A young man's musing and memories as he tries to escape a futuristic fascist regime |
FOUR You held her the last time before they took You away. Her eyes, large pools of night behind wire-rimed frames, stared at you from above high dark cheekbones of brown And her full red lips pulled into a forced smile Of clear African beauty. A soft, smooth face rimmed with shiny black hair cascading to her shoulders in calm waves gone to curl. They can’t destroy us, she said. Not if what we feel is true. Not if what we dream is strong. You smiled sadly in reply, doubting her words but hoping their truth. An intertwining of pink and sepia fingers in a final press of love. THREE These are the places of dreams. These are the places of years burned out. Of plans tangled with whispers. Of ideals weighted with dusted paper. Of sacred societies fragmented by cracks and cuts. These are the places of dreams. Of catchphrase ideologies dug into busted, rotted brains. Of simple solutions staining a complex pain. These are the places of days dried up. Of dark, endless nights illumined by a mad-hatter’s moon whose cold silver lights a lunatic equation: Let All equal One if One equals Nothing. These are the places of dreams. TWO Rising through the swirling mists of orange sodium vapors Like languid foam from a cracked wine bottle, We surface on a cold, concrete shore --plastic pygmies who cannot dance, with our feet stuck to stands. Rising through the mists of orange sodium vapors, we stare across an endless avenue piled with rusty wrecks of cars and shopping carts and arcade games and shattered records and pictures browned with stale ages. Rising through the swirling mists of sodium vapors like shimmering shockwaves through the stratosphere, we alight atop the fractured vault of firmament to see the world contained in a tight wax groove circling a central sun of off-key free jazz and the cacophony is a spectral play of party-colored lights that fill the grid holes of our haunted spirits. We shall oil rusted valves of dead magic brass and dance like wind-tossed confetti, our clockwork worked past mechanical limits till it breaks asunder and we swirl in the party-colored winds. ONE Lights cloud in rainbow rivulets over shaded pines and sleeping foxes in some cool climb south of the pole star. Mist in the grasses kneads its way whitely across the meadows as red eyes scan from the dark places in the foliage. your hands are tied behind your back with barbed wire stigmatizing bony reddened wrists and your hollow glass eyes reflect the Northern lights and water with the moisture of memory. gaunt sockets darkened with accelerated age hold your sight in a sunken skull. Salt in the eye washes down a dirty, cut cheek. Your lips peel like faded, time-worn paint on a wall. Green-gold eyes mirror a smoothly dark pastoral scene. A motel room painting. These are the places of dreams. You recall childhood visions of oils and acrylics dabbed against a woven canvas framed in faux wood. A scene you always wanted to step your child feet into. Now you stumble and wade through wild grasses that ripple with dry bass whispers. Shattered concrete rubble hulks on the shadowed horizon. There is memory in the shell of structure. There is memory in the bones of your head. There is memory in the meadow turned grey by dusk. There is memory in a child’s vision: oils and acrylics on woven canvas nailed to a faded wall of peeling paint. The sentries in black uniforms trudge in cracked leather boots across a fractured concrete plain gone to seed. Gone to weed. Gone to the entropy of regenerative Nature. Assault rifles are swaddled in leather gloves like messianic infants. You are a shadow spilling up the horizon. You are a shambling, shattered hulk of a wreck. You are a memory gone to seed to regrow with weeded life And twisting vitality. You are a silhouette framed in the blood-red shimmering of electronic scopes. Free as a tumbleweed. As a torn flyer riding the currents of breeze. As a fragment of worn thought on the eddies Of a tired mind. You will sleep in due time. You will sleep in this darkness. A lone oasis on an interstate highway. The walls worn with ancient paint. The walls adorned with neatly priced paintings. Mommy and Daddy let a little boy sleep in a bed by himself. Just like home. The journey has been long and the price beyond money. It is not over yet. You fall on the leafy quilt and sink in the night loam. There is moisture in your eyes, salted and dark and red. A child’s dream on an interstate highway, Between Texas and Arkansas. With grassy meadows on walls. Love in the silence. Love in the watchful eyes That peer from the darkness with redness of exhaustion. |