Awhile ago, I had been at a party. I’d listened to someone talk about Kate Moss for ten minutes straight. I left the room, found my flatmate and asked why anyone was interested in anything at all. We’d come up with no answers.

All this started a month ago, and all that started long before. I will not bore you with trite aphorisms about how I survived, or how wondrous life has become since. At some point my mind broke. This is a collection of memories about my attempted suicide and the absurdity of the entire experience.

Wednesday, 26th of April, 2017, midnight.

Couldn’t sleep. Surfed the internet. Fell into ASMR sub-culture.[1] Meta-satire, transitioning to post-irony, before pseudo-spiritual out-of-body transcendence. I thought, *this is the most ****** experience I’ve had in half a decade, while a woman spun spheres of blobby jelly around my head and whispered elephant mourning rituals into my ears.

Tuesday, 27th of April, 2017, afternoon.

Woke up mid-day. Looked at all the objects in my room, unable to understand why any of them mattered. Milled around the flat. Went online to order helium so I could make an exit bag.[2] Cheapest source was The Warehouse, though the helium came with thirty bright multi-coloured party balloons. I kept imagining one of my flatmates walking in later that day, seeing my crumpled body surrounded by these floppy bits of rubber and a note saying this life is absurd and I want out of it. There was no online purchasing option, however, and I couldn’t be bothered walking into town. I began reading suicide notes. One was from a kid who’d slowly taken pills as he watched TV, culminating in a coma. That sounds pleasant, I thought, whilst at the same time knowing that it takes up to three days to die from painkillers and that the process is anything but painless or final. I opened my drawer, found a bunch of paracetamol and began washing them down with water, whilst listening to the soundtrack of End of Evangelion.[3]

I’m not sure why, but I began crying violently. I knew I’d have to leave the flat before my flatmates came home. I hastily scrawled a note that said, donate my body, give my money to senpai, give my possessions to someone I don’t know, it smells like burning, it was good knowing you all, before walking out the door with Komm Süsser Tod playing in the background.[4, 5] I’d already written my personal and political reasons for suicide in the pieces méconnaissance[6] and **** Yourself,[7] so felt there was no reason for anything more substantial.

I wandered the back roads of my neighbourhood. My body shook. I felt somnolent, half-dazed. I wanted a quiet place to sit, sleep and writhe in agony while my organs slowly failed. My legs kept stumbling, however, and my head was beginning to feel funny. I found a dead-end street and sat on one of those artificially maintained rectangles of grass. There was a black cat lying in the middle of the road, just bobbing its head at me. I zoned out for a bit and when I came to a giant orange cat was to my left, gazing intently into my teary face. I tried to refocus on my crotch. I couldn’t help but notice a white cat across the road, pretending not to be seen. It had a dubious look on its face, a countenance of guilt. What the hell was going on? A delivery person looped round the street. People returned home from work. Garage doors opened, cars drove down driveways. Here I was, slowly dying, surrounded by spooky ******* cats and the bustle of ordinary existence.

“Uh, hey. You look, uh, like something isn’t . . . do you need, uh, help?” a woman asked, crossing the street with a pram to reach me. I groaned.

“It’s just that, you know, ordinarily, um, I mean normally, people don’t sit on the sidewalk,” she continued, glancing down with the half-confused look of a concerned citizen who is trying to enter a situation outside of their usual experience. I mumbled something indistinct and went back to staring at my crotch.

“You know, I can, er . . . I can . . . I can’t really help,” she ended, awkwardly. “I have a daughter to look after, but . . . if you’re still here when she’s asleep . . . I’m the red fence.” She darted off without another word.

Had she wanted me off the sidewalk because it was abnormal to sit there, or had she seen the abnormality as a sign of something deeper? Either way, she’d used abnormality as a signifier of negative change. Deviancy as something to be corrected, realigned with some norm that co-exists with happiness and citizenship. I was being a bad citizen.

I thought, I miss those cats. At least they had judged me in silence. Wait, what the hell am I thinking? This is clearly a case of deviancy associated with negative feelings. Well, negative feelings, but not necessarily negative change. Suicide is only negative if one views life as intrinsically worthwhile—

I could hear pram lady in the distance. She was talking to someone who’d just come back from work. They thanked pram lady and began moving towards me. Arghggh, just let me die, I thought.

She introduced herself as a nurse. From her tone and approach, it was clear she’d handled many cases like me. I’ve never hated counselling techniques. They seemed to at least trouble neoliberal rhetoric. There is little mention of overcoming, or striving, or perfecting oneself into a being of pure success. Rather, counselling seemed to be about listening and piercing together the other’s perspective. Counsellors tended not to interject words of comfort. They’d tell you mental illness was lifelong and couldn’t be fixed. They’re the closest society has to positive pessimists. Of course, they’d still want you to get better. Better, as in, not attempting suicide.

I talked with nurse lady for an hour about how life is simply passing. Passing through oneself, passing through others, passing through spaces, thoughts and emotions. About how the majority of life seems to be lived in a beyond we’ll never reach. Potential futures, moments of relief, phantasies we create to escape the dull present. About how I’d been finding my media and politics degree really rewarding, but some part of my head broke and I lost all ability to focus and care. About how the more I learnt about the world, the less capable I felt of changing it, and that change was a narcissistic day dream, anyway.

She replied “We’re all cogs. But what’s wrong with being a cog? Even a cog can make changes,” and I thought, but never one’s own.

She gave me a ride to the emergency clinic because I was too apathetic and guilt-ridden to decline. Why are people so nice over things that don’t matter? Chicks are ground into chicken nuggets alive.[8] The meat-industry produces 50% of the world’s carbon emissions.[9] But someone sits on the side of the road in a bourgeois neighbourhood and suddenly you have cats and nurses worried sick over your ****** up head. I should have worn a hobo coat and sat in town.

Tuesday, 27th of April, 2017, evening.

I had forgotten how painful waiting rooms were. It was stupidly ironic. I’d entered this apathetic suicidal stupor because I’d wanted to escape the monotony of existence, yet here I was, sitting in a waiting room, counting the stains on the ceiling, while the reception TV streamed a hospital drama.

“Get his *** in there!”

“Time is the real killer.”

“It wasn’t the cancer that was terminal, it was you.”

Zoom in on doctor face man.

Everybody hugging.

Emergency waiting rooms are a lot like life. You don’t choose to be there. An accident simply occurs and then you’re stuck, watching a show about *** cancer and family bonding. Sometimes someone coughs and you become aware of your own body again. You remember that you exist outside of media, waiting in this sterile space on a painfully too small plastic chair. You deliberately avoid the glances of everyone else in the room because you don’t want to reduce their existence to an injury, a pulsing wound, a lack, nor let them reduce you the same. The accident that got you here left you with a blank spot in your head, but the nurses reassure you that you’ll be up soon, to whatever it is you’re here for. And so, with nothing else to do, you turn back to the TV and forget you exist.

I thought, I should have taken more pills and gone into the woods.

The ER was a Kafkaeque realm of piercing lights, sleepy interns and too narrow privacy curtains.[10] Every time a nurse would try to close one, they’d pull it too far to one side, opening the other side up. Like the self, no bed was fully enclosed. There were always gaps, spaces of viewing, windows into trauma, and like the objet petit a, there was always the potential of meeting another’s gaze, one just like yours, only, out of your control.

I lay amidst a drone of machinery, footsteps and chatter. I stared at ceiling stains. Every hour or so a different nurse would approach me, repeat the same ten questions as the one before, then end commenting awkwardly on my tattoos. I kept thinking, what is going on? Have I finally died and become integrated into some eternally recurring limbo hell where, in a state of complete apathy and deterioration, some devil approaches me every hour to ask, why did you take those pills?

