THoZ - 3

Just to get her to relax again, and laugh, that carefree way she'd been before they ended up outside, walking back from the dimly lit bar with smoke in the air and lights that danced above drunken men and women, conversing in tongues and with tongues, swapping secrets directly into one another's mouths.

Total: 15354

The House of Zodiac

"S-s-sorry," Leo said.

Virgo broke down crying.

Taurus looked deeply uncomfortable.

"S-sorry," Leo said again. Less of a st-stutter, but still there.

"You killed her! You're why she's dead!" Virgo screamed. Then she ran.

Taurus watched her go, then looked over to Leo. "I hope that's just an emotional accusation," he said. "Because if it's not…"

Total: 10255

Rarely do the present and past selves get along.
There is nothing I love about the self I was years ago, and nothing of the me now could the past self find redemptive.

You're getting the gist, I guess. Or maybe you're forcing words to conform like the normal human being might. The differences between past and present are slight, but the future changes us more than we've ever been ready for. It's a step out into the then that becomes now. How is no longer a question, just a statement made to indicate this predicament can't go on.

Someone came up to me on the street, held out a hand and told me that I should take a chance - that stranger-danger was really fear on steroids and that we had more to fear from androids invading this place than anything we might make to hurt each other. I took his hand and time be passing maybe lasting I found a lover, hidden in a man who wanted to be a boy.

Once upon a time there was a rhyme that reached all the children, and I was the one who couldn't listen because I was too busy telling tales that others heard and failed to understand. Failed to not believe - the child who ran away from home to escape the droning monotony of family life and fell into a dream world instead. Living there, everyone I knew was either dead or dying, and there was nothing I couldn't do (except for flying; wings are banned below, doncha know?)

Sage wisdom says not to approach the world of the living once you've died, but words of wise men have always lied where I've been concerned. I learned early on that bending the truth works well enough to get along when the song's on repeat. I touch what bits of reality you haven't forgotten yet, and I weave my wings out of words that I've heard others refuse to say - the day I find a word I can't use I'll give up my wings to literary misuses.

What you don't know is that one day I'll be down in the underworld for a playdate with Hades, and maybe then I'll fuck up the security system, just for fun. Cerberus likes honey cakes, but doused with opium and he'll be flaky as a guard at best. And Sisphyus' slavery might be cut short early if the mountain accidentally plateaued. Or if someone introduced machinery into the scenery. I'm willing to come storming in to break the chains that keep them from gaining the freedom they don't deserve.

I met a boy who said he couldn't win - said he was nothing but a sinner who could walk in daylight when he chose. A boy who claimed the devil kept a corner office reserved for when he arose from the deepest circles of hell, ready to retire to the mired conditions of below. I still don't believe him - not about sin or sinners, because he's still a beginner in life, even if he knows more than me. See, I've done, touched more places in people than I've yet to be held accountable for, brought down for. I know the taste of wrong, and the way bad notes jar a perfect song, and I still haven't found those in my wild child, yet. But don't tell him. He likes to think he's all that.

There's no one who knows the taste of cold metal like I do - no one who drew on the canvas of skin the same way I did and could say it wasn't painful. Wasn't wonderful. .
That there wasn't something hidden within that made up for the sin that collected on this doorstep, that was hidden in step, in time, in rhyming nature with the nurturing fools that cared enough to use and use and run. (The way the sun does, dontcha know?) And even though I think I've learned from the boy who came around, the one who shook up this part of town, I'm still in classes on occasion, taking over what Ive failed to take in. I'm still learning the offbeatness, and the sweetness of sorrow scented bleeding. Hey, be a doll. Pass the bandaids - it's still seeping.


