#detonating-doll

Please don’t - 

leave my window or

the chiasmatic cave;

the slant has found

a home and -

the oak tree is a slave.

God is not an object,

your hair is not a crown,

Don’t continue with your tongue,

if the bottles’ bottom can’t be found.

He weeps -

he weeps -

but not because of me;

the fault is in my teeth,

and what they say

before they flee.

Most people are children,

specters of the pen,

dancing for helter skelter,

so they might die again.

The doubt -

it conquers for the

east or maybe for spring;

I know of your 

mind but not -

not what your mouth will bring.

God is not an object,

the chest is not a canvas,

I’ll see you for the climb,

but this world is not a palace.

//a.h.//

Why don’t you figure it out yourself? With a shotgun and an old obituary page. Without my scratched forearms in your hands. Without my art or my silly words with no meaning relevant to anyone else but me. It shouldn’t be that hard; take your time. Besides, you’re only a few minutes away at any given moment.

               Your hair might be screaming for an escape from the advice of friends. Your neck is bruised, but not in the bad way. You’ve got another religion’s God right above you, but you’re still praying to the old one. When will you tell the fog you’ve changed. It really shouldn’t be a problem, but you’re just a fucking mogul.

               And somehow, this ended after two weeks, one of which was too passionate not to build a lake around. The other was a mess, where we fell apart in each other’s mouths. Because of that, you now have a little of my empathy in your throat. What a shame.

               I’m your favorite, you’re mine for now. It’s the first sunny day in a long time. The scratches on my arms are almost healed, despite the fact that I’ve kept forming new ones on top. They’re not the most original marks of territory, but the place in which I found them is a little brighter.

               Here I go, again, sitting through a personal bout of convolution of the worst kind. I’ve only got five more minutes before I have to pack up and leave for a little, to see your other friends ask questions that drive everyone else crazy. You drive me crazy.

               If anything, please just lie to me until I find my own excuse to leave. Be soulful about it too. Don’t mind the stares coming from other lovers, who I was never really a lover to, just an outline to spend some money on. But that’s okay. We’ll get by in what we’re wearing now, even if it still smells like that night we first tried to outdo each other.

               That two weeks was a long time ago. We were younger then, maybe six whole years so. If you don’t want to be alone anymore, I’m your rival who will pretend to be a clearer version of myself. I promise I’ll lie to keep you happy. That song, or all of those songs, sound exactly like you, even when the church organ won’t stop wailing. I can’t decide whether or not I’m sick from listening or from the idea of you being the one who couldn’t give me a jacket.

9. Name a LEAST favorite of each: book, movie, tv show.

Oo this is hard. Book: Frankenstein. Movie: My brothers forced me to watch Cars so many times that I cannot watch it anymore. Tv Show: Gomer Pyle.  My family is obsessed with it and it's terribly irritating.

12. What is a weird habit you have, or people have told you have. (Weird, not bad. No nail biting or any of that nonsense.)

If I'm eating candy with multiple flavors I save one of each for the end and then eat them all together for one giant flavor blast and I've been told that this is w r o n g.

19: How many concerts have you attended? Which was your favorite? Least favorite? If none, who do you want to see live the most?

When the first snowflake hit my nose, I knew that it wasn’t a snowflake. The ash was made for drowning us; the flames were made for burning against our eyes. We were only kids, but now we were kids who had seen something burn, not just fade away. We were something, maybe not to the rest of the city, but to the sky. Oh, we were the sky.

Only one building burned. Only one building collected summer’s heat on a winter’s day. Only one building mattered in this moment, and it was ours. We could see our bedrooms shoot sparks onto the street, as the other neighborhood children danced barefoot and dodged around them. Our books were just piles of midnight soot, only useful for helping us stamp our way to the town square. Our front door, no longer red – or existent for that matter – could no longer keep anybody out. Our gardens weren’t growing, our windows weren’t shining, and our spirits weren’t broken. Oh, God, we were so alive.

I ran to my brothers, punching them in the arms to show our success. We were the kings and queen of this street now, even though our castle was gone. We could be dissenters, bandits of broad daylight.

“How fun will it be when mom and dad see this? Imagine their faces! They’ll be glowing from the flames! Oh, they’ll absolutely love it,” we chuckled, as we danced on our barren creation, “What a time this is!”

By now, the adults began to shuffle out of their little storybook pages, wondering why the sky had turned gold.

“The delinquents,” one screeched, “they’ve burned their own house down!”

“It’s about time,” said the old woman down the road, bowing her head, as we threw our cloudy confetti throughout the air.

We had created a utopian land, where we were no longer constrained to four walls and a blaring radio. We were the kings and queen of the city now, even though our castle was gone.

Soon, the sirens blared and the children shrieked as the magnificent red engines roared towards the fire. But what could they stop? What could they do except build our world even more. At this point, they had no choice but to be the fire’s friend. To be our friend. Our subjects, kissing our dirtied feet with open eyes.

The ash continued to snow down. And we were everything to the sky. Oh, we were the sky. Our hearts could not run any quicker; our pleasure could not ride into town any faster. There is something about a fire that makes us believe in everything that we never knew we could be. We could start over, just the three of us! What a world to see! What songs to be sung, and letters to be written to the children back here! We could be heroes! For more than a single day. The sky will last forever and so will we!

