Let the Words

I lay in the rain with a purple sky, twelve suns swirl slowly without ever setting. My breath is heavy and the air is thick. The droplets of rain are like acrylic paint, forming little dotted mountains of color across my bare chest and legs. There is a kind of silence that feels like heavy stones piled a top my head. I cannot move. The rain increases. Putting the world around me into a slick of fantastic colors of red and green, purple and blue, and gold and silver silver streaks. I am becoming part of a painting, not of my own making. I try to stand but my limbs feel like tree roots being forcibly torn from the ground. I am starting to feel the sensation of drowning. Drowning in a pool of paint. I slough off paint from my face, my chest, my arms, my legs. As I slip the paint from my body I notice my skin has become translucent. I can see the fat tissue and beneath that, the sinew of muscle. Alarmed, I finally force myself to sit up. I gaze at my navel. I can see my innards and pushing

"There's a chaos inside that 'll not die down." Unsteady gale wind whips at hair rips souls from their bones leaving corpses of naked bodies curled and crying, wet and muddy Blackness, sound of breathing a scream that wallows, tares from the intestines spewing brown bile, lead heavy words "You'll not drown in a wake of your own making." Shoving gravel through eye sockets, dreading tomorrow caught in a web of mucus, rotting tobacco leaves, dust of glass sprinkled on tongues Empty bottles of fire sing heavy somber tunes, tumbling off the end of the earth, cutting the heads of goddesses bathing in the stars "Turmoil inside suffocates tomorrow and the next." "I know."

Impatient mother scowls sourly at her children and scolds her husband, silent and seemingly dull, with wide soft eyes, for being a lazy ass. Their youngest daughter of four, bobbing her giant head with an amber green stare, smiles shyly at me in a shopping cart full of children, doughnuts, and diet Pepsi. It's 8:49 AM. Sleeping in a parking lot after another pulsating never ending night of nodding off for fifteen-dollars an hour, a woman clearly Tlingit, clearly drunk, and clearly lonely, asks over and over again "Aren't you coming with me?" There's no response. It's 1:37 PM. Steady clicking, pecking irregular bird, chattering confounding words, for future comas to come, eyes dry, brain heavy sack of fluid and distress, "documentation's for the birds," I say. It's 4:49 PM A day has passed and I am ready for a beer. It's 5:54 PM Cheers.