ORGANIZING LIGHT

Book VIII: Flickering Out After a Long Rain

I watch the rain come down and it makes me think of Michael and the duel and the fall. My two feet on the dark earth watching the water fly. I see everywhere they fell every time and we’ll never know when it all ends it just repeats. “The dead are asleep,” they told me, “…and one day they’ll wake up.” They aren’t watching much of anything they’re dreaming but I’ve yet to see it anywhere, where time is really up. I do remember being violent I remember the cigarette between his fingers and where it touched, turning me, and I remember how it was said that my life flung him to that desk and he had to stay there all hours of the day. I was not meant for this world and that’s how I ended up here every time. I guess I was flung too…perhaps hereditary?

There were friends to be had in every version of this but they’re like grains of sand now I see them fall too and I wonder how I’ll escape or is all of this a painting somewhere and we just can’t see it? I watch everything unfold all the time perhaps it’s right to be the narcissist here and the artist’s audience is using me but if that was so how would I be able to know…unless it’s true that I’ll never really get out? I long to be born elsewhere and finite and rest with the others that are asleep that I can’t reach anymore - not that I ever could. In one time I kept a book and I’d write everything I ever knew down in it and when I saw the beginning people they called me different things like it was me making it all so. Go further back, to nothing. It’s quiet now and good to sit and watch and think. I shouldn’t be here yet I know when I became and even the language is confusing. “When did it start, again?” Talking to angels (not men) won’t make much of anything clearer though they try their best.

I remember when it was so bad my eyes burned. After the red ashes pushed into my arm and then it happened again and there was even the time he flicked the butt at my face and the cherries floated, changing to something much darker so fast and touching my eyelids. The papers to free me stuffed behind the middle-most left shelf and there they’d stay until the end of time. They’re there now I’ve been told but haven’t checked. I was unleashed upon the world in adulthood and I didn’t know where I was or how to take a deep breath and the only feelings all desperate at best. I see myself when I was one of them and it’s still hard to watch even after thousands of times. I don’t know how this possibly ends well because I never did, and I remember thinking that too even before this distortion and perversion of life. I’m sitting in a car that will be mine eighteen years after the departure not wanting to walk through the front door each night and he was long gone and his ghost apparently had much better things to do than advise me to make good after all the incidents, I thought, but now I know why he never came. I wouldn’t wait for me either, so I don’t. Rifling around my old notes for hints of another like me to question. I find curves not like anything any me ever used and recognize coordinates in the careful writing, the thick lines so clear and bold. Make it quick, I suppose. One of an unending series of scenarios where the people of home believe their time is almost up, like every man that came before them…and every child that came to be and grew to adulthood without flickering out prematurely after.