Do I have to repeat my answer for the rest of my life?

I gazed at the stain to my right. That was back in ‘92 when the piping above burst on a particularly wintry day. I shifted my gaze. And that happened in ‘99 when an intern tripped holding a giant cup of coffee. Afterwards, everyone began calling her Trippy. She eventually became a surgeon and had four adorable bourgeois kids. Tippy Tip Tap Toop.

The nurses began covering my body with little pieces of paper and plastic, to which only one third were connected to an ECG monitor.[11] Every ten minutes or so the monitor would begin honking violently, to which (initially) no one would respond to. After an hour or so a nurse wandered over with a worried expression, poked the machine a little, then asked if I was experiencing any chest pains. Before I could answer, he was intercepted by another nurse and told not to worry. His expression never cleared up, but he went back to staring blankly into a computer terminal on the other end of the room.

There were two security guards awkwardly trying not to meet anyone’s gazes. They were out of place and they knew it. No matter what space they occupied, a nurse would have to move past them to reach some medical doodle or document. One nurse jokingly said, “It’s ER. If you’re not moving you’re in the way,” to which the guards chortled, shuffled a metre or so sideways, before returning to standing still.

I checked my phone.

“Got veges.”

“If you successfully **** yourself, you’ll officially be the biggest right-wing neoliberal piece of ****.”[12]

“Your Text Unlimited Combo renewed on 28 Apr at 10:41. Nice!”

I went back to staring at the ceiling.

Six hours later, one of the nurses came over and said “Huh, turns out there’s nothing in your blood. Nothing . . . at all.” Another pulled out my drip and disconnected me from the ECG monitor. “Well, you’re free to leave.”

Tuesday, 27th of April, 2017, midnight.

I wandered over to the Emergency Psychiatric Services. The doctor there was interested in setting up future supports for my ****** up mind. He mentioned anti-depressants and I told him that in the past they hadn’t really worked, that it seemed more related to my general political outlook, that this purposeless restlessness has been with me most of my life, and that no drug or counselling could cure the lack innate to existence which is exacerbated by our current political and cultural institutions.

He replied “Are you one of those anti-druggers? You know there’s been a lot of backlash against psychiatry, it’s really the cultural Zeitgeist of our times, but it’s all led by misinformation, scaremongering.”

I hesitated, before replying “I’m not anti-drugs, I just don’t think you can change my general hatred of existence.”

“Okay, okay, I’m not trying to argue with your outlook, but you’re simply stuck in this doom and gloom phase—”

Whoa, wait a ******* minute. You’re not trying to argue with my outlook, while completely discounting my outlook as simply a passing emotional state? This guy is a ******* *******, I thought, ragging on about anti-druggers while pretending not to undermine a political and social position I’d spent years researching and building up. I stopped paying attention to him. Yes, a lot of my problems are internal, but I’m more than a disembodied brain, biologically computing chemical data.

At the end of his rant, he said something like “You’re a good kid,” and I thought, ******* too.

Friday, 28th of April, 2017, morning.

The next day I met a different doctor. I gave him a brief summary of my privileged life culminating in a ****** metaphor about three metaphysical pillars which lift me into the tempestuous winds of existential dread and nihilistic apathy. One, my social anxiety. Two, my absurd existence. Three, my political outlook. One, anxiety: I cannot relate to small talk. The gaze of the other is a gaze of expectations. Because I cannot know these expectations, I will never live up to them. Communication is by nature, lacking. Two, absurdity: Existence is a meaningless repetition of arbitrary structures we ourselves construct, then forget. Reflexivity is about uncovering this so that we may escape structures we do not like. We inevitably fall into new structures, prejudices and artifices. Nothing is authentic, nothing is innocent and nothing is your self. Three, politics: I am trapped in a neoliberal capitalist monstrosity that creates enough produce to feed the entire world, but does not do so due to the market’s instrumental need for profit. The system, in other words, rewards capitalists who are ruthless. Any capitalist trying to bring about change, will necessarily have to become ruthless to reach a position of power, and therefore will fail to bring about change.

The doctor nodded. He thought deeply, tried to piece it all together, then finally said “Yes, society is quite terrifying. This is something we cannot control. There are things out there that will harm you and the political situation of our time is troubling.”

I was astounded. This was one of the first doctors who’d actually taken what I’d said and given it consideration. Sure we hadn’t gotten into a length discussion of socialism, feminism or veganism, but they also hadn’t simply collapsed my political thoughts into my depressive state.

“But you know, there are still niches of meaning in this world. Though the greater structures are overbearing, people can still find purpose enacting smaller changes, connecting in ephemeral ways.”

What was I hearing? Was this a postmodern doctor?[13] Was science reconnecting with the humanities?

“We may even connect your third pillar, that of the political, with your second pillar and see that the political situation of our time is absurd. This is unfortunate, but as for your first pillar, this is definitely something we can help you with. In fact, it’s quite a simple process, helping one deal with social anxiety, and to me, it sounds like this anxiety has greatly affected your life for the past few years.”

The doctor then asked for my gender and sexuality, to which after I hesitated a little, he said, it didn’t really matter seeing as it was all constructed, anyway. For being unable to feel much at all, I was ecstatic. I thought, how could this doctor be working in the same building as the previous one I’d met? We went into anti-depressant plans. He told me that their effects were unpredictable. They may lift my mood, they may do nothing at all, they may even make me feel worse. Nobody really knew what molecular pathways serotonin activated, but it sometimes pulled people out of circular ways of thinking. And dopamine, well, taken in too high a dose, could make you psychotic.

Sign me the **** up, I thought, gazing at my new medical hero. These are the kinds of non-assurances that match my experience of life. Trust and expectations lead only to disappointment. Give me pure insurmountable doubt.

Friday, 28th of April, 2017, afternoon.

“The drugs won’t be too long,” the pharmacist said before disappearing into the back room. I milled around th

She stood up against the wooden bar lit by a stale football field that shined florescent green and highlighted polyester blue like a muse of Van Gogh or Galileo. Her hair ran down the nape of her neck like a ****** waterfall and the light of the bar highlighted her sphinx like eyes as she turned and caught his eye. He stood at a small table away from the main bar with a couple of friends who were telling stories of their old college days and he, half-listening, quickly looked away, faking to scratch his eye, for he knew he had been caught looking at the back of her and she, with her women's intuition of being observed and knowing this, kept looking and he knowing the only way not to show he had been caught was to look away quickly and very obviously; like a bad actor caught dumb and silent, clueless of their next line. They blushed and shared the heat of embarrassment in their cheeks with the sounds of worn dollar bills slapping hard against the smooth wood of the bar, the bar man eyeing it angrily as cigarette smoke surrounded them and slowly drifted up like a lost soul toward the ceiling and the piano man, eyes tight shut played for everyone there when no-one cared to listen, all underneath the dim light of the bar as they strained to look away from one another, trying to find something they could put their focus upon, but, at the same time, wanting very much to look back and have their eyes meet by mistake all over again.

He focused on the design of the bathroom placards that were in the right corner of the tiny bar where you had to turn sideways and touch shoulder's with every soul inside just to get a drink. He feigned interest in the bronze design of the men's bathroom: a tiny boy looking down at his pecker as he ****** a 1/2 inch thick stream into what the man gathered to be a sunflower ***. The boy was thrusting his hips forward, both of his hands on his side, and he showed no smile, no grin of satisfaction or victory, just a stark, blank face, as if he were thinking "I am peeing in this ***. That is all." The women's bathroom sign was of a young girl with the same kind of *** the boy had been ******* in, but it was missing the sunflower and was replaced by the *** of the girl. She stared up into the sky and into the ceiling lights and was dramatically reaching for a butterfly or bird - he couldn't make out which - something with wings and made him think of a basic metaphor that this poor little girl just wants to get off the *** and be free like the birds and butterflies and clouds in the wide blue sky.

