Who would dance in the sprinklers with me? I want a show of hands!
I want to wear my socks on the outside of my boots today... I want to pin a towel to my shirt and run to work going "Woooooooshhhhh!"

Forgive me this insanity, I dreamt of youth and memories, of love without lust and challenge without hate. I was once a lost boy... did you know that? But I grew up... and neverland makes you forget.

Oh and I'm so sick of expectations... I want to buy the whole grocery store and invite the children in, knock the walls down, gorge yourselves on sweet rebellion! Never forget these freedoms, because someday they'll expect your spirit to die.
Shackleshackleshackle.

My inner child wants the cars and the trucks and the grown ups to disappear, so I can ride my bike on empty streets. Trick my skateboard down rails on empty stairs. Voices from the bastion of my memory say "Wouldn't that be a perfect world???? Dude! I'm serious. Dude! We could totally do that! We'd have enough canned food to last us a gazilliandy years! It's the bees knees my compadre!"

Why should I stand in line? Nobody yells "No cutsies" anymore. It's fair game. I want to buy Mcnuggets just to throw the sweet and sour sauce down and stomp on it and they're standing in my way!
I want to use anything saucer shaped as a Frisbee. I want to walk up to a random girl and kiss her on the cheek like it's the worstest dare in the whole world... times infinity... like infinity-infinity. The next time I'm in my car... I'm going to stop it at a red light, turn the engine off and just sit there going "Waaaaaaaa! eeeeerrrrt Waaaaaaaah! srkeeeeee! Waaaah!"

And if anyone ever asks me the secret of life, that's exactly what I'm going to tell them, and if the powers that be ask me what I learned in my time on earth I'm just going to look straight at them and say "Waaaaaaaa! eeeeerrrrt Waaaaaaaah! srkeeeeee! Waaaah!" 

Solve the riddle of a life...

A heart that drove life to the fingertips of a comatose stupor, when even the mind willed the body to dust.
A heart that quickened when the grass blew in argent ribbons against an autumn sky and cried for the lack of sharing.
A heart that inspired others to love, to breathe, to create in the smallest sense art, and in the largest manifestation of it's warmth, new life not long for worldly things...

Knowing this heart, Introduced as you are.
Now open the mind to shadow... Or it's Vestige. Accept That there are moments when that same heart can barely imitate the luster required to string two beats together. Like some limping automaton from Grimm's horror show it drags each moment along behind the next labored step.Function following function, "est" for the sake of "est."
It beats... because it can. Because it always has.

Shedding the innocent arrowhead shape of greeting cards and finger painted window frost, it adopts now the cold reality of the machine under flesh, a system of tubes and pumps, nutrients born of marrow and proteins. The cold fusion reactor of a trapped animal. The Clay mechanism of a golem. And the last thing it remembers, is the spark of fidelity to hope, that defines humanity.
The last thing it will trade is the tell-tale sound of a heartbeat, and put in it's place like a fractured wind-chime, the sound of an icicle hitting asphalt, then being crushed underfoot. Repeated in a cacophonous crescendo, until all sounds are monologue, and the only thoughts that stay, are the ones that freeze, and stick, and drown.

You hear it inside...slowly. Like a hospital patient recognizing the new sound of a pacemaker, discordant, inhuman rhythms shuffling from where the love used to be. You draw the distractions of the world around you, running from the sound of your little pump. Terrified of silence.
A life, becomes a new and terrible womb.
And like a ravaged Eden, it's greatest insult is it's continued existence.

No happy thoughts today. I will not fly. My love gave me up for Lent.

Smile for me please.

 

 Darkness and Strobe. Splintered shadow on a hundred faces. The floor caught in perpetual quake. There is a part of me that is disgusted. The part that detests the selfishness of hedonism. The part that doesn't differentiate my fellow man from hairless monkeys.
I ignore it. I often ignore it, when the music is right.

Unshackle the beast. The release is almost tangible. Wolf eyes, they aren't always serene... Find the beat. Find the heat. Keep my composure while I dance. I'm no dandy, I'm here to hunt, not to impress. Find the girl with the sunflower perfume. The prettiest stranger. The back of her head against my chest and her body writhing. I'm too eager. All hands. It's been too long. Something gives, Fuck composure.

My arms around her waist. Hands in tribal rhythm dancing themselves slowly hellbound toward her secrets. I gently bite her neck and whisper my request in her ear. Never uninvited. Her consent is a slow nod.

Take it. Take it all. Her arms backward around my neck as I play her passions, delighting in each unwillful gasp and rapid breath, each stifled cry.
Reluctance ... she's crowd weary, feeling exposed. I rip her around in my arms and keep her close. They don't exist. It's just you and me...

She can see it in my eyes... I know because I can almost feel the recognition reverberating through every part of me. I find it reflected back at me, our bodies desperate to get as close as possible, a dance older than courtship, older than sin older than social custom.
I find her heat again and lift her to me. She bites my shoulder hard and breathes the most delicious sound as I feel her encompassing warmth. She's forgotten the crowd. I can hear her cries above the music now. There we are luv... Sing to me...

