Noir

Seppuku of the night. Memories are wisely collected, like chattels, in a graceful jisei, as a gesture of life's final song, and left by the rivers of the soul. I am the drunk pilot with vertigo, adrift in this house of bondage. I can't seem to find my way out of this everlasting nightmare, these stuffy catacombs where I lost my pneuma. I spend my days like a wandering ghost, looking for something real, something I can touch, a tangible way out, objects of the life source, the brass tracks, the raison d'être, but all I find is questions with no answers. Today has been one long and drawn out, symbolic mauvais quart d'heure, although I'm slowly gathering pace. Outside taverns,  I hear trumpet nonsense, and it makes me sunder in the night like your forsaken whore you left in a puddle of tears.

I want to do wild things with you. Call you by a name no one else does, or run through fields into sunsets so we can't be persecuted for witchcraft and sodomy, where we could eat yeot and sesame fruit, and write love poems for each other using all the words we know. In endless dreamy blues everything reminds me of you. There is no life outside of my walls, in the unexplored caves where eternal darkness is calling me to the shores. All I see is fading watercolours. 

Oxeyes in the murk singing Fleetwood's praises. When I'm not sleeping through hard times, I walk through thresholds and feel like I could flake out in the suburb I've come to love, where mango plumes disappear into radio static. I tear through the darkness like a horse in a storm, with the jeremiad I crafted from my lament, adorned with my immortal flow in an echo chamber of hate. My heart knows what it wants. Self-assured at one's disposal. I have never felt more insignificant. Body of Duḥkha. He called me frog boy. Mercerised? Tesselated? Picking off the rose petals. I burst with purple fizz like wisteria.

I call him my Arizona heroin. Never-ending perimeter of our quaint sky with black coffee eyes. Resuscitated. Brought back to life. I unravel, silvery and metallic, at the penultimate act. "Are you okay?" A distilled voice asked. "Yea," I replied. "I'm just trying to feel something. That's all." 

The burning lamp is orange and waxen like the pith. Unmovable ephelis. Stuck here like a cherry waiting to be picked. The brain pathways lead to the cocaine sky, clouds above where I was stung by thorny nettles and consoled by the floss. I go there when I'm falling apart at the seams, wanting you to put me back together. I scarper. Furcated in the vagary. My doleful tears are an enterprise, like a rill, a spark at the tip where blood percolates and apprehensive solubilities are supermassive like a fertile mind. High erythrocytes.

In my French class I would dive into snows of insanity. Anorak of the thermostat. Not so complete. My scars never let me breathe. They're ships, bells reverberating like nocturnal caterwauls at the knife edge. The wet blanket is more useless than a dewclaw, and I've had to kill the thought of it. I am like lumber, bevelled to fit inside a Wonderland. Sober enough to apologise, but expected to shut my unholy mouth. Worn fustian, in Morse Code, woven through the drums of vitriol. Reciting poetry for deaf ears. I got nowhere and cried when I understood the foot is dead, has no more breaths, and then the sun came with a revolution, and there was nothing to cushion my fall. When I bustle, in an unorganised room, I'm painted as the black sheep, doing everything I can just to avoid a confrontation. It doesn't matter how dysfunctional my life is at the moment, nothing can stir me from lethargy. 

It's an impossible question to leave unanswered, between a kaleidoscopic fleet in a sepulchral district. The truth sticks to me like tar, like noises in my ear, and I end up in blood thistles for the king with a reindeer diadem, in a pile of broken promises and barbed wire, thinking about how the light stopped for me, how milk climbed into the wound, how I left my book on the table in the parlour. I flatlined. The sea wet my face and I was marked with an obvious X, combusting into red sparks and Blitz-like. Standing as the interloper, how ironic. There was a movie in my mind. Midwinter lavender erupted. I overdosed on the feeling but nursed wounded birds back to health in my backyard. Put pacifiers in them and sent them into the solstice.

