It was 20 years ago, or so, that I started writing a piece of poetic prose, that I then revised several times over the coming years, slowly letting the text grow its own form. I haven't read it for some years and now I can't seem to locate it anymore. This, that is to be created here, will be a new construction to hold a reconstruction that, in some ways, will duplicate the original text, or more exactly, my memories of it.
"I guess, confusion..." is what I called it. It used to start with the word "Roses" and then came other words...
... roses! I saw them in the garden, stained with the blood of loss, trembling in the warm summer breeze. I never touched them. Almost certain that they would disintegrate before me. Mostly I sat on the granite stairs leading up to the main entrance of my home; a huge wooden palace that was so old that it had begun to sink into the earth, or was it earth itself that was on the brink of devouring it, I don't know. Maybe the house was no house at all but just the odd outgrowth of a tree and me too, and the front door on its hinges; the, almost endless carpet that lay all about the interior spaces save for the kitchen and the odd floorless room on the third floor from whose lush wilderness I heard animal laughter; and the almost total absence of furniture to most of the rooms; and most of all the layout of the groundfloor because it seemed to change without pause and still be the same always. Yes, roses! What nauseating imagery they call up from the next-door abyss; children with empty hands; subterranean libraries boarded up and forgotten; strange smears on my bed sheets; and the subtle bickering of all the fore-goers...
... sitting is what I'm good at. same place, always the same place, but never ever still, always movement, always on the spot; returning -recalling - repairing what was never broken; the idea of repairing something only because it's not the same as its siblings disgusts me to no ends; sitting - focused; entry - mood; a creek of vivid emotion lapping at the shore of my dreams... I want my name, please...
"Your name isn't here."
... within the boundary of just a moment everything that I knew to be true wasn't. I ran out to the willows and shed my tears onto its wooden trunk, clutching, climbing into its lap and finally cuddling up in its strong arms... I want my mother, please...
"Your mother has never been here. We don't know who she is."
... fell without fear but on the contrary. I fell across the sky and I saw entire nations set on fire. I went into a big white house but the devil wasn't in; could I wait? No! But what about the dogs, they seem friendly but a queer bit hysterically, are you feeding them properly? You got 10 seconds to get yourself out of here... I drifted out of there and I saw that they had begun constructing monuments for the soldiers that had yet to die for their country. I bow my head to their perpetual well-being; but when I came to... I was standing on the second floor patio before a magnificent view of the whole front garden. A garden I couldn't see beyond... beside me sat a beaten up suitcase and a coat, carefully folded, hung over a chair. On the table lay an umbrella, a big black hat, a pack of smokes and some matches and as I was about to treat me a cigarette I felt that my sister was already stepping out on the patio, and turning to her I felt her warmth pouring into my wounds...
"I saw your face in the clouds, and I knew that I had to get here. Are you okay, Brother?"
"Yes, dearest Sister. I'm okey!" How are you?
"I need to go to bed and stay there for a week I think. Will you join me?"
"I will always be with you when you need me. Our bodies needs each other for reasons that have fled my knowledge.
We went to bed and slept for 24 hours straight and woke tangled up in one another... the rain had started during the night and when I looked out the window I could see tiny little rivers flowing in my garden, and there were little people coming and going with equipment to use in navigating these fresh new rivers.
"I will always be with you when you need me to, and you've always known it, because our bodies need each other for reasons so clear that we can not see them on ourselves, only when our mind are at its best... yes, it's so clear the thought blinds you."
We went in from the patio and hadn't but made it to the bed when...
and when I came to, I found myself in an utter darkness that, when my lips touched it, was there; the darkness was really there as though it actually was an objective, and...
We must have fallen asleep at the same time we fell into the bed, because you woke up, untangled yourself from me, and went for a walk through the house, taking a detour to the patio to pick up your things and put them somewhere else. You sat against the past, letting it rub your sore shoulders, as you continually constructed the dream were I could, not only exist, but grow and really flourish... and up from that manic sky I floated slowly to a surface so distant from what I'd seen before that it kept me staring at it, fighting not to let anything part us, not even the familiar off-beat rhythm of water dripping and dripping and ripping into me, fighting me fighting it, and it was a rhythm in itself and it was gaining on me, building up a force so unthinkable, so eerie that I couldn't resist it, and there were the room again, all the same. Moments passed as I tried to sink back into the mud of sleep. A quick glance at the clock told me nothing of value. Beside me, no more, was my sister and only then I heard her metallic beauty...
"It started two days ago," she said as I stumbled out on the patio.
"What?"
"The rain! It has followed me around the world for to long," she said.
"What rain?"
"In your dream!"
