Posted

Apr 6th 2009

Mood

Virused

Music

tool

But the voices still say no, you have to look at it sideways again. Then put the blinds back down and start driving that invisible black horse toward immanent doom.

When you look at it sideways, you’ll see what I mean. You have to stand on the ceiling and let the world come with you. The colors mix like paint and you can create the world over. I can hear the hearts beating like drums. The hearts of the pale and the fragile and the paper birds. But paper birds don’t have hearts, it says. Paper hearts. The kind that don’t have a beat. Paper thoughts, the kind that live in one dimension and stay blank and white like starlight and clouds. But they fly above my head and they move. And I see the clouds falling from the sky. It’s raining clouds, I said. I said it’s raining clouds from clouds from clouds and the sky gets all empty.

But if you stand upside down, you’re falling toward the sky. Fall into the great blue and watch it turn gray and black and white and yellow. But you reach the edge and it’s cold and hot and wet. It burns your skin like ice. But I don’t remember.

Sometimes it’s like the universe crumples itself into a ball. It’s all one big sphere, and some kid somewhere is tossing it and hitting it with a bat.

I write on this paper and it writes back. It tells me the words of the worlds of the wonders of the wandering wolves. It tells me the silence of the everlasting noise. It tells me black and white and gray and everything on the outside bursting on in. It tells me why the sun doesn’t rise and set anymore. Like the sun is turning around and around like a top in the sky, and no matter where I look, it’s in the same place. The big ball of fire is crashing and quaking like a dancer in the sky, and the drums beat out a rhythm. I dance with the sun and it flies away. It flies to the back of the galaxy and spreads its paper wings and flies away.
It’s so dark here that all our eyes turned to water and we wept forever. The trees all took their roots out of the ground and flew into the sky and wound round the planet like vines, like a net. And we were the captured, butterflies, sand through a sieve let us out into the sky and the light came and we were blind like mice with our tails around our bodies, nooses around our necks, hung on our own sorrow.

I hung my halo on the rack with the others. I dug my fingers into the flesh and I took hold of the wings and the knife and I dug my fingers into the flesh and the feathers. Black white red feathers. Wings like living beings themselves in my hands in my arms in my legs and my ribs, cutting my stomach so there’s red and purple and black and it hurts and my back is the ocean is the sky. I’m gonna fly, fly off the earth and fly to Mars and fly to Pluto. Fly with my wings bloody, dripping blood and black and ink like a martyr, part of me like my soul.
Today I’m the ocean, waving goodbye. It’s like swimming in water, swimming underneath the sky and the ground and into the earth’s core. I’m swimming so far below the surface I can feel the pressure breaking my bones into shards that pierce my skin from the inside. Like a body fighting itself. I like to break into pieces and watch myself float away on the surface and spread out like a ripple on the water. I’m like sine waves pulsing through the air with the music in my veins pulsing through my heart and bringing me to life.

And then I’m in pieces and I’m everywhere at once like the dirt and the water and the fire and the air. What’s going on? I said to them, what’s going on? Where is my brain and where’s my soul and my wings holding me up to the sky through a magnifying glass to see the cells through another microscope in the air above the oxygen-nitrogen balance to cause asphyxiation and I cough and I see the sun again. And I wonder where the others went, and they’re up there, too. They’re falling while they fly, like airplanes running out of fuel, looks like a butterfly landing on flowers and being indecisive about which of the many thousands of flowers it wants to land on. Since they’re all beautiful. And they fall from the sky and land on the flowers and burst into flames like they knew they would, they just didn’t let it get to them to let themselves push the button and escape through the emergency exit. What happens when you die in your dreams?

Sandman comes and picks you up and drags you with him and they never see you again.

Sand covers you over like a grave in the summer heat. Soaks your heart through with dryness.

Dance to the center, holds the pen in hand and performs the evening ritual. Falling the sky to let the sun escape the blinding light of the stars and lose its will forever to the giver of the night, the light moon. A new order to reorder our disorder in the sky flying like lost bats, forever lost like paper birds.

The shine on the silver blinds us and binds us, but the sliver’s not silver. It’s silver nitrate and I’m slivered and shivered and stolen like my soul in the photograph. A double exposure to the sun and I’m burnt and I’m blind. I’m inside the inside of the orange peel, the right below the surface where it’s still warm but the blood is underneath if you cut through the paper wrapping. And it’s a shredder, spikes on this saw to see to move this hand around the fold to push the envelope and open your letter from God, it’s last week you said it’d be lemon cupcakes and pennyroyal tea, and you said tomorrow was Monday but it’s not my calendar on the wall upside down so the months roll back and we get younger after spring comes winter. Making it cold again to start the machine rolling through the ice age meltdown to burn the ice castle down and out and up the chimney with the sweeping motion when you try to get the dirt off the floor, but it soaks into your hands and peels the flesh like lye. I’ve got friends in high places, higher than the moon sees the swamp to take a dive with the frogs to somewhere lower where it isn’t so lonely at the top, friends with the dirty pigs wallowing at the bottom.

Hey, I’ve got a friend in the floor. The floor moves the ceiling, so you never see it moving the world underneath so slowly. And then you’re in another place altogether and it’s like magic until you see the floor moving. But they never see the floor moving because they’re moving too. They move wherever the floor goes. The floor takes them back to their childhood and forward to the grave. The floor tilts them sideways-
When you look at it sideways, you’ll see what I mean.