Hand in hand, walking, mother and child—appears every time I close my eyes. I see you in shadow, me in light—I am the younger of the two, sometimes—sometimes in reverse. A knock at the door—I freeze: everything outdoor is the danger of my criminal within, bald man just from jail, come by to remember the good that pussy was, comfort of the redness of my room, where we dined on monarch caterpillars and recess for boys and girls together—all in one cell, let outside for two hours a day, all for hiding in the woods from a flashlight a gun and a dog and when your knuckles hit the wood, your life story etches in terminal causeways beneath the great pyramid—Khufu's Horizon—my mother in the night sky. She is born! She is born! She dies! She dies! Terrible nightcloak busy paralysis stunned at the gate nothing of value noticed until it is dead by the time you hear these notes the woman in the red room will be maximally disintegrated, flowers, rocks, roses, stones. She release my hand running legless in a daisy field, wilderness of spots, pink in panties, my Ferris wheel stopped with me at the top and no way down. Trash bag parachute—ya dig? I am driven—I am not the driver. Like a diner working at a piece of chocolate cake with an Allen wrench. Fix a bicycle with powdered sugar. She guides me through a path of thorns, squeezes my fingers to alert danger—she knows the other side so well I wonder if she is in it. I recognize those whitened finger tips rap rap rapping at my chamber door! Know that my end will begin with the white wind rushing through my door—distance of an inch killing me, looseness of a chain that clicky-clangs with every stroke of the pedals. Squeezing my fingers, she bends the pinprick rules, my eye is gone! Gone through the tenor's holler, gone by the side of the road on the only move I ever survived—after that my head was in a vice and the rest of me kept alive on machinery filling a red room from carpet to roof—this is why I never leave. I am no body, only a head with imaginings still and vastly churning there are skies that churn this way and preternatural beings bending over the bed checking my organs with ET hands—bright orbs the size of marbles—I am alien. Part of someone else's breeding plan—subject of someone else's experiment, Dark City, unknowing my identity, switching us around each night—am I a murderer? Rapist? Raped? The one at the door? The one barring it from inside? Part of a clan of blind girls touching an elephant? It's a snake! It's a fan! Of course, reality is one, though people speak of it in different ways. I am the hurt and the healer, the punk and the Punk'd—I am desperation. I am relaxation. I am hoarder, ascetic, humble, pride. I have come to dance. My feathers touch one man, then a man, then a man—the floor lights up with every step and only lost in a memory, found—only seen in phantoms, the stage is obliterated, dead.
Everything I hoped is only in my head. I am a knotted tree, split at the base—one half dead and the other half carrying the weight for us both, the moving part and the still part, someday it is that the only part of me alive is a single leaf at the very top and a twisted vein spiraling all the way to the ground and sending up through dying trunks just enough molecule for me to read the light—the rest of me is bark and scales. Wondering if I will ever be saved—but I won't. This is it: the end of me, winding from the dirt into the sky, waving at the height of the world.
Taking in a momentary glimpse.
Starting out as momentary love, the admiration of my mother becoming her burden, her slough, the axe in the winnow of her hair—to a shirk, to annoyance, to a slithering, to a tow. And then to a pinprick, to a tack, to a nail, to a mouse, then to knowledge, then to horror, then to commerce, then to a hole in the door where an old-time key would fit—and thence to a cradle! Then to a grave. Then to the all-hallowed screaming shingled under the outer name of every place of peace.
A formal collection of handhelds from mother to daughter.
Profound conversations.
I see the mouths moving but cannot make out what they say.
They are on a dock somewhere in Mexico—a cruise ship—some meeting of minds decorated the backs of my eyelids, one a fetus, one a mom, one a teacher, the other taught—I hold to this image desperately I hope that when I wake I will remember it and I hope that it is true that what happened there really happened that I am remote viewing someone's life who was better than mine someone who didn't each throw away the key (one overtly, as I have—one covertly, as my mother) but that this vision is my future—or my past—and we will hold those hands forever.
But that is not the case.
I have closed myself inside a coma inside a room inside a house inside a world you are not welcome. Decided dead would be better than what everyone else brags about on Facebook: proclamations of fealty commitments in straw braggart love living like words below the wave. Messages written in sand—revoked in a fine period after viewing—meant for the ephemeral—temporary, transitory reading—a transient fish.
Everything is alabaster. Alabaster everything.
I seen you hold it in your hand, I see the twist of the digits, seen the dove turn into a rock and the rock turn into a dove. I seen the nightlight turn off by magic—by time—and I am left to the visions performed by my brain—in a theatre of time—forced to watch a voluntary troupe of improvisers—each of them drawing on their dreams—until the light comes back again.