It was strange how we all accepted that it was over, though no one could say precisely what “it” was.
It felt like a thousand pieces of the same great puzzle that had been lost or stolen or burned in some magnificent fire, some grand testament of idiocy.
It only existed in retrospect.
Born a phantom, it rendered itself exclusively to lamentation. We were only aware of it once we realized that we were mourning it. How did we know that it was over? Why now this sudden exasperated sigh that draws ones attention instantly to the ground. This extraordinary gesture of accepting life as it is and not as you wanted it to be.
As if simultaneously we all realized we were characters in a novel nearing its end, and the period at the end of that last sentence might as well be a meteorite heading directly towards the Earth.
The Execution of
Lorca 5-11-09
I wept for Lorca. I watched his cold execution in a thousand horrible daydreams. It’s the kind of experience one waits their entire life to write about but no one thinks to give the doomed pen and paper.
There is Lorca, dead, his last poem lost inside his head or spattered about the field and on the hands of Franco’s soldiers who recall that the Catalan air howled after the gypsy’s tambourine had been broken and guitar inhabited by vultures.
Lights in the Mirror 5-13-09
Pupils flood the surface of my eyes like ink wells that the light, like a quill with rusted point, makes ripple. The same light that made ghosts of our candle offerings. The kind of eerie light you see looking up from a cold, steel table.
In the mirror I seemed eager to breathe the ashes of scorched cities. I was old and ugly, with hair thin and as gray as a wet cigarette. It’s 4:30am so long as the world hasn’t stopped again, and I’m suspicious of my reflection who seems unsympathetic to my fear and anxiety and who I may have even heard laughing between swigs of rat-piss and vinegar.
Only under strange lights are we visible to ourselves, I pretend to think as I kiss the hospital. It tastes like tar and eucalyptus and feels like drowning in concrete, with muddy channels drying through tear-ducts like retroactive hooks through the face.
What she told me after night and before day 5-14-09
I observed the high-water marks in my eyes; the great black ponds that were shrinking into puddles after twelve-hour marathons. She appeared in the doorway behind me and pried me away from the mirror while my horrible reflection laughed at the demons who tickled it. At her touch, my heart burst into flames, like the shaman’s flower in the desert. The smell of the perfume she rubbed in her eyes made me drunk. We danced like Shiva at the end of a plank.
I wept for Lorca. I watched his cold execution in a thousand horrible daydreams. It’s the kind of experience one waits their entire life to write about but no one thinks to give the doomed pen and paper.
There is Lorca, dead, his last poem lost inside his head or spattered about the field and on the hands of Franco’s soldiers who recall that the Catalan air howled after the gypsy’s tambourine had been broken and guitar inhabited by vultures.
Lights in the Mirror 5-13-09
Pupils flood the surface of my eyes like ink wells that the light, like a quill with rusted point, makes ripple. The same light that made ghosts of our candle offerings. The kind of eerie light you see looking up from a cold, steel table.
In the mirror I seemed eager to breathe the ashes of scorched cities. I was old and ugly, with hair thin and as gray as a wet cigarette. It’s 4:30am so long as the world hasn’t stopped again, and I’m suspicious of my reflection who seems unsympathetic to my fear and anxiety and who I may have even heard laughing between swigs of rat-piss and vinegar.
Only under strange lights are we visible to ourselves, I pretend to think as I kiss the hospital. It tastes like tar and eucalyptus and feels like drowning in concrete, with muddy channels drying through tear-ducts like retroactive hooks through the face.
What she told me after night and before day 5-14-09
I observed the high-water marks in my eyes; the great black ponds that were shrinking into puddles after twelve-hour marathons. She appeared in the doorway behind me and pried me away from the mirror while my horrible reflection laughed at the demons who tickled it. At her touch, my heart burst into flames, like the shaman’s flower in the desert. The smell of the perfume she rubbed in her eyes made me drunk. We danced like Shiva at the end of a plank.
She confessed
that she incubated ghosts between her thighs.
I admitted that my mouth was a graveyard.
In a dream she told me that she believed that by brushing her hair over her right eye she would be cured of her current terror. She said that she could only see the dead things with her right eye.
I asked why she never wears her hair like that.
“Because it makes me look silly.” She said, her face contorting suddenly into some ghastly paroxysm upon seeing the image of her drowned grandmother emerging from the bathroom sink.
That night
I asked her if she thought I was a fool.
She shuffled her deck of cards and smiled politely. I saw death in the reflection of her
teeth.
In a dream she told me that she believed that by brushing her hair over her right eye she would be cured of her current terror. She said that she could only see the dead things with her right eye.
I asked why she never wears her hair like that.
“Because it makes me look silly.” She said, her face contorting suddenly into some ghastly paroxysm upon seeing the image of her drowned grandmother emerging from the bathroom sink.
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