प्रेत

smoked myself so high that suddenly i was sitting next to myself. there was no chair beneath me. i hovered somehow. staring at myself. surprised to hear a familiar song. i & me reached out to touch it as it hung in the air. the front door opened and let someone into the house. my bedroom door was locked, i didn't care. the chill of the air sent my skin into minuscule undulations, all over the map of my body. or else there was a ghost in the room with i & me. possible, that. i reassured me like a child afraid of the lightning-storm. "sometimes people just get stuck," i said. i combed my hair back with my fingers. the words came out like a murmur, though i'd intended them to be louder.

later: the sun, just under the trees. snarling through the lacunae of their branches, frothy pink and red. our shadows fled us in fear. walking sidewalks until they ran out. i heard the sound of a drum, something wild - and growing wilder. the sky, folding & unfolding above us. we were side-by-side but not hand-in-hand.

the cemetery, then, newly manicured, each gravestone nervous with its exposure. the old tombs backed into the hillside. their names: Sawyer, Haggett, Longfellow, Hillborn. the darkness hung low between the trees like a trap. clouds assumed the guises of mountains on the long-away horizon. our shadows leapt into each other and stayed there.

i have discovered this new dark, this non-light, this thing i am a sun of.

and something inside of me (after) is newly mazed, is tightening its corridors like veins, constricts & contracts and then dilates with the all-too-short duration of each breath. and there is something running the maze, something i am terrified for. something that lied too much & too often and was imprisoned there as punishment. there is no solution to the maze.

and i woke up this morning thinking about how my left arm is laddered with scars, tiny scars. and i fell back asleep with my glasses on, leaning against the wall. face tilted north. the chill in the air made a sheet of itself and wrapped me in it. i re-woke, imagining adding rungs to the ladder. stared at myself for time immemorial and woke up again. maybe i was the ghost. the difference between ghosts & us is that they know when they dream.

and later i will hear that an old friend of mine has changed his name to Only, which will make me laugh so hard i fall to the floor. only, (from ME, from OE, 'having the form of (ly) one (on(e))). slide a labial in there. (l)only. he always was so lonly. overcompensated for it. grew another shadow. grew three. they died like unwatered hanging plants. crisped on the vine and flaked away from him until Only he was left. then paired off again, with a living shadow. trekked. used their feet and their mouths. used wild pantomime to speak and laughed silently, like devils, into the night-hours. and of course the past had put microphones in the trees. and of course he knew it and so they stayed silent.

the unavoidable. the inescapable. find a bottle and cause it to become empty. become devoured by an urge to empty every bottle you see. drink the oceans. in the morning, vomit hurricanes.