I. Loco
Life is tender if you gently let yourself float through years like a balloon.
Life is tender when you lie in your room writing small soliloques with multicolored crayons.
During this time of tenderness you write with rhyme and meter and divinty bursts from your solitude.
This time alone is living, even if you float in a moatlike space in cool black waters with seaweed clutching to your ankles.
Even if it seems as if every path through your larynx is only silent breath, an expulsion of nothing but dust from the dead.
This persons, who sat in a wheelchair across from me in my room, name was Stetson. He was a newcomer, my new roommate.
I awoke that morning in a white suit and slippers. I let my fingers slide gently through the cold bars on the window over my bed. The bars formed a mask which mixed with the sunlight and created a mixture of colors over my face that blinded me. I closed my eyelids and examined the shapes and sizes of alien forces, armless creatures of purple mass with stars for eyes.
I gently set my fingers to my eyelids and watched the creatures dissolve into particles of stained glass. Particles of Saints that fell from grace into the darkness of my mind.
I knew Stetson. I had been Stetson or I had met Stetson years before. He sat queitly in his wheelchair. His eyes were covered with cloth and his arms tied outward to expose the fresh red lines that moved slowly like earthworms from the lower palm of his hands to his inner elbow. Fantastic designs of fresh red stains formed into ameobas that slowly danced in an ecstasy of orgiastic proportion.
Stetson did not move, he only sat, silent as a teacher.
"Welcome." I said to him, "This room is cold and lonely and sends chills up my feet. Sometimes my fists beat the cold air and sometimes I fall asleep with frozen tears."
Stetson only sat in silence.
"This is just a starter." I said, "You know a kickoff, a boost. I'm trying to get my feet on me and back on track."
"Do you sleep?" Stetson asked.
"Sleep is a wonderful asset to the world, and they give us such darling little pills that help us to find it." I replied.
"Well then sleep." He said.
So I laid down and slept as well as one can sleep when a complete stranger sleeps in the bed next to you. A stranger who stares down at you and scopes you out with his mind. A stranger that envisions you with your entrails gutted and thrown on the floor like confetti. A stranger that slowly removes your legs and arms and sets your torsoe aside like some sick joke.
"Go ahead use them! Go ahead free yourself! Use your arms and strike me! Make a run for it! Come on, or have you given up!" The stranger would scream.
So I slept as well as one can sleep when you just wake up, when the only reason for the drowsiness is the white pills you take from white cups. Pills given to you from the smiles and friendly gestures of men and women who can smile. People who can go home after work and spit out the bad day and start again fresh, to feed the freaks.
But there is freedom in not being able to play in the sun. Sometimes my spirits are drawn into the translucent heavens of fake light. I have the freedom to cry, bite, hit, swear, spit.
Stetson was a larger man than me.
That afternoon after we woke from our slumber Stetson looked over at me and asked me why I was there. I grimaced and stared off in a theatrical stare.
"Who knows?...I forget...I think I was depressed."
"Your just a fucking kook thats what you are."
"That could be so."
Then I asked why he was there and he began to scratch his groin and growl. He slung his head back like a sling shot and threw his words at me like a pellet of iron.
He began to tell me about how he lived in downtown Reno and was a member of a gang. He said that a rival gang had smelt blood and was out for action. All his friends felt the heat, some of his close friends had recently faded out, reached for the light, and moved on to some perverse heaven.
All he said he recalled from that evening was the darkness. The sky had no stars. Everything was lit by street lights, red and sinful.
He walked with a partner of his when someone hit him over the head. He blacked out and when he awoke his partner had been beaten to death. The murderer had left the iron rod next to the bloody body, cold and unremorseful.
He said that he felt a rage in him that he had not felt before and he ran as fast as he could six blocks to the south were he new that rival gang members would hang out. He spotted a rival gang member and ran up to him and shot him in the chest.
