Nightmares For a Week

When I go back home tonight I will return
to making threats against myself. I will return
to inducing ferity, a new nature like an animal
pushing unhoned teeth through my gums.
I will return to forced sweetness. I will return
to little, obscure reassurances. I will return
to oldest fears resurfacing, hands and teeth,
eyes that refuse to blink, breath, coming
in gasps, the singular thought, no longer
drug-saturated, This cannot be happening again.
I will say this is for a story I'm writing.
And then I will not write about any of it.
If you knew the things that crowd my head.

However, I begin to think that it is not fear that motivates this paranoia, but something less discouraging.

First, he sinks. Quickly, like a fragment of cinder.
Fatigue wells in his eyes like jaundice.
Bruising sighs, sweet and cerebral.
Freedom ties her hair back. Fear rolls up his sleeves.
He feels compression wash through his ribs. Greatly alive.
But paralyzed. His nail beds scrabble.
Glacial, shallow against the green.
He engages. Finds teeth, catching, carves a lifeline under the beds of his nails.
Salt water slowly soaks into the green horizon.
He feels it on his forehead.
He engages. Builds a bridge with his shoulderblades.
Starts counting stars again, automatically.
Fear is ready with a punch in the gut.
Suddenly the paralysis has its hands in his stomach and throat. He fights.
Feels the worms in his limbs. Thrashing, writhes.
Retching. Almost. No. Gripping. Head heaved over. Paisley.

Paisley in red and blue.

His eyes well up and he starts swearing and he swallows and bites his lip and stops himself. His whole body hurts, but he has to move. He is not alone here after all. Blinking hard, he realizes that he has no place to go. His bare toes flex in the underground air. He needs to keep his head down. Put himself back together. But anyplace safe is far away from here. So he'll keep moving. No rest yet. Just running, and hiding. And healing. And making do.

As it happens more often, it begins to weigh on me.

clouds like small children. threatening to fall.
to turn into a grey ceiling again, where the pores look like stars.
feet clutching the wet ground. he smells gasoline & home.
freezing and abrased. his extremities are clubs and spades.
his dead fingers part the fog and prickle with rebuke, or some seventh sense.
his hand over his heart, he listens for the sixth but cannot feel reassured.
he reaches out but he is stuck. everything is dark, like diamonds or vampires.
people simply vanishing. he is alone on an intravenous island.
his shoulders haul his arms like blocks of giza. he is alone.
he will hide by himself in case he disappears too.
the bilco doors close and he wraps them around him like a shroud.
but it is too dark and things start flashing in his head. reddish hair.
he swats the air and his fingers tangle in something. afraid, he tries to pull away.
light. light. he is alone. his fingers tangle. something to hold on to.
in the mirror his face is red. red dripping from his eyebrows, drawing lines.
red rims under his eyes and red reaching for his irises. like a warning. stop.
he turns away. finds in his blind spot an open field.
he curls and feels his breath curling into dried skins in his lungs.
flattens his hand against the green expanse that threatens to get away from him.
over the edge and spill onto the concrete below.
turns his face into the felt. tonight i am sleeping here.
i am sleeping on a billiards table in the basement of someone who has vanished.
i do not know what day it is. i do not know the last time i slept.
i am alone. i am finally alone. no more reddish hair coming in the dark to

I think of it whenever my mind happens to go blank for a moment.

It was strange.
For a second he could swear he smelled the Sound, like he was at a marina.
"That's strange," he thought.
And it felt like he was breathing cold air into his lungs. Cold, salty air.
But he couldn't hear the ocean. Or see it, really. Just gray.
"Wait a minute," he thought. "We're not near the ocean anyway, are we?"
When did he last see the ocean? "Was it when I landed? In Olympia?"
He wanted to look around. He tried to lift his head but couldn't.
He tried to smell the sea again. All he got this time was wet concrete.
Wet concrete and glue. "That's strange," he thought. "Maybe it's the drugs."
Come to think of it, where was he? "Where am I?"
This was troubling. He should be panicking. But he wasn't.
In fact, he felt rather detached. "Maybe it's the drugs," he thought.
He tried to move his hands but couldn't.
He tried to move his legs but couldn't.
"Where am I?" he thought. "And who is the man who is keeping me here?"

I have a very specific paranoia.

He was splintered and winnowed and taken apart
to get down to the quick of his core.
Still he looks for the failures and flaws in the heart
of the one left for dead on the floor.
He is missing a light to shine through the cracks.
His sight has been warped and he's blind to the black.
There's no rest, no solace, no closeness here.
He would boil his blood to be rid of the fear.
Too fragile, and yet too staid.
Too rattled, and yet too brave.

earthgod

all i get these days is blood,
blood in a bird's beak, blood
trailing from a coat-tail
on the ground, blood
mirroring on the floor
and flowering in the whites
of my eyes, blood pouring
down from burst pipes, bursting
upward as it fills my mouth and
i spit it into the air, blood
racing outwards at a whim,
gathering at pores and then
lurching forward as if drawn
by a magnet, blood reflected
in the reverential shine of a
freckled face. all i get these days
when i try to clear my head is
birds and bursting vessels and
blood, and blood, and blood.