The
Scream (A Pipe Dream)In the beginning...blood pounds in a fever. The red rush of losing pounds — I couldn't afford the time to eat. Profound poetry emerges instead as energy. Which flows out from my fingertips. And hands.
A toilet overflows on the island. A tax debt is forgiven and my brother forgets to flush. Best friend (replacing quantity with quality) does not write. United solidarity, we worship a white flag of surrender. Regal pride I've lost. A post office overflows its shores. Your fans. Invitations and investigations.
A crucifix shines from a teenager's neck. Spots on my face and bites on your neck. We all rejoice. Once I read James Joyce, I lost my faith. Chocolate chip cookies not God! Digested a pill and wrote on a writing tablet. A foreign trip to the other side of another world. Reached both hands round. They touched.
Everybody get out and V-O-T-E. And we all know what we should do. A party. And a line. Can anybody tell me where does love go? Out to lunch. The Bermuda Triangle. The pool balls are being set up. My cue is to go to the bar. Chatted up by a thirty-year-old Marxist from Hell. Left a mark on my bed at home. No one cleaned it up for me. It is black and dead and it burns me like cold.
Somebody knocked on my door to welcome me. They tread on my welcome mat and drank my tea. I couldn't pot the balls but I went for it. Anyway. A straight shot. Up my arm and erect like a reptile. Clinging to a salamander's back, gripping flesh that refuses to tear.
At the new studio, I plugged myself into the wall. A chord. A diminished fifth of my emotional savings right down the tubes. Electrified in the wires. I flushed him goodbye. I flushed my brother, too. I put my country in the waste bin.
I've been a reefer in Babylon. I went intimately inside a frontal lobe. I knew the answer. I covered it with a Union Jack. Skeletons fell out black-eye-socketed from beneath it. I simply knew. For an instant.
Although she's only a substitute, she may be killed. Teachers could tell you, I had a neurotic tendency. The school gave it to me instead of a scholarship. I demanded a refund and bled. Smile out of place.
Look closer, out the window, you see a gardener with his prick in a mermaid statue's mouth. They ride through the topless tulips together. And exit stage left. Wanting satisfaction, the train leaves the station. (Could YOU live with THAT?)
The army let him stay holding a toy airplane. They put dark glasses on his face and told him his life was a waste. From now on. Pasted a pastel drawing above his desk. Some kind of cheery landscape.
I sighed deeply...sunk into a dark hole. Blackholes multiply rapidly...across...the...sky. Swallowing stars, I gulp, looking into the eyes. Many lies and sunsets to cry about. There is no peace beyond the forest. If only I might avoid the stern gaze of the trees.
Cherry red poppies. Their snapped stalks and the wonderful feelings which grow and grow. Mysteries of not knowing everything quite yet...divine rays of light.
Experience of you being mine and less so in time. A scream emerges, agitates, boils the blood, raises the hair. The teeth grit. Sand blows into abandoned homes, does anyone know why?
A yawn, a paralytic gasp. Spasmodic tool going into, penetrating a metal square to the power of two. Truth of a dictionary definition is like being a professional prophet. And then making a profit. A poem being logical? Language expressing anything?
The Rum Queen am I: rolling her sweaty flanks along a white sheet covered in sugar cane and its granules. Grain waving its seed pods in the fields. Waving "goodbye." A whole meal of water turned to wine.
A growing scream inflates the gut, blows itself into pieces of a puzzle and expels itself into a bastard — our child. Crazy mazes which amaze and daze. SCREETCH! Can you feel it growing? Larger than over my head and beyond my tiptoes.
All the family send ALL their love All the way. From a mud pack over someone's back, hope you "get well soon." Fresh ham sandwiches and satanic messages. Subliminal. Over the moon am I with this.
Gray fog fuzzes its way to the common man. Communism. And the red bleeds into white. A cell-encrusted with civility. Clicking of signs (makes sense in MY mind). Foreign land invasions. Rocks and cliffs, and flat tops.
And he's decided I'm no good. But... I can dance and smile at the same time. And somebody is watching me from the dimly lit balcony, sending me tail lashings and rasps of lemon peel laughter. The toast of the town.
Diamonds lost under elaborate sand castles, washed away in the sudden turning tide of indecision from him and helplessness from me. In the wake, a dark angel leaps out from the unchanging night, gripping a cloak and an infection. Dripping from his mouth is uncouth slang and hallucinogenic figures contained in drops which drip onto our tongues. Pure innocence in a vial.
A white smothering duffle, we sweat inside. My urges move us to leap into the cold void. Extremity of experience would be nice. The heavy breath of a man too close; alcoholic and slowing me down. Moving circularity around. Me. Steady, and you could win the race. Honestly. And stark naked bones jutted from the skin unpleasantly pale and sick. Blood bruises me where he touches the skin.
The Chinese prisoners eat in bare solitary containment. Confined on a spotless floor. Pudding spilled onto my tray. Somehow, I licked it up and got my fill. Washed it down with tears and fears.