Alarm clock went off. On the outskirts of a villa, by Junction 10, I was waiting for that one song. Putting two and two together. I made my baseless claims with electricity. Take all my happiness you chameleon. Got a free ride home to the nearest street, when I was seventeen. Now I get lonely in my thinking and I think the saddest things on quiet nights. I can't help it but listen to the shell casings as they bounce from surfaces Ghalib would have defied, turning into dust, in the temple of the old gods. Who owns this hand? These obsessions. In crowded streets with seagulls not blinking. The Chicago scene covered in asphalt. My last prayer vanished and the strangers were staring at the cuts on my legs as I was falling apart inside. 

My body was blue. I seen it from two different perspectives, how my love for the flame was a sunshower, knowing how to make a crying child smile, pointing to the direction of a permanent sunset, beaches of a paradise where you can hear the songbird's ballad in a dream. Sun after rain. Captured in delight. I lit candles and drank my body's weight. Thoughts dovetailed like they do, like they were vague holograms. Caribbean green beans in a sky full of colour. Blistering at all hours, walking long into the cold. Have I scared you away? Inwards in an asylum. This island is a tooth, a Gartloch I remember, a concrete jungle with a vacancy big enough for all my problems. Me when I'm wallowing in pleasure. Trying to ignore my insecurities. I can't remember when it started, when the beanstalk began to grow at the trig point on Earl's Seat, in a mansion with a barrel vaulted ceiling for a Tobacco Lord, at Bishoploch, in St. Enoch. I can't put my finger on it, like unforgettable moments when I was fourteen years old like a rat in a famine.

The postman delivers, speaking in tongues. Enervated by an incredible dosage of anger which won't abate at every hurdle. I look at life from every angle and I am impersonal, but the stabbing pains of mania are always pensive. Wearing an amulet, days are tedious. At the door of cloying recollections, snakes in a network of follicles, I get a feeling like a sugar rush, telling me I'm more moribund than resolute and stalwart, looking back at pictures. I've endured enough torture to last a lifetime, and still remained sane enough to remember what it was like before, when my only worry was what I was going to say next. Eagerly waiting for a verdict, for the gavel to slam and ring out. How could I have known how bitter it would get in a city of dreams? I took a bite out of the apple of innocence. Making silent observations. A yardbird is in Jesus sandals. 

It's the worst feeling in the world, unrequited love, when you can't move on, when you're like a yacht docked at a marina, the Babi Yar from my Asgard, with a view to the Nothern Lights, playing your cards like Kasparov. Invisible like smoke. Incognito. Down dead ends, roads leading to nowhere. On my unvarnished peregrination, folding from what bleeds into me, and in its divergence I cogitate, and wonder how I came to be here, lukewarm in these regrets I have accumulated, as if I've been poisoned with belladonna. Last night I was someone I don't know, but also someone I've been before. 

Cutting new sandwiches on the nightshift. Rhombus shaped. Hearts eaten in hinterlands and reveries. I can't cope with what I've created. Monstrous seas. I put the fire out and ran for the hills like a raconteur with iron lungs, far from Lake Garda, the city of romance, places where you can taste dandelions and train your reflexes. I can't imagine my life without your jetsam. It seems remote, an island washed out at sea, a barren land uninhabited.

Do you remember the covenant, huh? Do you remember the deal we made? The 38 caliber you shot, trying to make things right, in the hopes that the words would last longer on the page. Now you're a silhouette in the hallway I meet so often on my breaks from daydreaming. I'm distralt in bed, like a labourer with dirty hands. Ignoring unwanted text messages. I hold my eyes open with the prospect of meeting again. Writing gloom-filled rondeaux. Been awake for two days, exhausted. Trying to muster up the willpower to continue. There is no worth to gain from being exceptionally sad. How did I get here? 

Striving to find the good in me. Sometimes I am beetroot, but it depends on what mood I wake up in, when I get out of bed on 47 Bell Drive. All routes have been explored. The foil is traced back to swampy waters which drown me. We say our words, and after some time, in which the house is turned upside down, you tell me you love me and I sigh. I don't mean to be mean, but I love you in my own special way. Barefooted on sand. You're my dopamine. The candlenut I hang from. I'm your drone bee. We couldn't be more different, yet more alike. We couldn't be more different, yet more alike.