F

inally the cops take control.

They all drive back to the prison, the game is over, and the sun for some strange reason has decided not to go down any further and justs hangs, coughing in the dust.

I turn around and there is a huge lioness/tiger leaping over the prison fence and gallops towards me and begins mauling me. Horror shoots injection through me and freezes me in mind flash: scars, handicaps, death.

This huge toungue was scratching my face and I was tossed like a doll in the dirt, my small frame wrapped in tight power paws. I clench my white knuckle fingers around the beasts neck and start squeezing, harder and harder and my nails sink deeper into the warm flesh and fur. The neck crushed in as if I were squeezing a chicken; muscle spasms and hollow spaces filled with carlilidge and bone and pleghm.

suddenly slowly

it stops moving and it's body begins shrivelling like a baloon losing air, there was the same gasping wheeze and it sunk into the dirt like quicksand. Then, from somewhere, a ball landed at my feet; the sun began going down and the train whistle blew.

From where I stood I could see my tatooed dream standing on the free side of the prison fence.

his morning I looked up over backwards saw red clouds while we were speeding a rain dark highway in the super hovercraft with the narcotic highbeams painting smear drip friends on our eyes; blue swirls like when you're falling asleep but right now we're wide ball awake and she wants to get off the shakes and go back, wants off the fright elevator and it's not even at the top yet.

It's a slow ride up baby
so you can't help it so just lean back in your rocket chair, that green chrome spider seat, and look out a window. No window. Pretend; can't pretend.

Outside maybe there's mountain islands in the smog zone all washed out: multiple underexposures.

The room is a booth, cramped. Hospitals stick you with a new instinct to run. You think of death. I thought maybe to wait in your room, stuffed in beside the bed, hot, and imagining, thinking, wondering what I would do if someone would walk into the room and say...I don't know what they'd say. How do they announce death? You're not going to die that fast.

Just keep it piece by piece.
Good-bye uterus.

I'll just stay in the hallway, it's safer, I think.

Colored lines down the middle of the floor; red to surgery, green to x-ray, yellow to the cafeteria. Maybe. Trolleys roll by with bent legs from the weight of the green wrapped bodies. Squeek squeek squuek; dry wheel sockets, dry bones old and broken.

I looked up, red eves, to every appraoching clipboard; looked away from the shuffling dregs leaning on their saline dispenser carts, following the lines this way or that. There was television sounds coming from an open doorway; intensive care.

I heard a story unfolding;
pictured a black-and-white mother lying in bed sick. Her husband was telling her that all her children had left the country even though they had all died. He created letters and phone calls from the children and the mother kept believing right to the end. Right to the end.

I heard a bed come rolling towards me; someone was moaning in the room, didn't know if it was the t.v. or someone seeing the end roll on top of them ,a dark laughing avalanche. She was coming. I followed her bed, her body, her nurse, into the room. Her knees were bent up like when she would be in bed with a book propped'up.

My chest was tight and the pain of association speared my stomach or maybe my liver. She had been opened up just below her belly button; opened like a sleeping child's coat. There was a smell no-one has ever remembered. Two blank white faces asked me to leave the room. I stood outside watching someone's shadow on the floor, they were in a room down the corridoor washing the floor. It must be empty. What did they do with her insides?

Must be like a halloween pumpkin with candle light from it's eyes. I followed a colored line to the cafeteria, passed a room with a view of the mountains. There was an old man with a taped up nose smoking a cigarette he said something to me but it sounded as if I had bottles over my ears, everything was echoing.

I sat in front of a plate of food and thought of the painkillers she'd be given. The food went cold; I climbed off the bucking chills and went back to her room. They looked me up and down.

Maybe I wasn't sterile; I was born to be sterilized; now I had
the fear

We were alone in the room and I felt like a fallen angel staring down at a corpse; shallow breathing like a drunkeness not natural or calm. Her lips were thin caked with white powder and her skin was the color of pale leaves, veins full of slow life clinging; I wanted to touch her cheek like in the mornings but it was strange mottled red and I was sure that if she could open her her eyes her eyes would be blue like death.

Her eyes suddenly opened, slow thick asbestos theatre curtains and they were blue like beyond that depth I imagined.

I grabbed onto the steel bed railing looked down and tried to smile. She grit her teeth and rocked forward as if she wanted to sit up. It sounded like she was screaming while someone clenched a hand over her mouth. The nurse came in. Don't they ever smile, it's the hospital atmosphere slowly eating away at the spirit; they're just setting up the dominoes and they see it all happen; fall fall and all fall down.