And then, as I came up to the railing, I saw the water. It had transformed the garden and in it's place were a myriad of islands; an archipelago of colors and mirrors.
"Oh..." was all I managed to.
"It's beautiful!" sister said, "you made the rain go away. I can see the sun! I can see it! Look at what it can do!" she said, pointing at the roses.
I gasped and the whole army of speech quickly ran into my open mouth and hid there, trembling... I looked at the roses. They were radiating smooth waves of kind red light, and green light, and yellow semi-darkness, and quadruple crimson, orange, brown and blue aw...
I'm not there now. Where she did go I don't know. Everything is flawed. Beaten into submission like all those memories from way before there was a self to contain them. I've been at the big wall, listening until my brain almost came apart. I had to stop. They never wanted to understand what was inside my questions. They just bickered and blew air at me, shapeless...
Dirt falls from my armpits; from my eyes; from Muhammed Atta; from a sad smiley... the city has its period and blood pours from the sidewalks and I'm slipping around and I lose sight of Germaine but a naked beggar informs me that she's near; I sigh... I guess; confusion is biting my nails; confusion is behind me, beckoning... the contents of that letter LL wrote me in 1987 attack and retreat; attack and retreat until I scream something that I don't understand.
Back on the patio. Germaine hasn't arrived yet. Germaine is my Sister. She is strong. She knows how to defend not only herself but me too. She is carrying me around whispering sweet and soothing words to calm me down...
It's 1974 and mum leaves me at the hospital because something is wrong with me. I remember! The awful rubbery smell of the anaesthetic mask and then waking up after surgery, trying to sit up and the room, spinning... I was nine. Was that when I began to subdue myself emotionally? I remember! The bathroom that I didn't go to at all during the week I was there and how that led to constipation and enema and I wonder... and dirt falls out of my thoughts...
Now I will tell you everything from the beginning. This his is...
Roses of all colors is almost all I see when I look around. The grapes are on the other side of the garden but that's Germaine's business so I wont go into that subject to much just now. The garden is pentagonal in shape and in its midst sits the house which also is pentagonal. The basement is carved out of solid rock, supposedly by the little people that also maintain the garden. They've been around for so long that they really can't remember when they came here. But according to the legend they used to live inside the earth at a place called Total Light. Or so I think, I should say, because that's what they thought to me one time when I was drowning in my mind. It was hopeless and I couldn't save myself and they sensed that I needed help so that was when they showed me Total Light.
Although the little people look like regular people, only much smaller and imo much nicer, they are different in that that they multiply in a way that they are like potatoes. They go and sit in the earth and grow smallings, as they say, and when the smallings are ready they are yet so tiny that it hurts to think about such a smallness. I'm talking millimeters here.
Ayreon. Thanks!!! But I'm not sure I understand your question... I might not need to understand it, though. And now that I've found the original text I almost wish I hadn't because my memory of it was more interesting. It's laden with very black and depressive pieces. It'll take some time before I'll continue to install it here...
I sat inside some kind of building whose structure were almost non- existent, digging in a myre of despair; both in emotion and in language. The fault lines were everywhere. The projectal trajectories pierced my body with shockwaves, flooding and ebbing simultaneously; tsunamis of images like ground up ice floes hopelessly mixed and re-mixed. Thoughts based on what I thought were absolute truths; the forrest of thoughts was invaded by swarms of locust; I could go out and die in a hail of bullets; Those were my thoughts. The emergency in my every move was cutting into the very foundations of my selves.
I sat there in the piles of rotting teeth from annihilating angels, handling them with the love and care of non-negotiable madness and the produce is ripe with the smells of frenzied sexless lust; it's eating into the atoms of this story, attacking me - its father, trying to plant shadows of doubt in my soil; my fingers are confused. This story un-writes itself and robs me of my role as its writer. I'm only a poor copyist; a sad remnant of
"But that's not the truth!" I shout in disbelief. But it's futile...
"Guard!" I scream as I toss random teeth into the abyss that I carry within my disordered self/selves; the shelvings are coming apart. And I listen as they fall to hear them hitting the bottom of my soul but all that's there is the total absence of what I'm waiting for...
"take me away..." I try, but it's only a wimper...
"please..." and the nothing hits me at last...
Again I'm here. In the beginning of the story. Has its dream emptied my soil of reason? No answer to my questions... No questions... I remain seated in the nudity of mirrors... Everything was a lie...
"But I can see the tree tops! Touch them! I can touch them..." The walls greet me and I feel welcome... I sit there and feel...
"Yes!" I sit there and feel...
"I sit here and I feel... " It's not the end. All exits are the opposite...