“God, what a beautiful painting you’ve created! With all the ambers and the reds and the blacks! What a world you’ve made; what a city you’ve broken!” I bellowed towards the seas of smoke above me, outstretching my arms to be taken up to the sky. I screamed one more time and then closed my eyes.

Another table waited on. Another slew of shaded, condescending looks. Another feast for one at midnight. Another day, another day, another day; they move by so quickly, but the nights are my true lasting lovers. The neon tragedies shine from the Laundromat across the street. The shadows of dusk crawlers with no jobs and nowhere to stay lurk past our streaked windows. They stop to give me winks filled with ill-wishes and concentrated pupils. I accept them in my mouth, as I twist my lips to brave the chapped cold of winter’s fingers. But, here I am, with a faded red apron filled with straws and pens, ready to take another order.

Tonight, the restaurant is empty, only inhabited by pinball machines and kitchen laborers whose backs are breaking from the heavy air. They still make pizzas for the men coming home from work, picking up dinner to bring home and enjoy after they shed their suits. I know they have tender families of crinkly-eyed mothers and high-achieving children. They’re not like us, the sewer rats of the city.

Now, a group of boys strolls in, hoping to ravage the room for something that will feed their stomachs, as well as their egos. They sit down, as rambunctiously as possible, shuffling their feet and tossing crumpled napkins at each other. Each wants to be the other one’s hero, the alpha dog. They are all megalomaniacs, fighting for a chance to find some breathing room. They’re just boys, so they feast like strays and shove each other out the door. I am alone again, except for the murmuring of the radio.

                It’s not late yet, but the seasons have taken the daylight with them. God, is it cold in this part of town. The air, the people, the cars. The sky is at ease, but the ground is shaking from the frozen dew caressing it. My world is shaking. My world is shaking.

                For now, there is a thorn in my side. I am the forgotten word in a chorus of naysayers. The broken tile in the palace. The book with its last page torn out. I can’t be moved, that’s the problem. I do my rounds from table to table; I am just a race horse on a beaten track, except I never win prizes, just a check worthy of minimum wage.

                I set my coat down on the counter, as I gather my soul. It is now 11:40, and I am ready to end my day. When I get home, I will take off my smile and put on my robe. I think of the sweet, sweet touch of the velvet as I walk to my car in the back lot. My hands are too callused to handle the steering wheel, so I sit there, waiting for them to soften and for my thoughts to thaw. I don’t want to be the forgotten, broken one anymore. I want to move, spiral out of control with another soul. To have that connection, oh, would it taste good, like ambrosia trickling down my throat. Oh what a day that would be.

                A heart beats. It sends blood to the dripping canals all over the body. It is the timepiece of fear and lust and rage and insanity. Yet, it cannot sing so that the fallen angels can play along. Or maybe we just can’t hear it.

                Somehow, I’m still here, even with my heart in my head and my hand in the air. I’ve tried to coddle the infection, but the sunlight doesn’t shine on the floor. There’s only a tiny speck of light burning in the hole I’ve created, like a miner searching for rubies. Except he never finds them. But I’ve found a song that before could never ring past the cathedral doors of my chest so that the whole world could hear what I really have to say. But now the song is here to forgive and grow its bright eyes.

                The song is not a beat; the heart lies perfectly still, as if maybe it knows that the mind is what truly kept me going all along. The song is just a pounding of heartstrings, each with its own tinge of sin and late nights. This song is only the first in a trilogy of lovers taken back by what they find on my bookshelf. Even with this gaping hole in my chest, the heart still has songs to sing about people I always wish to know.         

                I still have my hand reaching towards God and his judgments, yet the faces of the crowd don’t realize that I’m here with a weeping ode to be heard. They continue, with their heads ducked and their cheeks on fire, writing my eulogy. They once sensed my anger but cannot lace my sober apologies and drunken slander between their fingers. The melody still hasn’t stopped, still releasing the score of backseat symphonies the heart has written for a year. The faces all have their own music boxes, wound up at birth, in their pockets, so maybe my heart’s hymns will never be heard. Except I know…

And on the third day, I awoke. From a slumber of symphonies and ballets in my head. From a handful of rings and a basket of ribbons. From a thousand kisses and a thousand tears. And when I awoke, I did not know what to do with myself. The river was dry, and the sky tried telling me stories, but I still I remained mute. I knew that, this time, I was dead. I could see my shrouded body inhabiting the spot where ancient dirt used to be. But my soul was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t feel it in my chest or on my skin or in the back of my throat. It was gone, and if my soul was gone and my body was down there, then what was I?

  I tried ringing the bell at the gate, hoping someone as broken as I was would answer. I begged the tongues of salvation to let me stay. God, I wanted to stay, but God wasn’t around to hear my pleas. Because they were silent and God can never hear your thoughts as much as you wish he would. Where is my soul, oh, where is it? My only friend, my medicine in bloodied ceiling days. Soul, where are you? I cannot die without you. I rang the bell again, wishing that anyone, even a saint himself, would open the gate for me. I just wanted to rest; I was numb from the scratching and bruises on my thighs and knuckles. I tried breaking my wrists and biting my cheeks, in the hopes that someone would smell my blood and be tempted to drink it.

  Soul, I need you now. You’re my timepiece and my footsteps. Your shadow is my shadow, your eyes are my eyes. Please, Soul, please, come back. You’re my key to the afterlife; I have shackles, I’m not free up here. I don’t think I ever will be, but please stand by my side. I’m sick of hearing the others dance and tremble on their knees. I need to feel again, please. Please. Please.