine-gunned on swampy ground jerked into the water by happy-go-lucky-gators. Grue from blowback holes created strange red hibiscus and somebody dressed like a comic book super-hero collecting specimens from slickery drug merchants not above 18 or even 8. Their garbage chum sang with an oily fungal sirens’ song, “Come down. Come deep. Come down. Come deep”
Next fade fade, not so much as a bang as a purl. In a blink a blinded saint’s wink, a chick’s clinic with pregnant ladies in the waiting room thumbing through books of baby names, needing refills on pre-natal vitamins, shopping bags full of plush toys and tiny booties, a clinic like that changes shape with a flutter of walls and disintegration of the roof, explosion of rosy genitalia. Up to meet God, the Father, the Tool. Down seeking Hell’s regenerative pit. Three days later, beginning cherry blossom time and swarms of tourists, thousands of abortions rained onto the Washington D.C. Mall. Somewhere—close as conception—a supreme court was in session.
Fade fade fade.
Dull-eyed children, pale and stiff, cute angelitos in toy coffins and doll clothes, nineteenth century fin de siecle, when rage provided parents with photographs of dead babies. Yet on closer inspection he saw the kids were still alive, herded together into a peppermint-striped corral. Words tattooed on their arms denoted for which gourmand dishes they had been raised to be served in. The fork’s for pork but the spoon scoops the moon.
Teenaged wannabees, cutting out their own tongues, wiring their jaws open, stretching longer/wider every few days. Nonstop drooling, silvery as snail trails under klieg lights. Couldn’t talk, no communication save for slurps and foam, electronic chips implanted in their voice boxes maximized decibels and vibrating fragile bone effects. They sewed one another to the hips, swinging down the street like the first long shadow of nightfall.
Swallows. Wingless/flightless. Spittle-drenched in perpetual stink-hunger. Opened further, those mouths did, flapping back over the body… over the known world. What goes down the chute? Is it digestible or will it linger in the hollers, rotting from the inside out? A stone fetus carried unawares until the host dies in sepsis. She was a slag anyway.
The Myth of Falling Page 4