Through the stillness within me the fragmented imagery of unreachable memories drifts around in shapes so familiar that it hurts to not to recognise them... everything is near... disembodied, skeletal, almost invisible... names and faces mixed and watered down, colorless phantoms... my face in the mirror... I must learn what it means or not means... or must I? I studied...
We ran fast along the west gravel path, jumped the gate, crossed the road and continued through the cheramic forest and its habitat for staircases, ladders and their kind. We saw a spiral staircase, free at last from the boundaries of architecture, gently gracing and casting us a curious glance as we rushed by its nest, and the ever watching cats not longer captive by the hypnotic hum of the electric plant... and we ran by the plant carefully not to tread on the cable works snaking their way to Crow-City-On-The-Water and before we knew it we stumbled through some tough bushes and out on one of the eight backyards of the little hamlet with the long name...
The backyard was flat just like the rest of the cheramic forest but the apple trees was enough of an answer to whose place it was. We traced our way off the lawn and followed the first path we could find until it got us to the back of the gardeners house and proceding ever so gently we tiptoed through the house without finding so much as the color of a cats fart, but as we got nearer to the front we heard voices coming from the front deck. We stopped right inside the door and stood there for a few moments before I knocked. The voices fell silent and after some shuffling and creaking a face appeared in the opening...
"Oh, my!" its owner said, "please come out!" and so we did and in no time we all sat at the deck, sipping cheramic beer and saying almost nothing, merely pointing, waving and gesticulating at the objects of our conversation.
"Tough bushes back there!" I said, and received a few blank stares, some rolling shoulders and a sigh that seemed to wrap it all up...
"You guys came through the bushes, I take it!" said the gardeners in unison... "They don't like intruders those bushes, you ought to be greatful they didn't catch and captivate you. We've had to rescue quite a few strays back there before we put up the fence."
"What fence?"
"Didn't you... well, of course you didn't... did you?"
I looked a question at Germaine and got the answer straight back.
"No fence back there." I said, and gave the gardeners a puzzle, some safety matches and a plastic bag.
"No fence back there," they echoed in unison and fear tried to find its way into them but was denied entrance. "What can it mean?"
Silence and immobility struck us so hard that even the beer stopped ejecting bubbles. We all stared at the the beer. Five pair of eyes against some cheramic beer, but it was a draw.
"dot dot dot dot dot dot" I tried to no avail. The others just looked at me. I looked back...
Again I am - and it is culture... I sit inside the wounds of my thoughts as the wilderness of images rain outside... Smoke... I am... Depression is a recession and its (that eats everything) noness is... I move things around moving the image; trimming it; shake its contentment; evaluating the neurotic of... And it is... It is so near me that I am millimeters from myself... Dots appear as I shake within me; they're what; they're wet; they chew! Again I am and I can taste it; I learn! It is disintegration without... I sink... Disintegrity; teeth (and the ease with which) minus my words... This language and how I make it mine and how the color fades; the material is cold; it is a joke; I evaluate... Move on... The years behind me... A path that disappear in a... And it is... It is so; minus my words... What is this? I dislearn and introduce illusive elements... The tobacco of these days; a cigarette of confusion; smoke is its coat; I stay behind; it is red... It is a paint and it is glowing... The radio and its coolness blows my mind; and I think about something and some things are always the same; devoid of logic and proportion; I move on... I move on from these tired attempts at litterature; blinking lights appear on the horizon; useless paragraphs on the... And I am... It is only a symbolic stance; it doesn't verify more than what it stand for; each one is alone in here; in here, in the heat of our darkness, it is the only direction to go; it's so soft and; living...
That was relaxing to read
Thank you very much!!!
The story has slipped out of my grasp and live its own life. I wake up tangled in the bed sheets, sweaty and somewhat confused. Now, fortyfive minutes later, with freshly brewed coffea, a cigarette and some sound in the stereo speakers I sit here at the window to this two dimensional world and thinks. I've looked at some threads and some replies and I've posted something too, I think, and I've talked to people in my mind... Fragments of dreams from the latest batches of sleep floats to the surface and sits there for a few seconds as I'm trying to get a grip at them, I was in a room with someone and there were all these magnificent clothes there that I've never seen the likes of before, I was changing from one outfit to another... I look around the room for the old papers that contain the original story that I thought were lost... I zone in and out... I was at some kind of highway intersection, hiding behind concrete pillars, shooting at the enemy, evading fire... The ice floes move in my head... The number of dimensions are countless... The scenes superimpose themselves onto each other and... It was 1932 and there were a lot of bicycles parked in perfect rows, young men shouting, I saw it from above... Two men running like mad (present time) while talking about an art project, I was crawling in a tunnel and trying to get through... I don't have the means necessary to describe what I witnessed... I keep going off on the side; the streets multiply... There are an endless amount of simultaneous directions; infinity taking place in one place, one room, a hyper volume... Movement and stillness in obscene conjunction... And all the time it falls, moves gracefully, swimming through solid matter as though it was the matter that swam and not the...
