Antoilleor

It was that type of ferocity got me in trouble in the first place.

Roaring down the highway, reds mixed with blues, all the colors of the sky stretched to their limit and wailing with the pain of saturation. The bullets struck all around me, through my passengers, taking damage along with themselves from a place I could no longer see.

Standing at the bar with head in hands. Susan asked me a question; I couldn’t even make out the wood grain enough to answer her. 

“How was it?” in the morning. How could I tell her I don’t even remember yesterday’s supper?

Drunk enough to know my drink order, and little else. 

It was a rowdy bar that night, flush with ecstatic graduates, all flaunting the accolades of their effort, drowning out the night with a humid buzz and a murky sound. I woke up in my bed that morning, all traces of my earlier tour scattered and lost around me like leaves to the wind. The new day was promised to me to never lose control again.

The treadmill thrummed below me with an admirable reliability. Sweat dropped, and the heart was a-flutter upon the conquering trot; then the fuzzy blackness came in and took all there was to have.

What is it when we make a loved one comfortable. To have a known effort, which, upon being conceded, is taken from us to guide us further on? I rested, face on the pavement, ready to make a final call.

How was it? then, when I died? did not friends take the trail away and then family make the failing sway?

I’m still stuck on that bridge. The water runs pink and orange sunset under me, making iridescent oilslick swirls with each riverstone encountered. I’m still on that bridge, even now, as thousands of fireflies sing the world around me. Trees are silhouetted against the sun, casting off golden waves of glowing enchantment. Owls call alone into the deaf distance, and the church bells’ chime is muffled as they’re taken down into the lightless tower.

“Oh, Duane, you must be so pleased!”

The mahogany-finished fan twirls delicately, slowly of its own accord in the humid breeze of the Hawaiian afternoon. A beetle attempts to traverse the thick carpet of the living, his dark body stark against the white floor. I bring the glass to my mouth as the ice clinks lazily within and take a sip of the cool, dark rum. If the light sifted any slower through the half-closed blinds, we’d violate relativity. I sigh contentedly through the boozy haze that shutters deeper feelings.

I knelt, metaphorically naked, before her that one evening at the fancy Italian restaurant that was an hour’s drive away. A captive audience regarded us with bated breath as she reached for the ring and uttered the incantation, but I didn’t hear the words, inaudible as they were in the eternal stretching of that moment. In some way, I am still there, kneeling, looking up, expectant. The walls and tables swam in colors around me at a nervous whirl when you touched the engagement ring, brilliant bright smiling as the restaurant’s applause submerged me in watery, dull thunder.

A home that’s the hearth of the hume as a heart is not hurt by a hart of a hue that is heard. We pass so dreamily and quickly through our middle age, as if it were an interlude, and not an act of its own. I awoke, prying my mouth from a saliva-encrusted circle emblazoned on the yellow shag carpet you adore so much. My shirt stuck from a cold, spilled puddle of margarita, its host glass tilted longingly within arm’s reach. A lit, stubby cigarette on the floor trailed smoke in wispy strokes up to the tiled ceiling, the wisps becoming laminar and broad upon reaching those higher altitudes, where we so hurriedly and often wish to join them.

And so you recline now, in our tiny Hawaiian home, on the spacious gray sofa. Floral patterns on our drapes bloom profusely, regardless of your current state. You leave me here alone, Marilyn, never to feel these emotions which so doggedly stalk me, as you gape in a quiet way at the stuccoed ceiling, dead in the arms of your modern fashion.

I remember how easily the sanguine flow streamed over my hands as I stabbed Mike Phillobos repeatedly, and with ever-increasing vigor; like red ink it was, as I wrung the debt out from his blood-soaked shirt. All in a day’s work, to pick up the money afterwards in a manila envelope while the beer cascaded smoothly down my throat. I feel responsibility at your passing, as if there is a small moneyed envelope I need to claim at this juncture.

It’s hard to affect me now, Marilyn: my heart sinks at a constant rate. Your dead mouth forms an “O” of surprise as you stare at that far-away place that only you can see. Surprise at the shortness of life, at the hatred that only I could see, at the nothingness that only we will see. Why can’t I find the motivation to take action?