She focused on the man's shoes. She looked at the black shine and the pristine black shoe laces, all looking like everything had just been purchased that day. "There is not a single scuff on them and the way this man cuffs his pants only a single turn," she thought to herself, "Tells me he has something of a style on him". Not so run of the mill. Something special. Something of interest.* But then, she was annoyed by the cuff of the pants because she remembered that was what all the schoolboys in her prep school would do when the day was rainy or the boys rode their bikes home from school or they were nerds. The memory immediately turned her off of the man all together, but luckily, she put her gaze back on the jet-black, seemingly un-touched leather that told her success, class, and security.

The man heard a loud Cheer's!" from his table, abruptly bringing him out of his distraction. He was forced to turn and as he did, he made sure not to look up. He kept his eyes on the table and looked for the half-full beer with the worn Budweiser coaster underneath it. He could see from the his top periphery that she was still facing him but she was looking down at something toward the floor. He fumbled with his large hands for his glass and panned his eyes up slightly. The woman, seeing the movement at the table, looked up. She stared back to where she had first caught him looking at her and waited. The man felt her looking at him and in the same instant, saw the faded Budweiser coaster and reached for his beer. He picked the glass up and as the second Cheer! was yelled, he clashed his glass against all the others, all the while keeping his head not toward his friend's faces, but turned in the direction of the bar toward the girl. He smiled at her as he lowered his glass, not taking a drink. His friend slapped him on the back and told him," You gotta' drink after the cheers or its bad luck," and so he did, still staring dumbly at her as he did. She nodded at him with a self-conscious and embarrassed grin, raised her nearly gone low-ball glass of gin and tonic and tipped it toward him and turned around to face the bar.

"I"ll stand here and wait for him to come up to me," she thought, "And if he doesn't the man is a coward and a louse and not worth my time. I have looked twice now and there is some rule in some magazine that I read somewhere, that if you look twice at a man that it is sign, not a coincidence. No, it has a purpose and though I barely know what reason I want this man to look at me other then to get a drink out of him and maybe some conversation, I am certain I have looked twice, maybe even three times. Yes. I have looked at him and I have made my interest known and now I must wait for him to either come or stay with his drunken friends. They look like frat boys cheering like that. They look like drunken, silly frat boys that wouldn't know the first thing about chivalry. Hell, they probably couldn't even spell the ****** word." She laughed under her breath and smiled maliciously to herself and caught her own reflection in the mirror and, for an moment, wanted to quickly look away. Her face did not frighten her, for she was a beautiful woman, not her skin, which was milky white with the faintest and gentlest dash of rouge on each cheek, nor her chocolate colored curls that bounded like boulder's down a hillside. She turned away from a look upon her eye she had not seen or had recognized in a very long time. Her eyes were frightened.

"Frightened?" she wondered.

The man put his beer glass on the table on top of the coaster. The foam rested at the bottom of the cup like the thin layer of ice that blows over a frozen lake, barely there at all passing with the wind. He stared at her back and liked how she leaned on her right hip and put the toe of her left high-heel to the ground, rocking the nose of the shoe back and forth like she was thinking about something playfully frivolous. Behind him, the noise of his friends became a hollow echo, drowned out by the draw of this woman. She swung her left heel back and forth like a pendulum trying to hypnotize him. Someone touched his shoulder but he shrugged the hand away as in this echo chamber he could only hear the music change tracks on the juke box. The song had changed to an old Ottis Redding song and there was nothing else in the world that he wanted to listen to in that moment. As he watched her, leaning into the bar seemingly all alone, no boyfriend or girlfriend in sight, he saw her raise her glass to the barman and knew she had something by the gentle nod of the back of her head. He then saw her point with her left finger and tap the rim of the glass. Her drink was empty. She wanted another drink. He would buy her another drink.

"There is nothing in this world that a man is more responsible for than getting a woman like this a drink," he nodded, thinking to himself and trying to pick up his courage,"One that plays with my heart like a kitten would a spool of yarn, and yet also like a vulture who would peck out the eyes of a dead man in the desert. This is nothing more then that obligation. A rule passed down from man to man, from age to age, where chivalry was not for the base reason to lay with the woman, but to honor them, praise them lightly as the rain from a heavy mist and show them to the pedestal every woman, whether they wish to admit it or not, do wish for, sincerely do at least once in there life." He readjusted his belt and realigned his shirt that had gotten crooked after the celebratory cheer and thought some more,"I'm not going to do that here, this pedestal stuff. This is more like a step toward that pedestal. Yes. A step toward the shrine she wants to trust she deserves and will one day end up on. And this shrine is all cast and painted in the blurry french film noir of dream, is it not? Aren't dreams the only thing we hope to one day come true? How often - when and if they do come true - they can sometimes disappoint and eventually turn sour like a bad orange. I hope she is drinking and that wasn't just a tonic water. If this woman doesn't drink I don't think any of this will be worth anything at all."

She stood there serene and angelic, the hand that held her drink now resting on the base of the bar. Behind the man, he heard the chatter of his friends and the drone of football scores and player updates coming from the ten or more televisions that hung from the ceiling. Someone reached out to touch his shoulder but missed him as he left the table. His name then echoed behind him but soon the sound evaporated as dew does that rests on blades of grass in a summer morning to a summer afternoon. There was only her and her smell that had drifted to his table and shrouded him with the scent of white chocolate and smoke and her delicate, porcelain hand that had held up the drink shyly but not weakly, in passing demand without that demanding quality drunk people can get like at bars sometimes. He approached her, hovered behind her, but she did not turn, and then came up to the bar to lean into. He did not turn to look at her, though he wanted to very badly, but looked down at her low-ball glass with two half-melted ice cubes and a used lime. The smell of gin came from the glass and the man smiled to himself and put his hand up to signal the bartender.

"If this man orders his drink first and walks back to that table with all of his drunken friends, I am giving up men all together," the woman thought to herself," * Tonight and forever! If he can put his hand up and not even turn to look at me, as I was doing, I thought, to be very flirtatious but gentle, then I see no reason at all to keep going with men. They are barbarians that only want to eat, drink, sleep, and fornicate with women that are easy and provide no real challenge at all in their life. If he wants it easy, he can have it as easy as he wants, but not with me. No sir. Not with me ever. Not with me for a night, an hour, a minute, or even a second."

The bartender, a stout slightly overweight man that was a little over forty with streaks of grey in his thin, short-cut hair, looking very much like he should be home reading with a nice cup of tea by his side rather than in the bar serving drinks to stranger's, approached the man and asked him what he would like.

"Two gin and tonics please," the man said, "With a slice of lime and four ice-cubes in each."

"And what kind of gin, sir?"

The man turned to the woman, "What label do you drink?" he asked.

"Pardon me?" she stuttered startled, her eyebrows raised.

"Your drinking gin, aren't you?" He nodded his head toward the woman's empty glass. The tiny lines of transparent lime skin floated on top of the water that had gathered from the melting ice-cubes.

"Yes, I am. I was just about to order."

"I'll get this round and you'll get the next one."

"Any gin is fine."

The man turned to the bartender," Tanqueray, please bartender."

He nodded and went to make the drinks.

"Your very perceptive," the woman said as she turned to face him.

"I try."

"I saw you from across the bar, but was afraid to walk up to your table for fear of getting ambushed by all of your friends. Those are your friends, right?"

"Yes," he nodded as he looked over his shoulder at them, "Old college friends all with old stories of college that, truthfully, bring me little or no joy to even hear."

