sleep schisms and new shades

I’d fallen asleep in a theatre hall, it might have been an hour or a month. the seats had been left vacant and weighty crumbs of smoke exhausted the cinerous air. I knew the room well, for it began within me, asunder and shielded, from the red of the curtains to the penumbra dramas. their warmth emerged somewhere at the midpoint my cells, as a binding sequence of exit. yet that night it was vacuous and drained of crimson, as if its very shades had wearied out their hemic performance and abjured diseased to the bleakness of crumbled paper.
my eyes, drowsed with sleep, could hardly tell the nature of the play unfolding before them. rambling, ear-splitting monologues encircled the room in unfathomable pounds, thrashing deepening cracks on walls and ascending up my body in the shape of fever. I felt my feet dragged forcibly from the ardor of my anchorage to some bleak, recondite ground whose contingence I refused to adjoin. till there was nothing but utmost silence, a silence too inordinate for the inflection of my breaths. it was as if the actors consented to quitclaim the unyieldingness of their acts: some left the stage, some remained deadpan, some sat down with their hands covering their faces, some motionlessly looked the other way.
I laid my head on my arm and watched them as, one by one, they stepped back and began to gradually turn to paper... and, as the swelling fever was marching on my eyelids, I could only ask myself which of them would be the first to shatter and turn to ashes.

onlooker of mayhem [sociopath's love poem]

by the time the performers grow tired of this silly diversion
you'll be artlessly heaved in your senseless uproar
while I'll resign composed in my observant position,
irked and disenthralled by this madcap auditorium,
by their turmoil and futile dramatics.

they're all drunk, my dear, I tell you,
how obsolete this language they speak,
irrationally, backwards, plethorically,
how unreasonable their temperature and gestures.

see, one by one, they slide in currents and drink their downfalls,
so unaware of the nature of their entrapment...
and you, well, you quietly and absurdly drink your own,
in your mute innermost twilights
when you run fore and backwards on hazardous bridges
from illusory night skies to nightmarish blood-red dawn.

and I can only immovably measure the vacancy of this desert,
in my cold, divided hall of mirrors,
while we humor ourselves in this heedless actor status,
in the microscopic simulacrum of existence
between those two minute, cut off extensions
where you begin and end on my resolute orbit.

so strange that you spread yourself in this draining convulsion,
because I can merely assume to grasp the unhinged nonsense
of an alphabet I've forgotten how to speak
somewhere ahead of time, ahead of sense and axioms,
of a certain slip of hand and uptight voice tone,
of humans and their fickle absurdities.

how derisory, Image, how pointless and strange...

theme for a blackout

a lighthouse burned today.
noosed in the breaths of the life-absorbed night, a wandering ship sunk to imminent blackened bottom.
in the strange inertia of petrified hands covering eyes, the drowning seconds surged in crippled flows and tiny explosions, clashing on the board with the deluge of a shattered chandelier. opaque sequences of space consumed themselves before the passengers' surprised eye grips. some clenched their hands into each other, others cried, others laughed like madmen.
somewhere in the midst of the death-inhaled screams, the wearied arms of a last survivor cleaved the charcoaled waves, angling on the needlelike thread between his unwieldy entrapment and tight limbs of inexistence. the fading terminus of the last burning lamp cast his spectacle with the delusion of flames on black waters.
he died by dawn, as I feared.

23.5ºS

it might have been that fickle temperature of your dreary being
or a yielding vision of wontedly-merging fragments
that stirred me to bewilder you and draw you towards my surface.
and I thought I could nimbly close my eyes before you
and fall asleep in mild threads of skin,
logical and discharged of my weighty chaos.

yet somewhere the pieces blacked out in discordance
and I quivered as if clashed by a mid-december nightmare
of a late night traveler madly knocking at the doors of my dwelling,
a dwelling I'd left a long time ago
for the shielded seclusion of my own winter.

I thought it might have been those three long nails
savagely thrust at the vertex of my spine,
burning to drag me down through erratic dark waters
to the inmost core of your silence
where hell begins
and we're stripped of skins and tongues.

but I had you there, weary and unshielded,
and thought a meager grip could cling me to your wrappings,
all succumbing, mouth, neck, skin and ribs,
dispossessed of that immersed something that entwines them
and weaves your cells in their fucked up logic.

yet it was the very angle of your eyelids
as if death itself was drifting through your lashes
that cleaved the warmth of my skin and its coherent ways,
fixing me deep down a concealed chamber
and I could only back away in defense
from you and your nervy december limbo.

intermission

I said tonight I wanted to be air again,
the red has etched me to racking sections.
by dusk the assailants will be marching home
and long tired breaths will absorb the charcoaled radius,
where I will walk open through the wreckage,
backwards like a chimera in a deaden movie scene
contemplating its petrified avatars
strewn in dissevered quotas all across the compass,
interspersed,
plagued,
lacerated,
like blacked out chess pieces on a bloodstained board.
my eyes, vermilion and stripped of lids,
my mouth, corpselike and desert,
my throat, numb and wedged with embers.
a blood ingrained nail,
a severed arm,
an ear,
two,
three,
four,
my awareness, hardened to endemic edges,
my memory, punctured by arrays of scalpels,
my logic, consumed by its own weight,
my aims, naked and aguing.
I close the door and they dispel like luster.

in my dream I'll step into a vacant room,
denuded shadow with half-closed eyes.
the neon lights will have been long time shut,
all faces swallowed in muted penumbra,
and words will float around me somehow mangled
that they'll no longer impair my feet like glass.
 
there, next to an opaque window,
my monster and I will sit side by side,
like silhouettes in contre-jour,
disarmed to each other through distant gazes
and conjured in a mutual sealing silence.

my goodness, I haven't slept in months...

miscast

maybe I'm merely a projection in a black & white cinema - 
moved by concealed machinery I wade through manifold shades of gray,
dragged from frame to frame I dissolve in pixels and shadowplay,
unfolding in small beginnings and endings
before each evening's new listless audience.

and from my high-angle shots
I can tell the precise shades on their faces
or measure the seconds between their finger twitches,
as they distantly assess the semblance of my acting
or absently dwell upon their daily matters.

from time to time I try to spite the director's composition,
so I fix a face and attempt a subtle grimace,
hit my shoe to the floor
or alter my voice tone,
yet each time they remain aloof and disconnected,
tapping their feet,
holding other hands
or checking their watches,
while I'm rushed by lines and gestures which I have not chosen
or swiftly abscond dislodged by tour de force characters.

then, with each evening's denouement,
freeze-frame, I watch them grab their coats and leave their seats,
as, one by one, they dispatch my fleeting performance
to redeem thoughts of events, friends or lovers,
while I remain shut down behind the aged screen,
watching crumbs of ashes cover the empty seats
and waiting for some stranger's hand
to appear and trigger my machines
so I can begin and end one more evening.