Deadheading

No good place to start. Dreams of bombings and things. I don’t like to spit out details, in fear of getting caught in your web of deceit.

I always think deceit is spelled like receipt.

Well here I still am, I’m absolutely devastated to announce! But you know how it is with devastation. There’s no longevity in it. It always morphs into something murkier eventually. And God knows I’ve had the time to forget the real biting taste of it. You know when you wake up, middle of night, and there’s thin streaks of harsh, cool light stripping through the darkness of your room and you’ve got to get a glass of water down your throat in seconds or risk choking out for that god-awful congealed, impregnable dryness in your throat? That’s what the taste of devastation has become. More or less.

There’s never any point describing one thing with the brush of another. But I guess I’ve got time to kill. There’s a quiet, sinister spinning in the air; some strategizing going on and it’s not in my head. If it was, I’d be set. I’d get in and take it with my hands to spin for myself. No, I fear I’m the one in the web. Spiders are falling on my head. You can’t help but think of God while in this state. Who he is and where, why he isn’t here or there, what makes him so invisible, what made us think him up at all. I don’t know anything and I stay away from answers. Answers are nothing but damage control. Psychological damage control. But I’m looking as hard as a person could. I’ve got time on my hands, you know. The closest I ever get to finding it is in lying face-up in the cool of the river. Green and moving and shiny. I sometimes wonder about image. What anything plastified would mean without being shoved so close to our faces. I’ve been doing nothing but listening to music and imagining I’m an ugly rockstar, because they’re the only ones I’d ever want to meet. Ugly, spitting, pimply.

There’s nothing to be said for the softness of plastic. But if I’m ever doubting any of this I force myself into the river. I strip and dunk and float on my back and study the patterns of clouds and consider the mountains hovering around me. Mountains with their endless hidden caverns and colours I can’t make sense of.

White skin melts the quickest. I’ve seen it.

I can’t do any kind of mental gymnastics when I’m sprawled out like that, naked and cool, submerged in the deep concrete of reality. There’s nothing like a concrete slap across the brain. It’s the closest I ever come to falling off the edge of consciousness. I can’t sleep. Still. I’m sure it wasn’t necessary to tell you that. After all this. What could have had a hand in changing things? No, I still can’t sleep. But I’ve stopped dreaming too, which I only count a blessing. Of course I dream, but the kind that makes reality a little less suffocating. I’m not bombarded with scenes of dying things and curdling flesh, is what I mean.

I dream about other uses for skin. Ways I could honour it, and be honoured myself. I imagine (I suppose that’s actually the right word, not dream) holding someone in my arms who’s still breathing. I think of the softness of skin, I think of the rush of rivers. Not my river, mine is slight. It moves slightly and I am humble enough to move with it. It does not hold power over me because (I presume) I know that it could if it wanted to. Skin is born soft, dies lived-in and beat and crinkled, sure, but not hard. Does not grow into leather outside of fire. The sun is as close to burning as any of us were intended to get. I especially love the days in the river when the sun moves me too.

I’m not tired, if you’re wondering. At least not in the way you’ve ever been teased by exhaustion. My body buzzes all hours of the day. Doesn’t shake or anything, it vibrates until I feel it reaching some kind of exciting threshold, but then peters out and I lie my head down and close my eyes until I’m given a vision of intransigence. And I lift my head (and I lift if high) and I pick right back up where I left off, plucking some words apart and weeding out the brutishness in my chest. I have a tendency to behead things. Sometimes I purposefully neglect my thousands of plants just so I can indulge the urge to pluck their deadness away. I take pleasure in it because I know it is necessary for oxygen to reign. Oxygen somehow still reigns. I do not yawn often.

I have always been in love. I have never seen past the meatiness of people. Hearts and souls are meat as well. Tangible, visible, precious. You can touch every inch, breathe in, hold it tight, whisper words of comfort and delight. You’d know what I mean if you’d seen the horrors of my dreams. Flesh pulled apart and sprawled for all to see. No privacy. No walls of survival or safety. In beauty, hearts are sprawled the same and I cannot stand to have them shut up in boxes of human fear. Let’s go find some sparkling things. My river is full of them. (It is not mine. I own nothing.) I think you’ve started to think that I am not really a person. Well, it depends on what you mean. I am interested only in sparkling things. I could spit or bleed or piss on this page so you’d see it and touch it and know just how here I am. I have not transcended into anything. I suppose it is not that I cannot sleep, but that I won’t. A nap would be a fine place to start, but I have nothing left to start, I can only keep moving. I can only keep hoping that somewhere in the vacancy of my arms a little fire will start. If I smell it again, maybe I’ll somehow forget.