"Then why come at all?" she asked, "You seem smart enough to know that if you meet up with old anything, you'll be hearing about the old times all night."

"I was forced to come."

"Someone getting divorced?"

"No," he laughed, "The opposite. Married."

"Well, I hope it's not you or this would look very bad if your fiance walked in."

"And why's that?"

She clicked her tongue and turned to look at the shelves stocked with every kind of liquor. The bottles reflected the soft orange glow of the lights that circled the bar and the colors of the television screens. The man continued to look at the woman who had turned her back on him and caught their reflection in a bottle of Jack Daniel's. He waited for a response, but she stood there silent, knowing she was playing with him. Behind him, his friends were growing louder and a tray of shots had found its way to their table. The waitress who had brought the drinks, polite and with a smile, asked them to try and keep it down. They shouted "YES'S and screamed "YEAH'S" with moronic smiles on their faces, their heads nodding up and down like a dog playing fetch. The waitress giggled a thank and walked away shaking her head with disgust when she was out of sight.

"Well," she said,"You did just order two gin and tonics and I think if your fiance walked in with you chatting with me with the same drink in both of our hands, I think she would be a little upset. I know I would be."

"Perhaps we could act like we are old grammar school friends and just happened to run into one another?"

"Well, that would be a lie."

"Yes, that would be a lie."

"Which would mean we were hiding something from said wife."

"And what would that be?"

"That you approached me after I looked at you, perhaps the look from me wasn't flirtatious, maybe I thought you looked familiar, like I had seen you somewhere, and you came up to me and ordered me a drink and started a conversation with me, much like we are doing right now."

"What's wrong with conversation?" The bartender approached them and placed the two drinks in front of the man. The man took out his wallet without losing his gaze on the woman, took out a twenty and slid it toward the bartender. The bartender took the twenty, paused for a moment to see if the man wanted any change, but left when he saw he didn't want any by not moving.

"Conversation can lead to very dangerous things," the woman said playfully and wise.

"Your here by yourself and your not stupid; someone is going to come up to talk to you."

"And your that somebody?"

"I'm sure I'm not the first one tonight."

"Your sweet."

"I try," he said as he slid the drink over to here,"Your drink."

"What should we drink too?" She asked and raised her glass, the light above them reflecting in the ice-cubes and thick glass of the high-ball.

"Conversation," he said proudly and with a smile, "And the danger that it brings."

They clinked their glasses together, their eyes never leaving one another, and they both took a long drink.

"I'm not here with anybody and I'm not expecting anybody tonight either," the woman said.

"What's your name?"

"Why?"

"I want to be able to tell my friends I met a very interesting woman, but they won't believe me if I don't give them a name."

"I'm standing right here, silly. Go and tell them you met the most interesting woman in your entire life, look over at me when they ask you what my name is, then point over to me and I'll wave."

"You'll be here?"

"I'll be here."

"Promise?"

"Go, go, go," she repeated, pushing him back toward his table, "You bought me a drink, didn't you? The least I can do is wave to your drunken college friends."

The man walked back to his table, glancing quickly over his shoulder, trying to hide it, before he reached the table. He arrived to all of them drunk, beer spilt on the table and an ashtray full of punched out cigarettes and ground up cigars. Every one of them were rocking back and forth with each other, their arms sloppily hung around their neighbor's shoulders, their eyes blood shot with their mouth half-cracked open barely breathing in the smoky, beer smelling air. The man struggled to wedge his way into the circle, and when he did, he tried to get the groups attention by screaming an

Fingers tapping, one, two, three,
A slow rhythm drums in my chest.
The words on my screen blur and fade before me.
The world slows as we are put to the test.

The streets, barren and eerily silent,
Darkened windows, chairs on tables.
Places once filled with noise now absent.
Are we now living in one of God's fables?

Perhaps, then, we must stop and listen,
Listen to the lessons He is teaching us all.
These drastic measures, so brazen,
Yet we are close to the edge, were we to fall?

See kindness and beauty,
See all that is good,
As Mother Nature breathes freely,
Tired from all She withstood.

Laughter and bored games,
Brought together by distance,
Whilst the air, the water, She reclaims,
No more waiting, no more patience.

Yes, waters clear as emissions drop;
A truly beautiful consequence.
But we must not forget - take the time to stop,
Extend our minds to at whose expense.

Unemployment creeps ever higher,
Many lives are lost.
For those a dark and terrible chapter,
Enduring such a saddening cost.

The good that lies within,
The beauty of humankind,
Rainbows, clapping, togetherness underpin,
Our world, our people, our priorities realigned.

So listen we must,
To our animals, our rivers, our Earth.
Look to your nearest and dearest,
Use this time to recognise their full worth.

And so, I awoke
Where no sorrows are awakened.
Distant galaxies sang, pranced, and danced in the glee of the night
Eon long, lost constellations realigned and with joyous relief
Whispered beneath the chill of the autumn air,
“Oh, sweet child o’ mine,
He has moved your soul to happiness.
He has given life a new understanding,
Love a new meaning.”

Undoubtedly, that was true;
For thine words are so sweet,
So kind,
And so pure.

And though the future is uncertain,
To awaken to your bliss…
I cannot imagine more heavenly than that
And in those moments of realization
My heart,
I promised to you.

The carpenter sits in his rocking chair as he thinks,
as the sun drowns itself into the dark clouds, he waits.
Waiting for something to tell him that he is no longer a boy anymore,
that his maturity and humility have been masqueraded
Into a body that resembles him.
Every night, when he eats, he sits alone
His plate as round as the moon,
He lights one candle on his dinner table.

Most nights, when he is drinking heavily,
he walks to the back of his house,
sits in front of an old wooden bench,
gazing across the lake and he picks up a book,
construing ideas and proposals that he fails to recollect the morning after.
He reads poems to himself, poems from books.
Poems about the nature and history of the human condition,
about the muscles and the tendons in our bodies
that bend and crumble and shiver at our disposal.
Bottle in his left hand, book in his right.
And sometimes he switches hands to highlight his drunken dexterity.
Clinching his book of poems as if they were his children,
too afraid to go out into the soft fear of the electric night,
and he was the wild one to present to this world.

He feels abandoned, dismayed,
and he no longer sees a light at the end this tunnel,
like someone or something is closing it,
leaving a crevice wide enough just to test and to tease
his willing and purpose to escape from it.
He feels a burning in his chest
as he trickles down the last drip of scotch onto his lips,
tasting death like it was tapwater.

It's midnight and he has to wake up in six hours,
wake up to a routine where his work becomes unnoticed
because he doesn't have the ***** to stand up for himself.
So, he sits and he waits for something to happen,
something fantastic or supernatural to help him grow wings
so he could relieve the tension on his shoulders,
his bones realigned to fit the being of gods.
He closes the book, walks back to his house
and blows his one candle at the dinner table,
blackening the room to fit the clouds of the night.
He lies in his bed as he engulfs his body with his comforter,
hoping to never wake up in a world that will not hesitate to laugh in his face.

I'm glad you're my friend

A shoulder to lean
A crutch to stand
A dwelling of respite
And the dawn's first break of light

I hope to give as much as I take
Laugh with you and cherish
To face what comes side by side
To be silent comfortably on those long car rides

I can never be angry at you
No matter my efforts
A smile from you is all it takes
A cure to my recurrent mental aches

In an unfulfilled life, your company is contentful

But

Like a poisonous nightshade blossoms
The fruit of friendship ferments
Forms into an intoxicating sweet wine
Drunk from it, my mind is realigned

I don't want to be friends with you
"Friend" is such an evil word
It brings so much yet restricts all I care for
A false comfort when one longs for more

So perhaps I must go
To some distant desolate escape
To myself, I must be true
I have to save myself from my love for you

I hate that you're my friend

I spent months
setting them up

those emotional "dominoes"

black rectangles on end
balanced just so
white spots spelling out

ego
    emotions
                soul

just a sharp stroke
of a tongue
on one corner
and
they fall...
   and fall...
      and fall...

they lay
      scattered
                  and
                     chaotic

on their backs
          like beetles
unable to turn

their undersides exposed
                             and vulnerable

how many times
            can they be realigned

how many times
              before the spots erode

how many times
               before it's empty inside

like dead beetles'
                       dry, brittle shells?

