Kingdom of Dreams

At arm's length I wanted to throw myself into motion, but suffered an allergic reaction to life, went all weak and decided not to move after several minutes of consideration in which I imagined a brutal, midnight death scene. I had feared the airways would tighten until I would asphyxiate and go purple, as if there was a snake around my neck, and the terrifying thought outweighed however magnificent my motion could have been, so I had made up my mind and there was no returning. I stayed in bed in the same position I had woken up in, with my knees bent and tucked up to my abdomen, thinking about all the possible ways I could explode into colours. Thinking about your eyes for hours.

I feel more alive than I have done in my twenty two years, admiring how birds move in such an elegant manner, like pariahs, very diffident but shiny people, and my bones snap at the strike of clocks. I can easily beguile individuals into thinking anything I want. Underneath my glossy exterior I am burning away like a fire in the loins, building castles in the sky. In a dimly lit room I am calculating my next move. Motionless and mute. My lips are sealed shut from the mass I've lugged from each hour it gets darker, and my eyes are getting brighter, less sullen. When I hear knocks on the walls I dismiss them as drops of liquid from a running tap I forgot to turn off properly in the bathroom. I turn up the volume on the radio, drowning out the rushing sound of traffic coming from the busy streets. Comically enlarged, bulbous faces are looking around suspiciously. Ghostly figures, night spectres mumbling under their breath, apparitions of smoke escaping through the window I left open.

I don't have to say anything when you can see what I feel on my facial expression. I pity you and how your brain is rotting away with each word you utter, and how you're more concerned with alchemical matters than discovering the truth about JFK. If only I could delve into the waves of your mind and untangle those thoughts, those flowing tunnels like Ticino, then I would put everything back into order like the housekeeper in your Manhattan hotel room. I'm bowled over by the fait accompli. Spent days feasting on your opinions. When the sun is setting I remember for a week I slept in the most uncomfortable positions, tossing and turning until I was tired enough to pass out from the exhaustion of back aches. I would walk through the hooded woods of my turbulent childhood, and crash into sturdy contentment, finding peaceful ways to take my mind off the murk, such as hosing down the tire rims of Chryslers, making paper nasturtiums, roving around on train tracks, or fitting my body into hollow ducts. 

In and out of empty rooms in my brain looking for one good, useful thought. Heartbeats. It's preposterous to think you can weed out something magical from thin air, I've tried it. Depleted the surplus, drank the last drop in the bottle, sucked the juice from the brain stem but I never get a happy ending. My relationship with my father has always been tainted, and eventually the communication between us came to a sudden halt last year, months before my birthday vacation, and I soon stopped thinking about him as much as I did, and as much as it hurt, it was easy to overcome, and I haven't heard from him since. I've moved on as if it never happened. Navel gazing in my kingdom of dreams.

We fit well together, like twins, never at variance, never looking gift horses or trophy steeds in the mouth. Resting on the declivity. From the palace's highest oriel I see the birds, unknown species, personable and bluish, fall into waterfall orifices, and I am complaisant, very much diaphanous, however I remain myself. I put paid to the phases. My flowers have withered and the oasis of my mind has dried up quicker than rheum, quicker than rain collected in the stomach of the calyx. I'm looking for an afflatus, something saccharine like baby's candy. I can't quell the desire to write, I need to feed it. For so long I've been pulling the pollen from the O, putting grape seeds in cherry soil, after the vanilla essence, flying with spruce winds into unknown constellations slotted into aeons. Reading about hypothetical syllogisms, boys and their tragedies, how the plumage moults in the restless hours. The silence is a cincture for the figurehead wreathed in a garland. I traipse, as if someone has stolen the elixir from my woebegone heart, into the sun's glasnost, like a silkworm ready to lay its eggs. I tighten the tourniquet. Shared a catena of events, bedtime stories, arias, with no room to swing a cat. I think of all the times I made you laugh, all the shit I said, all the times I called you a bitch, all the conversations we never had, all the times I got high, all the times I fucked myself and woke up the next morning with my dick in my hands. Unable to stand, unable to function without you, and how your mouth made those shapes when you were talking about the valence of a carbon atom. How he wanted to fuck me, be inside of me. 

I am as cold as my domicile, as cold as a sepulchre, as cold as all the books I've read. Slumped over on my bureau. I would traverse through open spaces, crowded places, blindfolded. Going deeper into that cavernous quietude. I would go to this echoing forest where I had discovered a tree swing and I would hang from the branches. I would go there and reminisce, but make new memories in the process. I had recently finished my third year of high school and had befriended an acquaintance whom I first met two years prior and had grown to admire over the course of that fruitful summer we had formed a unique bond based on our mutual understanding of sex and of Plato.

