Fancydelic

I've been dreaming dead mothers. Night after night I lay my head down and, instead of sleeping, dream a woman being killed. The death is always sudden. Either disease - a sudden onset, a quick decline - or murder at the hands of bandits. There's no other kind of violence, no rape or anything. Just the death of someone's mother and then grieving. The first night it was my boyfriend's mother. I don't have a boyfriend, but his mother got sick of cancer suddenly, one night, and he called me at four in the morning to say, "Kyla, my mother's dying." And I said, "What? How?" the way my mother says What?! when she hears bad news, with ind

The sink is clogged with asterixes - fool, you're supposed to rinse the kettle before just sloshing the whole damn pale-blue mess down. The dishes are corroded with semicolons, the apostrophes are spilling from the chipped, pastel mugs. It's all going to get caught in the filter, anyway, he yells, the flicking of his tin lighter like typewriter keys down the hall. The towels are gasping, wincing, with their wrinkled terry-cloth tongues; when I sink into the scummy tub for a soak later, they'll still be whispering about his hullabulloo. Someone with slow, accented words is muttering about cocaine on the radio - scrathy,

We don't have time for this, love. These days melt away over ankles and throats like warm milk; over shoulders and mouths to pool in the hollows of our bodies. Soon, the days will be bright again; bursting with springshine and suntime, filling the expectant cups of our hands to spill over into our emptinesses; grass will unfurl, breaking the soil with sharp photosynthetic spines, lapping at the air with verdant tongues, like fog scattering against city parks. Summer will be quick on its heels, heavy-handed with a toothy grin, leering into the faces of every creature it embraces, leaning closely to mouth searingly at the back of th

(At rise: Jason is in car with four friends, hotboxing.  His speech patterns are erratic as he talks.) JASON: I'm fine, I'm fine, shut the hell up and I'm fine.  Give me a minute and everything will stop pulsing.  Ah-haaa, hell.  Shit.  (Pause.)  Uh, is the heat natural?  I've never done this before.  The heat is natural?  (Pause.)  I feel like a damn power source.  Is the pulsing natural?  (Pause.)  The pulsing is natural.  The heat and the pulsing are natural.  You know what it's like?  Every three seconds I don't exist again, I forget what I'm made of.  Then it's like, somewhere inside me, this explosion, like Eden…it's too much power for

Strangest fog, this illness. Sylvia talked of tulips and white hospitals when I was seventeen, and I thought, "This is morose. This is what maudlin is meant to mean. What strange self-indulgence." And now, I see the inside, or I saw it, once. It's when the eyes recede into the caverns of the mind, like cupping your hands at your temples, except it's bone and skin, in walls around you and the bright at the end of the tunnel is really very white. Strangest fog. Walk like your body is not your all. Talk like a tin can kicked down the road to sandstone, soapstone lives you've lived, built from the matter of your mind, abrasive,

A breath sits down in me. The woman across has breathed it, she is sighing. A struggle is over. "You have always been love, through waking dreams and walking sleeps" - but I cannot speak. I cannot ever speak or too many words will go down our throats and we will choke. Words walking the heath in my head. But I no longer breathe wishes. There has always been love, but it has sat down and my work is over. What is left is nothing large, nothing overtly valuable. Just a wish that God would speak; and the repetitive memory of my head, down on the floor in prayer - "Let it be a kind of love." I'll be saying it forever. As for the