Serial, Stage 4

I stumbled over the rocks and dying undergrowth to keep up with my companion, who ran towards the smoke with a concern I had thought him incapable of. The main, indeed, the only street in town was a boulevard in Hell, with every building from saloon to outhouse a mass of flames. He nodded at the ground, where clumps of hoof prints circled each other before racing off to the West. “Musta come through last night. Dozen maybe.” He spat on the prints and nodded to the fires, having exhausted his meager confabulatory reserves.

The dead horse was still there, but several other corpses had joined it, each now coated in thin layers of dust. Some buildings would soon be only embers, while others roared at the height of their intensity, adding to the already pitiless heat of the morning sun. I yawned and scratched my head, while the empty bank collapsed behind me. I wondered if the teller had ever woken up.

My companion had not once exclaimed what a shame it was, and his usual grunts and rumblings were absent, replaced by a more complete silence. I stood looking at the inn where I had slept the night before last, right next to what had been the train station. My worthless bank notes lay in my pocket, my suitcase still at our campsite and stuffed with contextually inappropriate clothing. An unwieldy embarrassment clogged the back half of my skull, and I lurched to a run towards the flaming inn before me to try and escape it. “Damb! What!?” was the cry that followed me through the front door.

The bar was on fire, the cash register was melting. The shelves behind the bar were on fire and emptied of liquor. The tables were on fire and the corpses sitting at the tables were on fire, and the old player piano in the corner was on fire. The ceiling of the common room was two stories up, but the entire second floor was a sea of billowing smoke, glowing orange and red, groaning and roaring. Everywhere the sound of wood cracking. The poisonous air joined the embarrassment in my skull, and I shook an old man at the nearest table. “Get out! You have to get out!” I coughed and coughed and kept shaking him, though flames danced on his head which lay in a pool of bubbling blood. I might have kept on shaking him, had I not heard a cry from up the stairs at the back of the room.

Past the player piano and up the steps into the smoke, with enough sense to wrap a discarded rag around my face. There was a small child on the steps, indistinct through the tears in my eyes. And then I was carrying her, rushing out of the smoke and back through the room. An ember falling from above lit on my forehead as we raced out the door, and waves of heat chased the poison from my skull. I dropped my burden in the dusted road.

My companion was next to me now, and he shouted, “Ahbrow! Ahbrow!” then slapped me in the face. The burning subsided. I lay on the ground and ran a hand across my forehead to feel a small colony of blisters rising where my right eyebrow should have been. I blinked and looked at him where he stood sporting what must have been his first smile ever, clashing with his mustache, which was like a hairy frown of its own. As my vision cleared, I nearly cried out in horror as the muscles in his cheeks writhed with the pain and effort of this newly discovered expression.

Serial, 3rd entry

In the night, I was plagued by a sickeningly comfortable dream of my family’s house on the East coast. The white-washed walls, the sound of surf audible from the deck. Father and mother’s uniformly disapproving stares. Jane’s sandy white dresses, and Jay turning blue in the face from the tightness of his bow tie.

As a child, it had always seemed a long walk to the shore, but it was just over the hill. My adult legs trod carelessly over the flowers and insects I used to examine. I quickly reached the crest to take in that familiar view of the surf stretching across the horizon.

It was only just then, as I blinked in the sunlight, that I realized I heard a howling wind, and not the waves. In place of the ocean, lay a vast and crooked desert. It creeped up the shore, killing the grass and the flowers as it went, and my skin blistered in the light. I felt a hoof on my shoulder, and there stood the horse on its hind legs, tongue hanging out and stumbling, neighing intensely while it pointed out a dust storm in the distance. It’s big horse lips were on the verge of forming human speech. “Wahg op, ged! houhyhnm!” it said.

I opened my eyes and blinked away sandy tears, the taste of a nightmare on my tongue. My bearded companion was shaking me by the collar. I pleaded with him: “What!? What did you say?”

“Ah sed ‘wake up, Kid!’” he said, “’Gimletsville’s ahn farr!’”

