08/12/2018
The moonless night; the haze of two death-rattle-flickering streetlamps you can just make out in the distance; already twenty minutes late… All the reasons you come up with not to take the newly discovered "shortcut" home, and you came up with that list without really trying. You could come up with much more convincing arguments for not turning down that alleyway, but… But, there are people down there. More than the space should allow… adjusted to the darkness’s surreal architecture.
It looks like some sort of street carnival...but in such an odd place? At an even odder hour? Someone has written, "All Are Welcome," on a piece of cardboard with a sharpie and hung it above the thick steel door.
Other people turn back under these conditions… We pay them no mind.
Will you turn back? Never to be know the stories you’d have been remembered by?
Tragic. But we have to pay them no mind.
We're too busy telling our tales. Many of them are hard, full of blood and p**s and foul language and sex… Some of the stories here are all great wild fields of drawn in pine green stalks, still sleeping, your red nostrils bring in that chill morning air that fills your lungs and remains like so much firewood widening your exhausted eyes; still so much of you left somewhere back in bed—lost somewhere in your cotton stuffed pillow dreaming. Outside you’re standing eyes half open in a ratty old bathrobe you stole from The Hilton a decade or two ago, you hold your steaming mug of coffee clutched in both hands, then sip. Then sip again. Black, bitter--just the way you like it, if you liked coffee. But now you lower the cup, it's almost time. The sun coming up over the mountains. Already the dew, the most delicate of crystals, slowly streaking down the sleeping flowers’ buds, the stems, as if caressing a lover: their cheek, their neck...moving so slow, so gentle you can feel your heartbeat belong to them in this moment, hard and slow.
Cautious, you reach out to touch one. You ache to join them, to be, you think, to be something so perfect; to not be flawed or have your life flawed around you, even for the briefest of moments would be worth anything a lifetime could buy.
Before you have a chance to cut in, though, the first true ray of sun pours over the mountains: the spark, the sizzle and those dew dripping stems ignite like matches, torches—the dew shaking off like sweat. A blaze of yellow smoldering pedals opening, almost as if it were some wild beast in a maddened run, charging right at you. More beams; the flicker, the igniting smoldering pedals swirl and engulf you faster than you could ever escape; but not for all the world would you run.
That's how forever this is.
The blossoms have broken free in a sudden gust of wind. They surround you, spin you, kiss you on the lips and both cheeks too. It is the loveliest fire that will ever burn you alive. But I fear for you, my reader, as I fear this, my scene—my pedal mornings that I write late into the night that no poison or chainsaw could touch, but if you were to shy away, to blush or cringe or discard it as a few quant paragraphs of fancy, then what might have been beautiful becomes a double homicide: two corpses, a few stalks, dried through and through to the faint yellow brown of emptiness, the second, I can see it plainly enough, but it is lost to you: in a way it is you and all that dazzling green and yellow and where a field like that might have taken you—all the things you’ve loved and touched and dreamed and sang but, as the blanket is pulled over your eyes that for the slightest instant saw with my visions, it is the corpses of all the things you’ve never done.
All are welcome. But some are too shy, some are too bitter to let us say our words and sing our songs, to let us practice our art before them and with rhyme or skein or color or note, spin them new eyes to live the world through, if only for a while, and productions of shimmering stages and gold-shadow costumes: new worlds to make their eyes shimmer a color different than it ever has or ever will again.
Those who turn from us mockingly see only themselves, and so they see fools playing at what they believe is important business.
We pay them no mind.
There are too many desperate for a sip, a drink a gulp of what we have to offer. Not a man dying of literal thirst will we save, but a man dying of loss, of unrequited love, of the fear of tomorrow and, worst of all, of the phantoms and furies, the shaking ground and hellfire of those so horribly particular yesterdays.
…through force of sheer will alone, to have murdered time. To go to that place and allow it never to end.
Why not? If nothing else will do…
And in the flaming petals we've danced, and twirled, and lifted, and you’ve fallen back into a dip and they caught you. You knew they would. And now we are dancing some more but the splendor of the field, like all splendors before it, soon crumple away like ash to give way to the memories, the time that torments you. The flowers, their petals, they asked if they made formation, if they hugged your arms and your legs close and gave them wings, could I teach them to fly. Could flower stuck to flapping arms and kicking feet go faster than the speed of light, slingshot you through a black hole back to the time you have to get to, to the words you have to unsay.
You think on it, one should always be truthful with friends, so you gave the petals your answer: "Of course."
And they were already clinging to your arms and legs…