I watched the nurse inject her with a painkiller and then leave. Synthetic morphine; there will be the sound of wind and wheels and car crash sun set out. She might have seen me, like she said she had wanted to, but if she did she saw me as if she were looking up from our empty bathtub while water seeped up around and over her face. In my pocket there was a purple flower head. I wrapped it around the tangled string that thing from the emergency call switch.

I thought of lifting the bed sheets to look at the wound, look at the stitches across her soft belly, but was afraid to hurt her or be sick myself. I sat down and watched the dripping intravenous. What a photograph it would make with the trees out the window; we could look at it at sometime when she's healed. Pass it back and forth, both of us really high high and I could tell her how I felt when she didn't.

There were airbubbles in the in the line and I squeezed and molded the pliable rubber and thought a body bag. The needle was taped to her hand, all brown like iodine, and when her wrist bent the skin stretched taut over the needle like a sheet on a clothesline.

I just stared at the hand.
Drip drip drip drip.

Her eyes rolled over; slow opaque marbles.

I put my hand to her hair, it was brittle.

Her hand groped out for mine and she dug her nails deep into my hand. She began shaking in anesthetic burn; rolling side to side slow motion fish dying. No nurse came, I went into the hall, went to the front desk. Seeing the nurse putting labels on a cart tray full of speciman bottles, seeing the buzzing centrifuge beside her, invoked an eerie respect from me.

I motioned to the room and she got up and walked in front of me.Christ that needle is so long and silver lightning. Ten minutes and she was asleep. I sat down and watched the dripping. Later they came and inserted a cathater becasue she couldn't piss, they call it voiding.

If they don't use it, the bladder fills up and rips the stitches. There are deep black lines from where she used to smile. Deeper in the pain. There will be no child inside of her. There is only a woman; a woman afraid of people and she knows that it was them who made her what she is now. At one time she was tall and clear white like a fresh wall but with all those people hammering nails and hanging pictures, well, it left marks. You never know who'll move into the apartment next. One thing is sure, the walls are never clean. The memory of her family is uneven; the need to forget as strong as the attempts to remember.

After all, there is a new tenant inside her now, so why bother re-living. Why not just wipe-out every word and thought that had infected her for all those fiery years; they become abstract like a dream. Now she is free to invent herself but she knows most things new are of things old. How often does a change of clothing have a different wallet in one of the pockets? Now she's all patched up too.

She always seems comfortable to other people but she did her best to shut out the voice inside her; liar liar liar. Sometimes she had fun being honest with others, like throwing the covers off someone sleeping; they jump awake and shiver and shout at the revelations. But no-one ever willingly wants to get out of bed. She has been asleep for so long now. For so long it had been despair to despair to despair like walking on thin ice and you have to keep moving or you'll sink but there is only a huge warm ice lake around you.

She had been swallowed in childhood and still now she was naked and afraid to look down at herself. After the pregnancy and the collapsing breasts and suicide slashes on her wrists and time after time neglecting herself. No-one ever wanted her for the right reasons. They found her intelligence to be a distrcation and her need for excitement as something to be tamed. She never felt safe. The voice was always there: liar liar liar.

There is nothing more, unless, you can say that there is more to a vacant lot when there's garbage blowing in from the street, sticking up on the chain link fence.

She knew where all the junk paper came from: children were the presents that parents gave themselves but were afraid to really unwrap so they just left them sitting under the tree and when the tinsel finally came off it was all too clear; the hideous difference between what they got and what they wanted.

You never forget your first love. Hers was her father. She never understood why he slipped loving her the way he used to. It came so suddenly when she was twelve. He just stopped coming late night to her bedroom;" stopped touching her under the covers and he never told her why.

She never asks now and just watches her parents grow old and die and then she'll watch herself follow.

As hard as she tried she always ended up just shaking with morning withdrawls or lying in blood, mumbling for help on the bathroom floor, still alive. Most of her relationships had been like this; either it was so bad that they were doped all the time just to bear it or it was so good that when it ended you wanted to die with it. Either way you were dead and then you didn't know what it was.

Her relationship with herself was like that and she's been reincarnated so amny times into the same thing. Re-born so many times into the body of a woman who is laying in the doorway of a pub getting spit on by someone kicking her in the stomach.

Her first words in this world were: I hope you're happy now.

