Mahler: Symphony No. Three

Well, I wasn't...

Anyway, twenty four hours later, caught inside a grain of sand-- carved and ancient but with the plastic American wrapper. And what was just wildly romantic now seems sweepingly "Disney."

Mahler-- Symphony No. 3. Bitten by a flock of bloodthirsty mosquitoes. My head hurts of absence and my wrist moves faintly with fatigue. The size of the sound pounds inside of me but does nothing more that stretch the film over my eyes wider and tighter and I feel my heart tremble as if it were Palm Sunday in Jerusalem.

The horns are too clear. The sound of thunder is the definition of all things abstract yet most tangible-- like time or measurement (Duchamps-- Three Standard Stoppages).

And the taste of my painkiller sticks to my tongue through a whole page of my life-- taunting me with the possibility of what is only a pocket away. And Monday-- no coke, no food, NOTHING.

The bird that flies into my hand doesn't realize where it goes-- I will squeeze the life out of it until that throbbing mass lies limp and I let it roll to the ground-- the tiny carcass that I can't help but weep for.

Inside my head on the outside of me! Can anyone understand the weight of that? Probably not...

And my eyes glaze and concentration drifts down the winding halls with girlish, ghostly moans. Writing saves that but they beckon nevertheless. The cross is tasteless and cheap against the backdrop of the rest of this. The candles have drowned themselves in their own loathsome wax, melted by the eclipsical lights of the cameras.

The tympani player breathes deeply.

If I stop writing, I know that I will go under-- to sleep or unconsciousness-- pulled by the weight of this whirlpool of Mahler.

The army fades and Hollywood responds: "Don't go! We'll make you better! Bigger! More the way we want you to be!!"

The army silently contemplates-- dead-- the corpse merges with the screen-- an underage necrophiliac.

"Tomorrow," she says.

"Uh huh," I reply.

And wonder what kind of nonsense pours from my eyes. What color ink I cry. But I can not cry at all now... for the pain of absence is too great-- absence of those puddles-- absence of Patti Smith and Pete Townshend and yesterday's stale breath.

And, oh God! I want to throw up, I want to throw up, I want to throw up, I want to throw up and self consume from the inside out. To stain my coat and spoil the floor and disrupt the world with horror at having seen a fully grown person disappear into a vomit stain on the floor of Riverside Church.

My eyes won't focus now and I am too tired to force them and am scared of myself and what I am doing. I spoon the mist away.

But this only sounds like the score of Beauty and the Beast, Part II, so it all seems hopeless again. (Even though II is a rather beautiful Roman numeral!)

I can't think anymore, so I close.

*******************************

Movement three now.

Suffering speaks: PERISH!
But all joy desires eternity!
Desires deep, deep eternity.

-Nietzsche- (Also Sprach Zarathustra)

Weh spricht: Vergeh!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit!
will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit.

That is the only rub.

But my throat burns now from that minty poison that I should have thrown away long ago. That mint that rejuvenates the spaces in my collar bone but can not clear the mist form my eyes-- only infinitely compound this headache while I long for release-- to be spared the burning lighter on my nail-- to call back the wind just this once so that I can stand inside a glass box and watch General Custer die on the plains alone.

I will throw kisses against the windless fingerprinted surface, watch them spiral to the ground and hope that they have sealed his eyes in satisfaction. As the horns now play a gentle farewell and three young men from West Point shoot against the white sky-- the kind that I hate-- the kind that makes me sleepy (as I am now).

And stained glass depressed when the color is gone. The branches batter my box in a Renaissance dance and coax me out to join them. Letting me close my eyes again the blue and believe, for a minute, that blue is permanence. (All the while that skipping record in my head reminds me that it is not).

And at the end of the night, the street lamps shade my skin with the color of yellow infection and blisters swell and fill on the bottom of my feet and I crush them as I tread along the thick white paint of the crosswalk. I press my stiletto heel into the head of history and lean back with all my weight, sweating and squinting as the blood pours out of my ears and trickles- sticky- down my neck and dries in red streaks. And when I pick up my foot, all of the blisters run and have burst, but there is no dent. Time springs back effortlessly-- like foam.

And I want off the carousel NOW! But Billy just laughs at me and refuses to pull the switch, and so languidly, I sling my arm around the horse's neck and press further and further into myself the prayer to stop and the delusion that it will.

"It will not," the record says.

But in my exhaustion, I do not have the strength to acknowledge it. No strength, no will, no plan-- only the soiled shell of myself kissing the horse's neck, remembering that there is no heat in plastic and praying for someone to switch the god damn switch to OFF!