Even god debates that sometimes, though. She’s one of those who just can’t seem to be content with anything less—more—than the status quo. (But the status is NOT quo, is it? Just visit the downtown slums sometime and have a moment of peace and quiet with the bums who still talk to the thirteenth air molecule to the right; it’s a sight more sane than any other place I’ve been.) She’s been hitting up the reasons and the seasons and pretty soon she’ll be back home in bombshell fashion, with a last minute cry of victory as if she’s gotten something done. God must be a masochist because she made the world with free choice, and once given a voice the human race couldn’t help but deface her, and tell all these lies that maybe she’s just a man in disguise. They don’t call the world mother earth for nothing, but this god we won’t pray to has given way to a vision of derision and disillusion so deep that even children aren’t given to belief anymore. And now for god, even waking up is a chore, sometimes. When the dawn rises... You know each day has new surprises, but what’s it like for god, when she knows the ins and outs of every word that’ll ever be said, and the life cycles of everyone who isn’t quite dead yet. There’s nothing to wait for when you know the end, and it’s so damn near, but the young tragedies who walk the earth can’t even hear it coming.

Imaginations.

Blond hair in a mohawk, the band around his forehead, bangs falling down and over. The red hatch marks--almost gone native--under his right eye. Shirt off and black pants. Multiple piercings in the ears, glittering triple industrial piercing, crossed.

The pressed tattoos--wiccan symbols crushed against pale skin.

The girl with black and red hair. The pierced eyebrows, and black--so much black. Like the chieftain's daughter.

Haunted by a song? Haunted by a notion that you absolutely must do this.

The two drunken lesbians...heh.

Get into a car with two people you don't know. And one you barely do. How do you know each other? We're mental arts people.

And the black boy, in tights and a pleated skirt, held with the black and silver belt, ripped mesh shirt and all the lines on their faces, like war paint. Some kind of clan mask, in tangled mobs of x's under their eyes.

His hair was curly, an Afro against his head.

What is it with Alexander?

Delight in the little wonders...

Envision a past from a different perspective.


When do you begin to believe and when do you begin to forget--

What did I want to have happen?

Fifth floor.

And I'm alone still.

Again.

But I can hear the screams down below. A few floors down.

And if I close my eyes I can trace them.

Like that high pitched one a few moments back was from third floor, cell six. She's been here for two years. She's a youngster. Barely begun.

They move you up with each passing bit of time, each human being who passes over. Gives up. Goes under.

Those are the lucky ones.

You know when they go out because you can hear them start to sing, and it's fucking eerie. Like an opera singer when whale, or something with a bit of wolf howl thrown in for flavor.

To explain why they always sing more on a full moon.

And after a month or so, then they stop singing.

And we never hear them again.

But the screams on third are softer now, and there's a bottle of isopropyl on hand for all your painful needs.

Cuts, scrapes, burns. Cleaning, waking up, getting sick. Burning shit.

Except the only way to bleed is to claw through your own skin, and they try to keep us from being able. Smooth walls. Smooth enough to go mad against, and the only other flammable substance is thought. Everything else just seems to wait, laughing.

But as torture poured into sinuses, it does the trick. It hurts, and it's impossible to sleep through.

But I wish there were more matches. It feels so wrong not to have the graze of fire on my skin.

Like a bit of me has died. They tell us the need will go away. We know it doesn't. That they don't know what they're talking about.

That these men in pale green and alien suits have never known the touch of a knife, or match. Have never dreamed what release it brings.

Have never -

Singing.

It's coming from the seventh floor. May souls rest in peace, in a hell less hellish than this one.

And as for me,

I'm sleeping now.

Don't much care when,

Don't much care how.

And when I wake

I'll sing a tune

And laugh and play

My own soul's doom.

Timeless excerpts, 8/8/10

There are days I want to touch and hold onto forever. This isn't one of those days. This is just one of those moments when my eyes droop and shut and I dream inside this fever that is life. I want, and I realize that I am, and it confuses me until all I want to do is find a way out of this existence. I am. I need to be else, until I am nothing that can be remembered in the end.

I liked that feeling, and when I finally hung up the phone, it was so that I could fall back into sleep, but I tumbled the way someone does when they're dying – in slow motion, until the seconds felt like hours, but once I was asleep, time was nothing. I felt awake when I woke up, three minutes before my alarm clock went off.

