cardboard adolescent

To wrap you around me and keep the stars and the moon in a cloud around my waist. Catch the sunlight in a golden cup and get drunk on druid's hill with six pleasant, erudite beavers. Something about the way the Church glows as the Sun hides, or as I hide, lying and facing in directions that eventually branch and diverge. There are veins that connect me to the stars and they pull me upward, over the heads of stunned spectators and overprotective parents. I can't say which I prefer, the spiraling closure of Gothic arcs or the gaping ruptures following the movements of a restless Earth, the beautiful violence of tectonic plates trying to get comfortable. I think of being filled with sand, of bursting with obscene life, worms and weeds. He is determined to understand me, so he can beat me at my own game. I shuffle the cards apathetically, dealing them with detached eyes, automatic hands. He gets upset when I win twice in a row, and deals with his frustration ironically. I fake bemusement. Eventually he gets up and says he has to leave, and does so. He leaves a trail like a snail, the room feels sick and heavy with his mucus. I have trouble breathing, I feel I am sticking to my chair, I feel that this room is becoming a mirror for my body, and my illness is a decomposing figure leaning against the coat rack, falling apart in unsettling fleshy drips. Bones clatter and roll along the floor. I light a cigarette, and flames rip through the air. A thing is not inevitable until it is part of who you are. The blue screen prompted him for a response. This call was unalarming, it had been domesticated, he could justify himself glibly. “I did it for no reason;” the synthesis of hero and anti-hero is a measure of bad faith, the faithless protagonist is neither hero nor anti-hero because (s)he can not structure a narrative, things must happen to them or they can only speak through the discontinuities of what is expected of them. So, for instance, with the prince who, upon finding the princess, coughs. She awakes from her slumber prematurely, while he is still an approaching shadow. It is human nature to put sunglasses on a fish. With ascending classes of infinity, God presents us with independent realms of aesthetic ecstasy. The imaginary, with the density of the irrational, fills in reality and pulls around us like a blanket. The folds of spacetime are the robes of a naked Adam, smiling innocently as he waves the fabric. Next to him lies a faithful dog, grinning and panting, tail in mouth. Our prophets whisper madness to the future. They have seen the past with burning eyes of madness, they have seen the horror of lives betraying their limits with blood-curdling screams and hot iron. They say the sound of searing skin has no end. Father told me I would have to abandon him to follow Christ. He told me I would have to count all those I knew as nothing. As a young child, this made me feel oddly elated. I pressed down on my eyelids and resumed my flight through the isolated world of androgynous bricks, giving forms the opportunity to present themselves. Ready, as always, to provide an audience. I would love to map the curves of your shoulders, to lift you in the air and swing you around, and lick the corners of your eyes. “Come,” she said, “let's get out of here.” She stepped up, onto the horizon. She became the color of the sky, she was a dancing white outline on the edge of the big open. I yearned to chase her down the labyrinths of her convoluted steps. The harmony of the spheres hung about her neck. She did not belong in my corduroy afterlife; her escape was bittersweet. I played a song to mourn the loss and managed to charm myself. A frenzy of blood and wine does not ensue, rather, the lyrical laughter of the opium den, enamored glances that skip along veils dropping slowly, playfully. The mystery of the feminine becomes the mystery of its disappearance. Finally I get my wish, surrounded by beautiful women, each a self-contained spiritual kingdom, overflowing with the intoxicated tension of modernism. They all love me, and I find them beautiful. Together we craft memories that can not be held. No stories follow our deeds. Time begins to fade, we are becoming a crystal. Suddenly my world is a network of caves, a rippling web, a skeletal edifice mocking transient epochs with slow, deliberate gestures. I fall in love with plants, living entirely on the surface. I try to imitate them and bring everything to the surface, but the guilty lines emerging on my body make delicate souls shudder and turn from me. I feel I am pushing away everything I need. I am pulling dollar bills out of my wallet to bring it all back. The sales man smiles and shakes his head. “You won't find anything like that here.” He points to the sign over the door, and I realize my mistake. I stumble into my shame. I look around for something else to buy, but I am only making the situation worse. And yet, I am not unhappy there.