On the first foggy morning of May I prepared for my exams. I rushed into the dressing room next to the Theatre, and I got dressed as quick as I could, and into character, in front of the vanity mirror. I put on my velvet blue waistcoat, buttoned it, and slightly adjusted my hair with gel. The boxes around me meant nothing significant like the lines of the script I had spent days memorizing and continued to regurgitate as I stood backstage, like an orchid on a window sill or a cloud in the empyrean waiting for my cue. When I made my entrance I could feel the sweat bubble on my forehead from the warm lights, and I had never been more nervous. In a bright corridor next to an office beside the foyer where I would stand waiting for that envelope with my final results, I never asked for an arm or a leg but they thought I should've been locked up in an institution.

Another day turned sour and I was crashing through the hour, reaching out for the milk tip. I wound up at the turtle fountain, as slow as the slow driving cars. Didn't think I'd get this far. I am clogged with recollections under the washed out, blue sky. Misplaced on the other side of town. I untied the brown locks and unravelled like a well-designed metaphor, enjoying the mundane of it all, the stroll in the park when the sky gets dark.

I am someone else. I value my life like pearls, but it's not going the way I had planned. More like a cortège, a drive to the last stop. Nothing remains but cinders from my reveries. Missives, locutions, fusions. Dream theories. I am nothing without the thrill of the night on high seas. Sometimes I am discouraged, but it's never too late to change. With every inch I edge forward the clouds have parted and I'm back where I started, cutting into mountains with the fabric of my jaw. Frequencies in my mental prison. I had a dream I was in Heaven, and the truth's glittering eyeball shimmered like the moonlight on a plastic ocean. Umbels of a poem. 

When a crack appears on a surgeon's hand by a dollar green lampshade, I am another scar in a winter rage. A neutron lodged in the hippocampus with all the experience I've gained. Pulverising mushrooms. At the furthest point to the east, soaking in a concupiscence. Wherever I go I light shadows, stoke the orange embers, like a one night stand, and before I can begin to regret the things I've done, and the things I haven't, I'm thinking I wish I never loved you, wish I didn't have to feel the way I do.

In April the bloom of Jupiter overflows, goes down my throat like cinnamon, or oil. Nightmares in my bone marrow. I chewed on the priceless fruit, and each bite was a paradise in my watery mouth. The flavour of melon, the wrinkled face after the stringent lemon. It's like the face of Laura after she had a shot of Tequila. The last I heard from her she had moved closer to the beach, and I later learned she had assumed room temperature in her forties after she suffered from cardiac arrest whilst undergoing an operation to remove cysts, and not long after her eldest son, Kyle, committed suicide by hanging, like my grandaunt had done when I was eleven and in my first year of high school. 

That wasn't the first time I had seen death. I seen the windmills, and told them the emergency was a child of the nurse. Jim would drive me around in his car when he wasn't watching those black and white cowboy Westerns, and I would browse through magazines. I watched the disease in his body eat away at him, until he was so thin he resembled a different person, someone I didn't know, but someone I loved, and one day he was gone like my soldiers have left me in a place of despair. They thought I was Guiderius with a stubborn nose, as aureate as the menorah, at a home run, never going back, back to that place.

I can't seem to break free from my mistakes. I watch over them like the stars, like the dark over the skies. You would think they were bramble on Challah bread, or the prawn cocktail, vegetable rolls, sweet and sour sauce, and fried rice I ordered from the Chinese place where I took off two layers of flesh, where I pledged I would never look at you the same way again. I will never look at you like you're mine, you're not my mistakes, my winged seraphs telling me miracles can happen. In tune with my surroundings as picturesque as the morning sunrise. My eyes screeching away from the scene of the crime. 

Desiccating my tears, acidic gouts, a sum of years. Lachrymose and writing. Nothing is in the waters. My wavering love for you is underfoot, unheard, like all the prayers I've made are in the grey fold. I keep the heating on to keep my heart warm, to stop myself from freezing over. I've woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of a shrill. Paced up and down. Went back to bed, fell into that deep recess. When I closed my eyes over I could only remember my mother's coffee. Memories of my former life playing like a film on a silver screen.

I don't know how to be happy. I've tried many ways, but all I can seem to feel is a certain sadness, every time I remember life is not what it used to be. I fell from the top of the world and landed with a swan song. My last breath. The last American sunset. Happiness is not a religion. It's a fleeting moment in time, a stranger you meet, poured from an ewer, something you can't teach, a love affair, the last immortal to abandon Earth. Delphic. I am clouded by my turpitude, by the pulchritude of the night. Being tortured in circles.