monarch

It's not as coordinated as it sounds. More like wars and rumors of wars. Locating this crazy broad is alarmingly simple--and in my alleged experience, she seems to find you. All you have to do is think of her.


Yeah! and then she just kind of emerges like a...like a Satanic Venus rising from the figments and froth of quotidien hardship!

                                                                                 -o-

Resilience allows trauma to trickle into the backwaters of memory for the sake of survival. But it's not to be trifled with.

Resilience also cuts tags off of mattresses, tampers with and disables smoke detectors, and encourages blow drying in bath tubs. Last time didn't do me in so what's another go?

Because it's a lot like "love". And we've talked about it. We've been over it.

                                                                                 -o-

She showed up again, looking really pretty.

And all of a sudden: rational decision-making is for the birds, am I right?

O disfiguring burns! I don't learn. Not from you, not from the scars and the lights, or from the dark holes for that matter. No one told me this would happen. Just-say-no booklets neglect to say that basements, matrixy lasers, questionable youth...some of that might lend itself well to the dismissal of prudence. It just taps you on the shoulder, like the devil in a little pink dress. Love comes knocking in a similar fashion. She doesn't use the front door.

She comes in through the bathroom window?

Protected by a silver spoon. What can I say? Sanity looked a little too comfortable in the cockpit. Smooth sailing charted a course too straight and narrow for any sort of candied catastrophe to get a word in edgewise...the too-goodness triggered a sort of black swan intervention. And where were you?

I suppose the dark side locked the night nurse in the broom closet.

The Big Nurse.

By one gambling fool, McMurphy! You've always been my retarded understudy. When I'm out sick. You just slide on into the driver's seat and tie that blindfold tight -- cruise control, naptime, toes at 10 and 2....and the characters you'll pick up and drive anywhere they want to go...for miles, hell, for years! Don't think I'll ever forgive you for the last one. Because I won't.

                                                                             -o-

So how was it?


After the rush, reason goes out with the bathwater -- the electrocuted bathwater. By the time it hits, it's too late.

That's when I peered in to see just what, exactly, the hell was going on.


Yes, and I ran you over.


And then giggled. Carry on.


Every minute cost me at least ten in the trenches. Everything sounded like tangible lightning, like I could bend it. People were like pipe cleaner: cradle me! let me knead you! It reminded me of the vanilla twist cones that I loved when I was little.

"When you were little"... isn't that the tail on just about every donkey-assed sentence? I think you left the barn door open.

I took inventory: six hours of jumping in place, two withered cochlears, a mysterious bruise. Then you showed up with a hot spatula.

Nursey kicked the door down.

I heard the whistle blast. Cucarachas retreated, pedestrian lights revealed unpleasant truths...and then I suppose I woke up --marooned, as it were, on suicide island.

Only one way off.

Even the palm trees looked flat...oddly Seussian and indifferent to the apocalyptic serenade still playing in corroding cavities that I believe are yours. You looked like a horror-struck parent!

You looked like something out of Dark Crystal. I found you sleeping in the piano, on the strings, turning your teeth into sand.

Perhaps that's why the dream felt so real.

You were grilling a cheek in the sun, all the blinds were broken. You sheepish idiot; that stamp on your right hand had been reprinted via sweat several times across your forehead. What, my dear bastard, had I ever done to you?

                                                                          -o-



I do wish to apologize – I want desperately to take it all back. But I rode a black horse into Versailles, became the horse, galloped through the Hall of Mirrors and slept with Marie Antoinette. White lasers cut across her breasts – she hunted men across wheat fields, through ancient forests to find me. And all without losing the blue velvet ribbon that held her together. And the music: like Goa, like angels, like melted chocolate--

Like Headquarters.

Exactly.

And whatever do they serve for breakfast in the Hall of Mirrors?

Birthday cake.


                                                                         -o-



Sit up, you're bleeding, the piano strings are cutting into your bones--you're getting blood everywhere.

Shall I play you Something?

Something in the way, she moves, and all I have to do is think of her.