~NLY

No, I was not there,
up on the church stairs
the wind in my hair
the one that flew from Rome

No, it was not I there,
up on the church stairs
No wind in my hair
it was not I that carried you home

lets put a new coat of paint on this rusted up town,
we'll set it up, set 'em up, and be knockin 'em down

I'll wear your dress babe, you wear a tie
go on laughin at that bloodshot moon
in that burgundy sky

And isn't it tempting, with the fates on the nod,
to go runnin on empty, bourbon, and God

I've known a few a people in that loose-laced daze,
and before they went on, dear, they always did say,

"I think the rain must make a lovely sound
to those who're six feet underground"

This is a formal apology to one Todd Keisling, a poor fuck who probably thought he was going to get some bona fide prose for once with that last entry.

It's coming.

body like a folding chair, doubled up in the corner, face in hand like a man who hates fine china, 'don't go outside anymore, her face like a chorusline, croppin up all over the city ------ again I forgot how to talk, they said I was reformed ----- spent weeks holed up and snatching moths from mid air ----- I don't want to talk to people I just want them to keep talking, I write her a letter a day, when the seizures come I just scribble them in REM likeness on the undersides of my eyelids ---- body like a folding chair, doubled up in the corner, singin a song with a rock in my mouth,'

"Continue."
I feel like one of those headshrinkers.
Not a pscyh-bitch, smile-and-nod until you want to kill them even more type, those Amazon fuckers - As I look into his eyes I can feel his skull tighten on his brain, his blood thicken in minuscule vessels every time I say that word.

'I don't like -- I -- don't like needin - people. I want to be so alone I've been trainin my body to forget how to put off shadows, been wrappin myself in linen, suckin my brains out a straw, and fuckin god damn't every two seconds there's this woman in my skull and I want to throw her out the door but she looks she's made of lily stalks and oyster spit, can't touch her, not unless you just wanna pull your fingers along her cheek, talk to her, even though you just forgot to talk, and there's not a damn thing about you that could do it, but she comes back in, our talks are always like a slow-motion lightning, pronged off in two directions and dead before it can get anywhere, fuckin woman, fuckin sleep, no nightmares, just memories, fuckin woman'

"Tell me about your desires."

'to di-'

"Nono, desires. Not wishes, we're not talkin ponies and straight razors here, just desires - What can you really get for Christmas?"

'books'

"You live in a house of books."

'nah, books I can read'

"You read all the time"

'I read too slow'

"You used to read so quick you were busier than a one toothed man at a corn on the cob munchin contest. Tell me what you're getting at, Gabriel."

'The pain got worse, I don't got no drugs for it, the seizures are pickin up pace, everything I read I read like a blind man feelin up a Monet painting, a deaf-mute tryin to attune his pulse to the rhythm when he's slow dancin to Mozart like smoke slippin out of a barrel, morphine man, I can't walk this world like this, my eyes won't stay still, God don't give a rat's ass for blind men, never once wrote a petal in braille'

"We don't do drugs anymore, Gabriel."

'Then fuck you, straight razors and ponies.'

"Fuck me? Alright. I'm gone. I don't have to be in here to work, after all. Two minutes after the next attack? You're off like a player piano, no one at the keys, and I can scribble as you drool, 'body like a folding chair, doubled up in the corner, singin a song with a rock in the mouth.'"

'Doc?'

"I'm not a doctor."

'Oh.'

"Yes?"

'I thought you was smart.'

"Hm?"

'Don't you know?'

"What the fuck is your point?"

'It's ghosts and angels at them keys, man, ghosts and angels'

I walk through the cell doors, my eyes do one of two things. I can't be sure. I'm either pocketing my surroundings, tucking them under my scalp, eyes workin their way like a sundial through it all, slow and steady, blinks breakin up the framerate - or I'm trying to vomit, pupils like the lolling tongues of bushes in an unaccustomed hurricane, with wind marking their scalpel curlicue of incisions through the smoke of the abandoned burn barrel, and I'm the vagrant who stayed.
I don't feel sick, I think. I have sickened others, though. I decide, therefore, that I am time, and act accordingly, laundering from my eyes a pace appropriate for the pulse as I allow my apartment to materialize in orchestrated patches, like a day, a night. Wallpaper of pages from poetry booklets, floortile of their covers. Bed polka-dotted with cigarette burns, like Gabriel's arms, maybe. Not so pale, maybe, mellowed and smokestained. All the lights are on and all the moths are looping shadows under cover, battering out their suicidal pageantry; like lucky sperm into fertile eggs they slip into the light. I snap my pen in two, suck on it for awhile. When I lean over a vase of white orchids, and pucker my lips into a dropper above the petals like curled tongues, I inlay in driblets a black, black braille, raising pert and invitational from the whiteness, like breasts, or cathedral domes.
There Gabriel, I think. When we're through with this, I'll let you read that.

I sit at the desk. Through the glass doors, I hear Gabriel screaming. This is not relevant. I realize I'm half deaf for a reason. I slip my fingers through the session log, every page reads the same:
I knew this already.
Thousands of them, days and days of them, it seems the point was not to know anything. I sit at the desk, waiting for dawn, thinking about how to write without a pen. To pass the time I take my knife, rusted like a dead lexicon, and slowly cut out my tongue. This, I think, is the only piousness I possess, hunched over the notebook like a drunk resting his head on the pew before him, trying to hear the sermon - I'm waiting for the next day, so I can hold faithful to the rite, make my diurnal rounds, and when I hear the hoarfrost hissing and dying in the sunlight I poise my fingers around my inkstained tongue, and begin to on paper untangle words:

I know this man.
I have been saying, it seems, for a long time, just how well I know him. But that was not the point. We are coming to the point. This is the point:
He is principally a principally an instrument; his nerves are strings. All of his mirrors and promises are broken. He loves the snow because it reminds him of his woman, and so every winter, game over, he's up and down the block, sweepin the flakes with a flame thrower. Heart like an ashtray, his love is dead but overflowing; all those who sat near enough have black stains on their clothes. It's silly to think he is human, but somehow all of these things leave us no option but to term him thus. Once, we know, he was not. He saw diamonds divide in the corner of an eye, however, and all of this soon changed. There is a woman, far away, and without a word he loved her with his mouth, hard as he could. Soon after we bought him a muzzle; his lips hunger to this day; distant beauties need not worry, my knuckles are choke chains, his love a bark that aspires in whispers only. Until my grip is tightened, go a little deaf.

-Darian


When I look up, I see Gabriel, and his new lack of utility in this becomes apparent to me. He has cocked his head at the petals. This has been an interesting experiment; but the boy's madness is no longer amusing. I walk over to the clear doors of his cell, scrawl and smear my thick black tongue along it.

"Story Time"

He nods.

I nod.

I hadn't though of what I was doing, writing braille in ink. It's strange how simple.
I press one finger to the petal.
What I wrote does not matter, the true story is a short one. No one cares about words that die. What does matter is that Gabriel knows this.
What I wrote does not matter, what does matter is that Gabriel is a storm, and my fingers give way to a black and white rainbow.


'it's about time'

I'm gonna crawl from the ocean, paint in my cave, though I should be workin all weekend, I need to get paid