(a holocaust of wedding roses)

XII.

         I feel it all. Gas pains, flattened against a bed one night broken-in. A death in Toulouse, on a roundabout near the airport, left ear folded forward, face flattened, the incomparable, quick pop of impact, the ringing of boxed ears. Watching a man ring a bird's neck, watching noises, guttural, and a sick pulse between the ears and throat and stomach. The swelling chest of panic.

         I always thought reality would look different, that awakeness would feel less like a dream. That Real would not include TV static in the visuals, nor lasting, lasting impressions of the previous; highly colorful after-images, as part of the picture, the picture lasting into itself, the moment taking another moment to finish up, and another one; it never ends every time a moment finishes, ceases enough to be captured and last. I thought real would look solid, would look whole and complete, and now I think that seeing the sky or the windows or the walls or the sheets, seeing the greatest, most upwards winding growth, or the darkest and downwards and sickest something, blackest chasm---seeing a thing or happening in its entirety, without billions of tiny resonating holes, but filled with billions of tiny dots of what's Really There, that it would crack me open like a nut. The utter completeness of the picture would fill me to a place past full, and blow open the doors of mind and feeling with a wind as unstoppable as the tide, the moon, the earth the sun. Because Everything, a person can't contain and still know; they must be Open, and no more a container than a teacup that's been split in two.

          So that there's no having. That's where we have it all.

         I feel it all, I know it. Peeling sunburn, peeling skin, elastic, wet and burning beneath the dead-not-quite. Raw flesh, exposed, drying out; every drying, dying clump of cells screaming out in blood-curdling silence, in itchy agony, screams that for some reason can only be heard by the greater being they compose. And the parts, perhaps. In not a sound that comes to us, to me, but suddenly, as the more or less direct way of feeling, of existing. The suffering of living, it is parts of me dying, sometimes violently. And that is healing, and growing, and I can't help but feel like the wedding roses from the night before last. Thankfully roses are not like humans, who generally seek some purpose and are saddened by the loss of it. Humans, who would not easily bear the wedding rose's life---to grow for months and months and be sentenced to death the moment before blossom, sentenced to death away from its roots, to not be remembered as an individual, or remembered very often, or at all, or as what was important. The wedding rose, whose service to the external world would be fleeting and not Necessary; it's a good thing roses aren't like people.

         I was a witch that night. I tore off the outer petals, drying, dying, of a huge number of white wedding roses, I tore until they looked newer and more closed again. Then I plunged their stems beneath the kitchen faucet, and severed them where I saw fit, so that they could drink more easily, huddled in a fishbowl, flowerfood and water.

         I was a witch because alone, I alone decided to have a death ritual, to make a ceremony of the dwindling fire in the pit out back and the petals I had torn off the roses, which in all fairness were not that dead. Which were quite alive, and would've still drunk, til the last living cells had lost their connection to the whole, til the water could no longer reach them, til they were cut off and isolated and surrounded by cells that were no longer living, til they had no choice but to follow the parts, follow the whole into death.

         On two plates I heaped all the ivory petals and picked leaves and severed ends, and took them outside to their death; I sat by the cauldron and tried to really Feel each petal before I fed it to the fire, which was hungry, which ate each thoroughly without recognition of its own last meal. The wet stems and dripping leaves crackled and pop-sparked, giving rise to a nutty-smelling smoke; the petals, soft like skin but not soft like petals, perished quietly, lonely. Most petals I kissed, some died a little more memorably---stuck on a burning twig, lasting longer on the back of a log. I was a witch for doing it, because it felt a little like a holocaust, of things that aren't like people. Even the fire died, trying to burn itself.

         The roses huddled in the fishbowl were unwittingly thrown out the next morning; it's a good thing roses aren't like people.

The clockbook, "Hello"

Hello.

I am 18 and I steward, part-time, a home on the line of Orion's belt for a Lost Boy and all his questions.

I am 18 and I have migraines. Right now I can’t go to school or get a job—it would be silly, of course, if migraines had a sense of time or respect—and that's why I steward the home for questions.

