Atrox
Terrestrials
1. Lay
You know you should lay your ghosts, but you've become used to them.
You make your bed at eve, stretch ghosts over the mattress, let the insane bed tuck up your dunes, hide your dreams under the pillow.
"You have made your bed, and you must lie on it"
At dawn you wash away the nightmares and wait for the daymares and the spectral echoes of canned laughter.
You swallow yourself - later it won't help to put your finger down your throat. There won't be a finger, there won't be a throat.
2. Ruin
Out chasing kites and dragonets, loosing the track, jerking out of scrubs. Getting clasped by the creepers of a tumbledown stone wall.
Shattered gargoyles on the ground. Their eyes staring up on their pebble-drooling congeners and on moss grown sculptures.
Beheaded dismembered marble figures. Corroded disembowelled marble humans.
Marble limbs sprawling. Marble heads nuzzling. Marble genitals gaping and heaving in the grass. Marble fig leaves eroding on the compost heap.
Friezes on the walls where grotesque granite creatures revel. Stone reptiles strangling stone gryphons. Stone maggots consuming the struggling monsters.
Stealing through, you'd expect to find the skeletons of the Sleeping Beauty's wooers in the hedges and perhaps her spindle and the witch inside.
Inside Rooms without walls. Columns without ceilings to support. The capitals shedding dead Acanthus leaves which descend in slow motion to become parts of the rustling on the floor.
Doors leading nowhere. Stairs spiralling into open air. Formerly secret passages now exposed, leading deeper into the woods.
In one of the rooms a pile of tiny bones and a pointed hat atop of a tiny skull staring into the corner.
Strange... it seems as this palace decayed so quickly as if someone wanted to get rid of it.
As if the entire host of Seraphim gathered in zenith and wept it away with toxic tears.
3. Mare`s nest
At last I've found you. You're here, you're mine, you're a machine. Hear my tales, decipher my dreams, tell me things.
So happy. What can I use you for - ogling, nestling, coddling? Keep up the spirit, enliven me, keep me alive, don't let me die.
You're beautiful as only you -Heebie-jeebies! - You blow bubble-flies into my belly. Have a glass of gastric juice, have it all.
I want to see you cry. I want to see you hurt. Let those tears flow. Shall I cut onions for your eyes? Let your tears flow.
Miss me, long for me, be desperate for me. You're a jumping jack, you're a golliwog. Maybe you don't exist at all.
Warm hands when they're numb of holding you so tight. Stay in your nest and I'll put a flea in your ear.
Paroxysm - craving much. Cataclysm - giving much. You stay in your nest.
4. Nine wishes
Deep down in a smiling bucket swimming clouds.
If it was up to me this house would be almost seven hundred years old and more than thirteen kilometres tall.
I would sit in a rocking chair, creaking along with an out-of-tune piano and an orchestrion that always tricks me with ever-changing tempo
I'd be able to walk in the ceiling. I would eat nebula for supper. I would wear a necklace made of strung hailstones.
The well outside would be an eye that stares itself blind at the moon. The water would sob. There would be two winds moaning.
The shadows would converge when the clock struck twenty-five.
Oh how I wish I could walk about on the walls. And how I wish there were more hours in a night…
When I can't wish for more - the vision of scarabees crackling mandrake roots in soil breathing ghosts of worms and scolopendras
haunting you with their fumes of horror till your soul tears your body apart and escapes.
5. Human inventions
So you took him moonward from the cellar. Put him in the black garret. The window's spotlight chasing him into the dusty sheets tossing.
Did he wince at the stuffed woodwose lined up with the manikins by the end wall? And when he made his way through the mishmash and crawled into the casket - did you, didn't you lock him in?
Mercy, have mercy. He's harmless, don't you know? Pity, pity - he pities you. You're harmless, defenceless.
Cautious, be cautious - he's dangerous, insane. You rip his head off, crush him, drive a stake through his heart.
6. Mental nomads
I am the constant comings and goings of my selves.
Some of them settling within, some going on. Others sojourning indefinitely, tuning in, tuning out.
