When the Sunflowers Quote Grandmother Cloud

                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                    

the doorway to the insane asylum is guarded by a Saint 

whose eyes curl in dark ribbons.  His moustache is on fire, bread crumbs

and a lace curtain of broken words spun by a tongue that seems

constructed of cardboard and cow magic.  The eyes are blotted knots

of broken stone. Dark. Containing nothing, not even nothing, 

but a strange sucking cacophony of voids, calculating emptiness

that seems as if it was engineered from some distant vantage point 

in the future.  The mirror of God is suspended in the Chromium 

counterbalance between the interior of my brain, which is everywhere

and nowhere, and this door, which opens with a knock and closes

like a mouth, the shuffling whisk of a click and a lock

perfectly timed.  Robot fantasia.  The air of a dead man's lungs, 

stale and perfumed with the scent of tears and vomit and paper.

There is an old woman, assembled in a crash of bones and black cotton 

lying helpless on the waiting room floor.  Her teeth are broken yellow

like the mouth of a cat, pursed with silent infancies, insane and insanely 

incapable of being ignored, until her fingers rush against the thin 

air and She begins howling a lost name, not even a name but a series 

of throaty crutched contagions, zephyrs of some Greek Goddess ---

whirling around the room in pursuit of an ear, a brain,

a spine, a response from the universe that seems rational, real.

It is not, and there is none, and She just lays on the floor,

a bare writhe, her clothes curling in ligaments of a ghost.

The attendants are laughing, and the room is full of nursery rhymes on the 

verge of bursting into graffitti on the white painted walls. One can

hear Cinderella weeping in the Sky.  The Lumberjack is snorting blue fire

on the edge of the forest, which seems to be made out of pencils

and bureaucrat bones.  The room spins on the Z axis, a strange paranoia

drifts in light and syntax.  Order. there is the Order not of the 

Law not of the Speech not of the Theatre, but of the Madness of God,

and it is an enchantment experienced in bursts of fantastic pauses,

face into face like a series of clocks, all telling different times.

In one eye, it is Midnight.  On the other side of the room,

it is the year 10,000.  There are cerebellums screaming symphonies

of sound from deep inside the year 33.  The other man, scattering his

bones in the dust of the night shift at the Insane Asylum, is murmuring 

Job 10:16, his fist raised like a tornado of questions, grasping at the 

sky until the room turns on it's X axis, and the photons scintillate

in perfect intimations of post modern madness, and the attendant 

walks in strange lunar footsteps towards the mouth of the Door,

and in perfect rhythm:  AS SEEN ON TELEVISION:  The bombs begin raining 

down, telephone bombs and the lipstick faced bombs of the Saints,

the half deranged testimony of shopping malls, bursting in white fire

red fire blue flames that singe the eye with a deep green hearse

of money and wisdom of the evolution of the world on the Y Axis,

and the room turns silent, until the Dark Haired Woman coughs, and it is 

a paragraph of God's immaculate madness.  This night, the Asylum

will host the Angels of the Lost Beginning, the shadowy parade

of the Moveable Feast, the Banquet of Unbroken Energy, one by one

the ghosts arriving in perfect timed precision, synergies

of Heaven and Hell balanced in the flesh, which is trapped on this 

Earth.  The old woman clamors up onto the couch, her skeleton like 

a necklace rising up from the mud of the night, fingers whirring with 

the Last Temptation of St. Joan, a fiery bonfire of normalcy gathered 

around her in the ordinary world, the Waiting room like a cross

between a discotheque and an emergency room, no blood save the phantasmagoric

dreamlike visions of the people, one by one as they stagger in their 

eyes wide as saucers, flying saucers, broken dishes hurled

through the night to the bottom of the floor as if that was what made

sense, that explains everything.  On the wall of the waiting room there

is a series of postcards burning with phosphorescent languages,

the host of the angels sleeping in the Mountains of Oregon, Hawaii, 

a newborn child's face, ten thousand miles away, the ribbons and the dream 

of infinity above a typewriter paused on an unfinished word:

psychosis, diagnosis, the network of belief, ten thousand prisons,

waiting on the other side of the waiting room, where the Doctor is humming 

perhaps a scene from some ancient Opera, perhaps a murmur of broken memories.

*

I am sitting like the Orphan of God, trapped in the Birdcage of this

hallowed non event, describing a series of blue lines that have appeared 

racing through the suburbs in perfect rhythm to the Lines on the Talk Show,

Jerry Springer has his audience howling and in the room, standing somewhere 

between the television set and my face is a blue curve.  Perfectly balanced,

moving in slow motion, connected like Moebies Loop in what seems to be a bioluminescent 

apparition, the Doctors Eyes turn purple, invert, inside out, breakdancing 

while the audience begins to swivel in their seats and on the other side of the door

I can hear the Old Woman begin screaming a parable of Blood, her voice

shrieking like a bird in a bellydancers hand, as the whole world begins 

to careen into a series of transcendental superstitions and it is apparent 

that not even the Doctor knows what he is doing, his face like 

a Mayan Ziggurat, holes and cheekbones bathed in wirey bones that seek 

something other than themselves in the Mirror Image of God, which is 

I realize again, nowhere and everywhere all at once, like the rain when it falls

in your heart as it is surrounded by television sets screaming about the 

endless sunlight and the Old Woman nods in slow motion and the parables

are fueled by the admonitions of something on the other side of this Night,

where the sun is not finished and the Chinese people are perhaps throwing 

fishing nets across the heart of the Inviolable Buddha and their daydreams

slip through the soles of their shoes into the aquarium 

sitting on the edge of the Table.