The night reverberated with the shot and sent a rush of electricity through him as he shot the gang member three more times in the chest, point blank. He felt so good, so powerful as he knelt down on his honches and felt the warm blood. He tasted the blood.
He then realized that his life was over that this one act had been his undoing and he ran again with the gun in his pocket and headed towards his mothers house.
His mother had been battling back pain and spent most of her welfare checks on pills. Most of the time when he was at home she slept on the couch in a stupor brought on by over medication. He couldn't remember a time that they had actually had a conversation. He ran in the front door and past where his mother slept and grabbed a large variety of different pills, around seven or eight of them, and swallowed them down with a glass of water that sat next to the couch.
He ran back out into the night and towards his girlfriends house a few houses down. She had left with her parents and no one was home when he got there. He broke into the house through the front window and turned on all the lights.
He went to the restroom and found some razor blades and slit his wrists from the bottom of his hands up to his inner elbow, as deep as he could.
His blood came out hot and fast as he looked down at his wrists in awe. He felt dizzy and lost as he moved out of the bathroom leaving a trail of his blood behind him. He stumbled into his girlfriends room and began to write "I Love You" in blood on her wall by her dresser mirror and fell to the floor in one last pleasurable quiver.
Only to awake in a hospital, and then to sit across from me in my small white cubicle and to watch me as I made designs with dust particles and light.
I looked over at him.
"My friend was a corpse also, and when he was buried out in the desert a patch of Azaleas grew, they grew even though it was rocky ground that never recieved water." I said.
"Oh." He replied.
Stetson escaped the next day. I heard awhile later they had caught him and put him in some sort of white room and tied him to a table without any clothes and gave him a month to think.
Whatever people think of in situations like that.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
II. Brenda
I thought I was a prophet, or a poet.
I sat in wait for my time, some miracle. I wondered if miracles existed, I wondered if I could write at all.
It was then I realized that I was ignorant. I was nothing. I never had the ability to kill or to follow some tragic script or become some tragic figure with both hands pressed against my lips in prayer for forgiveness.
Her name was Kat. She was petite like a small fragrant European herb. She would wear her hair in a little ball on top of her head.
Her eyes were blue and watery, they were soft eyes. Soft and experienced.
Half the time the things she would say would have no meaning, just senseless words. The words would float from her lips in gentle spirals like cigar smoke and would always land on the ground in a heap, like discarded nightwear.
I loved her voice, it wouldn't bring forth intellectual sputum but more of a chirping, like a Red Robin.
We would travel around like one body. I was the lumbersome body and she was the voice, the expression. We would sit over coffee. I being the body would drink the coffee and her being the passion would discuss the light reflected off of the liquid or the steam frolicking from the top of the cup.
We would drive and I would force my foot on the accelerator until the car would be close to overheating and she would explore the words explaining how warning signs and reckless abandon were what made living real.
Sometimes we would sit at the park and she would play her flute. At these moments I realized that she was really Venus and I the mortal Tannhauser who by loving a goddess had removed himself from mortal man.
Then we would lay back in the grass and speak French, well she would speak French and I would try to understand. I didn't really listen to the words. Just the way the words flowed from her like a liquid. They made me feel as if I was underwater. I would swim with every vowel and dive with every consonant.
Her body never touched mine. I never felt the moist touch of her lips or carressed her slender unshaven legs. Instead I became her. I joined with her spirit. I was a giant and she rode on my shoulders.
Yet through all this she wasn't really there. She was speeding along in her mind much too fast and I really did not exist to her. I was only the body who listened to her voice, her flute, her French. I didn't realize this until years after her murder.
Years after I struggled with her being gone. Years after I carved her name into my chest with a knife and sat in the bathtub and bathed in my own warmth.
I remembered Kat once in group therapy. There was a woman, in her late twenties, who began to sit next to me in group. She always seemed distant as if she had never had a friend and when she talked her voice came out in a whimper and a whine.
I felt a strong sexual pull towards her. She always said the same thing.