Behind that honey golden fence in that high sun, this young girl hikes those rosen panties and her hands writhe names and constellations on her legs, she can smell the source of the blood, joins like the animals in the search for a fresh taste. Bulls storm the castle, her castle of dreams stands in a cactus bed dust plate, a tectonic sleepwalker stumbles and bumps everything from its gravity hold, shaking pink bodies and their hairless vulnerability. Drawbridge burns smoulder full of arrows, the moat is full of extinction. Inside there are empty glasses with silver spoons and the little spoons are finger printed with beautiful thumb prints that are warm and sweet for sucking.

..She is behind the fence now chasing a dragonfly with a broken wing and the sick biplane chokes and rises in the drafts and barely misses trees and she swings her dimpling arms and laughs the sweet laugh of sleep, chasing and laughing forever she does and her breasts are rolling the lonely circles of the planets, the sun is spinning her slow summer slows in the stickyness.

..The dragonfly drops exhausted on the fence post and there in the small backyard clearing with the trees and the smell of chopped wood and fire from the chimney and the door of the cabin is wide open, inside the sounds of water running, filling glasses, tinkling spoons. She jumps high into space and colored moons shine in her eyes as she sinks into the river.

..Standing up from the cold laugh she swings her arms and hits her open hand against the rusted brown pail that is sunk in the sandy bank and it echoes hollow metal bonk.

Blood spins on the surface of the water and she stands still and straight/inhaled with water dripping down her cheeks and her shoulders and her back. Danceblood was peeking from her finger, she clamped the hand and the blood oozed, she looked up into the sun and the white sky dropped heavy sandbags onto her brain.

..In the tall stemmed itch out back she lays with a cotton hem bandage pulled around her finger, her hands were open palmed to the sky. The headrush drug break swirled into her sinus again, her body tensed, her skin turned thin and fragile. Her rose printed underwear was pressing hot seams into her thighs, she wiggled out of them like a cocoon, and tossed them onto the anthill. There was a wind in her ears, the wind of the dragon fly or the wind of her own game, she knew only the wind was blowing the sound of crackling wet wood on the forest floor and the sound of rolling bicycle tires. Water pours around the ferns growing in riverbed pails, seeding grass spilling their parachutes against the black noses of the animals running towards the smell of blood, running near the tin can hill and the lawn of white stones, hard and sharp.

..There in the dust cloud a huge billowing fear was a small girl. Not moving not moving her legs or her arms, her hair was pushed over her face and covered in tears, tangled in blood. Banana seat peddle bike was upside down in the ditch, front wheel spinning broken spokes as if her foot had gotten caught in the spinning loss of control.

Sound of bees and mosquitoes land and sting the soft red shoulder of the poor crumpled lonely. She opens, sees a fence and large trees through the dust falling confetti, sees something moving in the berry bushes in the distance, bushes moving and black birds caw and flap like burning clothes. Numb timber splints shoot into her legs and blouse, dress, knees skinned and torn and red with blood, something is moving in the blue berry patch, a a voice calling out. She turns to her bike all broken pipes and blacks out into a tin hole, black hollow wind. Across the field she was brought, through the gate in the golden fence, across the border that was the stream, into the cottage and then to a bed.

..Small room with one window and voices in the distance, she can hear a voice sounding from another room, the creaking handle of a pump in a sink, a chair sliding on the planked floor,a clock with an irregular beat. She sunk into the springs, deep into a cave, a warm cocoon slipped around her, carried her into the saturn glove. Freehand spiders printed their slogans across light year leaps, the dawn brought up the lively flowers into the cool dew and the ground began seething with the bacterial sucklings of life. Hummingbird connectors swarm the sap hole and sink into the hot sugar pie that is morning.

..The world turns on her magical plexus.

The dragonfly flew from the far side of the river and through kaleidescope peepers saw a world of many beauties but in a flurry of windstorm backfire, a huge skin wall, a close-up zoom face came banshee hammer on, ending her fragile life. This girl with a billowing dress and twisting handle bars crashed onto the hard road and in an instant gravity stabbed her with a knife point flashback.

Memory caught up and cut her and this was her first experience with the pain of experience.