New attendants join - cynicism, misanthropy, indifference. Should I embrace them or have them exorcised?
Oh this inevitable madness. Let it come. Transmute it by enduring it.
Let sorrow in. It will leave eventually. Otherwise it will stay knocking on your door forevermore.
Are you possessed still? Yes? Then what about now? Possessed still? Are you addicted still? Yes? Then what about now? Addicted still?
My hour of sanity. The unpredictable.
I meant to lead you away from madness, but that's exactly what drove you out of your mind.
7. Changeling
Do not leave. Leave me weak. Do not leave me alone with this loony they say is me.
A mooncalf - I am in panic, I am manic. A changeling. Pinioned, crippled. I am, believe.
I can't come to terms with the terrestrials. I can't come to terms with me.
A lifetime's worth of tears gathered up in me. I've been on the verge of tears all my life. How can you be me?
I'm postponing my life again as so many times before. Self-pity is my substitute for others mercy. Contempt is my comfort.
8. The bedlam of the bedlam
A young man astride a rocking horse. His petticoats bristling. His eyes closed with pleasure enjoying the euphony of his fork scraping his plate.
Facing him sits a filthy oldie shaking his dentures like castanets. Whistling through his nostrils, giggling with tears in his eyes.
The clattering of my teeth. Sometimes a coff, sometimes an achoo.
Heard a cry for help, but didn't pay attention. Thought it was only myself as usual - the beldam of the bedlam.
A toothless hag moving eyeball-beads in an abacus. They stare so, they stare so on her rope of pearls: A row of Lilliputian skulls on a string.
The oldie chants the alphabet in an order he has fixed himself. Once he strode down the aisle with a wedding gown on an arm's length.
His bride-not-to-be (anymore) in the soil right outside.
The youngster tells about how he once lay in a bathtub barely conscious in rusty-bloody-red water.
The bathtub tiptoed on lionpaws to the landing, tipped over and flung him down the stairs on a rusty-bloody-red runner.
I'd like to tell them about a dragon with hiccups. Hiccuping fire in headwind, burning itself. But I'd better not...
9. Translunaria
Borrow my imagination for a little while. How can I comfort you? You say you like it this way. Night or day - it's the same to you.
Until that day I plant mercury globeflowers in my garden and until that night your beams make the flowers explode and spread your seeds.
Comfort? Yeah like putting plasters on a limb consumed by leprosy. Comfort? Yeah like sticking the head in the sand.
I conjured a miserable creature for you. A restless moonling always on the move. It founded its own nomadic state - Translunaria.
The moonling can never be seen from earth.
Braiding moonbeams.
How can I comfort you? You like it this way, don't you? Slowly revolving a white horizon round your axis.
Your magnetism is so week, you can hardly keep the ivory tower I conjured for you.
How can I...? You say you don't want it. You say you don't need it. How can I...? You don't care at all, do you?
10. Look further
In the shade, in the cold, a grey pastry, a sallow dough. A giant lump of some ¤/&%/ substance.
Wallowing in an over-sized glass jar. Quivering, gurgling. Reminding of muddy aspic. It looks so "/)&/"¤%. It makes me feel so ?)#/&?=`*,
Like a giant mite about to burst after gorging ichor. Taking *¤&()?*¤#"%& shapes. Stretching flabby limbs. Worming out of the jar towards the yellow light.
Excreting a trail of milky pus through the surface rendering.
Outgrowths form in no time, falling off. Tongues emerging from the orifices. Froth and drool drying up as all crumbles away. The pus smouldering and steaming off.
Looking is not seeing is not understanding is not believing is not agreeing. It looks so *%#¤()=. It swells, it grows, it expands. I think it will #¤/$L@(?.
Waiting is not longing is not hurting is not bleeding in a world trapped in a world trapped in a world. The dough's gurgle ceasing with the yellow rays scorching it. It's throwing a crust, which cracks and unpeels, reminding of flocks of mangy dogs running downhill. The two of us can't coexist.
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