Ours Is A Life Of Certain Uncertainty And Frustrating Simplicity

Musing on “Adult Life”

The Phrase “Well that sounds like Adult Life” accompanied by the indicative chuckle as if I am nothing but a lowly child instead of a full-fledged adult who pays their own bills and holds a degree in a field you can barely pronounce, much less understand. 

You have no interest in anything except your own personal gain and whatever you are interested in that moment, which has been the same topic since you were literally 14. 

I refuse to apologize for having ambition, 

I refuse to apologize for expecting others to do their damn jobs so that I could do mine 

I refuse to apologize for being me 

Nightmares Part 3

The door opens to a small grey room with only a table beside a bed to furnish it, a girl sits at the table writing ferociously in a journal the only thing visible about her is that she is exotic and has been beaten and tortured other than that she could have been any girl in any room and any journal because you could not see her face for the tears and the hair spilling over her head and into her eyes. As she writes a woman comes in and asks her a question, without hesitation she replies savagely. The woman seems unimpressed and strikes her then walks out leaving the girl laying on the floor with blood-mingled tears running down her face. When she looks up all of the walls have transformed into glass and on the other side there are men, taking notes, she looks down and seems to notice that the floor has suddenly become water. She begins to swim, the climate continues to change and the men continue to take notes and the girl continues to cry, and wail, and try, and survive.

Nightmares Part 2

When I awoke there were 3 men in the room. They all looked very different: the one closest to the bed had skin like muddy water with eyes the color of a blood moon and longish hair the color of the evil night, he was dressed in a white long-sleeved shirt with a tweed jacket over it, and a pair of bloodstained trousers were barely hanging onto his muscular legs, he had no shoes on, he could not have fit them over his massive paws he had human hands and lupine paws; and a collar that barely fit his huge neck. He was by far the most normal of the three.

The man closest to the doctor had bleached skin as if he was already dead blood was running freely from his eye and nose he had numerous brands on his chest and upper arms his fingertips were claws he wore no shirt and his disproportionate muscles were left for all to see. His pants had gaping holes in them where raw wounds were seeping through the gaps in the material. He wore a belt that was a chain and ran right through his body, held by an unseen force that kept him still as death. He wore shoes but they had holes in them where fur and claw peeked through the stained leather. A dark force surrounded him. The one nearest the door was the most frightening. He wore only a blood-stained loincloth. The parts of his body that were visible under the blood were covered in black, dusty, foggy scales. He had no face, but where it should’ve been was a mask of dripping red liquid that was too thick to be blood but thin enough to drip down to the floor he had no hair and claws for nails he was barely humanoid with no neck and bumps in awkward places. The doctor herself was the strangest person I had ever seen. She had ashy skin and long gray hair it looked like she had turned into ash there was no color in her entire body except for her blood red eyes. She was the most terrifying of the three because it was as if she was a black hole sucking up all life, hope and all things good in this world she was the darkest being I had ever seen. She was alive and not alive she was dead yet she was animated and walking around. She was a terrible puzzle a calamity if you will a person, yet a beast, someone who literally killed the mood and made her own sinister presence felt.

When they approached the bed it felt as if an eternity had passed when in reality it had only been a couple of minutes. The muddy-skin man spoke first; it was as if some of his speech had been removed his voice was a mix of gravel and an avalanche. Then the doctor spoke her voice was lilting and deceivingly contradictory to the words coming out of her mouth

“If you do not cooperate you will be scheduled for immediate termination. I do not care how valuable you are I will; kill you if you decide to rebel.”

I did not reply not wanting to talk to the horrible doctor, not wanting to obey but afraid of rebellion. As they moved closer, the doctor with a journal in hand, a sinister looking device became visible. When the men carried it into view I, at last, realized what it was, it was a suspension device, it was for keeping heavy things in the air for extended amounts of time and often used for torture.

I miss the rain

Or better, i guess i miss the way it rained there

Fat heavy drops

Not like delicate tears on your skin but so full of water you could feel the individual impacts like your grandmother's hand patting you on the head

But just like grandmother's, not all rain was soft and kind, it also raged and thundered

Loud screaming into the night and the sound of those heavy blows on the roof like rocks from the heavens

To go out, to experience the storm was to feel whole and yet also wholly small

The rain is

Quiet, here

Tamed and angry in it's taming

Anger of futility

Anger of frustration

Maybe some others would call it gentle or kind or soft

But there just isn't enough of it to be those things

Not to me

To me it's just a drizzle, never more than a pattern of calm and too still even in it's movement

The last remnants of a still dying god killed long before it's time

The rain here is dead

And so

I miss the rain

The Red Backpack

Time slipped away

        We knew, had known, will know

She had years, then months then days, then none.

