a seventh year d/g, a little dark, a little depressing, a little…experimental.
Laughing laughing laughing brown and egg.
Smoke-filled lungs and eyes and lives that each time I exhale I have to wonder where this smoke is really coming from and what we really are burning.
And I saw Plastic casts molded across our bodies pressing us into an immortal frame of our own disfigured selves and I wanted to tear it off because I can't tear off my skin and say this isn't my reflection this is a joke that our shells might show something of who we are and that we have shells at all is a joke joke on all of us.She puts a cigarette to my lips and it drags away my pain she puts a joint to my lips and it drags away my pain she puts a bottle to my lips and it drags away my pain she covers my mouth and it drags away my pain and lets me breathe something I'm not supposed to breathe and something deliciously against myself that I may as well be hitting myself with a hammer and saying that this is a fun new game.
When this is Our little creation and symphony and painting each brushstroke of man a chapter and each act of man Our only words then what a man is is Our art Our meaning and Our theme I want to give my homage to a We that creates torturous lives for the sake of torturous lives' beauty.
She puts a gun against my lips and pleads with eyes lips and trembling fingers and I stare her down and break her with two blinks that demand a Popsicle and another blue shot of eidolon.
What does it mean that she is the one molding me and pressing me into this frame this one last time this person that I love and that loves me enough to end her life for mine eternal for the glory of an immortal art? What does it mean that it's her dripping in glue and sweat and crying as pruned fingers push layers onto me that only she can justify? What does it mean that she'll do this for me for her for god only to say fuck you to all of us and run out crying?
Cherry Popsicle like the kind I had when I was young and middle-aged and old at seventeen. Cherry Popsicle like the kind I had when I was sick with a sore throat and wanted to numb it with a little lie told in ice. Cherry Popsicle like the kind I used to lick off her to the sound of ecstasy bubbling through my mind like a symphony of undoing.
She flashes before me with dignity a scrapbook a picture a painting a lacy something and glue that won't stick to my watering eyes. Because my body cries to stop as it realizes what I refused to tell it when I fooled it with synthetic fabrications and music and visions pleasing enough to excuse a discomfort of ending with me.
My eyes dry on hardening paper cast to blindfold me and shield me and display me in some limbo between a hatred and love of everything outside of my self which all means so much that I want to vomit.
And I think of quiet words and rhyming third stanzas and clever puns and trim hedges and I think it's all so disgusting that we're trying to hide ourselves underneath all that cleverness and layer and hide what's screaming and wrong in all of us in life and in this work that surrounds me. And I show a blank face to my glue but they'll wonder what muscles strained against this hold while I cried and pushed against its grip and choked on its air and twitched and realized how stupid I was but still so oh beautifully stupid and naive. And it doesn't matter that they won't see my grimace and my contort because we never see them this is truth that I'm creating.
She lets me eat lamb and saliva and moist lips accented in salt and parsley and roasted portabella mushrooms. And I think one last hit one last shot one last drag one last fuck of anything before this and I admire my integrity.
And the glue tastes too bitter after the mushrooms. And I know I have to calm myself calm myself calm myself before I choke my art with fresh air and a clear mind.
I can't hear I can't see I can't feel anything but an uncomfortable desire to move.
And with each new thought and each less breath I drain one more lie away from me and enter that black fold from whence I sprang and to which I will slowly surrender Our art in me.
The city sounding loud around me of bustling life captured into my form projected from them onto them for them without their help.
And I wonder as my nostrils get plugged whether this is how We felt when We realized how agonizing everything beautiful is because everything has its doubts and I don't want to die and I was wrong and I wonder if this is how We felt because I'm sacrificing myself like We did for this beauty told in suffering and in pain of realizing that there is no universal beauty not even himself and so created suffering and pain in their fill an empty space.
She just isn't piling fast enough though I can feel the distant muffled press against my lips against my nose that vibrates her anger and hurt that I would choose all humanity over her and that I would choose Us over her and that I would be the one who gilded himself to beauty.
And will I stand on a pedestal in a gallery or in a closet of a home and in the souls of how many men? And when she tells them finally that the smell and the torture written in lines they can't see on the skin is then they will cry and weep and call us fools depraved and there will be a hearing for her.
And I wonder how long it will be before they realize what I will have become and why and wonder at a noble self-sacrifice and cry for a world that allowed it to happen.
Games and lovemaking and daring bluffs and beautiful scenes and it's all so painful let me out let me out let me out of this life!
What stupid sentimentality did I try to capture with this new art but like the painting and the novel I can't throw this one out all I can do is keep building it when I hate it and keep adding to it when I don't want it anymore and this is not We created when We decided to be alive suffering through life and I'm immortalizing suffering through death but what I didn't realize is that ongoing life is the immortality not some brief death and end.
How can she do this she said she'd leave when she finished and lock herself out and forget me beneath a hammer but why can't she cry and come back and let me breathe more than this trickle of glue and air swimming into my lungs.
But her hands were true and my fingers are solid and unmoving and locked in their suffering shelled by gravity and atmosphere and light pulsing in at all angles.
And I wonder how much longer I have to live. How many more breaths? How many more visions? How many more doubts?
And I speak as We spoke:
This is art This is beauty This is art This is beauty This is art This is beauty This is art
This is beauty This is art This is beauty
This is art This is beauty
And They'll realize that the only thing separating my death from their life is this cast this shell this form that I created we created god created for us to rot in.
We is god.
Aula: god that creates the dwarves.
AN: I realize that the structure of this shortie is not what one would call "traditional." It was written for my Friday fiction class (hence no mention of any names, though I thought of d/g while writing it.) Review, por favor!
sbl