Filed under: Dreams
I fell out of the world, dreaming; my frantic limbs tingled like ants and I felt myself collapsing through the mattress, into the floor. I wanted both to stay in the world and to leave it behind, but possessing these conflicted desires did not preclude the fall, which seemed almost to occur without me. I heard a composite of all the sounds around me amplified into one mosaic volume—water heater clicks, muffled television sounds, car engines outside, the rain—and glimmered out of my body, sliding through like snakeskin, as melodramatic and recycled as snow.
Filed under: Shrines
Virgin de Guadalupe in the form of caramelized melted wax, yellow and white like cake on the forest floor, covered in lake dew, and surrendered to algae: all of Her and staring. She was embedded in flowers, real and fake and it doesn’t matter, drenched in context and rain.
I made halos out of bailing wire. My hands are black and oily. They’ll smell like light for the next few days, LED and my own. After this odor of light has become familiar, and, in a week’s time, faded—when the stench and its fragile memory imprint has gone from my body’s perceptual abilities—I will search for it everywhere. The rabid stray dog that I am, desperate in a way that has always precluded rest, active in a way that has battled derangement but is inherently that which it opposes: I will need the smell of the light my body will shed. I will search for it everywhere. Suburban streetlights will turn on and off as I point to them, a flamboyant symphony conductor standing sock-less and symptomatic on the caving roof of a compact car on the sixth floor of the hospital parking garage, the tallest structure in town, built to hold all the stationary vehicles of all the people-statistics whom city planners have anticipated to be sick and dying, in one place, at one time, together. I will point to the windows of all the rooms in the hospital, and cheap, clean, regulation white light will flash intermittently like a birthday. Oblivious hospital staff, de-stressing with cigarettes on various levels of outside porches will puzzle over their smokes going out and then spontaneously relighting.
I will pull lights like puppets out of buildings, bending them into a song, and it will not suffice. I already know that I won’t be able to find what I need. I’ll have to produce it, choking up luminescence like bones from my decaying canine mouth, painting it on gravel with my tongue, and sniffing it, stuck; statuesque as someone’s doe-eyed heroine, pale visage burning in candle after candle which reek unmistakably of crayon.
I attached birds to my body with clear packaging tape. I have an urge to apologize. I am being totally appropriate, pinned to the carpet, underneath a harp, plucking with excellent posture at my nylon bars.
Family is forever. So is the freeway. The dead animals taste like the air, which is worse than its inverse. I will not outlive these people or the condition of their roads. Is true surviving knowing that you cannot? Anything I say will melt into the asphalt. Fragments of torn clothing, plastic bags, abandoned cars, star thistle, mattress springs. I’m going unavoidable, taping myself to my walls.
There are caves in Santa Cruz which house scattered remains of pirated electricity and heroin sales, tattered clothing and broken glass on the ground; caves so close to the waters that the ocean rises into the first cavern and fills it during high tide, threatening to drown anyone in the second cavern as the water trickles in. To me this is a holy thing, as holy as any deity a person could love, in any way they could love them, sitting mournful and pentecostal in a jail cell with only a Bible (King James Version, softcover, so it cannot be used as a weapon), in a bathtub praying, begging in a field under a half-moon, hungry and bored under fluorescent light manning the reg at a 7/11. There are people who love their deities and love them all the time, needing and loving like a chord. But the caves, I know, are holy, as is any place where completely downtrodden, desperate human beings have at one point converged, legally or illegally, in seeping and terrifying sickness that coats their every facial expression like bug spray, too toxic to even address. I have been in so many holy places that by now I should be God, or at least be able to fly, like my mother. A Quaker would maintain that I am God anyway, or at least, there’s a tiny bit of Jesus in me, which is the number one argument they uphold for not killing another person: you’re killing God. Can you imagine the impish, murderous nerve? My dreams lately, every day for two days, have been staying completely with me, replaying themselves like the master narratives they are, repeating and demanding recognition, preventing waking life from fully occurring. They respond to neither stimulants nor sedatives, meaning I need to get my strategies straight. I was reading about abused children and their tested and proven fantastic abilities, which they retain later in life, to detect infinitesimal shifts in the facial expressions or voice tone of another person, since their childhood survival depended on being able to avoid the fallout that occurred during an emotional shift for the worst in their abuser. Many abused children also allegedly possess the ability to dissociate on command, once considered a small gift from an overloaded psyche, and now considered a dangerous proclivity that correlates with a higher risk of developing PTSD as an adult. I was thinking about the people I love. I don’t think I’ve realized what a human requires until earlier this year, but somehow, as a human, like so many humans, I’ve lived for so long without knowing what I needed. My dreams are telling me, “You’re forgetting.” It’s true, I am. I’m comfortable with this blessed amnesia. Amnesia, also holy.
