Recurrent *working title*

“I need some sleep, I can’t go on like this,
Tried counting sheep, but there’s one I always miss…”

- The Eels

The skewed context of my recurrent dreams has forced a stand unlike any against the drudge of daily-ness.  The pine floor plaster wall safety of here (dasein) disassembled Derrida-like whenever sleep prowled from shadow.  Pillow-fluffed delta waves wormholed into a loom threading itself with an awful gravity.  The gothic architecture of this sepia re-imagining of my city was born of no discernible juxtaposition against the contents of my waking mind.  I’d never been anywhere but here.  As such, the place remains unnerving in its complexity and completeness.  Untouchable by any method of medication, a dark looking glass inextricably crystallized within my sleeping side.  And now I observe myself in the contrapposto.

In the midst of something I thought unendurable, I laid my services on the altar for auction to the highest bidder.  Relief never arrived, but that kneecap-shattering supplication found me indentured to an infernal contract nonetheless. 

The kaleidoscopic grain of the burl wood-paneled floors and book-swollen shelves makes a fog of what should be concrete features.  The room’s very foundation is malleable.  This, even the entryway, is discomforting.  Print dribbles from vellum and seeps into the whorls and knots of the numerous cabinets; furtive messages in lost languages eddy away just as one begins to sense a turn of phrase.  This is a passing-station where much may be known and nothing learned.  To linger is to allow the babel to become you.

One of the French doors’ small panes is broken.  The culprit – this time a Rawlings baseball – rests nearby, defiant.  The scene is never set quite properly.  Invading wind sweeps the curtains and varying trajectories of raindrops machine-gun through the jagged incursion.  The storm is invariably fierce when I arrive, injecting skeletal lightning into a lethal firmament.  But when I step outside, this otherwhere resolves into a hushed and fragrant autumn midnight.  A calm that settles as I require it.

Escaped leaves remain pigmented (if only indicated by a deeper saturation of antique photons) and moist to the touch.  This world teeters on the edge of Persephone’s return to Hades’ pomegranate-stained caress.  It is the letting-go place in a time of perpetual dying.  And I roam here, a reaper of twilight.

A carnival man with coal-smoke skin looms on a fruit crate near the edge of the hedge-lined pathway leading from the structure.  A vari-colored stovepipe hat gesticulates at a distance too far to be atop his head.  His soap-boxing is an evocation of bells and resonance, language as an insidiously self-recursive manner of knowing oneself, and the undeniability of faith in something (even if it be nothing) as a counterintuitive prerequisite for a healthier life cycle.

“An ingénue with dark eyes will upset your natural balance,” he says.

“Already done and said, padré.  No handouts for mendicants today.”  He glares but glints aware that he’s a figment of ticking clocks and my choice leads to wonders and malice he’s opted not to fathom.  He might have been my father elsewhere.  That makes sense.

Onyx-eyed woman.  He spoke of kohl-dusted orbs that glimmered tourmaline.  Lips, breasts and hips, perfect parabolic reflections of sacred scripts and s-curves alpine.  She bade me fancy impossibilities, possessed as she was of black will-o’-the-wisp passion.  And I, briefly haloed, dedicated myself as her willing fool. 

She remains peripheral.  A footnote to the task illuminated at the end of the trail. 

A single-file Lovecraftian platoon of gaslamps marches me toward metamorphosed visions of places I’ve known.  Flagstones reshape themselves into knobbled cobbles and my stride leads to a stylized, Victorian impression of an alley where I lit a dumpster fire years ago.  I had busied myself taunting flames, but the combustion was truly accidental.  Someone’s garage burned. 

Amid the smolderings of what now appears a ruined church nave, a lemur waits bright-eyed.  Insistent greenery has already shrugged through fissured stone around the ash-crusted altar perch.  The creature proffers its paws in a no-ill-intended gesture, inviting inspection.  His pads are blisters and pustules, the topography of flesh scorched while groping at truths not meant to be held close to the heart.  Rather than lay blame, he remains as a self-evident suggestion of a debt to be paid.  So when he disappears through an exit I had not seen, I follow.

The stairs are more moss than stone and the scent of spit-roasted intangibles intensifies as we climb.  This portion of the building remains mostly intact, starlight invading through the slightest of age-worn cracks.  Frameless canvases of irreplaceable souls I’ve hemlock fingertipped are mounted on the walls at regularly measured intervals.  The accusation is clear, but the suffering toward which this leads is one that’s long escaped, or never even been part of my memory.  Perhaps a patient blade has honed a unique atonement.

The familiar space that opens at the top of the stairwell is so expansive that the far edges appear pixilated and uncertain, though the walls in sight are clearly etched with my own mausoleum lullabies.  Cardboard boxes have scatter-piled everywhere, sometimes stacked to the ceiling.  Every forward movement dislodges this or that container, and the boxes vomit contents alien to any but each individual life I’ve displaced.  Spreading beneath my feet, the bric-a-brac that affected a keen sensibility one rare day inside each outlived owner now breathe time-capsule echoes of their possessors.  I wade through a litany of moments I’ve straight-pinned to my corked mental display in the manner of preserved butterflies.  And I relish the cruelty with which I’ve skewered their transience. 

But there is more.  Stepping like Astaire through the discarded spires of unjustly jostled unicorns, the wounded creature leads me through a menagerie of doors – portals I’ve seen before – where purpose is occasionally revealed, but more likely corrupted.

The fuzzed simian bows at me and scampers, apologetically I’ll concede, but his was a betrayal in any light.  Bringing me to her, the creature must know that he’s risked more than burnt hands. 