..Once while stumbling along as a small child in short pants on an autumn day while geese had flew with their lovelies away and there was only happiness. She bounced along the sidewalk and was suddenly attracted to the attention of a small black and yellow fuzzy wuzzy bubble bee, she bent down and her little knees hung under her chin and she wrapped her arms around her shins and her hair fell over her eyes and she spoke to the tiny bubble bee and was learning the truth about the force that lives within the little. Then, from behind her a nameless, faceless, somebody let out a growl and a black shoe came down and crushed the flying honey heart, crushed it and walked away and as she looked in horror at the spot where it had been was only a wet stain a little mound of goo, no color, only grit cement.Big cloud faces appeared, branches bent and waved hello, clowns. The bandage was soaked red, she stood up, time lapse blossom, put on wet clothes and padded bare feet down the animal path beside the river. She went to the berry patch and began filling the yellow plastic pail with big fat blue berries stain fingers blue lips.

The bandage soaked with juices, turned purple and sickly, turned like the sky did into thickening dark rolls. Fade in noise there, there, she turned her head trying to pinpoint the sound crumbling machine collapse, a scream bullet shot into her. Then silence with head pound breathing. Breathing from the the road, sounded like when she had rolled a tire down tin can hill, hollow wind chimes followed by the sound of a window crashing in a bucket.

..A breathing dark fear like something at night under a bed. Her hand opened, dropped the bucket, and ran towards the road: wind and branches grabbing long hair, feet stepping on bark and stones. She found a girl lying at the bottom of the hill, middle of the road, bent in the potholes, her dress flower print, torn and bloodied. She bent down to look into the eyes of the girl who was covered in tears and dust and spit, bent down and knees came up under her chin, looked into the shining slits where her eyes would be. A two wheeled toy is crippled in the ditch, oil can wrapped through the spokes.

.. Smelling of blood, she didn't move but a soft growling liquid bubble is born in her throat, a rasping gargle from the mouth. This raggedy anne girl, little flopping doll with no voice and no strength, brought from the road to the cottage, brought to bed. As the day sunk into night and bats screeched and clapped, tar paper cut out clouds all fibre blocked out the moonie man. Crackling fire in the cottage and sparks skidded out onto the floor with the big wet bag sound.

Flies hide and seek in the chinook currents rolling out the door, out to the night hiding the animals who move in close to the fesh scent, move in close under the bed. In the sleepy head house of the nightime picture shows came a strange appirition: carnival pipe organ music blew like smoke through short leavless trees, galloping calypso finger with a blue bandage sunk in the warm red quicksand: teeth grit lips pulled smiling breathing heavy flaring eyes clenched sinking sinking into a pool with flash lights and bubbles rolling from the hands and legs and clinging to the skin and eyes open into a vaseline glass, smeary and distant, warring animal waterfall plunging into a clear waveless pool.


.. Floating wide open, like a star fish offered to the sun, floating for hours then washing up on the white beach, like a great endangered whale coming to rest without a struggle. She leaves footy prints pigeon toeing in the sand, leavless trees with their steel wool ringing harpsicord scarecrow, there is no-one. There are only footprints leading past the tall grass with the yellow flattened patch where someone laid for a long time; footprints into the yard of the white wash house, footprints up to a girl who is standing outside on the smooth stones in front of a table stirring glasses of pulpy drink. She doesn't turn around or even move her head, she just stirred and there was the sound of a glass bell ringing. She doesn't turn her head or even move.

In the middle of her pale naked back, large like a walnut, a bee sucks and buzzes.

And it all comes back.

Here is that historical flood from the days before this weight.

This is it : the season of the band-aid ressurection, the cranes never stopped turning, lifted the liquid sky hole filler more and more, the leaves turned explosive shades. This is the time of the skinned knees and the sad sack elbows, black eyes and chipped foreheads.


This is the time when all the tiny inhabitants of vomitville battened down the hatches and crawled into the beddie bye night night just waiting for the month to pass when perhaps something normal might show it's head, the way the groundhog pops out of its whiskers, sort of.

This is when they saw the answer and usually no-one sees more that a hopeless future in this the time of hot smog showers.

But yes it's true beyond the red mortar, or mortal, brick window outside his third story window was the universal result; the grand survey answer
and he decided that it was now he must devine the meaning of the great bingo game he calkled his life. Had he not taken up cooking he would have surely become an athlete for now as the fry-pan boiled like hot hawaii lava he cartwheeled towards that third floor see through and crash crashed through the glass and the bendable steel frame gave way and he plummeted like a Newton headache through the wee precipice between his building and the building beside his.

