… let’s move on to dreams, phosphenes and the armatures and substructures that make up those worlds. Even in the most extreme and intense dreams one may see below the action unspooling in said dream narrative and peak at the structures moving the characters and things about in a dream. If one sneezes hard and freezes their vision—or better yet, rubs their closed eyes hard for five seconds—revealed to them for a few short moments will be the armatures, or puppet master’s strings if you will, that move things about in one’s dreams. They are always present, but in the waking state have nothing affixed to their ends—nothing to clasp on to, and you don’t see them. But blow out your consciousness and they will be forever present—waiting for the characters to mount, the scenery to take its places, the director to yell “action”…
“Dog autumn attacks. Syphilis autumn. And death visits one of twilight’s paralyzed legs.”
A vibrant tuning fork in hand— This is normally a prime time for burrowing a hole in your heart.
You tell me to videograph your heartache. You claim that this crowded urban area saps your optimism and your love for your fellow human. Someone’s banging on the door, yelling: get out, get out. You will slowly reopen your heart and repair the gaps, and hope for the best. It’s still not easy to be asymptomatic. Over the next couple of weeks before October love forlorn, love clinically enervated, will disappear permanently.
Fuel for the broken heart. Food for stormy weather.
“The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all.”
The refulgent quality of my psychopomp is only surpassed by my staring into the sun.
Psychopomp?
Who the hell needs to be led in?
I often stare into the sun. It’s the only way I know to calm down. My father required it of me when I was a young boy — he broke me early and often. He was the superintendent of our crumbling building in Camarioca after the revolution. Our homely squalor had a taste and a color: bile-yellow.
When I was a pre-teen my mother also demanded that I stare for hours at the sun. One early morning she plunged all of my father’s screwdrivers — a dozen from his tool box — into his chest; and when I say early morning I mean when it was still dark out. The talon ends of three claw hammers were embedded into his head.
None of this was traumatizing at the time. But over the past few years I find myself living inside that visionary loop multiple times daily. And here, when I say daily, I mean when it’s light out. In the dark I have other devices and literary tropes to rely on.
All these years later I live in exile, in Hialeah, and as you might imagine I am half blind. I still look into the sun out of habit, but the sun at this hyper-capitalist meridian is out of tune — a legato A minor flat 6 chord that fills me with revulsion. I want to go back to my island where the sun is in the proper key.
But for now I wait in this dollar-rama thrift shop of a philosophically bankrupt and pestilent country. At least I still have my guaguancó and my son montuno. I carry those in my heart everywhere I go.
I do like the sound of the word kookaburra but I hate the fact that’s it’s a god damned dumb-ass looking bird. It should be a god damned marsupial with a name like that. I hate it when life does that!
Life does that all the time.
And I hate inhabiting my skin. It gets to me, especially these days — it happens more and more that I find myself with some sharp implement in hand ideating about all sorts of bitter and painful ends for myself, but I can’t get anything to happen. My hands won’t conform to the images unspooling in the projection room in my head.
But, man, do I remember mother and those stare-downs with the sun. For the record, I never blinked first. I was always called away to do my chores.
Sometimes I envy how the Mongols had Caffa (I think they call it Feodosia now) and their trebuchet delights; how the Spaniards had their mastiffs for Taino ambush oneupmanship; and how deftly American colonials deployed their pox blankets.
Why can’t I get what I want?
Please, please, please let me get what I want… but I’m even off of that song, as the man who sang it is a supremacist of some sort now.
The rails— bottom and top — don’t stay in place anymore… everything that rises must converge… or so mother told me. But I found, as all frauds are eventually found out — it was really something she gleaned from a Flannery O’Connor narrative… and then she said that Hemingway rewrote the last page of The Sun Also Rises 39 times.
Apocrypha?
Sometimes I feel like a detached bathysphere. All I have is this metaphoric gibbet and the wheel: I’m here alone. Pitched up here — 30 feet in the air, spinning a half turn with every stiff breeze…
image: p. remer
“He wants to weep for the overwhelm that sucks him in, a quicksand.”
“The words are growing in the field, and they hover above the page. They’re like flowers, and I pick the ones I like. My eye is roaming all over, trying to make connections.”
There is gothic organ music swelling and ebbing in the ether.
There is someone muttering “bummer” nearby and the smell of acrid pot wafting on an eddy of warm wind blowing irrationally from the right. There are ochres and yellows on the walls—an overall orange mood to the large room. You are seated at a long white rectangular table, light filters from a window to the right, unseen. And someone else repeating: “people die everyday, die everyday.”
There is something important here, but you can’t decipher it, not yet, but you feel you will. It’s comfortably warm here and a woman is moving about beyond your sight line with pleasant food on a white tray—you sense it but you can’t see her. This is an inviting place, you feel comfortable here.
But you can’t reconcile why it’s a bummer and why someone continues to repeat: “people die everyday, die everyday…”
“All of humanity is made up of nothing but bad poets … It’s precisely because I write such bad poems that one day I’ll be established as a great poet.”
I wrote this yesterday under the influence of twin tornadoes While hiding under the bed with my grandmother and dog I planned a funeral as mattresses, pans and medicines strafed the air I saw my brother’s arm impaled on a jagged rafter The grey-green sky draped like humid laundry above I heard telephone poles snap in succession like cannon fire Fred, from next door, called for Annie as he flew by among the shingles and sharp detritus A dishwasher smashed into my one remaining bedroom wall Splintered it in 138 pieces, and disappeared into that toothy vortex…
“Boys had nothing better to do than to hold onto their dreams with what they didn’t yet realize was desperation.”
— Matthew Salesses / I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying
