saint oscar (pt. 1)

my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth and i can feel the heartbeat of the knife in my pocket.  the whiskey thunders through my veins like a disease and threatens my brain.  the architecture of my brain has become Brutalist.  lately i have been bleeding from strange places and all i listen to is a female singer-songwriter who is prone to write songs about winter.

a week ago i told Lucas that i loved him and he stared at me as though i had become glass and shattered.  i have never seen someone so horrified and it's not that i'm so ugly.  i am ugly like an overripe fruit.  on the same day, the season turned into summer like a depressed, irritable person shifting their weight to one side.  i abruptly vomited and he held me up while gobbets of myself drooled from either side of my mouth.  his look of horror had melted down slightly, like plastic, or wax, subjected to an intense heat.

'are you OK?'  he asked, solicitously.  i watched a long strand of my saliva fall to the back of his hand, like a raindrop in slow motion.

my voice had fallen away from me, had slunk out of my throat like a lover caught cheating.  i shook my head from side to side and vomited again.

'should I take you to the hospital?'

his eyes were so concerned.  there is a sheen of sympathy on his face, like sweat after a long run.  his voice is tired and weary.  he's had enough of me, i can tell.  i've had enough of me. 

i smelled of day-old garbage.  banana peels, orange rinds.  coffee grounds and sour milk.  i started to cry and mucus clogged the back of my throat.  one of my shoelaces came undone and lay on the sidewalk like a dead worm.

the only thing that will make me feel better is to kill him.  i considered a bullet.  i considered poison, the weird white lace of dusty arsenic.  i considered a bomb.  in the end, only a knife would do.  i've kept it in my pocket, folded like the legs of a cricket, for so long.  it's never had a use.  it gets warm in my hands when i grip it.

'HAVE YOU CONSIDERED JESUS?' a poster on the telephone pole is yelling at me. 

'no,' i tell it simply, lying, as i pass by.  one hand is in my pocket.  the other one swings haplessly by my side.  my friend the female singer-songwriter is singing in my ear a song about skinny trees bent over by the weight of the gray sky.  her voice is like a skein of yarn, unspooling, looping itself in thick coils on the floor of my skull.

i quit smoking in November but i want a cigarette right now more than anything.

Lucas lives in a five-story building on the other side of town.  i can see the brick of it in my head.  there is an obnoxious seagull that is following me.  i know it is the same one because it has a cock-sure look to its beady eye.  this started a week ago.  i ran at it to scare it off, yelling like a madman.  it just stared at me, and then took off, flying up into the sky where i couldn't reach it.  i'd like to rip its feathers out, one by one, and then burn them, one by one, with a lighter.  i think it knows what my plan is.  it's eyeing my pocket.  i've named it Lucas.

the other side of town is over a railroad track which acts like a tourniquet, cutting off the bloodflow.  all of the houses are drained white, blanched.  there is no color on this side of town, except for the trees in fall.  Lucas lives in number three-A.  his apartment building is full of beautiful people who never need to wash their hair to look good.  the kind of people you stare at on the street.  clothes were made for them.  i am in love with a number of them, but none so strongly as Lucas.  he wears an impossibly russet-colored shirt almost constantly, with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms.  he always seems to have a hooded sweatshirt on, even in summer.  when he wears a white t-shirt, his skin turns ruddy.  his eyes are brown and his hair is brown and straight and touched with weird brushstrokes of tarnished gold.  he is the kind of guy who wears one pair of sneakers and always has.  they are grass-stained and battered and their color is blue, as though they are out of breath and slightly cyanotic.  he can't seem to keep the laces tied. 

the sun sneaks out of a cloud and lances me right in the eye.  i blanch away from it and Lucas-the-gull caws loudly like he's laughing.  i wish i had a slingshot and a small explosive.  'fucking bird,' i mutter, and spit to one side.  my stomach is lurching around like a drunken giant inside of me.  i have to inhale, a shuddery breath that feels serrated, like a knife sawing deeply into a plank of wood.

i am pink on the inside, like a badly-cooked piece of meat.  i don't ever want to see the inside of myself on the outside ever again.  my tongue has unloosened from the roof of my mouth like the cuff on a shirt and barely feels attached to the floor of my mouth either.  if i open my jaw it will slide right out of me and fall to the ground, wriggling around desperately, like a snail without its shell.

my heart is aching.  actually aching.  it seems to beat like a tired drummer, desultorily hitting the snare, arrhythmically and out of time.

