DRAGON’S LIGHT
I keep thinking the door is getting opened, but it’s closed. Wanting with everything to find some change for the 30 cents I’m under. Finding two tarnished gold coins with the lady of justice on them, blindfolded, holding aloft scales. Whose values are unknown. The beach outside the massive hotel-school descending from shore to -line in levels. Call a quat adobe loft renectar. Over in simple sheets. One of which has all the answers I need to the test I’ve determined has the things I must find but which doesn’t ever seem to go as well as I’d want it to, and I end up being somewhat lost by the time the timer is over. Forgetting to bubble in some answers. What was the meaning? Lavender flowers cut my hand, stained themselves in my plasma, and I retracted it. Not wanting to be a part of the floral furrow, or the soil’s hearth of warm knowledge, or the grass’s purview in the sleet-show. ¶ God stiffed me, so I thought. “Maybe I stiffed myself,” I say. Don’t you know? You were waiting out in the cold when the fire underneath your mantle back home was ablaze, and songs were being sung, and thoughts—warm thoughts—were being had about you.
Whole in dots of colonized pointillisms interlaced and connected (some o them) via jagged linework to form the face of a friend that’s lost. Like the spirit of the one for whom your brother got his first tattoo, which he says he saw him floating out there on the interstate beside his speeding car before ascending with a smile, like he was saying goodbye. Your brother the main character to some epic novel going on in life all the time. It would seem. Everyone around you to some degree a main character. Feeling poor and self-pitying and sad for the transgressions of others, but still so harsh. Still so backgrounded and ashamed.
Lie on iodized fun. The truth in its Humboldt breadth pertrofied and passed out on the slunk blaghe of the beam your heart walks on. Fibers crackling under the weight. Not knowing why. Crying, being born.
Lay in waste the soon-too shadow-having solemn omen of sadness you must consume every day every night unaware what’s really going on. With you. In the breezeless windchill. Nonair in a cycle of space going round you. You’ll be subjected to another test, now. The test is to see if you eventually understand what the test is for, but it’s graded on a bell curve. Ire in the want to complete something for once for your own sake like Dear God, Please and methatic cloves of gusting joy died in the epilogue swung saloon doors of oldtime unpolished wood creaking sable. As Agent X enters to confer with Agent Y about a card table where someone else is joined. “You duly can-not understand.” ¶ “Yes I know.” ¶ “No. You don’t know. You can-not know.” ¶ “Yes, well. Then I know that at least.” ¶ “Well… ok.” ¶ Intuit the hand I have and see which one you see. Come the flush, X goes all in and everyone is forced to restand or sway or respond in some way. And deliver us from evil. “Not on your life, bud.” His and God’s voice speaking out at me from somewhere deep inside my throat. Right there in the viscera of the vocal chords. Tell me you understand, no—I—you…. Tell me you understand, oh. ¶ So when my face melts over the candle’s flame like a crayon and saps onto the floor a bit, my divested lips move and the whisper a song. Not all of it heard, not all of it comes out. Somewhere in the slight brazen gash apart from pretty much every eye that saw me as a fragile heap that day in my personal Doom, who knows…. Agent Y cries for Agent X and says nothing as he reveals a royal flush and rakes in everyone’s chips. I become a wallpaper icon in a triptych unthemed motif including russet leaves, where my figure is a symbol falling sidewise. The background is a kind of cream color and the leaves are illustrated in detail. Our acid tones to the laugh track make the sounds distort and mirth sound virile and ominous. Like there’s some maleficent dosage of character to the universe being screened, and you are a background character who cannot really know. I do not resent anyone else for this, no, only yourself, though you and I are… yes, so… anyway. ¶ Tableaux of congealed screams made carnal and prosthetic ears listening and worse-than-we-once-had-knowns coming true, sometime in the near future, in the near past, in the near present, though… having heard the song your melting face’s divested lips there on the floor whispered by the cast-iron prop upholding the candle, I wonder…. ¶ Glow in radiance, steam escaping from my eyes as I close them and I am trying to sleep. Trying to remember the words to the song, oh, something like… “While across the ocean there, / my nightly death and reverie / was lost upon the self that was then born. / And all across the ocean there, / when fanned-on Greek flames came and went, / I saw that all there was I could not see….” As though David Gilmour himself had sung it in a hushed tone. But what of…
Infinite dragon’s light on the nape of your neck as the radial energy regrets and redraws… arrows of cosmopolitan ensigns going plural over the dash refrain… into the bitter back of the brain, again, as you’d want to see…. But who on earth could have known? What the book was… what The Book was, who could have known? Over in a hundred different ways, the same story. Who knows where or when or why, but how we determine what we see with our mind changes. And this changes too, and in time. Where with all the muster it can limited blanched cretins demit to walk the lonely roads of life. I on the other hand… well, who knows.