And it's just a fragment maybe 28 minutes later; maybe 29 minutes later... I am a still a person with ten fingers; I made no attempt to locate the old papers, but they're here... I dug into a pile of papers, thinking that it's no use, what am I doing, and there they were... The old papers... The story begins (what story doesn't begin?)... The papers lie just next to my left arm; whose hand is extended clutching the side of the laptop; 40% of its fingers hold a cigarette whose fire seem gone (it needed lighting)... I reached for the glass of, not so hot, coffea... The story begins; I make hushing sounds, lean back a few seconds to think and stretch and find the words to describe it. You might be unaware of it but I'm not... The story begins; as if something was missing - look at how the words "missing" and "breakfast" interacts...
...
roses, multicolored clothes, a wardrobe
of fabrics, in my blood,
the transportation, the careful
destruction of my
loneliness; its mirror straying far without memories, without
the drunkeness rolling aimless
like lost coins,
in the sand in my dreams my murder my grateful,
made and made and made again,
the garden of my filthy
feet; melting...
roses, closing in on my departure, too drunk
to even taste the mud of
words choking me, that stay inside me--unsaid; sad, sad like
carpets leading nowhere everywhere; they
lie to me...
the blind sky; picture pretty and untangible, my
hands are open but empty, you
can touch me, you can set the emptiness on fire,
but you can not hurt
it, my name is water; navigate nausea...
the all-seeing garden; covered up, as
forgotten as all foregoers yearn
to become... it's time to
embrace your madness and turn your back to the patterns
that does not resonate, the night is nigh
and endless is the time that is
shadows--its light so still that nothing can deny its touch; the wooden sky
stretches its legs and yawns, its fire is so old that it existed
before there was anything there...
the house the house the shrinking house; live here, it says
in your sleep, and you float above the
ruins, the taste of electricity embodied as a
stabbing motion; an infrastructure
toward an integration of incompatible emotions, a language
that include rather than
exclude, a home that opens itself and listens to you...
...
Suddenly we were back in the old story were the 1990ies still was an abstraction looming in the tall weeds of downtown tomorrow. We stood outside some kind of place that catered to customers, thinking about breakfast and the adventures of the past fifteen minutes.
-Did you notice how dark it was?
-Yes, I did.
-The morning must have overslept.
-Yes, but isn't that odd?
-Happens to the best of us, don't you think?
-I think...
-There you go.
-Uh, where?
-Oh, just a figure of speech.
And on and on we went, talking, speaking, chatting, raking leaves that were but figments of imagination. Commenting on the darkness, the last fiscal year, snowdrops, John Cage's latest non-music, cottage cheese, pacifist highways until the hunger started to be to much of an issue.
-After you.
-Well, thank you.
We went into the place that catered to customers and sat down at the counter and ordered breakfast while the waitress suppressed the torrential giggle that had drawn us to the place in the first place. When she came back with our order and just had poured us some coffea I made it clear that I had something to ask her she stopped in motion and stood there like a still life still alive with the coffea pot in mid air and over her still lips, still glossy with a little red lipstick, rolled a perfectly pitched...
-Yes?
-Forgive me for being so curious but we just have to know what it was that you giggled for.
-Oh, that's the counter.
-Who's he?
-No, the counter that you're sitting at. Folks come in here all the time and scribble things on it and some things really gets at you.
She was suddenly past the previous pose as she let out a giggle so violently beautiful like she had several life times of experience on top of a Masters thesis on the subject and was the over all world expert on the topic of giggling. I looked at Germaine and Germaine looked at me and suddenly I was so hungry that I couldn't think of a way to un-hunger myself. I think Germaine understood because she began fork feeding me so that I slowly came back to my senses and could use my hands and transport the foods from their temporary exile on their plates; in their cups; in their containers, and take them on their final trip before being chewed to slices in the warmth of my mouth and I just froze up and couldn't move. My thoughts got stuck and started to wither and fade I can't explain how I'm able to... I saw time stand almost completely still; I saw the tiny cracks between life and death; I could scarsely move my eyes but just a few millimeters upwards, downwards or sideways and what I finally saw was the wordless poetry of laughter, the shapeless sculpture of joy, the dimensionless universe of love - all floating in absolute freedom...
Beautifully descriptive, wonderful rhythm of words.
Sounds especially good when read outloud.
You found some beauty on the forum outsidelookinN