if i don't stop i will follow through.  i can feel my knife warming up through my jeans.  Lucas' building appears slowly, like a scene from a movie, and i push open the front door.  it is not locked.  headlines are cartwheeling through my head.  TWENTY-YEAR OLD BARISTA SLAIN IN APARTMENT.  LUNATIC IMPRISONED.  SENTENCED TO DEATH.  JURY.  JUDGE.  EXECUTED.  "HE WAS SO QUIET."

i turn around in the dark lobby and see Lucas-the-gull performing a small promenade outside, bobbing his head up and down, knowingly.  he looses a garbled cackle.

colder

lately everything's rushing. suddenly the house is ten degrees colder and the floorboards shrink. heaters switched on. winter comes down like a bomb in the sky, even though the colours of the trees are as bright as hell's flags still. and not even halloween yet.

a kind of battening-down process. i'm backing up all my data in case of another hard drive catastrophe. cleaned up and rearranged my room. books all in alpha-order. all things in their right places. burning data to hard copy. settling down again. like a dog in a circle before laying down with a great sigh. and the more i think about time, the more time thinks about me, and then i'm crushed under its momentary consideration of my existence.

met a right asshole in the bar the other night. rush, or raj. i'm going to bet the actual name was raj due to his accent and skin color but i'm going to call him rush because it seems more appropriate. half-cocked, going off, un poco triste, my little lemming-mind jumping off the glass cliff into an alcohol ocean. standing to one side, watching - and then the momentary victory. connection, and a good one, a male-female connection, and what electricity - her smile, her laugh. a fantastic conversation lasting through two - no, three! - cigarettes, and the eventual return to her glowering companion, rush, astride his barstool. i am inflamed, have been, all day - all week! - with the private correspondence of H. Miller and L. Durrell. have devoured The Colossus of Maroussi, have embarked on Prospero's Cell. obviously when one reads about the apotheosis of place such as Miller and Durrell made Greece (and surrounds), there is a longing that shows up. for travel. for the past. nostalgia for these things which have not yet happened or never will. i am going off, a roman candle with a fuse a mile long, how much i'd love to see Greece, the Mediterranean

and Rush, good old motherfucking Rush, barging in. this is where my memory gets hazy. where psychic damage sets in. his false impressions of me, his generalizations, his aggrandizement - all of it. so much and so virulent. i feel like i'm in the middle of a swarm of wasps. he gets up to use the bathroom and Maria is explaining that i am "doing the right thing, exactly as i should," as though i am winning a game. the scene is becoming drastically skewed, like a fucked-up dream. i imagine the floor to be collapsing. or the ceiling. Maria wants me to meet her friend. Kirsten. she likes me, i think, or is entertained by me, neither of which i mind at this point - she tells me to write my email down. my phone number. asks me to be discreet in some way, slip it to her by way of some complicated scheme that both of us are too drunk to execute - but then there is Polyphemus again, rounding the corner from the bathroom. perhaps neither Rush nor Raj is appropriate but a slightly different phonic: Rage. he sits again beside me and strikes up the same conversation as before - i have no doubt in my head that he is smarter than Maria is drunk and so i do not slip her the piece of paper. he would see right through my ruse.

this continues. for far too long. eventually i leave. taking too much of the drunkard's skewering "observations" to heart. the only way i can deal with it is pretending it doesn't matter. another drunken conversation. another bar. no - scratch that. the same fucking bar. one of the same.

so, another cold. the rain sluices down today. it's no longer that the wind is cold, but the air itself. the space around everything. shrinking. freezing.

more layers. insulate.

onset

wild-eyed. flail. come to rest. wild-eyed. flail. come to rest.

shouting into gray. gray shouts into white. white listens. speaks with a black tongue.

in dream, i painted shadows with a brush. i moved faster than everyone else, faster than light, even. i myself did not have, did not need, a shadow. i worked for the light yet moved faster than it.

repeat myself. repeat myself.

woke up before the sun. stayed in sheets. slept again.

late for work, so late i should be fired. but the boss is foaming at the mouth at the top of a wooden ladder. hanging up chinese dragons by strings.

on way home, i walk like a drunk driver. through the evening's violent glow. past my apartment. all the way west. sit like an indian on the dying grass. watch the careful flicker of the airstrip. beyond the murmuring arterial of the interstate.

the first fall wind in the trees.