"In my dream, there is a little corner where the grass grows and a tree. It is a Willow Tree. Some Chrysantheums and Mrryh sprout from the center, there are rocking horses and cradles. Toys are sprawled in the shade that covers me. From the willow a face of divine happiness, of youth. It is always there staring at me. I am there and I do not want to leave."
I always daydream of Brenda when she tells the group her story. Brenda was a friend of mine from Elementary school who was always by my side. Brenda murdered Kat. She had hit her with a shovel in my backyard and then looked over at me with a strange smile on her face.
"Fucking nut." Someone said in group to the new girl, and our counselor quickly told him that was inappropriate.
Nosferatu
III. Transmutations
I know where I am and why.
Once deep down inside I pushed me away and filled in its place a stranger, that no one knows. This someone stares at me when I am drowning in feelings, when I am feeling lost, when I can't remember my name.
Because of Brenda. Did Brenda know what I felt when I awoke in this room? The feeling as if I had gone numb, that I was stuck in a cavern far from mankind. Did Brenda know how I felt when I looked at Stetson with his jaundice stare, his eyes filled with the shame of murder?
When you left I did not wish to speak to anyone. I felt myself becoming a hardened artifact of some distant far off land. I felt my heart and mind become strangers, miles from one another.
Brenda, you turned my burning red heart into an ashen grey.
Cars drove past us that night, their headlights screamed at us, they screamed at my tears. Then I felt time stop, I felt my future lost, I felt my past disappear. This was my last beat taken by my heart to live. My eyes grew tired of looking, I gave myself over to the wolf of goodbyes.
But this is all bullshit, through everything I think I was a normal kid.
I met Brenda in elementary school. We had Mrs. Tumbles third grade class together. We would sit in the front row of class ignoring our studies and giggle about our smells and bodily functions.
We laughed when Mrs. Tumble told the little boy that sat three seats behind us that he needed to control himself since he was always shitting his pants. She would send him outside and spray air freshner over his seat.
That made us laugh like we had never laughed before. At lunch we would journey out to the far end of the soccer field and talk about our stamp collections and any movies we had seen. She would always include adult movies she had seen when her parents were out.
Once another boy had grabbed her and kissed her. I broke into a rage and threw him onto the recess playground and started to swing my fists, one after the other, on his face. I could feel his nose crack and I felt his blood spray on my face. I remember the loss of control.
This was the first time I lost control. I had never lost control before. The second time would have to have been the first time I made love.
I only went to Brenda's house once. Her parents were never home and we would run around the house pretending we were in some strange Science Fiction movie. I always played the monster and she would chase me around with a plastic ray gun.
Her mother had many interesting things I had never seen before. Brenda said that her mother had picked up things from around the world. Like the strange bronze bowl with snakes that protruted out from the sides. Brenda told me that it was from a place called India.
We would bang on bongo drums that Brenda's mother had given her from Africa. We would look at stamps that Brenda's mother had given her from Germany. Brenda's most prized stamp was the one she had of Adolf Hitler.
In class we had to read about Hitler and WWII. I couldn't understand what could bring a man to such cruelty. I forced myself to read all I could about him and what he had done in the war.
Insanity has many faces.
Scene from Metropolis
IV. A Time for Changing
Now this is all bullshit... true bullshit.
Have you ever had a tortured mind. Has your brain ever been stuck on a rack and stretched until it pulls apart.
The stars just told me what to do. My astrology led my path. The stars said "wake" and I woke up. The stars said "feel" and I felt. The stars said "sleep" and I slept.
I had misplaced my childhood relationship with Brenda, my love affair with Kat, the death and the destruction of my choices.
I only wanted to drown in a pile of evergrowing bills and T.V. programming. I only wanted to succeed at my work.
I threw the shovel to the ground and fell to my knees. My parents backyard was suddenly filled with the sounds of crickets and frogs. I knew that my few flings with beauty, ugliness, and fate, had placed me directly under the moon with my bloodied hands covering my face from the stars.