Wanting to not want you. Can't scream. Can kick chalk against a chair leg. Watch it splinter. I cannot, will not breath. Suck it in deeper so that it spoils, rotten and unexpressed. Hidden shriek. Small and dense. A carbonic lump. A tumor was once removed. A needle stuck in a groove.
We danced in circles flailing our arms and ranting over each other. Madly. Embracing nothing with full force still feels like passion. And each of us swore the other was right. Cursing city lights (you can't see the stars), we walked awhile. At the end of the tunnel... There Are The Men.
Workers and others huddle. White hoods and the usual crosses. A priest that wears an earring, just to be sure something pierces to his very core. Is his ear infected? I hope.
A crow caws across the morning sky, and claws dig into the angles of a roof. The corners of eyes I do not see... droop soporifically. No one I know is awake for the dawn. They sleep right on through into the tomb. Doing my nightly digging tasks. Looking for something I lost in sleep. A fetus stuck to the inside of a crushed womb. Sample jars in the lab.
Smoke dripping from a bottle mouth, scaring the moths from the light. Vows, false. Promises, lies. Of endless return, the unspoken flapping of the wings. Twinges in the flickering leaf waiting to fall. An enshrouded thin tree bending beneath the weight of a surgical procedure. (In a frontal lobotomy, a knife digs behind the eyes — looking for SOMETHING). Afterward, the patient sedated, waits patiently. The warm slow crawling ugliness of puss from a wound.
Black creeping fur-shelled spider bodies and multiple legs which tickle the spine. You are SICK. Please shut up. Just shut the fuck up!
A man crowned with a heavy padded jewel. Under the weight of it he can't see the people he rules. Everybody knows. I don't care for the ruthless war games or the truthless love affairs. You are involved in. Skin deep, but something seething underneath. Please shoot now at my bulletproof vest. I don't like strangers, their hooded faces direct spotlights at my naked flesh. Please go away.
A sailor on the back of a tanker swimming, stares at the invisible horizon and wishes for land. A helping hand. When eating from silver tins, extracting nourishment is the difficult thing.
The breakdown is dead but not gone. It rots under a cobblestone square upon which I must circumnavigate each morn. The little town has not changed, but has added a new color — a yellow/gray mixture of swirling memories, the texture of the room I used to lock myself up in. Dreaming paintings and painting dreams.
I sit now upon a prism. Music plays around me. Rays of sun expose confetti spilling forth from the cheering crowd. They worship the absurd as they worship the wise.
A white and green two-sided rectangular etching. A tax debt has been lifted, and they feel no pain. People dying for the right to watch television. Suffering at every tiny loss. The draining strain designed to detain. Suicide and pills spilling liquid from broken bottles, crashing on rough pavement.
A whore swaggers, rump twitching, her shoulders smooth but her face hardened under blushing cakes, high heels stabbing spikes into the living earth. It's a sin what we do with mother's milk.
Mere children, friends compiled just this once, high on drugs in the night, scamper like rats over rubble and through the underbrush, seeking out the hidden moonlit thrill ride. A source of pride. A suspended railway bridge over dark waters, wooden planks separated by the thin star-reflected air. The rattle of ball-in-can. The fizz neon liquid-air on ancient floorboards. Scars.
Shame and Resentment. Space so unapproachable not final. Attempted and desired. A lie of escape. Fear in leaving. Darker still, the core goes, exterior malleable, torching itself with kerosene. Have you yet seen the meaning? A farcical laugh will not suffice. An hysterical low cackle perhaps.
A witch stirs her brew in a kettle. It's filthy thick with the past she's been collecting. Above her a cat practices leaping from limb...to limb...with a plastered-on perpetual grin. God is beginning to boil in the kettle, suspended above the fire's burning. A dark night stifles, and twisted tree shapes surround. Reflected on the surface of the swinging rage is an infinite starry sky. Empty. Translucent. Pale full moon. Perfectly round, pock marked and whole. Bombard it with vulgar vomit and violent comets; it holds its core tirelessly.
I still love you. A cat misses a branch and loses its grin, screaming into a boiling filth. The scream is eerie and strange. It is wildly emotional. It stabs wonderfully at the base of the spine. It is the ecstasy of pure burning pain. (Rubbing roughly at broken sores can be fun). It is temporarily endless.
The scream encompasses the meaning of the whole dark forest. Surrounds and holds within it the soft petals of spring flowers, the unclipped raw claws of wild beasts, the delicate wings of butterflies, the sharp steel of elfin blades. Piercing, drunkenly fluctuating, carried on the breath of the trees above and in circles, coating the world. Ice-cold it stirs up fears and closes off exits. A sign and signal snaking its way into the water supply. Poison, venom. Biting important veins, echoing across emptiness and space. A plea for help reaching, futile in its search.
Just as suddenly the scream stops, and all is silent. The witch continues stirring her filth. A once round moon bubbles, disrupted upon the surface of the dark pool. Fragmented with every boil.
The scream — throat and creator numb — scalded by the roiling scum. Breaking up now into pieces of meat. Tough and unpalatable, unsuitable to eat.