#queue(dreaming)

and it’s not particularly nice to be here. it’s too hot, with the sun so high in the sky that it’s almost like she’s staring down at us from a moral high ground we could never hope to reach, but it’s too cold, with the air conditioning so cold that my legs freeze up and your ankles feel like they’re on the verge of a cramp.

the room smells of nothing in particular, if i were to guess, but maybe i’m just used to the scent of my self-loathing soaking into the sheets and my desk and my mousepad and my pillows. and maybe you’re used to it too, since i’ve brought the fragrance of my purest self-erasure and right to self-desecration out to every outing i’ve ever been to (including that of my own).

you could probably recognize myself, not as myself, as long as you could taste my flagellation and the resultant bloodstains as a mist in the briny air. like a shark, it would be easy for anyone to taste the drops of blood i’ve made by cutting into my heart and soul even in the ocean of love that people have tried to drown me in.

but, you see, i don’t breathe underwater. my lungs don’t fill with saltwater and deltas and beds of cracked condiment layer cakes when i inhale. the alveoli don’t contract and fill up with the compliments and deliver the oxytocin to every inch of my body, as it needs it.

instead, i choke. i choke and choke on the kind words. i can’t drink them or swallow or hope to fill my gullet with the goodness i so desperately need. it flows right down into my breathing and i struggle to keep in time with the waves. and people take pictures, you see? they hope that swimming will let me know that i can breathe.

you must be watercolour for the pigments you portray present perils past permission lent by sorrowful patters.

you corrode catatonic a mournful merry wisp like a ghost in the night who can promise nothing but careless cavities to hold empty words and moments to-be-forgotten.

yet i am left to live in the mouth of a cave so closed and casket to be locked by the dreary forged day.

clear your cupboards for my half-teaspoon resolve. and let me kneel at the mercy of your mellow dice.

it will crush me and corner the cradle we constructed as crescent-caked callousness clean the canvas off which i came to

crave your care.

[Image text:

this is it, right? a grass pillow for my petal-laced dearest a tire swing held steady by a broken jump rope daisies waving to the sky, a waltz in the sunlight, reaching out to the endless blue motes of dust and barely-pollen inciting a small sneeze but nothing more mossy rocks like rivets into boilerplate earth my dewdrop placements seem real enough the leaves cast shadows from a sun on the wrong side but it’s a watercolour and the paint is too runny for me to fix the shade there. you always told me that watercolours were hard to work with. i think i see what you mean, although i’ve stopped picking up the brush there’s a dance you have to play with it but i never learned with my two left feet (you were always better at holding a beat steady) a slow-weeping hill, there bleeding a love-leeched memory i’ve cried on this hill before, i think. but it didn’t look that beautiful through my tears.

-- v.a.