Crystalline endeavors find us reaching vainly for unattainable handholds embedded in an unmoved omnipresence.

Leave me now; go on to your final home. The beetle crawls slowly towards you over jagged, carpeted peaks, but our faces indicate a steady state. I cannot function, cannot carry you onward to your rest, cannot simmer with you in summery pools, cannot recover from your passing.

For all the nostalgia in the world you wouldn’t see me budge.

I will stay behind here to toil vacantly in your absence, and to suffer in my aimless love for you.

Poor Boy is streaked with sorrowseed That transforms in prescient, Working presence of mind With calloused rendering and Streakless shadowy timbre.

Such moral lapses don’t Stir the collective midst Where entire nocturnal strands Slither sickly away From our sad, hopeful grasp.

Where one moment we might Shout happily and then in The next we awaken In darker chambers, All desiccated and rueful.

Ah, the unsullied and quasi-opioid bliss what caresses me daily and nightly, in both dim, neon-tinged cantinas and in the stark (yet somehow opaque) brilliance of my private chambers, wherein streams of quantized bits of light anatomize the sordid mess of my chemical yearning to that neurotoxic carbonic swirling Duo. That such a small particle could be the ultimate Consoler, the essence of contentment, is a marvel that is the constant object of my adoration. The only barrier to meeting Him is the fear of impossibility; the thought (irreversibly made inaccessible upon encountering Him) of returning to the old way of existing.

If He (for the nature of this companion is undeniably male) be absent in a given day, I should not wish to live the duration of that day. To feel the grasp of His murky arms, the giddy touch of His hands on the top of my brain; these sensations give me purpose. Only when I have been baptized in His unending river can the pounding of my heart and the perspiration of my forehead and the trembling of my extremities and the anxiety of continuous presence be calmed. 

See me resting in my urn as you bear me all about, grappling with my memory. The way your reluctance and disdain mars your beautiful face pains me, son. I weep from within my urn as the desert bird coasts and sand lizard slithers beside our lonely procession. I weep from my actions and inactions that have made you feel such hatred towards me. 

You have put my urn in the saddlebag nearest the horse’s buttocks, which are covered in a fur so lustrous from his healthy diet; you think this positioning of my final form fitting, but, truthfully, I deserve much less. Regrettably, I have earned the right to be trampled underneath your fine horse, into the gritty, ancient sands beneath his marvelous hooves, which are so perfectly manicured; the right to be crushed back into the tormented powder of our ancestral, pernicious fathers before us.

To so injure another human being and then pass away as I have done… the injustice will haunt you, and the guilt, me, for many lives to come. I am saddened by the thought that our conjugate spirits will twist spitefully after each other across further millennia, convoluting themselves inextricably within the energetic fabric which threads us all.

You dismount the horse, remove me and my urn from the saddlebag. You face the rising sun; look, son! as it dissolves the tenebrous forms of my malignancy towards you that have so long bewildered your mind and flustered your efforts. Son, watch! as the shimmering dawn lays naked on the crystalline dunes the hideous particularities of my wretched and unforgivable crimes committed unto my friends and family. Muttering a well-deserved curse, you up-end my urn, giving me over to the shifty desert winds who each whisper tortured rationalizations and sob-saturated apologies into the latest descendant’s ears…

The winds take me from my urn, but they cannot remove the burden I have left on you. However, it is good that we parted so soon…

He smashed his fist into my face

Like a cymbal crash.

As I dripped red onto the linoleum,

Cherry blossoms drifted down in lazy waves;

Circ'larus ones embe, an blossem Up a tassel of milky arms, then withdraw some. Flowen seolc folwen ye cadre to glorie As the court chases after the story; Circ'larus ones embe, an blossem!

Strecchende hyde seted tremulant an lotioned That the court may weep of sickening emotion. Auice an cordes streneþ with notes that ascenden; Thoughts amok, of kith and kin, Be-ware ye hyde seted in tremulous motion.

Ye woden dore opynst, thruch swuch hevy reyn Looms Feon’ Tenebrawne with scarlet drips and stains. Ye cort skeltereþ in manysom weis, But Auice holds Tenebrawne’s gaze, Even thruch swuch feersom lihtening an reyn.

