Nightmares Part 4

Fall (in retrospective)

The leaves come falling down like lovers hearts and children’s knees

Everyones getting engaged and loving each other

People are preparing for the long cold winter

People are cuddling with loved ones and reaching out

Dress up as ghouls and ghosties to scare away the demons in our own minds, fall is a time for reflection, the leaves are changing color as is the people’s hair. The temperature lessens, the frost slides into the cold mornings and covers windshields in intricate crystalline tapestries. The rain falls down, the monotony of school starting is broken up by dreary rainstorms and brilliant shining brisk days full of cold sunshine. As the seasons change humanity is reminded of their own inability to control the world around them, photosynthesis and the water cycle and all of the wonderfully terrible things about fall remind you of all of the wonderfully terrible things about yourself.

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.

The Not Yet Now

The future past flashes forward in my head, I see blue eyes and long shaggy hair in my periphery with a warm hand on my waist the strength of the hand matching the strength of the musk on the hoodie that protects my wet swimsuit skin from the evening chill. 

We’ve spent all day together and a warm feeling enters my heart and my vision blurs as I come back to reality after seeing one of my fondest memories before it happens. The trees in the rove I lay in whisper “Lover you’ve returned to us” the river refers to me as daughter, the waterfall beckons “Child, come kiss your grandfather” while the wild mountain bid me fall into its warm motherly embrace. 

I am the child of the wilds raised as a meek human and thought to be of angelic broods

Have you ever watched the death of a soul? 

I’m not talking physical death, I mean knowing someone and falling madly in love with their passion and then realizing that passion has left when you see them again 

Their eyes are flat and dull 

the spark is gone

When exhaustion overcomes ingenuity 

when that which you had loved has faded 

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 

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

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 

Strands of Existence

Recently one of my favorite pieces of media featured a character brought back to life with the exclamation of EMPTY! empty empty empty EMPTY!

It resonated harder than it should’ve to be honest

because I feel like that

I feel like I’ve been killed by life

by friends who should've been

family that wasn't

lovers who refused to be

My soul, exsanguinated by those who said they would cherish it

My dreams scooped out of my skull by harsh words and harsher realities of funding and conditional love and security

My wonder pulled from my chest by the same hands I once placed my stained glass heart into

My skin sensitive not from angry and rash touches but from the lack of any love at all

And its left me Empty

Left me feeling like the only things left are the strands of the person I once was and tried so hard to be tying me to a life that I don’t really want.

I tried to cut those strings

those delicate blue strings running the lengths of my arms and legs and release the hot red magic held within them

tried to free myself

tried to leave on gossamer wings

but it didn’t work

it failed

i failed.

So I stopped trying, I now bleed on pages instead of pillows and try to find those wings within me and let them free without letting them see the light. I try to leave those strings be and let them puppet me towards a life I want to lead instead of one I want to leave.

I still feel like there’s only strings within me, but at least I stopped trying to cut them 

Now I pick up the pieces of my shattered stained glass heart and use yet more silver to weld it back together and try to believe what they say, that broken things fixed are just as beautiful if not more for the proof of recovery

And if I can do it

Maybe you can too

Maybe we both can one day look up and realize that those strings weren’t trapping us, but leading us to our destinies like red strings of fate tying us to happiness and a future that we can’t yet see

It's hot but it's not too hot it's hot in that summer, carnal, sweet sweat and hard work smelling strong of sawdust and body odor way

And you only get it from working in the sun, sweat doesnt smell the same if it's a hike or just sitting outside or a workout indoors in the winter

There's some . . . Visceral about hard work sweat in the summer

It's original sin

A wet hot American summer

Adam eating "the apple" under a blazing sun feeling the sweat bead under his curls at the back of his neck at the same moment that sticky savory juice graced his lips changing forever how he saw the world

It's what the pope fears more than anything

Raw

Humanity

Unfiltered

Un fettered

Animals running flat out across a grassland under golden rays

Laying in the shade of trees older than their speech

All their warts and beauty on display for anyone to see

Drops of it, stories encased in wet salt hit the ground and color it dark in a silent plea for rain

"Sit down" she said

"Stop fidgeting" he reminded

"I swear if you don't stop MOVING" they threatened

until one day one didn't

The teacher didn't say "Sit down" or "Stop moving" she said "here, when you get bored or finish an assignment I want you to describe to me what you are going to do on the playground"

This simple kindness to a small hyperactive child turned into teams of paper preoccupation detailing the grand adventures of various heroes, heroines, dragons and ponies as they battled vicious creatures discovered new locales and made friends along the way fostering forever in me a childlike wonder for the magic of the written word.