I. Personal Myth
Where does the day go after the adventure is through? We faced the bluffs and the breakers, dried in the sun and cracked in the sands. Bring me somewhere green, somewhere lush, where life overruns life and I will be fed back into the earth. There's enough to explore, and enough to breathe. Your beauty and your cheekbones cause me to cry, but my tears are my strength. I am the only one inside, and the only one who sees you. When the world ends, I will be the only one who leaves.
II. Habit of Dirt
Wine is poured out of the glass and into the soil. Sour and sweet into the eyes, splitting the joyful. All of the children are here with me, clutching their dresses and caps with bony fingers. After these few years, this isolated time, their presence still lingers. Amongst the leaves and the vines and the corpses of swine, the pigs who knew not of the human soul. Is this a prison or the kingdom of a god? Where would most benefit the kids that I once knew? The weeds and the weather and the woe is all the world sees now. Let's go behind the scenes.
III. Lobotomy To - Go
You are my avatar. You remove my mind and feed me screamers. I adore your winks and your spindly legs, the segments of your body impossibly connected with arrogance. I remember when I first met you! I spilled out of the saloon with six-shooters blaring, kicking and screaming as you dragged me around. Stop, you horse-drawn carriage! Stop, you insignificant midwife! Stop, you filthy peddler! The Blackness is here, standing amongst you! All drop at once. All the sands and structures fall away. The sky skitters away. Laughing, you toss me up and my stomach turns over. The spinal cord is out and the vertebrae are constricting wrists like hand cuffs. This is my new life and my new death; I have to forget about all of my loves and all of my children.
IV. The Western Gothic Epic
I was present on the day that Theodore Roosevelt and Susan Atkins married. They tied the knot and leapt straight into the deep end. He became so well read after that day, building castles with stone blocks as large as cities; once he had read how to do something, he would spring into action like a giddy schoolboy. She slowly faded away from him, her fantasies taking over, and as is inevitable, atrocity followed. She wasted away in the dark hues and drowned in the cries of an unborn child, while he broke through the ceiling into heavens of bright red, yellow, and violet. They divorced, as everyone expected. I met with Susan one October day, and she kicked around the leaves, sobbing. She said, "I regret this life so much." I never met Theodore, because he died suddenly in a freak zeppelin accident, in the spring of 2079. Sources say that when the fires finally died out at the crash site, there was a large black spot in the shape of a human heart burned into the ground where his body had been. The very same year, when the last Native American on Earth passed away, I attended the joint funeral; Susan was there, arms around all my loves and all my children. The whole country was there at the ceremony, and we all stood around the six-foot hole in the ground as the earth shook and fissures opened up, exasperated and angry. That year a mountain was formed in Ohio. Nobody knows how or why it happened, but it became the largest mountain in the world, spanning from Indiana to Pennsylvania and climbing to the upper reaches of our atmosphere. Ms. Atkins made it her mission to scale this peak, but disappeared from memory two years short of reaching the summit. Sometimes I travel there to her grave, 908,000 feet up, and start to cry. Crying is not the best idea at that altitude, as I'm sure you can imagine, and every time I just barely manage to get off the peak without suffocating. I used to think the world was going to end in 2012; I can't believe I was ever that naive!
V. Championing the Earth's Faults
Let's stay in bed all day. I just want to feel you next to me; can you believe yourself for leaving me? Everything is so sleek in this facility! White washed walls, black steel flowing, reflections in every peripheral glance! But now I have to leave on this ship, and it breaks my heart to know that you're not going to make it. You ride a motorbike to the top of this forested hill and I can honestly say that I've never seen you sexier. On the verge of death, all hope lost and fishtailing the dirt into the face of oblivion. I have to go now, though. The council demands it. Maybe one day in the future you will find me with your ghost hair glinting, in a time when I have become a ruthless tyrant slaying everyone in my wake, like the swine that I am. But for now, all I want to do is cry and kiss you, cry and kiss you. "I
do love you." "I love you too. Goodnight."
VI. I Admit the Mosaic
Is not a mosaic all we really ever have to offer? A snapshot of the mind and yet another; never truly knowing what you want, or what you feel. Some people, some moments, some events feel important. But one merely has to wave their hand into the curtain to see that it easily folds and reveals The Blackness behind. My avatar crawls with my loves on its back and my children in its arms! So, I will play in the weeds. I will bask in the weather. I will welcome the woe. I am simply me, born free and waiting for hope. Let's go behind the scenes! Let's go behind the leaves!
