Swans in Los Angeles

When I seen it had been snowing from the dark of my window my bones were aching with wanderlust. The neighbourhood was submerged in an opaque angel dust and I was giddy like a child throughout the month of December, eager to make the first incision, the first cut into the smooth ashlar, into the mouth of the protest. At first I noticed the illustrious hallmarks of a depression etched on the forehead like sins in Gethsemane or a prisoner in a tolbooth, and I was influenced by the icy wind of blue jazz to detach myself from the straitjacket. Afterwards, I noticed it was the 7th anniversary since my fame ended, and I imagined myself making cake out of today with blackberries, but everything came to a standstill like silence on the beach of isolation in the hoax of a web.

Memories of another time came flooding in, like visions of the Satya Yuga, serum of the missing years in the left hand of Mercury. I remembered how I am a highschool dropout, combing through 100 letters addressed to Thanatos which I sent to Pompeii, how a flowing melody was created by the subtle movement of the master's hand in the domain surrounding the vertical antenna of the theremin, and its sound design had a euphony reminding me of some mellow afternoon, the crack of a lighbulb. Sweet orange pulp. How I clasped the last cry of Romeo in my hands, and how I am two summers older than Rimbaud when he finally put the pen down, in the stomach of that decadence. Amphetamines in San Antonio, where a veteran had his limb amputated and is left with vet bills stacked up in his art studio.

Daylight was reflecting off the ripples in the water and drafts of hot smoke from the chimneys were seeping into the air. The moon in its last quarter phase, held in the sky at a precise position like a painting by Hokusai, fixed there like cytoplasm in a cell, was a looking glass, a pool of things I wish I could forget but can't. I call it a quotidian reminder coming into my brain like a dream, delicately pressing on my memory lobe, and go about, Gekko-footed, as if no one is looking at me as I deduce I am being followed by shadows of sleep. Illuminated. Hit my head off the concrete. Blind to what's in front of me. 

The whiteout of the place was as if angels had fallen in a freak accident from Heaven and made a bed out of earth, and the white sun was peering through the gaps in the trees, stripped naked and down to their bark. There was no evergreen, but a crunch from the untouched snow underneath my feet, which melted into a pink slush like words into papyrus. Footprints on The Pyrenees. I didn't want to leave, but didn't want to die in the opening of the shark, or like a rabbit caught by a fox in Ullapool. Northeast to southwest on a sinuous route. Not many people are being employed at the moment in this flurry I was told, not many people by the grey mountains in the far distance on the coastline.

No one was in sight. Everything was entwined. I noticed how the landscape had adopted a feeling of impending sadness, emptiness, nothingness, as if the place had mysteriously fallen victim to clear cutting and I had somehow stumbled into a desolate catchment where the only thing I could hear was the male song of a thunder bird echoing off the pinewood as it caught the wind and dived into glacial troughs, like a Zerzura, and I was descending on a funicular as ray finned fish moved upstream to spawn, but I had an inkling something big was going to happen, there had been an aberration, and I was hurtling towards a strange happiness, ravenous for the pleasures in freedom. 

When I first moved here I was still tired from the nights of drinking in an urban shoebox. Flicking through brochures. The air felt different. It was almost more grand like the banqueting hall, or the ostentation of a golden lobby. Grand like O Fortuna or Sierra Nevada, even. I would breathe it in like I was blood stained on a butler sink, and I felt like my mind was an empty barrel when it was once filled with beer anthems, felicitous newspaper words, bars of opera, and antidotes, but it was better than breathing in fresh paint, barbiturates. Bath salts and magic beans for my acid face. I'm accustomed to this pain, the long hospital wait, feeling like I can't breathe when there's a voice telling me nothing will work, not far behind like the corpse of the past. It has left an acerbic taste, but it makes no difference whether I listen or not. I have spent my early youth being cut open and sewn back together. Being philosophical when I have to grapple with reality, and wanting to play the harp.

When there is a squall in Jamaica I run headfirst into it, disregarding possible consequences like a wolf pharaoh on the wild side of life. I lick the watermelon from the gymnasium, from the memorial to the Korean War where fifty thousand people were buried mostly in unnamed graves. I lick it from Applecross, from Oxyrhynchus, from Orchomenus, like it's the sugar from Zeus. I lick it from his armpit, from the white buttocks, then dismantle myself at the final push. In front of the bulls in suits, proud like the Palazzo Vecchio, with a birthday smile. I am more laughable than a gazette stuffed with hokum that has been spring cleaned when the man speaks about how the flesh is only good enough to eat if it has white feathers, and when it's a broth he says the nurses will drink it to improve their milk. I have no reason not to believe him. 

He seems like a trustworthy person, telling me about Nocander, what he knows about morning wood, what he knows about being rhesus positive, what he knows about metempsychosis, and what he knows about eidolons in the Valley of Josaphat. Always moving. There is no beginning or ending. Heaven's nonpareil visited me in a dreamlike hallucination, warning me about the troubles of an afterlife, and asked me if I thought I'd wind up in Abraham's bosom. I didn't know what I was supposed to say.

How can I predict an outcome? I don't know how long it takes to die. Sometimes it can be instant, but what about people who are left in pain before their life comes to an end? I thought it would happen to the throat or the lungs, and that the world would make room for me. In a handmade Brahmaloka. I slipped into a temporary confusion on the veil of black ice thinly disguised as a safe place to reveal your secrets. A man's chest. I thought myself into a bad mood, never addressing the elephant in the room. In a rabbit hole, avoiding the shrewd weather. I remember the taste of the rain, the violent downpour like a tropical monsoon or a shower of unwanted thoughts, how the respected but defensive swans were forced out of their water habitat, seeking shelter underneath a nearby tree next to a pond, and I had to walk around the body of water to get a scope of things, where I locked my maidenhead in a tower, to find my old deportment, and I finally dropped my facade, releasing tears that went streaming down my face.