if the heavens ever did speak
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
Reality was an entirely fragile thing, an unreliable thing – it sits like St. Elmo’s Fire, a promise of light in the distance that he could never get any closer to.
There was a girl.
There was no girl.
The thoughts echo and contradict themselves in the ghastly hallways of his mind, chime like church bells:it was real. It was not real. It was real. Not real. Real.
But she is real. She is a touch, a sense of pressure, a streak of indigo. A scent, something he can’t define, like hyacinth mixed with the earth. She has a mind, one he’d touched, if only for a moment.
I don’t know, she says, and he is overwhelmed with relief – that he does not have to face it.
(Whatever it is – sometimes it’s a clown with a Glasgow smile, sometimes it’s a tiger with no face. Sometimes it’s the smell of gasoline and a match catching fire.)
But she continues.
There was a dream.
(Pause.)
A nightmare.
Yes, he knows, the dreams continue still, when he can’t help it and falls asleep. In dreams the purple recedes, in dreams the other things – the it he cannot face – rise up, ghosts in the machine.
Then, worse: I think I’m being punished.
For everything, the thought of punishment had not strictly occurred to him – he’d assumed some descent into madness, perhaps, a mind that was never strong to begin with finally giving way.
Punishment, though –
Perhaps he had not prayed hard enough, his jumbled words too disjointed.
(And he’d let Garbage lay his head across his back, let it rest there too long.)
Perhaps his mere existence warranted punishment – him being the kind of boy who should not exist, made from ill magic between lovers destroyed.
She is uneasy, too – they stand at the brink of something and he wonders who will fall first, or if they will fall together.
She says the color isn’t hers, and he knows this to be true, for the purple isn’t his, either. The purple is a memory, a curtain – the purple sits like a king on a throne, guarding him, and oh, if
(when)
it slips—
“Whose is it?” he says. He wants her to answer. He doesn’t want her to answer. He wants her to tell him he is mad and turn away, a wash of indigo and black in the sunset. He wants her to step back from whatever precipice they have found themselves on.
But he wants to step forward, too. God help him, part of him even wants to jump.
sleaze
cancer x garbage
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