Life is tender if you gently let yourself float through years like a balloon.
Life is tender when you lie in your room writing small soliloques with multicolored crayons.
During this time of tenderness you write with rhyme and meter and divinty bursts from your solitude.
This time alone is living, even if you float in a moatlike space in cool black waters with seaweed clutching to your ankles.
Even if it seems as if every path through your larynx is only silent breath, an expulsion of nothing but dust from the dead.
This persons, who sat in a wheelchair across from me in my room, name was Stetson. He was a newcomer, my new roommate.
I awoke that morning in a white suit and slippers. I let my fingers slide gently through the cold bars on the window over my bed. The bars formed a mask which mixed with the sunlight and created a mixture of colors over my face that blinded me. I closed my eyelids and examined the shapes and sizes of alien forces, armless creatures of purple mass with stars for eyes.
I gently set my fingers to my eyelids and watched the creatures dissolve into particles of stained glass. Particles of Saints that fell from grace into the darkness of my mind.
I knew Stetson. I had been Stetson or I had met Stetson years before. He sat queitly in his wheelchair. His eyes were covered with cloth and his arms tied outward to expose the fresh red lines that moved slowly like earthworms from the lower palm of his hands to his inner elbow. Fantastic designs of fresh red stains formed into ameobas that slowly danced in an ecstasy of orgiastic proportion.
Stetson did not move, he only sat, silent as a teacher.
"Welcome." I said to him, "This room is cold and lonely and sends chills up my feet. Sometimes my fists beat the cold air and sometimes I fall asleep with frozen tears."
Stetson only sat in silence.
"This is just a starter." I said, "You know a kickoff, a boost. I'm trying to get my feet on me and back on track."
"Do you sleep?" Stetson asked.
"Sleep is a wonderful asset to the world, and they give us such darling little pills that help us to find it." I replied.
"Well then sleep." He said.
So I laid down and slept as well as one can sleep when a complete stranger sleeps in the bed next to you. A stranger who stares down at you and scopes you out with his mind. A stranger that envisions you with your entrails gutted and thrown on the floor like confetti. A stranger that slowly removes your legs and arms and sets your torsoe aside like some sick joke.
"Go ahead use them! Go ahead free yourself! Use your arms and strike me! Make a run for it! Come on, or have you given up!" The stranger would scream.
So I slept as well as one can sleep when you just wake up, when the only reason for the drowsiness is the white pills you take from white cups. Pills given to you from the smiles and friendly gestures of men and women who can smile. People who can go home after work and spit out the bad day and start again fresh, to feed the freaks.
But there is freedom in not being able to play in the sun. Sometimes my spirits are drawn into the translucent heavens of fake light. I have the freedom to cry, bite, hit, swear, spit.
Stetson was a larger man than me.
That afternoon after we woke from our slumber Stetson looked over at me and asked me why I was there. I grimaced and stared off in a theatrical stare.
"Who knows?...I forget...I think I was depressed."
"Your just a fucking kook thats what you are."
"That could be so."
Then I asked why he was there and he began to scratch his groin and growl. He slung his head back like a sling shot and threw his words at me like a pellet of iron.
He began to tell me about how he lived in downtown Reno and was a member of a gang. He said that a rival gang had smelt blood and was out for action. All his friends felt the heat, some of his close friends had recently faded out, reached for the light, and moved on to some perverse heaven.
All he said he recalled from that evening was the darkness. The sky had no stars. Everything was lit by street lights, red and sinful.
He walked with a partner of his when someone hit him over the head. He blacked out and when he awoke his partner had been beaten to death. The murderer had left the iron rod next to the bloody body, cold and unremorseful.
He said that he felt a rage in him that he had not felt before and he ran as fast as he could six blocks to the south were he new that rival gang members would hang out. He spotted a rival gang member and ran up to him and shot him in the chest.
