Sucker Punching the Pink Heart

It was Demetra’s day off. There was no alarm clock. She lay in bed wondering why she was awake. It’s my day off. Can’t I just sleep? She could have made the choice to get out of bed immediately. After all she was awake and staring at the pop corn texture of her drywall ceiling. Demetra hated drywall. She hated her apartment. She hated all modern apartments. There was no grace in their design. They were just a collection of eight feet tall boxes connected to eight feet tall boxes. She was awake but she refused to rise. The sheets were soft and the comforter was warm. She pulled the covers around her tight like a cocoon and wondered what it would be like to be a butterfly. She was due for transformation, and felt that she had been in the larvae too long. To be a caterpillar would be good enough. She just wanted some forward movement. 

So she lay there staring at the ceiling until she felt that she could lie there no longer. Then, she shoved the satin sheets back, walked to the bathroom and turned on the hot water in the shower. She lit a candle, turned off the lights, and pushed the play button on her CD player before slipping into the heat and the steam. Nina Simone began to sing Feelin’ Good and Demetra took the heat of the water into her body. It drenched her brown hair, ran down her face tracing the contours of her thin nose and full lips. The water cascaded over round, pert breasts, continued across her navel, through her pubic hair and down the insides of her thighs making clear curving streams until it ran between her toes down the drain. There in the shower was Demetra’s favorite place. Eventually she would sit down, head bowed and the steam and the darkness would swallow her. This was her place of solace; it was her temple of meditation. She felt that she was returning to the womb, to the nothingness. It was the only time that she allowed her mind to go blank. Then, she would open and pictures would come in and answers would be delivered. 

Demetra felt the majority of the time that her brain was her enemy. She catalogued, categorized, and over-analyzed everything. She understood the meaning of Mary Carr’s words: “Your mind is a bad neighborhood, don’t go there alone.” She hated this quality in herself. She only wanted to let go, and just be. However, there was always the static of her thoughts creating a low buzz that interfered with everything. If only she could always feel as she felt when she was alone in her shower. 

Demetra had no idea how long she had been under the scorching water. Time slipped away in her shrine, but eventually she came out of her reverie and covered her body with a soft robe. She was bored, and had no plans other than going to the market. So she flipped on the T.V. Suddenly she was bombarded with commercials from Zales, Hallmark and FDT. The Valentine propaganda was in full swing, and it was only January the fourth. “Fucking Valentine’s Day,” she yelled. She switched off the television, threw the remote control on the floor and began to pace around her apartment. She hated this time of year. She hated the heart-shaped boxes of cheap candy, the cheesy pink cards, and she hated the brainwashing commercials. Valentine’s Day was a day of desperation where people were in a frenzy to be with someone, impress someone, or keep someone. People booked hotels, made reservations, or drank themselves into oblivion at some hole in the wall bar hoping to be touched and validated. Demetra felt sick. It wasn’t that the holiday itself made her sick. She felt sick because she wasn’t strong enough to rise above it. She fell into all the nonsensical candy coated crap, and let herself be jerked around by a date on a calendar. She felt like a victim of the holiday. She would say that it didn’t matter, but secretly she wanted that day to be beautiful. She wanted it to live up to its potential for romance. What she really wanted was to have one time when reality surpassed the coloring and promises of greeting card commercials. Demetra wanted explosions and electricity. She wanted to be swallowed in warm energy. She wanted to really be heard. She wanted her toes to curl and tingle. She wanted strong masculine hands to dance on her skin with lightness and desire. Demetra wanted her brain to fade out like it did in the shower. She wanted to completely give into the sensations of her body. She wanted to explode simultaneously with a man and for a brief moment become the big bang. She wanted to feel universes and planets spring from her orgasms. 

