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It’s a tremour deep inside me. Starting to urge its way from my belly.
Becoming a tickle in my throat. Soon digging deep and crawling past my
tonsils. Scraping my tongue. Clanging against my teeth and slipping from my
lips. All before I even knew what it was.
It lunged at her. Heading towards the breastbone. Where her body seemed to
warp backwards for a brief moment. Then she is hidden behind tears. Behind
two hands over her face. Behind motion lines, heading in the opposite
direction from me.
It’s my last vision of her. Hair, a jacket, a skirt, legs and shoes violently
taking the pavement.
---
Winter. We are all huddled together over our coffees, in a dim lit cave with
no heating. I think the twin is playing somewhere above and behind the voice
filled din of silence. People talk and play games and write in journals and
mumble incoherent coffee cigarette songs to java receivers.
I saw her with the Raggedy Anne. Raggedy was squawking flipping red doll hair
and torn trousers, back and forth, blending some tale of self delusion into
the weave work of the reality around her. Beyond that was raven hair and deep
focus, Asian eyes listened attentively to nothing at all.
Before I knew it, I found my self grabbing Raggedy’s shoulder and casting her
aside. She flopped sideways, crumpling against a wall, still talking, still
trying to justify her existence to those around her. I moved through the gap,
but raven hair was gone. Already there were those clouding around raggedy
pushing me out of the way, to become whatever dimension she was part of.
--
It’s only that feeling, worse than when you’ve been handed the splayed
consequence of a bad mistake. It’s the feeling of the consequences coming,
from a thousand wrong moves, building up, pushing on your diaphragm,
squeezing the air from your lungs, making it hard to eat. The feeling I had
every few months of my job. The feeling I had now, worse, amplified to pound
in my ears, collapsing my neural pathways.
Jittery, tired, expelling better parts of my lungs, I spent the days
afterward, inside smoke filled, arch enclosed, stucco made world of coffee,
and bad conversation. Or. Outside. Watching smoke blast out my nose and
breath rush out my mouth, in the cold, radiating my way outwards block by
block.
She wasn’t a raven, she was a crow, portending my death. Muttering. Crows and
ravens. They are the same thing? I’m driven nuts with analogous thinking and
must look up the words. They are the same they are different. Crow offers
little help.
ravlin (rav’in) 1 a violent preying or plundering; rapine 2 anything
captured; prey or plunder -vt., vi.
Later that night, I rip the dictionary again, from the group of bored scrabble
players, realizing raven is spelled different. They are crows indeed. I don’t
care. I’m shuttling things back in forth in my mind. Pills and scotch and
coffee and cigarettes and cloves then burning incense and green, sandpaper
carpet floors. Snow covered alleys and the dim, lukewarm confines of my bed.
Sometimes. And rest.
Diluting slowly into other states. Auditory and visual sensations, queuing
for nothing and everything. There isn’t. is. was just ice and the yammering.
Her melodic voice, as the spider sung the man, and. the. woman. The crow
whore was never there. You never saw those mirrors and puddles in the back of
her head, register you as vision and cause her to flee. Never. It was
Raggedy. Sung them, sung then into existence.
--
She curled me up on the floor for, a day? This was back in summer, of course.
Raven hair had reflected, and denounced my verbal blows with ease. I sat down
and. Curled up on the floor, tucking my head in my legs. She rolled me like a
pill bug.
“I don’t...”
she stopped
started
again.
“I don’t feel that way. you say you love me, I don’t love you.”
of
course.
She then leaves, maybe it was then I curled up on the floor for a day. No, I
remember the spray painted door slamming behind her. I was standing, slamming
it? No I was sitting, on the sofa. It smelled like sweat. hers. of course.
Then, I curled up on the floor. A day. maybe.
--
Summer, year before. We are all huddled together over our coffees, in a dim
lit cave with no air conditioning. Raggedy Anne wasn‘t playing her games
there yet. The people were almost sane. College students talk and play games
and start journals and proclaim loudly, whatever. Just, whatever.
I’ve decided against going back there. That night is, not painful, because,
I’ve no understanding of what pain is. Just pressure, I know what that is,
always there. It knowing, I knowing. But pain is foreign and...
--
Thirteen words from RAVIN is RAW MATERIAL. Thirteen more is RAZE. Thirteen
pages away is REGENERATE. Papa bomba. I own and eat them and regurgitate the
refuse back in forth in my brain. It spills like melody into an unsuspecting
head. It clutters and haunts and refuses to leave.
The spectre is there, in the back of a room, in a barometric nightmare. I
stalk, through the clouds, a leopard waiting for rain. She doesn’t move.
Black, black, raven, crow, hair, deeper eyes, paler skin. An alien picture of
a ghost. years and years. days.
If her skin tasted like anything, it tasted like a coin in the mouth. Copper
eye lids, aluminum tongue. I could cut my fingers on her hair. She smelled
like circuitry and spoke to me in the tongues of dragons and silk. Union was
like getting lost in steel wool. And when she left, the separation, it felt
as if my brain were stripped of some organic binary code.
--
Back, what? winter. yes. cold and my clothes are wet with snow. I’m burning
up. Fever addled, my head, feels like gutter sluice. Slush, snow garbage.
I’ve been sleeping for so long. I know now, what it is. For the crow was not
death. The raven was not a portend. It was brought to me. She was there to
remind me. But not there at all. There to bring the fever back, to jolt me.
To cause my waking world to revive, to plow forth and back in my brain. But
the Raven was not there at all.
Plowing forth, the familiar gobbling of voices, and the sing song melody of
one. Still creating patterns in smoke, forming her listeners from mud and
bone. Breathing them their life in words. I was pushing, spilling coffee.
Cursing under breath. Shoving the closer I got and the more strung to her the
listeners became. Raggedy Anne, no longer bothered with them, stared,
singing. Grabbing her, by the shoulders, placing my mouth to hers, I could
hear her song reverberate through my skull.
singing into me
“Papa bomba”
My mind, turning into a lattice work. Stained glass and slippery skin all
around her. Slippery arms, bouncing and sliding around me. No cold, no fever,
wrapping around her wax paper skin and fluttering clothes. My back arcs then
flings me sideways and away from her.
singing to me.
“Breath and create.”
singing to me
“Expel and create.”
Acid, and chunks, bringing the world from my stomach, onto the concrete,
brown paint, floor. Flowing forth from my mouth. spilling. Creating. Dead and
living once. Shuddering, muscle spasms, squeezing my stomach, spewing forth.
outwards. In wave after wave.
Violently now, I can no longer hold myself up and almost fall into the
landscape I created. She grabs me at the waist, from behind, then. Once
secure, she wraps her arms under mine. Only taking a moment from her song, to
kiss the back of my neck, in silence.
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