As he falls the phenomonon of life flashing before one's eyes occured with supreme techni-coded regalia and parade like precision; like a film unwinding onto the floor he saw everything and time was frozen in it's relative refridgerator while he tumbled past the bee nest on the balcony.

There will always be fat smoking shoppers pushing their carts in their blind grand prix of super sale saving lanes of that local supermarket and the no speed check-out is controlled by a small lass who can't even be afforded the courtesy of a chair while she deals with the dozo queue and some guy wants to cash in his ninety cents worth of stink-o bottles to buy some stink-o.

Yes these are the sad last thoughts of he, he who went a-tumblin' in the search for the great one. Now down and down body hits head first splits crack cedar timber splinter splat. Now the death beavers flash their morse ripple tail signals and converge on the mud bank blood red sidewalk to begin nibbling at the twist tie contortionist. Circus scouts gather with cameras to shoot the newest bent-up recruit, the latest sideshow freak, now dead. But the interest in the paying public is the dead, no? No not at all thinks the roomate staring down the broken skylight to the fly swarm vulture shadows festering over the ink blots; the psycho test, the black jack winning deal for sure. There is nothing now but an empty bed and supper still simmers but this time there's more than enough except when it comes to paying the landlord.

Yeah. Robbed and gagged and bound as well, there may be more to that poor flat body than meets the eye. Maybe it was an act of salvation or a message. Like seeing the bent back vertabrae rolled up under straight speed metro car; some fat guy with a hairy chest and khaki work pants decided that Christmas day was the perfect time to meet his maker; the great baker of the bloated cheeks, the great sailor of the still black seas, his gifts disappeared forever under his makers screeching machine. Roomate is wearing the Bar-B-Que apron thinks back to the day he met his
gone buddy under the ball bark green trees full of squirrels and pigeons cluck lambada down the fountain steps. Then they all were happy starting something new; then later it was not new but it still fit together like a little boys model car that is built in a glue fuming closet and ends up being used as a smash-up-derby target.


The past, ahhhh the past. What a four star joke, or maybe a four star hotel with minty green sheets and matching breath mints.

No No No...it couldn't be over for that poor helpless person leaking precious bodily pints into the soapstone sidewalk. The church was bellowing bell tolls; the traffic didn't let up and onlyt a few cyclists
now stopped to see firsthand a first rate emergency. Nothing to see now, only paint speckled broken pane lying over a red outline, color by numbers falling from windows. There was nowhere to mourn, no details to attend to only a bowl of hot spicey spaghetti and later dishes to scrape and scrub.

Death don't deter the dishes and life don't make them any easier. Eventually the tears did come from some distant fingers that wrapped around the pepper shaker of guilt and ground out over the late night wide open eyeballs and salties streamed into the pillow where the head sunk unable to sleep. All the closed up tight trunk and secret boxes were opened up and contents were distributed to the floor and regarded with suspicion and uneasiness for at any moment the dead one's ghost could drift through the door like the slippery smell of natural gas from a bent stove pipe.

Don't mourn me the ghost would have said for my choice was that window and I had taken some lsd the night before and as I contemplated the life that had been given me I became aware of the acute uselessness of inspring to greatness so decided that instead a flurry of glass shards and gravity would add spice to my inevitable disapearrance. Wake up in a sweat and hope that wasn't true.

There on the floor the plastic bag full of drug store reciepts, mostly vitamins; the collection of underwood typewriters, a lamp, flowers, a fruit bowl, a collection of coinage tossed I Ching; from the open window the wind comes in and there is no band-aid big enough.

There are no stitches; there is a huge gaping hole, tasteless and wide, in his burnt heart.


we

appear as ink
dropping
into pots of white
glue
and then
not stirred
just hovering
they we will harden
and the ground will open avalanche strains
and their skin parted scribbles
and the stickling protector fence
comes alive in the steam
with the dope wolves
high place

o

ne last final
rising elevation
then the blindfold ski jump fearless drive
red rimmed balls spinning fuzzy little sockets
and microscpoic hairs and pores and living life
swizzle stick together inside your little arm
in your armpit flesh grows the smile of my children

children
w

e cannot see or feel each other
but drop kneeling without nerves on
a potion mixed and attach ourselves by thin red line
and sink in the bath letting go of the edges
like soap between hands we sink in each other
we would shrink and soon vanish
if not for this
blood

David Milligan just here...in that ceramic tile blocked out foundation built of pill caps and promises this tired vacation blowing it up and making it worse until my cats come home despite everything it always comes back to a place like this