I've walked on beaches beyond reach,
Preached gospels bleached of mortal speech,
Eked out life; a leach, yet lived beyond impeach,
A million years each, but I beseech:

"You are tall upon these palace walls"?
Ha! With just a thousand calls, the balance falls,
You stall, but the audience is not enthralled,
You'll be mauled as Saul when they sought out Paul,

They can trade your riches for rags in this ragtime,
Sublime, subdued piano and rhyme,
Every dime a crime, every lie dines on lime,
Feelings soured like mine as it's about to be realigned.

Let’s stay as long as we can
And not worry about the end
But rather, enjoy the time in the middle
As much as we did the time when we first began

Show me your hand
Slowly unravel your fist
I want to memorize the contours of each fingertip
And the way the river of your skin flows down to your wrist

Oh god don’t let me forget this
Just this
Let me at least just keep this

I know the nature of our lives could never let this last
But nobody told me it’d slip away this fast

But even if this is all the time I get
And the rest just ends in heartache
I swear to whatever’s above; it was well worth it
That you were the one truth I couldn’t break

I think I always knew the color of your eyes
The way the light bends in the corners like the edge of the sky
Even if appearance is just a lie
Something behind the confines of your soft blue stare shook my soul awake inside

It's only time and a name we can't carry through
But this beautiful shape, we'll never lose
Our hearts are already too intricately intertwined
And if even if those bonds bend they'll always be realigned  

So I’ll picture the way your head feels on my chest until it all goes black
With the hope that the moment I see you again it all comes flooding back
Even if my mind can never find the time we stayed up all night studying the way our bodies can burn
I’ll stain my soul with pictures of fire and bones until I find you all over again and learn

So slow down….please
Sit down with me and watch the sunset
It doesn’t matter which one of us it’s for
Let’s just watch it end

And then ripple throughout the pond
Creating waves big and small that stretch on and on
Through different times and spaces across different lives and places
Until all the movement comes back together in the middle
And I can remember every first time I saw your face

Even if we can’t stay right here in this moment
I’m not quite sure that means we have to forget
Let’s carve memories into our hearts and fingertips
So that the next time they meet they’ll know exactly where each finger fits

And even if I can’t stay right here with you in this song
I’m not quite sure that means I have to be gone too long
So come find me when you fall asleep
I promise to leave the lights on in case it’s too dark to see

I’ll shout so loud my voice will echo across the ages
So that when the sound bounces back the octave changes
And even though my words occupy a voice you’ve never heard
I promise you’ll remember the song’s words

But I can’t promise this won’t hurt
And that our hearts will always be able to mend
I can only promise that each time the tide resets
I’ll make my way to shore and find you again

Someway
Someplace
Someday

i am a terrible poet.
the words i tied together in attempt
to annunciate 
the way your kisses felt
along the soft of my 
cheeks were
mediocre and just barely enough.

just barely.

there weren't enough ways that i could describe
the mouthful 
of stars that spilled at the seams of my

lips as you gently traced them with warm finger tips.

mm, your finger tips.

your finger tips felt like a personal extension from god himself as

they dusted the empty jars i left untouched

in the forgotten spaces of me.

you held them tightly and filled them to the top

with a breathful of morning secrets

and hidden places to meet.

i found you.

i found you and allowed the words to slip

through my small hands

as you kissed my palms gently and sweetly

and folded them into your own to keep for just a little bit.
(
i could stay here)
i could lay underneath your tired smiles

and messy hair

until stars realigned themselves and directed

me to you all over again.
(
i could stay here)

i could tangle in-between your pale sheets
and make up all the words that

effortlessly translate the way i melted and simmered

at the sheer thought of waking up and knowing you again.

i could illustrate all of the galaxies you whispered

onto the trail of my back with

colors and warmth i never knew

and turn them into poorly strung together,

black and white strings of thought.

you were my favorite secret

and the cause of all of my writer’s block.

(i could stay here)


i’ve lived in florida my entire life

and have spent more days than i can count

under the sun and in the wake of rays that always burned,

but i’ve never felt more warmth than lying underneath

your expired thoughts and eclipsing eyes

as the moon seeped through your broken window blinds.

i forgot what it was like to breathe

until you took my face
sweetly and sincerely
and kissed me.
the paragraphs and ellipses that perforated my parenthetical
sighs of relief
stained the corners of my mouth
and lingered
long enough for me to remember
the after taste of your recycled sunshine
as you left me.

i am a terrible poet,
but a better kept secret it seems.

Restructured
The fiber of my being
Reordered
The placement of my priorities
Reconsidered
The core of truths validity
Realigned
My moral compass and sense of duty
Rediscovered
The spark of my life and ingenuity
Recommited
                          Life

The graveyard
had been redesigned
The walkways had
been realigned

The biggest change
At least to me
Was the signs now out
For all to see

Five short words
that we all read
Not keep off the grass
Don't tread on the dead

Genius,
You'd have to say
Don't walk where we
The dead all lay

This sign,
It said it best
Don't tread on the dead
Let them all rest

Keep on the path
Respects may be paid
Just stay off the grass
One request made

The simplest sign
The words stay in your head
Not...keep off the grass
Just...Don't tread on the dead

It’s a bit like shock therapy
When you’d come to.
It was the Depression, sure,
And I was barely clothed and fed
But I woke up refreshed
Realigned and adjusted.
A clean sweep!
Surrounded by my loving family.
Back.
So this is the way things are;
The way things were,
Before
But it’s not so bad in comparison.

That over there was a disaster
The so-called
“Loss of consciousness”
Was I in a coma?
With witch’s feet
And those dancing trolls
A road leading where and why?
There are no other roads, so who cares the color?

It was a horror story, not a morality play
They were so presumptuous,
What I needed!
They told me that I had killed someone,
a complete stranger
and
That’s when it all got worse.

Bluebirds fly
Yes I suppose they do!
You are right!
I got my wish in a sick kind of way
I went beyond a “rainbow”
as it were

It was bad.
I liked those gorgeous orange woozy poppies
but so what,
I was asleep anyway.
Do you see what I mean?
Chased by monkeys and
people who don’t really like me.
Not really.
Not any more than anywhere else.
Despite what they say.
Anyway, everyone clearly had their own agenda.
It was a matter of convenience and opportunities.
What was mine again?
Oh yeah.
For it to stop.

The Wizard was a Kansas Man
He said so himself
And when I showed up
Well he decided to clear out
I guess we were two Kansans too many

Stay with us Dorothy!
We love you!
All of us!
We don’t want you to go!
Doesn’t that sound a bit odd?

So I came back with this bit about
Well “if I ever look
for my heart’s desire
again
I will look no further
than my own backyard
Because if it isn’t there
(It gets good!)
I never really lost it
To begin with!”
Can you believe that?
I also relentlessly repeated
HOME
Euphemistically speaking
and the word
LIKE
Which isn’t really a total and complete
lie

And somehow it worked
It came to an end
I can’t really explain why but
It could have been a Jim Jones situation.

But do you think that I believed any of it?
I escaped
And now I think that I know how to do it.
And I can do it again.
But to someplace
Else.