Filed under: Fever
I have a fever. The significance of a fever is often lost on me—during a fever is perhaps the most optimal time to process it, and also the most challenging. Like nightmares. If I could process a nightmare during a nightmare, it would no longer be affecting. Both fevers and nightmares render verbal communication somewhat obsolete, like having a conversation with a YakBak or a rabid dog. You can collect information, but that information is suspect, slightly more suspect than any self-reported garble a person might tell you during regulated body temperature hours. Reality-testing, then, becomes far trickier during my fever, and the nightmares I have inside it. Exhibit A: When I awoke from my nightmare this morning, I saw the latitudinal and longitudinal lines on my hanging globe dancing and shifting, rushing through blow-up aquamarine tectonic plates. Countries blended in and out of each other. I watched the performance, and stood, not in ovation, but in fading, mellow awe. Before fainting, and beginning again.
I have been going places with birds, which sparks public authenticity debates. An ESL woman asked me the perfect question, concerning the white dove that was sitting on my shoulder, “Is it true?” I smiled, meaning, fucking of course.
A dead seagull on the oceanic blacktop, with its wings hunched up like a balled-up trenchcoat and its beak pointed directly upward, from whence it came, was so wonderful in the frigid morning that I thoughtlessly mistook it for a swan. Can’t an animal be both? I kept walking. I had to keep walking, dizzy, sick of and blessed by the sight of rigor mortis wings frozen, crunchy white lace decorating the dumpster behind it. How is it that what is among the least sterile of things, the corpse of a bird dropped out of the sky, seems simple and nonthreatening, somewhat untouchable, a least likely vector of disease?
I walked in my house wearing lizards, wearing leaves, a dismembered paw. Don’t touch that.
How can a person stand still in something holy? I was in a haunted house yesterday, so dead I could feel the meth, seeping through the exposed wiring and dusting the insulation like organ rot. An attic door moved abruptly; I heard what I could have construed as human noises among the human spray paint, red, red, red, red, red. I was singing, had been singing. Maybe the only thing that saves people is their own voice. Mine is the color seagull when I’m scared. I’ve seen people when they’re ghosts and ghosts when they’re people. I kept walking, I had to. I wasn’t about to lick the hairspray off the walls.
There are flower petals all over the linoleum, and because the wind is blowing, because the window is open, because the apartment was filled with smoke, because the electric stove-top set itself on fire, the petals are blowing like birthday candles all over the floor. They are ridiculous purple birthday candle spiders, joined by a stowaway ladybug from Wattsonville that crept out of sprigs of rosemary and is dancing. The petals are blowing in a whirlwind, as leaves sometimes scatter, and I am reminded of an excerpt from a delirious letter I received:
“Autumn leaves of gold and crimson falling on the breath of the wind. Dancing to the ground they offer protection through the winter for seeds that have not taken root yet.”
It does not make sense to me how moving leaves can be agents of preservation, or where the seeds are coming from—seeds just appear on the soil’s surface in autumn? Seeds from where? From God? I guess I could ask the same question of the spontaneous combustion of my stove top. From what sinister origins came this Promethean fire?
The author of the letter compared me to leaves, because I am “a nurturer”, what with my vagina and all its gender accessories. How did my innately “nurturing”, estrogen-laden caretaking skills come in handy when the flames began to slurp the oil lining of the oven hood? I put the fire out with the water I had intended for tea, easy. If the author of the letter were here, she may have not put the fire out. She may have noted the fire, pointed at it, and made a declaration unto the fire: “Let there no longer be fire.” I’ve watched her do this; the fire remains. And so does her smiling stupor, unyielding and empty, her eyes like plastic butterknives. O me of little faith. The author of the letter would contend that God is here, God is here right now, in me and you and everything, and especially in the mysterious burning bush of the stovetop, calling my name three times in the night from behind the busted water heater: “Elijiah!” God or no God, the party rages on. The flower petals that are like birthday candles that are like purple birthday candle spiders that are like autumn leaves of gold that are allegedly like me are dirty dancing with the ladybug—what’s the name of this club again? I am forever showing up to parties I wasn’t expecting to attend.
Hellish dreams are not among the things for which a person can apologize. When people tell stories, it may be because they have to; just like a dream, obligatory, inevitable as the body temperature drop in the circadian rhythm. I accept these processes: the form. What I cannot accept is the imagery, the visions: the content. A child’s rhyming abuse narrative or a crayon depiction of blood is enough to—to what? There was something today, but what was it? There was a poem, poem enough.
Related is the fact that a Morton’s Salt container appeared recklessly sometime between 11PM and midnight on Tuesday in the kitchen sink, through no doing of mine or the people I live with. Clara picked it up to investigate, and the bottom of the otherwise sturdy cardboard container fell through, leaving a mound of damp salt, Lot’s wife framed by half-eaten yogurt, egg, and stainless steel.
I will never be someone’s Eurydice, gone hapless to Hades. I will never be someone’s Orpheus, either, betrothed to music and blind heroism. I think I would like to be the River Styx, but it is a lofty goal to snake through hell so easily.