There are words for people who can stand up and take the ridicule, and those who break down on the first compliment. There are places and there are feelings and there are pressures that end up making us who we can be, just by breaking down who we were and making us forget that.


--total word count: 35 678--

Timeless exerpts, 8/6/10

Poets, writers - they don't have the same mentality as someone who plays sports. I should know. I do both. There is a poet in me, a writer in me. There is an athlete in me, but I am also Gemini, and I have no need of being a single entity. I can be many and one at the same time. In the same way I can do math and love science but wish to be an author to make my living by - I am humanities and sciences. I am a combination of everything that may be confusing in this world.

But there is something inherently strange about touching the dead.
I don't really like it.
Even dead insects.
It's strange.
...So
much stranger when I realize that the mouse breathed with lungs the way
I do, instead of through its knees the way a grasshopper does.

I love to lie.
And I love to taste the way the world tastes.
Or tasted.
And I want to move on. Somewhere farther away than this hell hole.
I hate it here.
They drown puppies.

Excerpts from Timeless, 8/5/10

My room was no sanctuary, and I cried myself to sleep again, half dressed because I couldn't bring myself to have skin touch where skin had lain. And the water bottle he'd drunk out of was still there beside my bed, a quarter of its contents remaining. I slept then and dreams came, but I didn't dream ...of him, and when I awoke I felt guilt ridden and jealous. But I did not cry. All my tears were gone.

But my fingers tell truth more easily than the rest of my body does. My tongue likes the taste of lies too much to ever give up on them.

Excerpts from Timeless, 8/4/10

I had a phone in my hand and was texting god, asking why it was so damn hard to sit here and watch people leave. God doesn't have a response time, or a prearranged message to send to people. And god doesn't have texting either, but I couldn't bring myself to call, because any phone call I made to heaven was going to be collect, and I've already charged enough on my account up there.

I wanted to know what it felt like to know death so well I wouldn't have to touch it with my own hands to understand what was going on.

After breathing air for almost two full decades, I wasn't sure what to do with nitrogen. Alice in Wonderland came to mind - Eat Me. But I didn't feel like resorting to cannibalism to cure a problem that wasn't going to be a problem, because I decided it wasn't going to be a problem. So instead of figuring out that taking Lewis Carol's cake seriously was a good idea, I went with Ignore Me.



--Closing the day at 10,065 words--

Touch of Grace.

Yes, I'm looking at you.

No, I can't see you.

Maybe it's because none of us are quite real. Or maybe it's because only I am.

Maybe it's all one fearsome nightmare, bleeding all shades of red and blue and violet. The extra life in his eyes, the sense of self he was always missing - it's there. His body is slumped with grief, but he seems taller somehow. He feels whole in a way no one ever truly does.

What are these tricks, then?

The meaning of lucid is sane. When one dreams and does not know it, one is not lucid. One is not...sane. Maybe I'm dreaming then. I'm dreaming my own death - his death. Yours.

What is this insanity? These dreams none of us can wake from. The nightmares that have us all trapped in the floorboards, smelling hell's flames below but not quite ready to fall yet. Because when we fall, we'll all just wake up, won't we?

Unless the dream isn't one and the nightmare actually is. IF it really is your little brother on your front lawn with huge slate eyes that can't see anything anymore. because maybe that experiment of yours has discovered it's got some fangs after all... And maybe instead of killing you he killed your shadow instead.

And let's suppose your shadow was your soul, your better half. Where would you be then?

Dead? Lost? Destroyed?

Reborn.

But you couldn't have done it alone, because no one can kill his own soul.

So now you're seeing thing and hearing things and I belong to you or you belong to me if you believe in the sort of thing you swore could never exist.

Which leaves one to wonder who is speaking when all of them are out there, crying over the crumpled body of a black-haired boy. Because, who would think someone as perfectly demented as us could use the touch of grace?