new fiction (2014)
Shared Thread 5-HTP
I write to you from the cranky neck of my wif(e.) The year is 1777, and Sasha enters obelisk geometries of Josie city with a snails pace. -- she is biting me -- Small blurring German dolls at the curvatures of her eyebrows; she is looking at the lake, it used to be a clock. We don’t want to look at flat black, it’s scaring her, and I to sleep -- Snail trails of chipped, gold skeleton keys daisy chain beneath her, amidst this “orangutan logic” she has tucked, and partitioned with laudanum. I rub my eye,and struggle to rub my eyebrows against hers -- The slime is a mauve and golden reflection, displayed as multiple bulbs of light, they act in the way stars do, to retrace her steps; stars, so intent that she tucks deeper, unknowing, as she lingers to a shop window, handling the skeletons in her pocket. I dream country roads until morning, on foot, finding poor rusted housing --Twelve inch Sasha, I find out, through research at a public Library, hidden in the back with the manifestos, has written the most accurate account of my life. I find this out in the year 1666, through the Montague publishing archives. Ape trains rushing through town, dividing mental street from shoes and it’s hard to feel like a beast in these shoes --The next week I find her grave at the cemetery in Paris, on my way to Prague, to teach about the innovative filtration systems of the northern Gypsy. Blending down from the bent silk and alignment all string ~ I meet Sasha the next day, in Germany, near a Doll factory, where they make Steffen and wheeler dolls. She is reluctant to speak, but after some technical ranting on my part, she finally says her name and this.
“I will be home later.” and “Don't worry about me now, I am doing research.” There are hands Ivan found, painted white in the hospital, lounged plump, abandoned to a field, where the path smells like winter spruce dangling from ropes as fine as the razor wire used to keep out the blind from rummaging for manikin legs --Sasha follows me back to Paris, sitting on the train car directly after mine.
In those days groups of suited swimmers threw all night parties with fine cigars - mimosas - and manikin footage uncovered, where a group lounges drunken in the black water, sharing smoke over the legs of heads, of hands, of feet, dunked vintage manikins -- When she makes love to me, a dream of buried clocks tick under ground, women dressed in white paint their faces with leaves, using black ink until the perfect circle covers noses and eyes, mouths, earlobes, jewelry. That had been deconstructed by secret society, the known Walther’s white win-tress --Her body is a connection device, pouring essential oil into my skin, an inescapable vortex of clocks, both ticking forwards, and at the reverse back in time. Little pockets of the group still exist today, even an exploration to the first hotel (since boarded) takes place off the coast in a small town in these dreary folded papers-- the theater , and its coordinates cannot be discussed here.
Most of her subtle gestures seem derived from a past lover, and I fear, as I am falling in love with her, I am falling in love with her past.
Leather rose is all of the clue -- I move to Italy, and then to America in 1670. First to skirt back a bit, and curtsy for in the lights at ones binoculars -- I meet Sasha in America, in a hostel in New York in 1672. The hospice of the heart must warm before closing up , and cooling. She, like me is trying to escape something not worth discussing. Shared thread, a bony eclipse those shuffled rooms turning, turning, and on the perfect English argument, salt shoulders, check, change the channel, flowers, a bee and conversation with the grass -- We, instead wander New York together, finding objects: little forgotten remnants, scraps of the morning paper, and pieces of the city left to rot. Hold that thought: next, a white channel it takes, shuffles, flips next channel, the room, the waking room, the dark piled underwater, and magazines - a shared voice, one yelling-- We make collages out of these objects, and feel we have fallen in love again.
In an oak chair waking up from a long dream -- In Love together for months, every morning, every night, and sometimes three times in the afternoon, we imagine clocks, ticking underground and this all begins to take over my dreams. Cat masks, and candelabras in the chimney singing song fires -- In the mornings we drink coffee at a small table we found in the alleyway, behind our cheap tenant. Before the echoing chambers emerging open, before the echoing chamber releases its hourly pink signal, the rooms, wait, sleeping and the first flake of lead paint cracks from the ground floor in the foyer -- After some time, I have forgotten why I left Paris in the first place, sucked, abnormally deep into my dreams.
The shattered hands delicately shift around in a circle on the floorboards -- We make love for days, we eat nothing but rice and garden tomatoes she grows. A shot out window - hunks of plastic wrapped faces, and torso’s being staggered in a configuration that is well fitted to comet - Smashing me into the stove, the wall, crushing my pocket watch under her foot, she cries in pain, and blames me for her loss of happiness. Fluttering in the eastern clock -- I lose touch with my body for two whole days, transfixed in mid air, above the bed.
The signal draws a ghostly party at the swimming pool west wing -- We make love slowly in the air, starving. Caught in moving recordings as higher levels in 02 and moving objects -- Never leaving the apartment, Sasha and I stop exploring, we quit collaging, we stop paying rent on the apartment, and one day the landlord starts knocking, so Sasha barricades the front door, and says we enter, and leave through the window, through the fire escape. A talk show of European grays with three of the output/input RCA computers, glitch, and signal -- We only leave at night and she begins shoplifting. Headset’s feeding back with violin, harp, prepared guitar and 5:00 a.m.
I find food in the trash and we eat again.
And struggling to lift one of the white arms to the nose, there in one corner -- One meal a day. moves a mirror - She goes out for a week, and I don't see her. After a week of sleeping alone, I wake up and she is hovering over me. Oh, on string -- She demands nothing more than peaceful rest and kisses me on the lips, her skin smells of Patchouli and frankincense. We fall asleep together, arms wrapped, a cocoon of ticking dreams. Now the feet lift from the floor boards, bend he the jacket, and the tail feathers crawl their own string and a man above the room (floor four) with hands in reflections, all the many masquerades, the room makes and has witnessed -- She holds a mirror before my face, she feeds me medicine beneath the mirror and will not look at me, little gathered leaves she has chewed to help heal my wounds. Shot gun holes through that one --We write letters, hers post marked 1777, mine 1666. I begin to believe I have lost my mind. Or the post man has made some kind of mistake, or she is playing a trick on me. But still a good mask --I spend all of my time between composing stealing liquor, and cigarettes. Hallways flurry, puffy, cookie, birdie nests, fight, flight of white beak, and raven, into atticus -- I purchase with the last of my money a small parcel of rat poison, and stamps. That when the recording crew entering with boxes, tapes, computer wires, screens, chests of cable, two way radio, antennae -- I talk to no one, haunted at every movement, every shadow my hands cast, I begin to write the letter the place grows bored, wants only to rest and wither away from the
microphones aimed at their memories-- The rat poison glistens, dead black in the circumference of the small bottle. Danger. Poison. skull and cross bones. Do not drink. The liquid is flat and empty. The way I feel, but worse because it has the potential I am unwilling to venture through. I must get away. I must write the letter, and hide away for awhile in an angel of the morning, with queen of the costume room, changeling, withering, mirroring.