MadameBastet-Firing-Neurons

Phantasmagoria

There's a whole world out there...alive, breathing, sighing, heaving, pulsating like some giant monstrous heart...a hundred worlds, a thousand worlds, a million worlds of late-night coffee shops with fading linoleum floors and desolate truck stops on highways I have never travelled. I can hear the laughter echoing between worn-out bar stools, formica counters and lonely weeping willow trees.

I can hear footsteps crunching across the gravel in the dead of night and soft weeping fading down hospital corridors in the still, eerie sadness of 3 a.m....morgue doors closing, the sirens wailing, the keening of the bereaved, the wolves in the hills howling and the scent of some great despair filling the black and desolate cold air.

I can see it all, smell it all, the jasmine in the pre-summer winds, the stale cigarette smoke from dark and lonely alleys, from the darkness of my bedroom
the flickering blue TV the simultaneity of life assaults my senses and the sheer magnifent multiplicity of events....simply, ordinary events, brings me to my knees in refuge. The prayers begin to gods unknown and even unbelieved in, please release me from this wicked, aching, screaming din.

I hear the spoon delicately stirring the hot tea, the undulating motion of rhythmic fucking flashes before me, the screaming, thundering guitar solos in clubs in Amsterdam and London and far away lands, the bitter stench of hair dye and foreign cigarettes, cloves and pot and cheap cerveza bars, the drenching odor of stale beer and the stinking memories I can't can't can't ever ever ever forget.

Oh yes, they all come to me now as I rot between these four walls...I hear the distant echo of cars speeding down the street outside my front door and think, this is my story, this is all there ever was to tell....six o'clock shadows and the promise of eternity, the magical pink cotton candy sky bruising to deep violet, azure, gunmetal grey. I made the sun bleed and turned away; I caught the stars trying to escape and chaos is no great reward for believing with all your heart and soul in the great, grand theory of entropy.

I commanded the Gods and they did their part, but now...now it all lies broken and sallow, in sharp-edged shards and fucked-up compassionless regret, this ridiculous circus, this party of one, this lost girl of cruel neglect.

No man is an island unto himself, how wrong can one man be! I dream of lives unlived and lives forgotten and in the dream it is never really me. I hear the music, the notes come through the window and like feathers alight on shadows against the walls...have you ever realized how the whole of the world, the entire universe and every baby universe after that can exist in one tiny song?

I mean, did you ever listen to music that simply states the simple, long, deep, bitter want and nothing more than the whole of all your sad desires, all your crazy, pathetic needs and failings, and base animal wants....oh they all can be found between the first and last notes of one little song.

There are worlds out there...that beat and pulsate like strange attractors, strange and distant heartbeats that haunt me to no end...who are these people, where do they begin, where do they end?

The measure of time and rain-soaked streets, the measure of loneliness and faces you will never, never meet...yes, sometimes I think about all the faces I will never know, all the streets I will never walk upon, all the books I will never read, all the hands I will never hold, all the eyes I will never look into. These are the heartbeats that forever elude me, strange beasts I dream of and die for in dark bedrooms and on kitchen floors.

And I wonder, when the lights are on, when did it begin to go so wrong? How memories haunt and recollection stings! But neurons will not release the things I want so badly gone. I think about my best friend and how I have not spoken to her in 14 years, about how I walked away one day and never looked back, oh but that is not true, I have looked back again and again and the ghost is still there.

I am undefinable now, or am I? I remember the days when we defined ourselves by the kinds of clothes we wore, the kinds of shoes we wore...buying identities like groceries down on Melrose; a cross here, an earring there... a three hundred dollar leather jacket and all was well. Oh we could figure out how to get to the top of Maslow's triangle, to get to the bliss, meet the hierarchy of all our needs. We could call Heaven and Hell at will; we owned the world.

We built lives out of ink, paper, ash, who is to question, who is to ask? I do not travel those streets anymore; I am afraid of the streets and sidewalks and storefronts...the cruel spell of geography, the ugly call of topography. It only exists to remind me I no longer belong in that world, I have passed it now, and it has passed me. I do not want to slip by phantoms and ghosts and catch the reflection of a woman looking for a girl now long gone, for I am not good at making small talk with the dead.

I cannot find salvation anywhere, in any world, in any one, in any pill, in any glass or bottle or book or song. I lie in bed in the dark and dream of all the other worlds and wonder who is living, who is dying, who is eating, fucking, working, crying? Where does it begin, where does it end...?

I miss this girl who died inside; I never really got the chance to say goodbye. There was no funeral, no Sunday mass, no memorial or even scattered ash...she stayed with me because she did not know, she died so very long ago.

But now it is time to let her go, to bury her and send her on her way. There are worlds for her to haunt and roam, but this I know...I am no longer this girl's home.