Each word doesn't have to perfectly rhyme.
We herd dozens at a time,
to service the climb,
to serve as a guide.
The burdens we find are the worms
to the birds in our lines,

further
winding along, to a life of a search
is to thrive; an adventure to mine;
to sense in the back of our minds
that a fifth of our life, will be spent
getting sights realigned.

Pining for growth,
styling the spine in our notes.
Fly if we do.
Die if we don't.
Die to the wild.
Die to the child that shoots that
fire from our throats

"Why didn't I..," You'll say,
on a day you remember, the tune
of a song that you wrote, then BOOM!

Thoughts cascade.
Brought that pain to your heart
like you fought with a ghost.

Don't get lost,

but if you do,

take notes.

When we err, it is of human design.
Words spoken unhindered, without forethought,
deeds are done, not meaning to undermine.
Are we that perfect that we err not?

Yet still, our honor, is then redefined.
To offer forgiveness, true from aloft,
it is two souls you have realigned.
Are we that perfect that we err not?

Bringing closure to all those thus entwined.
Not just the transgressor, relieved of a black spot,
you placed yourself on the side of divine.
Are we that perfect that we err not?

1.1
The clock ticked two
The door closed and you knew

1.2
There goes a back turned
That'll never be turning back

1.3
Your silent reach forward
Stopping nothing , caged your feet frozen

2.1
Gifts left , broken , lost , not returned
Though giver proved unkind

2.2
You sobbed through hours of days
Looking for a mirror

2.3
To reignite the moonlight
For you to dance again around

3.1
Still , you walked
Letting creeks fill in your fallen hollow

3.2
Occasionally tipping towards evened out barricades
Yet always eagerly realigned

3.3
Once again letting out fumes of sighs
A freed marionette

You could have called it a blind date,
The manner in which we first met,
But one that was truly desired,
Not one made for some stupid bet.

A year has now passed since that day,
My life then so completely changed,
When my future was realigned,
And not just merely rearranged.

With the little sight I had left
I really liked what I first saw
But my social skills were lacking
And my emotions were red-raw.

She saw through my anxieties;
The pain I had coped with for years,
She seemed to sense the imprint left,
By many invisible tears.

Empathy was her strongest suit,
That was obvious right away,
Her bright sunny manner ensured,
We had an enjoyable day.

It’s strange how two can so quickly
Be bonded and then become one,
And all seeming as natural
As the rising of the dawn sun.

With the little sight I had left,
I really liked what I first saw,
And I knew the feeling was mutual,
When she nuzzled me with her nose
And then offered me - her paw …

We endure to strive see better things
Upon golden horizons
Though awe strikingly gray clouds
Obscure our precious sun's light.

I watch an ocean fill the gaps of the earth
Without a sound
We move past and no one breaks their gaze from their own lives,
And goals of material gain.

I watch an ocean
Integral
Intended
Full of depth too great for a man's mind...
We need not know
How vast a wonder
No grasp to attain
Just to observe
Breathe amazed sighs,
Gaze up towards full skies,
Ask to see through His eyes...
It is a wish of mine.

Canyons of water,
Buildings of waves
Architecture of sound and of depths
Too great
for my mind.

I fall away, fall apart, into the waves I drift,
and I may drown,
To hear you say
A word.

Daughter.

Alive.

With the gale of a storm in my soul I rise above and feel held together!
You have stitched my open scars,
Tied your hands as tourniquets to my outpouring blood,
Realigned my broken bones,
And whispered to my heart a message I could not hear or understand-
At once, it beat.

You are my source of equanimity.
My eyes see new things,
Because of You.

And because of all my healing
I now know how
The world will come to see You
And believe You.

My home is always in Your presence,
and I've risen from so many mountains of ashes,
Each time,
A touch
Brighter.

To divine the truth, is to define a miracle --
since you asked I'll reach into the bag of
both realigned and canned answers I keep
with the good intention of weaving old
wools for you, into wisdom anew,
just for you
Hell, I'd rather reach inside my lungs,
scrape with ten jagged fingernails at
lining sprayed with silver by what's
become known as better judgment
until the flesh caught underneath
peels away
There's gotta be more to this exhaling
exchange of words than we've let on
constructions of construction in the
destruction come from centuries
of hard and stark speech revision
for science
Ever open restaurant rooftop under
four grounded legs, four gazing eyes
Sky scape splashed navy painted dusk
You ask lightly, highly of me
How do humans rust?

A burlap bag broke in bleeding insides
I reach deeper into my recesses
the cavities keeping my trying heart intact
and pull that bleating piece of trash
up through my teeth and cough
up for you

Is there a soul there?
Is there a soul there?
Is there a soul there?

"Howdy, how's it going?"
The icebreaker at the time,
Was not a fancy one liner,
But must have caught that beautiful eye;

So the planets have realigned,
To form the third chapter,
In this journey of life,
That will take you to magic filled places;

And as our stars have crossed,
And the heavens bear witness with us,
And praise the gods for their yearly benevolence,
And for a brand new year of jolly, jolly hurrah!

<3 : TOFA

It was nearing the end of the rainy season. Steady downpours muted all other sounds of the village, the time when everyone slept soundly through the night. The rain had not stopped for weeks, until today. Khadisa woke up before sunrise again, to the smell of cool fresh air, no humid chaleur. She remembered the dream, a girl standing behind a waterfall. She said she could hear her voice, but not make out the words. And the water turned into doves, their flapping wings like beating drums. She started dancing to their music, and blood trickled down her arms and legs in the moonlight.
She uncocooned herself from the medley of blankets, warm tangled sheets still playing hushed reruns of her dreams like seashells reciting ocean lullabies long after the tide. She untucked the mosquito net from under her mattress and silently pulled on her sandals and coat as to not wake her roommate. Mariama was still asleep. Khadisa looked over her shoulder to see her friend nestled into the warm pool of the missing body under covers from where she laid, burrowing unconsciously into her ghost. The amber light of the hallway spilled into the dark room like cream rendering black coffee lucid as the sunrise still hours away. She preferred nights like these, when her husband was away.

“Come back and sleep?” inquired a small voice from a pillowy soft, dream-like haze.
“I’ll be back. En bimbi, Mariama.”

Mariama’s birthmark was just visible from under the covers on her petite frame, an angel on her shoulder flying towards the heavens, to her curly bronze sun-kissed hair and constellation freckles. A memento mori of Icarus before the fall. She was not her blood, but she treated Mariama as a sister, a missing half of herself that had been long forgotten.

XXXXX

I wake as if underwater, neon light and sound blurry like I’m underneath a murky lake. My head throbs. Long tendrils of seaweed bodies sway in foggy currents of flashing, turning, strident beams of light. I’m ascending, body buoyant without weight, as I try to move my numb limbs. What did I take? I look at my hands, the smears of fluorescent orange paint and powder. I just wanted to be free, to fly. Feel the wind, soaring down the mountain path on the back of Mariama’s moto. I stretch my arms out, close my eyes and become the air itself: drifting, unattached.
XXXXX

Guided by light of the full moon and Venus rising, Khadi eased the door shut behind her into the latch with a gentle gratifying “click”. I’m never in the same or different places, but I am good company regardless. I depart as air, a constellation rising. She paused and listened to the morning. Epiphanic night colors divulged to her the secrets of sleep-singing crickets, dream-dancing of cassava leaves, crystal-painting of morning grass. She recited the symphonic canticle with her footfalls on the uneven gravel path to the well, the delicate sway of cotton as she walked in the occasional whistling paths of mosquitos. Soaked in tepid moonlight overflowing from the frame of the mountain Chien Qui Fume, she turned off the path into a grove of trees towards the river, and felt like she was disappearing back into the dark.

xxxxx

“another nuit blanche, huh… or should I say matin? The two must be the same at this point for you now. Just a perpetual, non-stop existence.” Mariam added skeptically, eying Khadi over a steaming cup of ginger tea. The wood from the fire crackled, as if in agreement.