The night reverberated with the shot and sent a rush of electricity through him as he shot the gang member three more times in the chest, point blank. He felt so good, so powerful as he knelt down on his honches and felt the warm blood. He tasted the blood.
He then realized that his life was over that this one act had been his undoing and he ran again with the gun in his pocket and headed towards his mothers house.
His mother had been battling back pain and spent most of her welfare checks on pills. Most of the time when he was at home she slept on the couch in a stupor brought on by over medication. He couldn't remember a time that they had actually had a conversation. He ran in the front door and past where his mother slept and grabbed a large variety of different pills, around seven or eight of them, and swallowed them down with a glass of water that sat next to the couch.
He ran back out into the night and towards his girlfriends house a few houses down. She had left with her parents and no one was home when he got there. He broke into the house through the front window and turned on all the lights.
He went to the restroom and found some razor blades and slit his wrists from the bottom of his hands up to his inner elbow, as deep as he could.
His blood came out hot and fast as he looked down at his wrists in awe. He felt dizzy and lost as he moved out of the bathroom leaving a trail of his blood behind him. He stumbled into his girlfriends room and began to write "I Love You" in blood on her wall by her dresser mirror and fell to the floor in one last pleasurable quiver.
Only to awake in a hospital, and then to sit across from me in my small white cubicle and to watch me as I made designs with dust particles and light.
I looked over at him.
"My friend was a corpse also, and when he was buried out in the desert a patch of Azaleas grew, they grew even though it was rocky ground that never recieved water." I said.
"Oh." He replied.
Stetson escaped the next day. I heard awhile later they had caught him and put him in some sort of white room and tied him to a table without any clothes and gave him a month to think.
Whatever people think of in situations like that.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
II. Brenda
I thought I was a prophet, or a poet.
I sat in wait for my time, some miracle. I wondered if miracles existed, I wondered if I could write at all.
It was then I realized that I was ignorant. I was nothing. I never had the ability to kill or to follow some tragic script or become some tragic figure with both hands pressed against my lips in prayer for forgiveness.
Her name was Kat. She was petite like a small fragrant European herb. She would wear her hair in a little ball on top of her head.
Her eyes were blue and watery, they were soft eyes. Soft and experienced.
Half the time the things she would say would have no meaning, just senseless words. The words would float from her lips in gentle spirals like cigar smoke and would always land on the ground in a heap, like discarded nightwear.
I loved her voice, it wouldn't bring forth intellectual sputum but more of a chirping, like a Red Robin.
We would travel around like one body. I was the lumbersome body and she was the voice, the expression. We would sit over coffee. I being the body would drink the coffee and her being the passion would discuss the light reflected off of the liquid or the steam frolicking from the top of the cup.
We would drive and I would force my foot on the accelerator until the car would be close to overheating and she would explore the words explaining how warning signs and reckless abandon were what made living real.
Sometimes we would sit at the park and she would play her flute. At these moments I realized that she was really Venus and I the mortal Tannhauser who by loving a goddess had removed himself from mortal man.
Then we would lay back in the grass and speak French, well she would speak French and I would try to understand. I didn't really listen to the words. Just the way the words flowed from her like a liquid. They made me feel as if I was underwater. I would swim with every vowel and dive with every consonant.
Her body never touched mine. I never felt the moist touch of her lips or carressed her slender unshaven legs. Instead I became her. I joined with her spirit. I was a giant and she rode on my shoulders.
Yet through all this she wasn't really there. She was speeding along in her mind much too fast and I really did not exist to her. I was only the body who listened to her voice, her flute, her French. I didn't realize this until years after her murder.
Years after I struggled with her being gone. Years after I carved her name into my chest with a knife and sat in the bathtub and bathed in my own warmth.
I remembered Kat once in group therapy. There was a woman, in her late twenties, who began to sit next to me in group. She always seemed distant as if she had never had a friend and when she talked her voice came out in a whimper and a whine.
I felt a strong sexual pull towards her. She always said the same thing.