Ye Feon’ wielde hisse rasourly whippe, And lashed Auice’s throat viciously with its tip, An sende out a spirt of blood that turnaþ Once around, blossoming of Tenebrawne’s wrath. Ye Feon’ grennaþ with ye handel in hisse grippe.

Yet hisse gren waikenst as Auice throweþ for breth; Her eyes widen at the onset of death, An ye Feon’ realise hisse orrible mistake, That the life of Auice was not his to take, An Tenebrawne weped as Auice sihed hire last breth.

I. Les plumes d’un oiseau

Spindelling down through swept windcrest To alight with but one shallow exhalation. Timid but clean advance the feathered breast, Birdsong trebled and freshened in elongation. Summery beams lume the meadow undressed, A floral sway exalt a bird’s elation.

By chirrup to steep you in my disorient, Lytle bridd who hopsteps in the flowing heather. Would you be aided by what Nature offers abluent, Or would you forego’er, with me, together? Meadowbrook run and Fieldseed grow as aliment: For you: become they only, like dessusweather.

What mitterances offer you through scrawly beak That you would sufferself to land by this unsigned sowl? I would my wested years not be the story you seek, Cageolements could not part you from me, zum wohl. Va-t’en, nowthough! Irristayted by your black plumage sleek, Troublant and peined is the passed; to you, my parole!

Your trinisfeet colored by the semblance of damp ashbeds, The scaly sinistre now recoils at the stir of m’years agone. Sorweclaw emprint as you wing airy upward threads, Qu’est-ce qui ne peut jamais terminer ce feuilleton? It is your gift of flight makes me whish you were dead. L’oiseau fait pas le fin; vas-y! fabrique-le!    [Fais-le croire que tu n’étais pas la contrefaçon.

II. Les bois d’un cerf

Past onway have I from the previous verdant vista Where was met the peering fowl of questing concern, Where grewon the tendriled blades of earthy arista, And there it was hoped mighte the day beturn.

Thruch now I loop the denser, inner weald; Drȳcræft circles eddies, possessed of darker mains. Sensetouched, swivelled and sekinge me, a-croiz a deere congealed. Ysewen and aswagende, I accept the antlered chèr me deigns.

A regal nape bewrays a lesser motive, a sethende want, Vous voulez que je juge Sieur Renwick, qui nous tous incarne? His wooden gestures wreath an emphathic vaunt: A la luxure, toujours je m’acharne!

Quiet nou, ye currouned animate surrendres ye foreground, Ye sky-kyssynge arborshafts yschadowed of heuenstones, And we cunneþ know’n þat ye historys of Deere weren ydrouned; Cunneþ know’n, bye hem sek, sorwely mones.

III. L’Héritage d’un homme

Down throttled wetly to Thine office deep, Mirrored toads gazing astutely      from without the glass. Once gazed we upon Thy murky keep, Known fixedly of what shuddered to pass.

We’ve seen what mangled tractions      among us cause When wild bestial rage makes us froth,      sound considerations pause And we thrust accusations ‘round      like a hot poker rod, In attempt to commend us to Thee,      disinterested God.

When cold sea-stones no longer      warm to Thy touch, Let creative inability not      worry Thee overmuch. Time has come for a realization,      a stark ministration; Concern Thyself not of Thine      upcoming defenestration.

“S’arch, by makin’ we way back longsides ‘fore panicky graves, we tempt risk of wakin’ agonies acrost ‘ternities ephemeral, gainin’ harms.”

“Aux’ry, ye worryin’ uncausedly; account on traipsin’ over such a mild territ’ry shielded and free; incessant frettin’ destroyin’ my smile.”

The pair passed stressly by unkempt swathes of bladey grass, which, grasping gripply at their muddy leather boots, curled sickly after losing of the hold of the armored and trespassing feet, endeavored of repossessing original motion. Miniature mountains of fire sentry’d from distance varied with orange tongues revealing whisperwise the poems of damned ghosts. Aux’ry, distempered at such dismissing from his S’arch, let the air humid draw creamy syllables from his lèvres; creoled words slipped thickly from the or’fice of S’arch in response: