first breath after coma
Vanishing is the last art. You only get one chance at vanishing. I wonder how my editor would handle the finality.
"I'd like the check, please."
"How will you be paying?"
"For the rest of my life."
People come and go and make sound, speaking through hundreds of centuries of evolved speech and thought, and, I swear they express absolutely nothing. I wonder when we'll evolve past eyelids.
Or maybe I am hearing nothing. Or maybe I stopped listening. Or maybe you stopped making sound. I'm staring at blank expressions made in the shadows, inventing my own words, and I want to bite someone else's tongue but I'm afraid to ask.
I chew on my own. It tastes like warm copper.
All the machinery in my brain stops.
"Copper?"
"Taste it."
"Copper."
Something in a newborn lake makes a sound like a groaning door, but it's too dark to see. Something is making opening noises but it's all so invisible.
"Tell them about the basement," it asks.
"It has a door…"
"Does it?"
"I dreamt it had a door, but I hadn't the first clue how to operate the backyard."
I try not making sense, but it doesn't make any sense. I try attaching meaning to the loose leaf rattle of thought, but I can never shake the beat completely. Three-four. Five eight. Six feet, negative one inch. Everything exists in bodies and formulas and scientifically exacting measurements. Everything but water and smoke. I stand in the spaces in between spaces wondering how to become one or the other.
Time reacts with gravity and funnels water into the earth. Rain progresses. It occurs to me that everything progresses. Right now, I am progressing towards death.
Someone once told me you stop generating new cells at twenty five. I believed them, and have been dying ever since. If someone told me God was a carrot, I would probably believe them as well, because I don't believe in carrots. These things tend to make a bit of sense if you stand at the chalkboard long enough. Like, "when I was younger I used to play the erasers."
People tell me they did things when they were young, as if now they have relegated themselves to simply standing around to explain the passing of time.
Next Halloween, I'm going to go as elapsed-time footage.
It would be more interesting to say "When I was younger, I did nothing." In fact, it's been over twenty six years since I've actually done nothing.
"When I grow up, I'm going to be a fireman."
"When I die, I'm going to do nothing."
I want my late fees written out on my tombstone. Are you taking this down? I want my library card used as a name tag at a meet and greet for former subatomic particles. I want my video cards donated to starving drug addicts. I want my eyes hung from my first love's Christmas tree, so she will remember me always.
I want my lawn mowed by my own sense of self satisfaction. I want my teeth whitened with irony. I want my clothes dried on a guitar string, mid-song. I want to take all the curtains down and make socks for elephants. I want to smell like ceramic tile and taste like exploding sulfur handshakes.
I used to wander a park in a city with a girl, chain smoking. Twenty five years old and that's all I remember.
I wonder what happened to that girl, that city, that park. I wonder what happened to all that blood rushing out. I wonder how it all ended. I wonder where all combustible youth ends. I wonder where all that softly inhaled post-matter ends.
In the halls of my memory everything tastes so fucking exquisite, you wouldn't believe it. I cannot describe anything any further anymore. There is no combination of senses that could ever get you there. I don't believe in heaven because there is nothing higher than that taste, that sensation.
I've come a long way since that time. I've come eight years.
Eight years. And no matter what I do, nothing lives up to the loose rattle of my own memory. Nothing has been discovered; nothing pioneered. Nothing has mattered.
I am haunted. I breathe oxygen. I am made of carbon. I like long walks on the beach and short plays about suicidal dragonflies.
"Tell me everyone doesn't rattle."
"Veer Tory test. Deal neon."
"Stop speaking in anagrams. I'm too old for ice cream!"
So what if this is all just the confused jangle of youth? I have pretended to like ice cream all this time, but it has been a dirty fucking lie.
"Tell us more about the door."
"It has narrative powers. But I want everything to have answers."
I can't stand standing.
I want the check. I'm getting out.
I'm lying inside the brain of a shadow puppet wondering how to climb down. I've lost my fingers, and as a consequence, have no grip on reality.
"Waiter? Check, please."
