2008-09-20
bottlesphere
My teeth are still red from chewing this hole in the wall. This is where ghosts enter and exit. This hole in the wall. And I save up spiders before I throw them away. A pile of spiders to be filed away. Please don't place a grey patch over Saturday. Please don't loop that rope around the lighting fixture. No god could have the stomach for all this. For everything we do to ourselves. And unto ourselves. Why am I so terrified of empty swimming pools and abandoned motels. No, not terrified. Just hopelessly emptied. And greyed. Don't enter the office. Someone is undoing himself with a rope looped around the lighting fixture. And the lights in every room flicker. And my father is cruising his chemo raft. And my mother is alternating her irreality. And I tuck myself far and away. In the parking lot of abandoned motels. The novel has undone itself. All our favorite characters are leaping to their deaths until the book is nothing but a condensed blizzard. These trees can't record the people you know. Not even if you carve their initials into the memory of a cloud. The clouds are all competing to cover us. Do you realize that, dear imaginary reader? Accept it. It may be the only affection we receive this weekend. I let go of your hand and grey myself out in plate-glass reflections from the liquorstore. I have a binder full of imaginary memories. Plug them into an amplifier and you can listen to the quiet people committing suicide. On a Saturday. Illness isolates you and takes you down. Leaves a novel of blank pages in the parking lot. No rope burns warm the novel. Thumb through the pages and search for a secondary character we can rescue from the blizzard. Except, they don't want to be rescued. This blizzard is white noise of Heaven. The Heaven with sagging power lines and late budgets. Ghosts are still drowning in the now-empty swimming pool. And the sign fell over long before the neon went out. We are gathered in this parking lot today to publicly execute any politician proposing to raise taxes. How can I fault you for jumping from this world without a parachute? Just like I don't fault the telephone for its high-powered silence. This will be a meticulously planned disappearance. Because how many days of black windows and tv dinners can the staggering dead take? This man is emptiness with a nice haircut. And he can't escape the invisible university. The bus won't come, because of the smell of chemicals cracking the sidewalk. Tourists tear away and take your economy with them. There's no one left alive to disturb the water from a great height. I am bored stiff from masturbation. And it takes too much effort to die. The day greys and becomes my favorite cartoon. I find a new lung after nightfall. And I will meet the coastal fog in a nondescript morning to remember all the women who died without kissing me goodbye. And all the novelists who have shipwrecked themselves to the bottom of this heartbreaking universe. And I climb to the top of the lighthouse, in search of a radio and a bowl of hot clam chowder. And a fridge full of beer. And drink myself grey, then black. And listen to the storms come and go. Watch the coastline come and go.
Just like people.