“You are not this, nor this…,” she says, her lips taking precious forms so the air can quaff wine goblet-ed words.  Not using the ruinous voice.  She prefers to massage the distraction, this sleight-of-hand.  Easy to make an undreamt wrong seem plausible.  I was never caught, so I didn’t know what might have been lost in the fire.  Very little, evidently.

“You’ve repeated that since I arrived,” I reply, suffering her misdirection.  She’s made her den in fading flax, a once-flowered bit of me that insists on looking moon-eyed down imaginary roads, insinuating there’s a choice anymore.  She knows I’ll envelop myself in the London fog through the archway that’s masoned into existence on my left.  Her expression, though…

“Who?”

“The one you never wanted.”

“Oh.”

It is kind of her to mention it.  My exit draws her wistfulness and it flows behind, tatters of something about what used to be that might have mattered once.

Back on the street cobbles resolve to pre-formed, 3-foot squares.  Arabesque Charles Dodgson gardens level into Marine-cropped pates, and the elaborate homesteads devolve into a generation of stillborn clones.  The artisanal past rightangle-edges into the flat-paneled new.  Trees reshuffle straight-row and the soil becomes asphalt molasses.

The one I never wanted.  The park and the streets and the 7-11 are the same.  Rustoleum chainlink and zoysia under sodium arclight oaktree stencils on the sidewalk, where your shadow only ever grows to the size you were as a boy. 

One by one as I walk past, the streetlights blink and hold their lids shut. 

This is the orchestra’s breathless gasp before their symphonic touch of bow to string.

The environment and movement gain infinite liquidity.  Birds describe jetstreams measured in nanometers.  The cry emerges, a falcon-screaming ecstatic pursuit of prey that rises in hairline fractions through each note on the scale.  The hairs on my body salute as I fastdraw through the ether to pluck out the reverberation and braid it as a tuning fork ‘round my wrist.

Upon securing the knot, the feeling is akin to the sound of a bathtub finishing its drain.  Squirrels do squirrel things again and acorns rattle around me.  My feet endeavor to carry me directly to the destination, knowing there will be no gargoyles leering or Jacobean revenge dramas to play out tonight.  The kinescopic analogue of my birthplace is showing itself without adornment.  The bare business of my presence here can never be clearer than on this particular night. 

It chokes out a revulsion that the other configurations never did.  The yellowed-photograph quality is more jaundice than sympathetic rendering.  The postwar sameness and the economy of building materials multiply into a pox on the mind.  One walks block after block without having moved an inch.

I am not afforded transportation.  I must walk.  Unavoidable buildings in which I spent bulky portions of my youth resolve out of the murk with the padlocked finality of memories in which I will never again set foot.  That’s the spot where Mike Pink broke his wrist ramping the steep, out-of-place incline between a barber and a muffler shop.  Here’s the hard-water stained picture pane with a real estate sign mouldering behind it, and behind that a large abandoned reception desk behind which I made the acquaintance of a voracious young woman from, well…

Recalling the personal is uncommon.  I’ve focused on the changes, miraculous architectural abominations set against the foul nature of the proceedings I’ve trudged to behold.  I’ve seen a whole family murdered in an extant wing of the art museum that was simultaneously my uncle’s basement.  It’s strange to suddenly echolocate caricatures of yourself that exist only in these particular, familiar haunts.  There are friends and meals and philandering that would never resonate through the mind’s eye without the conjurations of landmarks that previously served as oracles in our lives.  A kiss remains a kiss if you stumble on the place where it happened.

I’ve been asleep for more than three months.  I already visited every night.  I decided to stay.  I prefer this to my occupations when I’m awake.  I sleep, but I’m cared for.  Fed intravenously, given fluids.  Nurses appear to manipulate my arms and legs so the muscles don’t atrophy.  I know because I’m just asleep.  I could wake up.  It’s not a problem.  The problem is here.  The problem is what I think needs to be done.

“Nothing to be done,” the raccoon-eyed remnant of the girl says to me, my false Beatrice in bobbysox.  There’s no paradise through which she’ll guide me.

“There’s plenty to be accomplished,” I disagree.  She walks alongside and interlaces her fingers with mine.  One braided pigtail swats the side of my ear every fifth step.  She was always taller than me.  “The things I’ve seen here are not like walking with a girl through the fountains in the park at night,” I continue as we wade, pant-legs rolled, through the shallow pool scattered with Monet lilies and we shiver right through the spray.

“But you know why you’ve seen those things.  You came to the way-station before anything like that.”  Sad, it isn’t merely the sound of her voice that’s right.

Even after, night after night, I consider it must have been nature’s cruelest joke to double-helix reproduction to the facility of pleasure rather than the faculty of reason – she catches hold of something vital inside me.

“I have to get there,” I insist.  She goes.  She’ll return.

Before choosing mind over matter I spent a night adjusting the mementos of my geographies and chronologies into straight lines.  I wanted everyone to stand at attention, synchronized with blooming iris alignments that coaxed away our delineations between here and there.  I hoped to engrave dictation from the intentions that each photograph and snuff box and mechanical toy dinosaur had captured in its frail way.  My affinity for the moment frozen, and exaltation relived ad infinitum, overwhelmed my ability to suffer or remember the day-to-day.  The humdrum.  And rather than disgracing it as a defect, I wished for it to be a force wielded. 

And it is.  A terrible one.  Everything speaks to me.

The house is closer.  Distance fortunately, despite the lack of public transit, unconsciously slips in seconds of distraction.  I’ve never given any attention to my shoes here.  I wonder if they’re always the same, or if they bear any of the wear and tear?  Turns out they’re the chocolate brown Converse One-Stars that went missing senior year of high school – worn and torn – engrained with most of my wild-night miles.  They’re my walkin’ boots, my blue suede shoes, and I’m Savion Glover on the moon.