free assoc.

(free-association attempts at prose poetry) take two-hundred, wash down with alcohol, and imagine you are swallowing me. then call me from the hospital bed if tomorrow ever comes for you. i'm attacking my piñata of dreams with a foam-rubber bat, the words "doubt" written on its length in times new roman, accented in italics. there's a single railroad spike through it's end. i try peeking out sideways with my one good eye attempting to spot it. even still, all i see is nothing, just a formless void where in i can only hear the sound of the papier-mâché unicorn swaying somewhere above me in the wind. blindfolded and tracing shit-streaked impressions, from force-fed watermarks to bar-coded expressions, i am mopping up your makeshift confessional booth post aftermath of a reluctant salvation gone wrong. ours is the single arrogant zenith in hyper color, awry and recognizable only by the sound of grinding teeth and nervous laughter. setting your body ablaze. a siren going off in our heads, hearing gunfire within earshot. yawn in the presence of messiah and laugh on your way to the gallows. like spitting in the hangman's face. an orchestra of throats, strangled and slit with piano-wire. a cardiac-arrest overture in D minor, string accompaniment courtesy of adrenaline, blood, and vomit. i'm still so far from hitting bottom, far from anything resembling a moment of clarity. from the hills i have watched the skies, the horizon will burn while we are alive - so long as long as i'm drug behind this pale horse, past the desert, and into the city of scrap metal and prosthetic limbs so the glorious sandstorm of analgesics and gunpowder may follow in my wake, extinguishing all pain in baptismal fire. from the town center i will watch the events unfold that will ultimately lead up to what becomes known as my aftermath. enjoy the fireworks display and repeat seven Hail Mary’s after me. i'm leaving through a hole in the sky - exiting stage left via this asphalt gravemarker, just as the martyr awaits the falling axe. seizing the opportunity i stand my ground and wait for the hi-beams to run into me. i fight to breathe just long enough to watch them continue past me, a mannequin laying with serpents of grass, meeting my maker. so now i am this ghost, bored at his own funeral. i begin mocking the spectator sport, holding my numbered ticket in the waiting room of a waiting room in purgatory. "yours were hidden hands..." say good morning, you exiled god, patron saint of the broken fists and paper heart. i release you from the sins of your father; seventh son of a seventh son, but the Eucharist is as far as you go. i gave you until the end, contact killer who broke contract, now the motorcade has left the vacinity. can you hear my missing heart beat to the rhythm of her hiss? there's still no sympathy for the redemption of guilt. she never broke character, she never miss-mouthed the words to her favorite songs, but she hardly sang the hymns almost always lip-synched anathemas. her lies are as sad and numerous and real as innocent death row inmates. the statistics are staggering. her truths are the byproducts, the grey areas of solace. is it as simple as, "we so desperately do not want to die?" survival starts with "no. 1" yielding to the boot that reconfigures the jaw, and succumbing to the mob-terror at the grand opening of yet another ant-colony. it is easy to smash the mirror, streaked with knuckle blood and saliva, but it's harder to put the jagged lies of the originally malformed puzzle pieces back together so that the lip-sticked kisses line up with the scars reflected on it's surface. (in alliteration) their doodling daughter, drunk and depraved, drowns the dead at dawn and drags the lake with her dredge. dancing dutifully down into the dark along side these denizens, she's then dipped in dismemberment and decapitated in the daisy field. "come close," called the coffin dancer, he who can capture the crucifix will cry for corpses. coaxed into the cavity, these creatures are caught between the colors of carob, causality, crawfish and curses, causing the creeps crawl, cast aside and cared for in closure. the carefulness of closed doors, ones whose cracks peek conspicuously from the corners of her pink and crimson cuts, clamoring for cure, clotting with ash and capsized by the cannibals’ coup (d'etat). today i took the teeth of a total stranger, in a trance of terror, talking in tongues . trapped by black tape and tied down with gasoline soaked towels. traces of blood taste of tigers' milk. tearing the tube that's twisted around the tricep, try tapping the vein until the futile attempts at tiptoeing towards tomorrow become too tremendous and tiring. traffic tension and tether tightening will surpass the trumpeter’s heraldic tune for tragedy or his temper-mental pension for taking lives and target practice. in the wrong hands the wrought iron writhes, awaiting the roar of the raging refugees. reprimanded and resentful, the ramblings of the remaining rapturous are written between the red flames and red blood of the ruler’s red right hand and left wrist. these only can be read only by the rotting embodiment of righteousness, the recluse who rides again, and retains the reigns as such a renegade would remain. here he is to be raped in the rafters during the witching-hour, then laid to rest in the rich soil of the rose beds. his is a religion now to be reaped by the wraiths rising from the rungs of ruin, clad in robes of resin, ready to revise the birthright and reunite the rabid ruler with his unrequited love for any reason to revert to Russian roulette. (out alliteration) the good, the bad, the flailing arms grasping vainly toward divinity and all of its smooth, greased, featureless tentacles of a glory unattainable. praise the rudderless who navigate the black eyed oceans en masse, hailing the sunset and losing their voices to the wind. blessed be thy haste. plotting piety in wet sand, making reservations somewhere near the scene of the accident, scene of the crime, to be seen and not heard. deserted on a desert continent, and island with no horizon past the mirage of belly-dancing beauties breathing smoke and firing trick-shots from the backs of elephants into the angry mob toting pitchforks and cellular phones. the angered who scream directionless while their plastic masks of normality and comfort slip down covering their eyes. they constantly have to do this. drop the ball and reroute personality. reconfiguring themselves. "insert soul here," i say first, singling myself out amongst the other phone booth inhabitants, "then discard immediately, and prepare to evacuate heaven," second. all this while losing altitude but before imploding into the supernova that was my once my belly, the epicenter that single-handedly created the supreme moral vacuum, a black hole of conscience, what/who is unfortunately known today as... "cut to the right, pass to the left," i'm told. subtle is the score, but the gamble is obvious to me now. my house of cards contains 50 suicide kings, and 2 queen of hearts. i have hope in spades, retribution in vindictive clubs, and i always remove the jokers before each hand is dealt. chance is a funny thing because although i've used up all my wilds, i am but one trump card short of the pot, which i cannot split for any reason, no matter the ante. and for when you try and raise me, i promise to see you one thousand fold, all while shuffling the deck and calling the dealer on every fucking bluff. i will "pull his card..." as they say. and yours too if i must. unlike then, now i wish i could have felt your skin crawl under my fingers when they touched down upon your neck. how foolish was i? with a better nose i could have smelled the bile on your breath. i am sickened to think of when you touched me with cold hands out of pity. perhaps with a better voice my words might have done more than flatter. perhaps with yours more honest, my senses wouldn't have dulled. and yet, even with all these things i know now, it would have happened the same way because even now i still wish i could do it all over again. 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