She went first

Skipped into death like she had been waiting for it all her life and I suppose in some ways she had,

I couldn’t handle it

I sold the business, the house, the car, I lived out of my backpack                       She loved books so I hitchhiked from library to library always picking up ones we loved. Then we’d sit down at one of the tables, two old coots living out of a beat-up red backpack and read and talk about everything

We got some odd glances often funny stares. I didn’t care I had my beloved back then I’d come back to myself and realize that I was once again just a lonely old man talking to an empty chair

Then I’d pick up that old red backpack once more and search for her in the next dusty corner of the next dusty library in the next dusty town

You don’t see the decay at first

Not at first glance nor the second, no you pass your lives through with silly little tasks

every morning you walk to work, sunshine bright enough to disguise that which you don’t see, certain patches of day seem dull as you walk by the pastry shop, colors bleeding, no longer true to form where they meet

the talons of light grasp signs and bruise the colors darker than you remember

you keep walking

you look down

you do not see

at night you laugh with your family, smile fondly as a book or chuckle at the news. Curled before the blaze you can block the chill of the void leaking in through your window pane.

The almost too close burn in your shins drowns out the whispering, the bright dancing cheerful orange distracts you, pulling your attention, away from the silvered, hungry smile with spindly teeth grinning just past your periphery where it waits for you to notice

you keep watching

you look down

you do not see

at midday! You lunch with your love, discussing mundanity and boredom to fend off themselves sipping sweet wine with a bite and licking drops of fat off your fingers as they’ve dropped from your meal

The savory oil coats your tongue and for a moment your thoughts are not your own, a flash of True Hunger grips you, an impulse to consume, devour, tear and rend to satiate your hunger with the cat you’ve caresses in a moment of love you want to grip and bite in a frenzy of feeding

but you blink

you look down

you do not see

you blink again

You do see, but now? They See Too

Nightmare Part 1

The most peculiarly specific smell of a hospital in Maine assaults my senses. I hear absolute silence, and then, frantic scratching. I am in a white room, strange stains surround me splattered on every surface, and I sit on a plain white bed, writing furiously in a leather-bound journal with yellowed curling pages, as I write the words disappear just before I can read what I have written. A man walks in, he is tall with darkish curly hair and caramel eyes, clothed in white scrubs with a yellow eye logo above the pocket and covered in the same stains. He takes the journal and leaves me screaming in anger and crying in fear. He deposits the journal outside the door in the visible hands of a man unseen. He trots over to where I lay, picks me up as if I am a rag doll, holds me close, and whispers in my ear It was a strangely familiar voice that brought back memories of days spent playing in the sun and lying in fields of wildflowers. I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying.

He softly brushed my forehead with his lips, set me down on the bed and left. As he closed the door I heard screaming, muffled gunshots then silence. Utter and complete silence, I called to him with my voice till all my voice was gone; and shaking I called to him with my mind. When there was no answer I accepted what had happened for he had not answered the call that only death can silence. As I left the door the tears would not fall, the tears would not come and the only escape I had was in sleep.

Light

I saw the light of day begin to dawn

I watched the final rays of moonlight die

I’ve seen the end of life

And birth begin

I know when my frail breath will leave my lungs

To He Who I Once Loved

I promised you something, laying on a curb in a tiny town, bits of broken asphalt digging into my back 

I made a vow under the stars holding your sweaty hand in mine 

I cleaved my heart to yours through a conversation to rival those had by ancient philosophers looking up at the same moon we beheld on that fateful night 

I promised to hold you in my soul even as my body got used to being held by your hands, large and unsure aginst my waist feeling like maybe we were too young to truly love 

I remember that night the snell of the freshly cut grass of the suburbuan maze we wandered deep into the night 

Do you remembeer the years to follow? Telling me I was special but treating me like normal 

Do you remeber breaking my heart? 

I kept my promise but not in the way you may think, I still think of you, the reminder of what we were still makes me cry and I still pray for you I pray for who you may have been and who we could have become but 

my dedication to those promises has been fading even as the skin you touched sloughs off my body in sheets of replacing cells 

Maybe by the time all of it is gone I will be ready to break my promise 

we invented and perfected the idiosyncrasies of the odd art, we are odd and we are not 

but are the vibrant dread, a constant antithesis of all we should be, we are alive truly yet floaters in a world we did not design and we deign to love 

the universe of our creation we are forced out of by the necessities of those who have and always will persecute that which they know not of and all are naught to understand