And it was. Winding towers of ash twisted into the stratosphere. I couldn’t muster much sympathy for such a place, but we set out to see what was the matter, regardless.

inappropriate

i am bird shit on your head
and the bird that shits on your head
and the head with bird shit on it

I am the whole
digestive cosmos
I am the dog at play
I drink my urine
to survive
I am God

and you are in my stomach

Serial, part two

Gimletsville had been a one-horse town

until very recently, I saw

but it’s dusty corpse now rested in the middle of the street
it’s tether frayed and one ear missing.

My guide was a mustachioed man who expectorated on the horse’s corpse and exclaimed: “Damn shame!” I couldn’t say to what or who he referred, as his slitted eyes broiled on me as he spoke. Later I would realize that anger was more of a lifestyle than an emotion for him.

The bank was apparently abandoned except for a single teller. He slept soundly at the window. As he was not roused by my companion shouting “Damn Shame!” at the walls, I raised my hand to shake him by the shoulder to find it was covered in cob webs. Rigorous oscillation drew an irritated mumble from his depths, but his snoring remained. This was distressing to me, as I relied on my banknotes and carried very little cash (at the behest of many of my wisest friends).

Eventually, he roused enough to pocket the notes I handed him, but fell promptly asleep again after telling me there “weren’t no money.”

“Dem shaim;..” said my companion, chewing his cud.

I returned to the street to gaze at the dead horse and its floppy tongue, which a withered feline batted at with its paw. The heat was growing intense, and the noon star baked the thoughts right out of my head. “Well um i guess.” I lacked ideas on how to speak or live for the present.

“Yap,” said the mustache man. “Diiim shim.”

That night, I bunked under the stars with my loquacious companion, who set to his boiled horse with a will. My own appetite was lacking as I felt on the edge of being gobbled up by the desert.

old poem

grounded dreams of dreary days
lie cradled on the shore
of oceans spent on goddess ink
to ask for so much more

Where are the bloated visions of yesteryear
grumbling, gurgling, feasting on the lore
they lie now in numbered graves
brittle and rotten at the core

to leap from mountains became
to hop from hills
to skip on moondrops
now to pace the shore

of the dreams you once had
when worry was a boy

to walk the moon
the eye of night
as she folds you
in her silent dress

to talk with death
the sigh of life
as he holds you
to his viral breast

dusty black and dreaded white
where went your roaring breath

it left you at the edge of hope
where skeletons of monstrous plans
smother in the stink of life

Serial, chapter the first

    What I imagined to be cacti, shrubs and bushes were streaks of dull green as I stared out the train windows where I met a man on a quest. This, in itself, was not significant. One is always meeting men on quests in this world. The countless miles of nothing between any place worth being turn the smallest errand into a journey.
    His name was Eustace Grimehorn, and his quest was to taste the meat of every animal within his lifetime. He had prepared a list, from A to Z, of those animals which were known to him (perhaps forgetting the less delectable varieties). He described, in his excitement, having completed the As - including such creatures as the ‘Armadiller’ and the Antelope - and moving on to the first animal on his B list: the Bald Eagle. He was taken with the idea, not only through imagining that it must taste like edible gold (being equally rare), but also because he felt that it would make him ‘more American.’ The idea made me somewhat uneasy, so I made an effort to divert him to another task.
    “What about Alligator?” I said. This had not been on his list.
    “They’s under G, for Gator.”
    My first meager attempt thwarted, I moved on to other strategies. “Why Bald Eagle?”
    “Pardon?”
    “Well, why not just Eagle? If you must specify a distinct variety of each animal, your list will be too long and redundant to ever be completed. Why not just Eagle, and be done with it?”
    His eyes quivered, and stared straight through my head. As I attempted to explain, he became increasingly more agitated, so I resolved to move to another seat. As I left him, he was already happily writing in the many varieties of eagle with which I had tried to convey the futility of his task. Still, he was not to be diverted, and hoped to find a Bald Eagle family roosting along the California coast. He had shown me the rifle he would shoot them with, leaning against the window; and he had flint and steel to make a fire, and a metal spit which he could assemble to roast them on once they had been plucked. I declined his offer to join him in the coming feast, and excused myself to the dining car.
    I was not in the mood to eat, after his explicit instructions on how to prepare large birds for consumption, but I could not grudge him his excitement as I found a seat in a different car. I was on a quest, myself.
    Most journeys end with a goal, but mine began with one, which I sought to move further away from until I reached an optimal distance. The goal was law school in Boston, and whatever dry existence might be waiting for me afterward. In order to move both geographically and socially away from this grim prospect, I had decided to make my way into the West, where there are neither laws nor schools. I looked on the surreal and inhospitable landscape flying by the train windows with an excitement only surpassed by our own Mr. Grimehorn and his noble task of devouring the entire natural world.