         My migraines are black cars so shiny that they look wet at night, so wet that I can see it raining through the buzz of static in my vision. They find me when no one is looking. Day or night, on the street, at home, in school, during a meal at a fancy restaurant. In crowds, in silence, in an airplane, in a bathroom the black cars come and find me. When no one is looking, when everyone is busy blinking, the sneaks park and pop out of their shiny black cars. They nab me and throw me into one of their shiny black trunks. The trunks are trunks of agony, full of fireworks and black cats and reveries and doorbells and bad breath and rainbows. Full of pillows that breathe and pulse loudly against my ear because they have disorders of the chest and heart murmurs and erratic circulation. The trunks are full of agony but also full of patience—clocks don't work in there. Once I got thrown in the trunk with my watch on my wrist. I don't know what time it was when they threw me in, but my watch said it was March when I got out into the dark (it took me a while to read it.) They always let me out because I always find myself sitting, or lying, or standing somewhere far away from people. Sometimes they drop me off so far out of the city that I think I'm close to death, or I think about how much bigger the city has gotten since I was smaller.

Sometimes they drop me off in a field. I used to think that was scary—I would feel so alone in that great big field that at some point I was the whole field. You know—so alone that everything around you is in you and alone, too. So bright that you forget yourself, you forget the possibility of the existence of darkness. So loud that every fiber of you is resounding with the sound, that at some point there is no sound because there is no silence.

  The view of the city is never great. I am so far away that I just can’t judge it; it isn’t a poor view because I am Very Far Away. Comparisons won't work there, neither do clocks. Sometimes the sneaks drop me off in a line at the store, in a lineup of cars at the drive-thru pharmacy. On a phone line to talk to someone very far away, online to lookup pictures to draw pictures from. On a line in time that has questionably relevant blue stickers scattered along it. The stickers are blue now—they changed the color from Classic Red. In the city, they used to make marks on my timeline in ink, but now they use stickers. The funny thing is, the ink never stuck and the stickers don't either. The marking and measuring and especially the sticking is an illusion; they all fall off, wash away as soon as I imagine it. Far away from people, time acts more like water than a line, anyways.

         Oftentimes they drop me off in my bed, and drive away hiding under the cover of dreams. But usually when they do that they pull the covers too far over themselves, they stretch the dream until it covers everyone and everything, the whole world around me and the whole line of time behind me. Then I see the skid-marks from their shiny black tires before they wash away. I remember that the view here is not more dreamy or less real. I think I'm too far away to make that judgment.

         Sometimes they drop me off in a parking lot at night, and I'm alone. It is snowing and there are grainy mounds of muddy diamonds. Or in a muddy, rainy forest where there are diamonds and pearls full of sun and they are resting on giant green clovers. The tree trunks are cold and hard and wet. They're dark and dense, slow and real: anything but alive. There are shimmering sequins and shivers of stained glass where the sky should be a backdrop for the branches. The branches look metallic and neon. The dead leaves that hang from the trees look like hanging lights, like drought-colored christmas lights. One time they dropped me off 35,000 feet above the ground where I saw six oxbows of gold eau-de-vie, five hundred miles of farmer's quilt and the slow wrinkles of the Giant's skin. With my eyes I touched the unfeelable horizon, rainbow-colored, but dim and bleak like gray. When I looked up I saw dark gray, and when I looked down I saw gravity.

         At one point they dropped me off just in time to catch a proposal on the windowpane. Just in time to realize I have always been married and will always be married. To realize that mostly I forget the marriage, I ignore it but acknowledge it although I'm still ignoring it. Like most of my marriages, like all of my relationships that get pushed out of the working frame but embedded in the Backdrop. All the time they drop me off where there are dry brownish-blue dead flowers that fall on the ground for no reason, for me to look at; where the snow melts and slowly and suddenly I am exposed to a measureless sop of decaying leaves from who-knows-really for no reason, and I look at it. The shiny black cars drive me to the most boring and mindless locations conceivable and take away my clocks and comparisons and suddenly, slowly I am so alone that nothing is more boring or less mindful. So alone that everyone and everything, the whole world around me and the whole line I stand in, and the dream, and the black cars with their trunks and even the sneaks are in me, and alone, too. Then they are all a bone in my body, a finger on my hand, a diamond on my finger that I've never put on and I'll never take off.