“At least you have hot water for breakfast. Anyway, I am used to waking before sunup to prepare food for the family before the hospital shift.” Khadisah added, “I’ll be fine, habibti. No worries.”

“I know your dreams are getting bad again. Hunde kala e saa’i mun. Everything in its own time. Take care of yourself first, for once.”

She struck a match without reply, lit the candles, and poured herself a second cup of tea. Mango flowers unfolded outside the kitchen window, drinking in the early morning warmth with dusty yellow hands opening to heaven. She held the matchstick and watched the flame approach her fingers, remembering the countless needles she has sterilized to perform surgeries even the male doctors were too uneasy to attempt.

“So, what grand prophecies did I miss in the stars this morning?” Mariama put on her glasses and slid them up over the bridge of her nose with her index finger.

“The usual 3am omens, no bad spirits.”

Mari hummed a little hymn to herself and half-smiled as her green eyes flicked downward to her open book and wordlessly melted away any tension as if she were the effortless break of dawn dissipating a mere cloud of morning fog.

Xxxxx

A songbird starts singing a clear soaring cadence. And I am falling back below inundated shallows. I feel her soft blonde hair on my face, her colors warm and sunny. My name over and over and over. She’s shaking me, but I can’t speak. Her voice is perfect, it is all I hear anymore. Mariama with ivory skin, pastel hair. A ghost? No, a child. No more muted ringing in my ears. I melt into her as everything goes black.
My father was kind, unlike most from where we’re from. The kind do not live long enough. Walking in tall grass before a storm, the wind would whip at us in riotous orchestral gusts; I spread my wings and let the weight of air lift me away into the music. I closed my eyes, face upturned to the swelling rainclouds with pregnant bellies. “My Khadisah’s a little bird! Keep spreading your wings, and you’ll fly across the sea to America one day,” he said in French, the language for educated men.
xxxxx

Prep is the hardest stage for projects. Mariama starts in the cold shop, mapping out the light and colors, the size and shape she’ll be sculpting with. When it comes to the glory holes, something else takes over. She was a fote, of mixed blood. From a family who supported her education, her liberty. She thought of Khadisah’s upbringing, pushed the thought from her head as she focused on the heat of the furnace, the twist on the yoke, and the heavy grounding of the pipe. The sound of the port outside the open studio window grounded her, Conakry’s canoes readying their nets, bobbing in the sunrise stained glassy waters. Khadisah is sea glass, she thought. She heals others as she cannot heal herself, a polished stone ever-changing, and strong to the core. Shaped by something bigger, without choice. Although, the fact that there is no true place for us is shattering. But we’ve learned to live with jagged edges, smoothed them in buckets of the rains we’ve carried for miles on miles. Words can be shrapnel, written of the body, in perpetual ancient gestures. Looking down at the glass on her worktable, thin frames of women curved in dance like limbs of a tree in a whirlwind. ****** hieroglyphics speak of the writhing societal inconsistencies, the murky waters from which we fill our cups. The scars in their hearts built by the privileged, defiling bodies and souls without consent.

They are the ones who do the slaughtering.

xxxxx

“I have always loved mythology,” remarked Mari after perusing a chapter or two of her novel. It was a miracle alone that she knew how to read. “Shame that we lost so many of our stories, women.” Khadi had lost track of time, meditating on her morning rituals. She glanced at the positioning of the rising sun on the burning horizon through gaps of light through red kaleidoscopic trees.
“Next time bring me with you,” Mariama suggested, tapping her temple and pointing to me. “To your walking dreams, I mean. Wherever the night spirits guide you when all other men are sleeping, and the world is entirely ours for the taking.”

Khadisah’s gaze fixed fiercely on her friend’s once more, and the whole room erupted with the veracity of fracturing, interconnected, rampant red color. I try to keep my visions to myself, thinking about what used to become of them.

Glass is an extension; it exists in a constant state of change when molten. People change every second, in a constant half-light of who they are and who they will become. Like the lake between dreaming and reality, or a painting in constant interpretation. A word without formal translation, a feeling. Making stained glass, revelations of shape-cut fragments are painted with glass powder and fired in Mariama’s homemade kiln, fusing mirages of paint to the surface. Soldering joints with lead for stability, there is something meditative of puzzling together their memories. When glassblowing, she breathes life into her art, a revitalized self of otherwise secluded rights. Unveiling colored lenses of filtered light, she distills her life, betrays time. Creating is second to nothing, as concrete as petrified lightning in sand, and the fern-shaped kisses of lightning flowers on skin of raging energy.

xxxxx

It was dead winter, dead night. No shoes, no coat. I stopped answering Mariama’s calls. Too many glass cuts and bruises, empty nights. Walking up the snow-covered sidewalk to the chapel, Khadisah felt like she was buried in the new seamless blankets of fallen snow, fallen angels. Sometimes she forgot who she was. Because she cannot save everyone. A wandering ghost, an oracle without omens. Streetlight glowed through polychromatic windows, complex renderings of tall white figures preaching of salvation. Vivid crowns of gold, marbled robes, and flecked wings outstretching and draped by flickering light on the walls. It all reflected on her skin, histories of stories in light. Candles softened the hallway with the smell of incense and old books. Khadisah sighed and exited, reentered the snowy dreamscape outside, and looked up at the universe. The absence of light was beautiful, empty, and full at the same time. The window from a miniscule existence, what oddly calms and keeps us up at night. It was quiet, no wind, no moon. She laid down, a kite without a string. She started making snow angles and let herself cry about them. All of them. The pain when her husband visited, her daughter’s inevitable path like hers. The imprint of her body congealed to glass by the time the sun rose again, and she spoke colors to the stars. The seasons changed; the stars realigned. And more snow fell into her ghost.

“so, who’s gonna take you home, huh?”

I wake underneath Japanese maple, red leaves outlined in dark umber flaming against the clear blue sky. After a deep breath and regaining my surroundings, I evaluate where I am. The underdeveloped path from the reservation meanders back to site. I don’t remember what time or day it is, but I stand and jump across a trickling iron-red stream, I land on the other side a bit older, a bit wiser. Outlined in sweet grass and sage, I gather the herbs. Mint, sumac, elderberry, and yarrow. Sunlight guides me, and I thank the earth. Wah-doh, I say to the four Winds. Peace.
The mint leaves burn, and their ashes float towards heaven.
-----

Like tuning into the radio station from deep in the forest, she heard fuzzy, fragmented sounds. She felt light against her closed eyelids, but only saw a shoreline. She knew it was a dream. The trees aren’t right – the leaves were replaced by flowers, lending their neon petals to the dense sunset air. Standing in tall sweet grass, but there’s no gravity. She looked up, and saw the Japanese maple, the embers of leaves. And saw a reflection laying in the sun looking down—or up?—at herself. She wanted to fight the setting sun, become pristine like them. But she couldn’t hold her breath under the waters for too long. Spilling from the vase of an inviolate soul, sewing the stars like her scars. When the day is burned, we vanish in moonlight.

_

Working in the hospital, the color red. Panic attacks disassociate Khadisah from reality. She can still see, but can’t move, and only watches the violence as she crumbles under the skin. There were more angel marks, more places, less friendly. Stitches from infancy to womanhood, pedophilic ****** rights. A mother at 13, she cried for days and... feels the words rush back like water flooding all around her, rising around her body. This isn’t flying, this is drowning. So this is permanence, imprisonment from identity. A body collaged up and down, cut and fragmented on city and rural streets like vines salvaging mutilated walls and shattered windows. Being so stuck she was free. She saw a lost childhood in Mariama’s glass, and she was light as a feather in her father’s arms again.