This is what she wanted. For a little while she smiled thinking about what this would be like, and then her hideous brain of voices began its daily intrusions: Fat chance. You’re dreaming. That only happens in the movies. You want too much. That’s why you are alone. Just accept reality. Find someone that works out, has a retirement plan, and settle down. Squeeze out a few babies and join the PTA. Every one else does it. Why isn’t good enough for you? She hated these voices. She didn’t know where they came from or how they became so powerful. More importantly she didn’t know how to get rid of them. She couldn’t stay in the shower forever. “Fucking Valentine’s Day,” she roared.

 

For half an hour the apartment was filled with the thuds of fists on the punching bag. Demetra hit the bag with speed and fury until she could no longer hold her arms up. At the point she cried and began kicking the bag. Her flesh burned from outside in and her muscles burned in reverse proportion. Her lungs heaved, her heart beat a loud deep drum in her ears, and finally she collapsed. Her mind was quite. She sat there until she could breathe normally again, and then slowly she stood until her eyes were in direct line with pink heart with an arrow through it. This is when she delivered her ultimatum.

Listen up Valentine’s Day, I’m pissed. I’m tired of your lies and bullying. It’s time that you lived up to your promises, and it’s going to happen this year, on the very next Valentine’s Day. You can take your roses and shove them up your aorta. I want tropical flowers: calla lilies and orchids. I want gourmet graham crackers covered in dark chocolate, and I want them hand wrapped. I don’t want your stupid red box with little cup cake wrappers. I’m unique. Do you hear me? You can’t love me with a formula. You better hear me or I’ll lodge a diamond in your valve. Try as you might it will never come out, because Diamonds are Forever!

The Morning the Mechanism Broke

The morning radio waves are gray graves swallowing my heart in static and Kurt Cobain feedback. The sun melts awake after a night of pouting moon and swooning lovers put to bed by the insistence of savored stars glowing tremble-ish. The water pipes roar themselves soar when the shower wakes me with water warm morning alarm, and my arms reach out for soap and the hope of redemption.

So soft waiting. Fainting or fighting must one begin. Electricity surges burned blue. Everything will fall fast and soon. Sounds funnel through cardiovascular limbo, and the inertia of emotion fuels fission. Nothing as precise as thunder, as a wrecking ball, as the jury’s verdict: Guilty as insinuated.

Everything falls, but first we have the prologue of termites. The slow gnaw. The patience of cancer. An engine revs into an explosion of parts: the block cracked, a rod snapped, but first the oil breaks down, gaskets disintegrate.

And so the malfunction begins with Blue Eyes casting off cat-eyed Sun Boy to hide her moon-mind. She wields apathy as her greatest weapon of protection. Her silence is the electrolyzation of the open-hearted emotional changeling who cuts his teeth and feeds his appetite with flowers perfumed in the midday sway of watercolor sky. She changes the language of her kisses as she rolls tides through her eyes. Her gaze ensconces Atlantis. How many ships have wrecked on her siren coast? How many men whispering her names are hidden in the cofferdams?

The breakdowns continue to wrack Sun Boy’s brain. Murder piles itself on neglect. Kym never glowed her smile at work that day. Phone call search lights fleshed the pale city. A meeting was called to make known what was felt. Dead. Trapped and killed without remorse. Her face and breath wrapped in black tape by the crack fiend’s hands. She floated somewhere between her paintings of Heaven and the mystical maybe that her parent’s prayed for. Her red hair flowed out forever around the sun and soaked up epitaphs of burning gas.

Sun Boy’s sleep plagued by the same bad dream. Night shook and no sheep were counted. The nightmare sweated his sheets, and carried his mattress across the River Styx to battle his shadow.

No redemption without confession. I am Sun Boy, and everything falls now.

I will come out of the cold cave as a tiger waving Damascus moonbeam blades and words of molten lava. I will flick my pain in the night’s star lace with rattlesnake flinch and fists of arrows. I am Sun boy. I am the archer. Give me my ram’s horn. give me my fire launching bow. I will blow down the amethyst brainquake, drive my lover into a corner, and demand that she pay attention. Held captive at voice-point. Tears heavier than sinking rocks. I will erupt the raw tsunami inside of me.