A question, a series of questions, designed to prove somebody's sane

somebody knows what is going on.  Who is the president.

What year is this.  What's your favorite color?  When was the last time 

you accepted Sigmund Freud as your Carnival barker?  Who cares. 

The Blue Curves keep arriving, and they seem like dolphins that have fallen 

from the sky, and I explain to the Doctor that there was a moment on the other 

side of the river when there was a group of people that 

were gathered around, in perfect normalcy and it was as if all of a sudden,

then did not even realize it but they all started moving in slow motion,

it was perfectly choreographed, like a dance, a scene from some 

celestial cartoon, for several minutes --- there was a point to point 

series of events, entirely comprehensible, premonitions of being 

as if the light had shifted it's direction, perhaps an unbalancing 

of the Light cone, a change in polarity, just as Richard Feyman might 

describe to the Bongoes he must certainly still be playing and the 

Doctor, nods at the name and the Connectionist Weave of human endeavour

advances like a fish swimming through the river to the place

where it always begins: everywhere, and nowhere, always simultaneously.

The woman on the other side, is pleading for her life.

Her voice is a screeching palindrome, Echoing negativities of 

poison and paranoia, an entire litany just as if it was out of the 

Love Song of Job to the God of Delusional Empathy.  They took her children

her house burned down, she has twelve scars from the last 

methamphetamine paralysis, the Risperdal reminds her of a communion wafer,

and can she please speak to her Grandmother.  Her Grandmother, I realize

is listening.  To every word.  She is right there, in the Light, only 

men do not see it.  There is no other place for the dead and the living  to 

go, to be.  The Doctor looks at me. I remind him, I am Hamlet, I am Lazarus

back from the dead, and TS Eliot knew this was going to happen, and I 

will tell him everything: especially the night above the graveyard

when there were tunnels in the clouds as I lay in the cemetery stoned

hallucinating a thousand faces, and the clouds opened up as if it was 

a giant tornado, and I could see straight through to the opening of the night 

sky, and several stars shined blue and white and the lightning -- became

frenetic, like a tongue, lashing out at the contents of my imagination

a direct correlation, but there was no rain, only that strange electromagnetic

syzygy, and the Doctor's eyes become like the eyes of a fish

unbalanced, and he says I will be going in, and I will not be leaving,

The Universe has disappeared and the old woman's voice is rising and falling 

in an eerie parellogram of madness, we will become conspirators against 

the end of the world, there, where perhaps that Man --- the one who looked 

exactly like Ernest Hemingway --- the one who screamed the last time 

for ten hours about how he was actually a Federal Judge as his eyes 

burst into a yellowy syntax like a lion lashing out in peril, wounded

by some convergence of events that nobody nobody could ever begin to comprehend.

I slip out of the chair, following the Doctor towards the other Side of the door

where I think I am aware of what might happen next, the same way one 

would imagine life would happen had one been abducted by a UFO 

and the inside of the UFO looked just like a living room only it was

populated by Extraterrestrials who knew everything, just as you knew everything,

and could feel the Beginning of Time bursting through your flesh 

in ways the Normal People could never begin to express or explain.

*

There is a man who wanders the night, on the edge of the streets when nobody is really 

capable of looking, drifting around the convenience stores, tall and grey haired

and with a tracheotomy, his throat visibly wounded and exhaling smoke underneath the streetlamp

obvious from fifty feet away.  Inside the Asylum, he is sitting watching 

Static.  Emptiness, perhaps like Sears and Roebuck after the Apocalypse,

when the rest of the world is on fire but inside the room, it is translucent,

a Cage of Comprehension.  The nurse appears. Her eyes are like Futons. Her body 

is a series of poses, mannequin robots, professionalism coated with an eerie

disconnect, which increases the paranoia about the nature of reality even further.

She stands in the edge, her skin the color of cholera. Nose turned like a sundial 

to the place where nothing is happening.  The Curves are everywhere, they are 

manifestations at this time of some Ancient Bodhissattva, a whirling carouselambra

of impossible charicatures.  Hahaha how fantastic. I am weeping.  The medication 

is sifting through my memories; perhaps it is composed of alien documents. Blueprints

of the Transcendental Object at the End of Time. I am like an engine, a smithy, 

my being is an exaltation of biological machines whirring against the gravity 

of God.                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                    

                         

Reviews

[.]

astonishing.

(i am with no more words!)

[Hawkmoon]

supercalifragilistikexpialidocious.