The men say the seizures are from the Diable, but it was worse than that.

Even glaciers sculpt land and cut mountains over time with oceans of frozen glass. But earth was flooding once again.

And there was no blood on her hands.

I've never been rear-ended
But boy does it sure feel like it
Wish I could say that straight-faced
But as a baby I was ss-*****
Now over fifty years
of living with this pain
And I can't shake it/make it go away
A life filled-up with rain
  

The ***** of ****** from Hawthorne
Made me look sorry for not marrying her
She may have been a Muenter
or maybe just related to it
You sorry girl, you're so pathetic
LOVE IS NOT POSSESSION
Now all those ***** hippie bands
Can be exposed as two-faced-too-fakes
  

It's a long goodbye
So please take the hint
The only thing I'm blowing
Is kisses in the wind
  

Politician's daughters lie
They steal inheritence
I've known this now for quite some time
And know that whales have ate it
When all the homes in California
fall into the ocean
I'll give that ***** a second chance
or just ignore that notion

Untill the crooked Big Jew Mob
return the Vatican
to the church it once belonged to
I won't believe in Him
Sometimes they are just as evil
as those killing in His name
I should have kept my mouth shut
They shot cancer in my coccyx

It's so long/goodbye
Would you take the hint
The only thing I'm blowing
Is kisses in the wind

To my dad in Colorado
Are you still making **** for kids
To my mother in the Poconos
Still ****** her grand kid's kids
If you ever find a mirror
Try to look into/inside it
It could scare the life right out of you
I hope, I wish, I pray for it

And those parasites in Florida
That make tapeworms look so innocent
I have my own kids/family now
Though I was brainwashed to forget them
My eldest daughter, Melanie
Has never been accepted
So why should I give gifts to yours
When they marry some old hothead

It's so long/goodbye
And please take the hint
The only thing I'm blowing
Is kisses in the wind

Jack and Joe sit on their porch
Make fun of people different
Amazingly how they can judge
While sitting on their pulgars
The stars have all been realigned
Like old chalk on a sidewalk
I can not help them anymore
This one last thing I do wish

Frost said eyes meet eyes
And I say lips meet lips
I truly hope to one day find
From ear to ear a happy smile
That isn't full of sht

It's a long goodbye
But do take the hint
The only thing I'm blowing
Is kisses in the wind

So use your demi-gods
But don't blame me for your sins
The only thing I've ever blown
Is kisses in the wind

It's so long/goodbye
And please take the hint
The only thing I'm blowing
Is kisses in the wind
The only thing I'm blowing
Is kisses in the wind

I am a well-maintained automobile,
battery charged and tires rotated,
brake system probably needs to be adjusted and my drive-shaft may need to be realigned
but otherwise
you could probably make a decent profit off of me.
My blood is thick motor oil, and
my scent, a lit cigar
ever-burning down to an infinite ****.
I'd probably go for about $10,000 (if you turned back the odometer 20,000 miles).

A stray homeless dog wanders this crumbling city.
It's heart held back by fear of failure.
Sniffing for survival, hungry and filthy.
Exiled by the pack, forever branded a traitor.

His bark echoes in these empty streets
the sound oblivious to unwilling ears.
All these shadows waiting for sin's release
living their life with cogless gears.

Resolution, broken.
Hope lost, unspoken.
I've let all of you down.
trying to keep my ego's crown.

I'm sorry.

Old sepia photos, nostalgia recalls.
Did I have to be sacrificed after all?
Life is now colors of orange and black.
Still, I wish to bring the rainbow back.

My own fragile little universe,
protecting it with loneliness.
Icy waterfalls in reverse,
preventing friendly caress.

Come and break it down for me.

These cold walls, high into endless sky.
A precise strike it's all it's gonna take.
Under desolation's weight, walls will break.
So we can finally see each other, eye to eye.

Finding solace in your caring arms,
hunger for hope in soulless eyes
feeling parched for penitence.
regret, my only sentence.

I only wanted to be a hero.

Teach me to care again,
my emotions have been wasted,
my smile is only painted,
my stone heart, my only gain.

Make me human again,
sweep me with your sympathy,
my demons, with your love, slain.
our purpose, realigned, in symmetry.

Come and break down with me

A river of pain will flow,
drowning in torrential tears,
as we review our existing fears,
safe from the scorn of our peers.

Let the despair wash through,
clearing the path in front of us,
let's walk this road, together,
A crossroad, to places ubiquitous.

----------------------------------- -
It's never too late to start being
that which we always could be.

Imperative perception
It was all far fetched, a time when I searched myself in others
No one can ever give me the moment of clarity and serenity
An eternity of peace within oneself, an embody of higher self
This place of ultimate truth and surreal objectification
A reflection of timeless lapses, the laps of completeness
The storms were a taboo, the recurrent flying unquietness
The un-resolving trips and flares of unpolarised magnetic currents
The escape to pristine moments, prestige throughs and peaks
A vision from the drowning sea, me sinking in the whirlpool
I mirrored my own reflection to yours, my 'I' to "you", your 'I" to "me"

Melodious Creeks
The moment called now is my only lullaby I can hear
A whisper so harmonised and crystallised deep in the seabed
A candle light of moment of truth in a rotating crystal ball
The chaos in the jungle have escaped to the peaks of the mountain
Uninformed lands with uniformed pebbles, the shattered glasses
Demons that stood ***** as they pierced and taunted a being

Why did it take so long?**
Lets go the springs and streams of pain, the unending past
It's not a feeling, or logic, its a way of human existence
An entwinement of anthems embellished with peace

Presentiment
***** the barred barricades for me to see your pastures
I can feel the darkness that embodies your soul and mind
A thunder in the unending jungle, jiggling in kingdoms
Reject my sharp vision, I cry your tears as you do mine
I stare at your blur as you submerge in the deep waters
The blackening tunnels with no escape reject my eyes
The icy layers squeezing to escape in your sorrows
The narrowed aisles have become the only island you cruise
The trajectory of our blood realigned in our future sins

Found self?
Listen to the strings adjoining in the basements of the cliffs
The line balancing on the centrifugal pump as it impels to shrouds

Of choices?
Predetermination and judgment of other as I lost a piece of my time
In this territory, I stand at the borderline of my devotion in battle
Holding my rifle and connecting to life and all; me a solider of love
Parading in the landscapes of inhibitions and thought processes
A soul I hold is my only liberation to live fully and autonomously
Eyes wide open, mouth wide ajar as we rise and survive doing our best!

My heartbeat, is beating out of time
I can’t sleep, or get you off my mind
And I’ve been here before, far too many times
I need your heartbeat, to get me realigned


So tell me is this love?
Is it a vital spark?
Or another question mark?


Palpitations, pound in my chest
I’m out of control, out of control
Hands keep shaking, never at rest
I’m out of control, out of control


You caught my attention like the lights
In the still night with flitting fireflies
Will you call me yours?
I hope in this lifetime
I need your heartbeat its life to humankind



If sail through the blue
To lands I never knew
For someone worthy of pursuit
It could only be you
Could only be you



Palpitations, pound in my chest
I’m out of control, out of control
Hands keep shaking, never at rest
I’m out of control, out of control

Jan folded the letter
running a finger
along its crease.

She looked up-
somebody was explaining
functionality,
She stared:
the new argument was
written on the white board
she returned to the letter-

another fold
another plane
pressing and creasing
opening
rereading
vertices missed,
words realigned.
Sentences brokered
with each new
configuration,
yet its meaning
reformed.

He- was disengaged
she- was misplaced.
Incongruent.
She rose
and left the room.
There would be
many such lessons.

Tommy Carroll