Give me armor from space debris.
Temperature rises 56 degrees.
And everything falls now!

Rust rain racks my thoughts with hollow conundrums.
Pelts my skin with paint of tainted angels hooting
And booting me knee first and thirsty onto the city sewer grates.
My brain is a bursting bomb: hydrogen inseminated
And split in the shake heave windowpane whipping rattle smash clash thunderstorm.

Realization is a wham slam slap crazy punch drunk skull crunch,
And life is a diluted dream.

The light beams are reflected, redirected, and caught in a clusterf*ck.
The lies are printed.
Goddess statues dented.
Pigeons evolve and subsist on cremation dust.

I’m reeling from feeling too intensely the effects of euphoria,
And my heart is a hammer beating me to death.
Arteries stretched to bursting point.
Dropping me hard on the sundial point.

My heart is a hammer
And the gods are taking bets on my will to survive.
The fates are snipping strings
Cutting and measuring
Laughing and pleasuring
Themselves with my demise.

Icarus is melting his wings.
Sisyphus is rolling his rock.
Lipo throws fiery poems on the river
And it all takes place without me
On the sun-side
Shadow-side
And in the valley is where I hide
Tromping and stumbling
Unable to glide anymore
Unable to abide anymore.

Lightning leaps in my cold wire core
And my heart is a hammer beating me submissive to this poem.
Desk chained and fettered in ink
Clashing flash phrases
Brain implosions
And word crazes.

The blank page is staring me down to teeth.
I have to get the words right
I have to get the words right.
I must find a form for this void that is consuming me.

I’m cloaked in confusion
Sweating nails with gunfire velocity
Driving wasted thoughts in the noon moon
Leaking lunar brains in the blue Milky Way shimmer
Cancer coating the mystical darkness.

I’m waving straying praying to the muse
And I refuse to lose again.
I stop begin stop begin push the pen.
If I can get the words right I can make things better.

Slam Bam hammer beat heart
Bam Slam heartbeat hamme

Cut me slice me vivisect my limbo
Light a candle in my darkness
and transplant me holy in the golden sunflower kingdom.
Give me words to say what feeling is doing this killing
Stop me from milling in my unkind, muttled mind.

I’m clinking
I’m clanking
I’m drawing blanks
The wind whoos and dances my flame.

I’m trailing smoke
I’m a punch line for jokes
I am a rubber-band man snapped back
To whelp myself red and white
I’m in fright without delight.

I need a conclusion an absolution the final solution to this abstract puzzle scattered on the blue green mean wave sea.
I need shelter from the shock shake storm clarity in form a key to the lock that bars me from the milk honey paradise.
I need a wise woman a wise man a gentle king a guiding hand a mage a sage a vivid page a full lung blown breath to inflate my balloon and carry me home to Auntie Em.

Will someone please cry olly olly oxen free?

The lights fade down dim diminished
And all I need is a solace kiss
To be called and missed
Love loved and love returned
Rejuvenated in the cleansing burn
Languidly loose and unconcerned
Floating longways sideways high
To float to fly
To reach the pinnacle point of magenta passion
Where our lips are binary stars.

Where I Went To Hide

The rusty barn was a thing that stood
At the edge of the back most of the yard
Propping up the sky.
It bordered the pasture that did not belong to us.

If anyone else ever visited it,
Then I never saw them.
Therefore it was only mine.

A dirt floor covered in wood chips,
A ladder to a second rotting floor,
No one interrupted.

The old green bus seat always sat
In the same place:
On the corner of Fredonia and Thrash Road
In East Texas
I owned my private kingdom.

No one could say
I was otherwise than I thought, and

I didn’t care if it rained
So loud. So very loud that the trees shivered.

Even the clouds are allowed to cry
Sometimes.