Be very afraid, everyone. This is my prose poem page. Yep. Prose. Poems. And, like most people who put poetry on their website, I suck.
| Be very afraid, everyone. This is my prose poem page. Yep. Prose. Poems. And, like most people who put poetry on their website, I suck. |
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Inspired by Joseph Cornell's "Bebe Marie." My geography is well-known to me. I have spent my life in exploration of my body, mapping its boundaries and falt lines, its topographical features. After all of this research, I have discovered that I am both lush and austere. I possess mountains, jungles, deserts, volcanoes and ice fields. The soles of my feet are permafrost. My fingertips could crush cars should they decide to rock slide. Yet one thing I can't explain. There is a hole in the wall of my left ventricle. Enmeshed within by veins so rigid in their duty, they resemble wood, is a little doll. She has dark eyes like nightmares or dead birds. Her hair has long since been dreaded by clotted blood. She has not tried to escape. Instead, her breathing has caused the rigid veins to rupture. One hand is wrapped around a branch of her prison. In her tiny fist, the vein, with its spurting blood, is a bouquet. She offers it to me. I stared at her a long time the first time I found her. I couldn't decide if she were flesh or merely plastic, and was too afraid to touch her to find out. I let her be, but I return there very so often, to ponder her. She surrends to me.
I don't know who she is or how she came to be imprisoned in my left ventricle. One prhase resounds endlessly in my head-- a line from a short story on werewolves. The exact coordinates for the location of my soul. Gimply inspired by Joseph Cornell's Hotel Eden (bottom pic on sidebar). For awhile, I was proud of this. Sleep is Death's spare change that falls out of his pocket when he's buying himself a soda. I spend my life dodging the fall of the coins. Death and I stand at the soda machine and joke for a bit, and then he goes off, rattling his extra nickels as he swigs a Dr. Pepper. I go outside to the field. It is a four A.M. field, a cold wet field, and I walk across it under an endless starry sky and let the cigarette butt fall to the peter-pan grass. Never, never dead, this grass. I like the field much better at four A.M. than at any other time. It seems broader, spread out in sleep, and I am in the center of this broad flatness and I could do whatever I wanted. I could strut across it naked if I chose, and there'd be none to second-guess me. Death would laugh his ass off, though. We're old friends, so he's allowed to laugh at me.
Death has an interesting face. It's long and delicate and sad, but he's a happy guy. He does his job and he does it well. Occasionally he misses an old person up in the Appalachians or the Andes or something. (Death doesn't like mountains. They're too pointy; they worry him). So the old folks up in the peaks get to be over a century old, which is usually against the rules, but since they aren't too good at telling time when they get that old, it doesn't get Death in trouble. Death likes to hold my hand at four A.M. because sometimes I get depressed and it worries him. I ask him over and over again, "Am I going to die?" and he answers, "Yes, eventually, but not tonight." I ask him to speed it up some, and that's when he gets upset with me and shakes his head, his big, dark eyes reciting a poem in one of those languages he speciallizes in. I always thank him later, when I feel like myself again. One of these days, he's going to get tired of me asking and just do it. But for some reason, that doesn't worry me.
I ask Death what goes on after a person dies, and he tells me I already know. I think I do. Sleep, after all, is his spare change. Inspired by Jasper John's work as a whole. (Example in sidebar). Wraiths walk the city streets thinking how sculptural everybody's wrists look. Murderers write poetry in gore on their apartment walls. It is time to celebrate, to snack, say the vampires, and follow a little girl home from school. On a dumpster, a yellow alley cat inspects the track marks on a young man's outflung arm for the road map to heaven. Over and through it all, reflecting in eyeballs and gilding the folds of space-age fabric, glowing: neon. The exact color tears would be in glass moldings with current running through them. |