long dream

Dreamt I was back in Bloomington, had gone to the grocery late at night, and decided to push the cart home with my things in it, as there were too many to carry. This turned out to be a terrible idea, as there were no sidewalks for much of the way, and the road became incredibly narrow, to the point where I was almost run over anytime a car passed. Several times I had to leap over a car to keep from dying, and none of the drivers seemed to even notice me, let alone slow down.  I moved along the curb so slowly that it was morning and I still wasn't home, and late for school.

The way home kept getting longer. Now it passed through farmland, and I pushed the cart along through the dirt. After a while, I was so tired that I forgot my things in the cart, and they were struck by a passing car, and scattered all along the side of the road. As I went to pick them up, I noticed that some of them were not mine at all. There was a small handgun that I certainly hadn't bought at any grocery store. Someone had stopped on their way by, and said someone else had claimed the things were his.

I abandoned my groceries to get a ride home from my mom, who had happened to stop by. The drive involved crossing an old wooden bridge that ran along a mountainside. She drove very fast along it, not slowing down, but part of the bridge was missing, as it unexpectedly curved to the left. We sailed right over the edge and into the bridge's wooden supports and rocks below. I shut my eyes, sure I was about to be torn to shreds when we hit.

But somehow, the car was fine, and we plunged into the river rapids leading down the mountain. The river carried us frighteningly fast, the land blurring, so that in seconds we were nowhere we recognized. In reality, we could have circumnavigated the globe in hours, moving that fast. It quickly became clear that there was nothing for it but to wait and see where the river took us. Eventually, it slowed down.

We floated lazily along the side of a road, and I noticed two identical cars parked there with their hoods open. And inside each was a steering wheel, just sitting there as if it were meant to be picked up and plugged into the car. I remarked on the coincidence of finding two identical vehicles just waiting there, as if someone wanted us to use them. But the idea seemed ridiculous, as who could have foreseen our crash in the river? Getting to the cars would have involved leaping into them as we passed by, so I decided not to take the risk, in case they were not meant for us at all.

A thousand different things happened next, and its impossible to remember any of them. I remember that we were completely lost, and sometime later, wound up in a hotel for the night on the way home. I walked into my room, and there were the legs of a mannequin just standing in the corner. Just as I was thinking how odd that was, they attacked me, running up and wrapping around my neck, choking me. I was able to call for help, and my mom pried them off me, and I kicked them across the room. The armless top half of the body came to life, but after I punched it a few times, it lay still.

We both wondered at how odd everything had gotten, starting with those two cars by the roadside, and I looked up at the ceiling and wondered how I could explain these things, and I realized there was only one possible explanation, which I had probably known, but not acknowledged before that moment, and that was that I was dreaming. And as soon as I said that, I woke up.

dream

A boy who lived in a large two-story apartment, where all of the doors connected to every room at once, so that he could never be sure which room he was walking into until he opened it. The middle two fingers on his left hand were fused together, his nails were too thick, and the whole hand was swollen and pinkish, like a pig's foot; but no one else ever seemed to notice it. Sometimes it would begin to grow thousands of silky, white hairs on it, and he would have to rush down to a small bathroom in the basement to shave them off. This involved passing through the cellar, and then a dusty unlit crawl space which was home to a family of ghosts. They made typical ghost noises at him, but still managed to be frightening.
Also, there was a lesbian nymphomaniac, but that's all I remember about her.

Today

amphet a mean sunrise

killing stroke on the fairy land
burn world of candy cane copses
and caramel latrines

of the heated chase
and the madman's pace
doth I dream

and shatter awake with feet made of steam

to hit the ground running this vortecal race
to singular finish with cosmic embrace
folded down fabric streams
to spin to the end as miasmic waste

bright! bright is the wound
where we meet again!
the firmament torn through
the God-plastic worn
where I took your hand
and whispered "till then"

and so I dreamt you this night
but now there are heavens to rend!