 Naughty isn't it? ... It was just a dream... Maybe... Even so, does that make it less real? I need to stay away from clubs. Morpheus... You lout...

All wrapped up in my mind. Traveling to Kafka's envy in my palace of cognitive illusion. Unseelie topography, where the grass is sepia-gray and all the rock is an obsidian fracture. Clouds... more clouds than seem possible existing in the same sky, Angry, discharging electricity like neurons firing from the minds that brought us industrial atomic nightmares.

Breath through my mask sounding like whispered death from adjacent rooms, my armor clings to cold sweat. Amnesia wind plays with my hair, acid rain running down my mask like tears leaving smoke-like steam in tribal dances across my field of vision.

This is my memory palace. Where exists a lock and a logic-puzzle key for everything I can only handle with extreme care. Every thought labeled "Fragile".
What a strange intrusion is the sun... Sending a laser-bright spear into the gloom, and the distant memory of a lie called "Blue skies."

That spear; your smile that redefines beauty in an archival world of derelict hopes...
Oh dance with me... Dance among the murder of my dreams, kicking with flamenco feet the remnants of so many derisive loves.

I'll carve your face into a fledgling moon, and hang it in my troubled skies.
I would name you "Clarity" in the peculiar vernacular of this eldritch landscape, and forever change the stars to fashion the treasures of our engagement.

She disarms me so...

Infatuated with the crunch of my feet on the white gravel road as it shimmered an alien landscape under the scythe of a shadowed moon. Madly in love with the winds cool fingers lifting and turning my hair, my shirt, my coat.
The smell of salt and sea grass so unfamiliar in this brooding setting.

The road turns and what once in retrospect to the backtracking eye, an effulgent pathway returning to civilization, is now a boomerang shape leading into a group of thickly canopied trees.
Almost before I can ascertain it's presence through the night-thick fog, there, a yard in front of me... My destination. A half eroded rot-iron fence with a worn out brass plaque.
The neighbor had said "There's an old cemetery up there, about 40 miles from here. Some amazing statuary." My car and my feet had done the rest.

"Safest place in town" Come my fathers words from the bastion of my memory palace as I look past the gate to the obelisks of the departed.
And there too, although another place and time, are memories of safety. Running from bullies and hiding with Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, foster parents who past on a hundred years before I was born. My escape from violence into a house of brick and dust.

Pushing past the gate, as always comes the crescendo of my own mortality, pressing from within and smothering from without. The sadness and the futility of trying anything, ever. When all we amount to is this... And I feel the anger of unfinished business...
Then comes the fear... Every zombie movie I've ever seen playing out behind my eyes and I'm the star.
I fight the urge to hitch and run as my legs want to give out from underneath me. A moments resignation to the thought that I was a fantastical idiot to come here alone.
And then... it passes... and the graves are simply graves. No monsters here.

Oh there are ghosts to be sure. But the violent dead don't haunt themselves, they are too afraid. Those who haunt cemeteries are simply lost, or waiting for loved ones, or coming to terms with the absence of physicality represented by our final words, etched in stone before they, like most before them catch the a-train to Avalon or heaven, or "The other side" to those still unaffiliated.

I can't see the markings in the dark. The grass is overgrown. Some of the stones teeter to the left or the right. It's crowded here. Evidence of the smallpox and influenza that conquered the area in the days before health insurance.
I sit down on a broken stone bench opposite a weeping angel, pressing down the three foot grass at my feet. How completely wrapped up in grief these catholics are. "you don't celebrate your faith, you mourn it."
Still it is beautiful. One arm splayed across a stone table, the other supporting it's saddened visage. Wings enfolding. It's beautiful, I can't deny that... Or the fact that I'm a hypocrite.

For a time I am overwhelmed by a sense of total peace. Rocked back and forth in a silent symphony of untold stories. Brushing by me as tangible as the wind. Nothing dies... the volume simply fades below the range of physical hearing.

And then I really look at her...

"No more tears..." And in the silence afterword I can't tell if I spoke the words to the angel or to myself. I can't remember if I said them or she did.

"I know... I know..." We whisper.
And I want to hold her... This frozen emotion, cast in stone... for what? How unbelievable egocentric... "And the angels weeped for him."
They carved her from stone in permanent pain... never once considering her. All things with a spirit entwined... Never considering the eternity of stone.

"I know you. This emotion, I know you. This won't do"

So I drive 40 miles to try frantically... futilely to wipe stone tears from lifeless statuary with my thumb. My hand cupping her cheek and jaw in the manor of a caress, a prelude to a kiss.

And I wonder... how much it would cost... how many witch doctors to employ, to transfer her essence to another monument... I would give it hopeful eyes, and a benevolent smile, and beautiful robes and sashes that would appear dry in the coldest rain, Wings that spread unbelievably far, and a sword, held high above, to keep her safe from her demons, her graveyard memories.

"I'll visit you..." and the ambiguity of our conversation is at once comforting and unsettling.

I need to buy roses.