"In my dream, there is a little corner where the grass grows and a tree. It is a Willow Tree. Some Chrysantheums and Mrryh sprout from the center, there are rocking horses and cradles. Toys are sprawled in the shade that covers me. From the willow a face of divine happiness, of youth. It is always there staring at me. I am there and I do not want to leave."
I always daydream of Brenda when she tells the group her story. Brenda was a friend of mine from Elementary school who was always by my side. Brenda murdered Kat. She had hit her with a shovel in my backyard and then looked over at me with a strange smile on her face.
"Fucking nut." Someone said in group to the new girl, and our counselor quickly told him that was inappropriate.
Nosferatu
III. Transmutations
I know where I am and why.
Once deep down inside I pushed me away and filled in its place a stranger, that no one knows. This someone stares at me when I am drowning in feelings, when I am feeling lost, when I can't remember my name.
Because of Brenda. Did Brenda know what I felt when I awoke in this room? The feeling as if I had gone numb, that I was stuck in a cavern far from mankind. Did Brenda know how I felt when I looked at Stetson with his jaundice stare, his eyes filled with the shame of murder?
When you left I did not wish to speak to anyone. I felt myself becoming a hardened artifact of some distant far off land. I felt my heart and mind become strangers, miles from one another.
Brenda, you turned my burning red heart into an ashen grey.
Cars drove past us that night, their headlights screamed at us, they screamed at my tears. Then I felt time stop, I felt my future lost, I felt my past disappear. This was my last beat taken by my heart to live. My eyes grew tired of looking, I gave myself over to the wolf of goodbyes.
But this is all bullshit, through everything I think I was a normal kid.
I met Brenda in elementary school. We had Mrs. Tumbles third grade class together. We would sit in the front row of class ignoring our studies and giggle about our smells and bodily functions.
We laughed when Mrs. Tumble told the little boy that sat three seats behind us that he needed to control himself since he was always shitting his pants. She would send him outside and spray air freshner over his seat.
That made us laugh like we had never laughed before. At lunch we would journey out to the far end of the soccer field and talk about our stamp collections and any movies we had seen. She would always include adult movies she had seen when her parents were out.
Once another boy had grabbed her and kissed her. I broke into a rage and threw him onto the recess playground and started to swing my fists, one after the other, on his face. I could feel his nose crack and I felt his blood spray on my face. I remember the loss of control.
This was the first time I lost control. I had never lost control before. The second time would have to have been the first time I made love.
I only went to Brenda's house once. Her parents were never home and we would run around the house pretending we were in some strange Science Fiction movie. I always played the monster and she would chase me around with a plastic ray gun.
Her mother had many interesting things I had never seen before. Brenda said that her mother had picked up things from around the world. Like the strange bronze bowl with snakes that protruted out from the sides. Brenda told me that it was from a place called India.
We would bang on bongo drums that Brenda's mother had given her from Africa. We would look at stamps that Brenda's mother had given her from Germany. Brenda's most prized stamp was the one she had of Adolf Hitler.
In class we had to read about Hitler and WWII. I couldn't understand what could bring a man to such cruelty. I forced myself to read all I could about him and what he had done in the war.
Insanity has many faces.
Scene from Metropolis
IV. A Time for Changing
Now this is all bullshit... true bullshit.
Have you ever had a tortured mind. Has your brain ever been stuck on a rack and stretched until it pulls apart.
The stars just told me what to do. My astrology led my path. The stars said "wake" and I woke up. The stars said "feel" and I felt. The stars said "sleep" and I slept.
I had misplaced my childhood relationship with Brenda, my love affair with Kat, the death and the destruction of my choices.
I only wanted to drown in a pile of evergrowing bills and T.V. programming. I only wanted to succeed at my work.
I threw the shovel to the ground and fell to my knees. My parents backyard was suddenly filled with the sounds of crickets and frogs. I knew that my few flings with beauty, ugliness, and fate, had placed me directly under the moon with my bloodied hands covering my face from the stars.