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dst |
paper snowfall, stained charcoal black like your lips, dripping with
the words of dead poets: love! they cry in cracked voices stricken
dumb with a slap; it leaves a dull grey blot on my face.
paintings crack open, oil paint flows into pools, coagulating in angry
red on the razorblade edge of the brush, paint the artist's only real
canvas one more time you know it makes the pain come out.
huddle under the blankets, feel the fever - is it the urge to drive off
into the desert on hopeless missions, away from the snow and charcoal
life, or is it just a viral chill from the concrete patio floor?
it doesn't matter anyway, no warmth amidst the blizzard's brutal battering,
blood boiling, but rage just won't come out this time - he and pride
are off getting ego stoned so he'll stop bitching about fairness.
and then cigarettes, a whole night of quick burns, sluggish lightning jaunt
to the sterile lights, efficient machine-people: look at that, it's
machines
fixing machines! i can see your machine at work on the monitor.
burn again, how is she? sounds hollow through a bad cell vibe, they don't
work around the equipment, one more incompatibility to add on the
stack, subtract it from the total using reverse polar notation.
burn burn burn, they don't understand, twisted mcewan morality of the two
is unbearable, a scalding cold that leaves marks on my wrists, mirror
images we are now, in perfect focus, only turned the wrong way.
then back into the cold light, to face the scrutiny of tired yet probing
eyes, i know they just want the answer key but i don't have enough
copies for everybody, so i guess i shouldn't have brought them.
passed though, and that's all that matters, greed is good and all, but
just like college what does it earn you? wallowing, pitiful and
broken in a studio apartment, the day's labor lost in the electric
void.
no, this is no knott's berry life, so plummet standing up through a
reverse loop too fast, blood rushing and brain flooding in a massive
hemorrhage until it drips out of my eyes - they call it a red-out.
and then in the morphine dreams i see you fucking him again - you wanted
human contact? well so the fuck did i, so now you have to tell me
again how big his erection was, let me feel it penetrate my
inadequacy.
i want it so bad, when it's done i'm laying panting and bleeding on the
bed, sheets and sanity stained with this knowledge i can't do anything
with, and you're the one getting help? the fairness issue rears anew.
too late, though, too late to catch the moment, it has passed in hazy
shades of mind-fucked memory, metastasized now into my lymph nodes,
can't you hear it in the fits of coughing, see it in my phlegm?
i'm sorry (i hear myself say) but i don't know why i'm saying it, do you
know why you want me back so bad? plague-ravished, malnourished
traveler, the past is no more than cigarette ashes and reruns.
what i want to know is different - ah, my hero said that once! – but
so much less innocently now, no longer crayon-colored ideas of love,
vermilion suns give way to pale gray daylight savings and i'm spent.
gone the illusion of an answer, explanation to silence the wherefores of a
disjointed reason, looking to charcoal or blood or answer keys, and
daylight savings time has no purpose here - there are no fields to
till.
copyright 2005
Scott
Miller |
