REMEMBER ME?
I found you tangled up in the impossible patterns, your brown eyes bending arbitrary points of reality into free streaming hierophanies, your chubby limbs and digits aping lost angles of no sun as you slung living fractals of the long gone whorl out onto the scene like fireflies on LSD buzzing bloodlight blue-hot into the green skein stirring the grasses, a mass movement so entangled in the tide of life as to—no wonder nausea is always the first phase of enlightenment. And your placement there, dead center of delivery room mandala, was no mistake. As evinced by the reversing sequence of symmetries to follow, you were born into this blip to bend—faces, feelings, colors, time—unlike most of us, the raw materials bred for blending, layering. Pigments to smear and fade. Interred beneath the shifting silt of our ancestors we are free again to feed the skein. The grass behind our gravestones on the south side of All Souls Cemetery then, pulsing as it tends to do with innumerable portals to the past in paradigm, is the perfect place for us to begin bending.
* * *
I cannot see the patterns at present, despite a complete disassociation with the failed body they buried beside your mother’s. They are still there though, the patterns, thrumming through the false mosaic of brick and timber serving as the south entrance to All Souls, between the silent beaks and the screaming daisies, in every jagged vein and slurping pupil, awaiting nothing more than your mere emergence onto the seen to unlock the clean circuitry of cosmos. But today the clouds are fat and dark and booming descants down into the trees. The bricks are bricks and the dead all dead. So when you do come waltzing through the diffracting gates with a toddler in tow, the redistribution of All Souls into Dali’s Exploding Raphaelesque Head is so immediate and absolute that we cannot escape that reeling feeling at the doorstep to ultimate awareness. If your mother and I still possessed the capacity to do so, we’d be evacuating what’s left of our bowels by every avenue available. But, as of course we do not, we remain swollen and a-sworl in the vortex of hallow matter surrounding you and your young one as you follow a ley line past the Earwicker Mausoleum to the green rhomb spinning atop our corpses. You lay down a red checkered blanket upon said rhomb and take a seat in the eye of the storm. She claims your lap and attacks a cheese sandwich. You proceed to tell her all about us and death and love and dogs and leaves and music and dirty jokes and junk food in disco ball bowling alleys and boats and trucks and building forts out of furniture after dark and fried dough and ice cream cones at carnivals and clowns and cats and pizza parties and school and summer and boys and bikes and books and stars and water and dreams and even about young Alice and the vorpal sword. To which your daughter replies—in half as many words thereby twice as eloquently—that she’d very much like to gyre and gimbal in the wabe, but not before you join her by the Tumtum tree behind the borogoves and snicker-snack a fresh set of mother-daughter grass angels in hopes of up-sparking the next mass mutation of the slithy toves. And, sure enough, as soon as your backs hit the green and your eight limbs begin arcing in the grasses our sworling skull falls face flat upon the cemetery grounds with a snipped synapse—S-N-A-P: a collapsed circuit of crop circles with a sword for a switch and two brown-eyed transistors pulsing in the wabes. Y-E-S: your mother and I find our slimmer circles intersecting between vortices two and three of the ninth Julia Set directly aslant the B.E. Superconductors drumming in the grabes. As one we produce our crowning symphony, wobbling round your longing years dilating. Gongs.
* * *
Thumping in my hand your hand will not let go as mine slips into static release, warmth and color fading out flat, last sad string strung out into that coring void crackling at the end of an old LP just before someone pulls out the needle and unplugs the wires. You close the looking glass. But, what you found there is not so easily dismissed. To wit, the spun florets of a hangman’s sunflower repopulating the dead black hole stoking the all-too-familiar flinders of an over- expanding eye.
* * *
You take a step back and address your full reflection. Yes, something quite unsettling about that long-too-long stare into one’s own eye. Wouldn’t you say? you say, that bottomless singularity still pulling you deep down into your daughterly pupil rippling black milk to bend all unblinking brains back to—stop. There you go again. Yes, something quite unsettling. So, your reflection. The important thing is: you’re breathing. Or, more accurately: the spectra bands wobbling off your color solid are rolling through their pious cycles and transmitting plasma-clear, at present. And you’re beautiful. But that’s no more important than your current age, attire, facial expression, favorite food, song, color, cocktail. Sixteen, leopard print and chucks, faux pout, Hawaiian pizza, Paint It Black, pink, Death in the Afternoon. Again, the important thing is: you’re breathing (three ways). And that today is the day you decide to leave your body. You check the contents of your backpack before slinging it over your bare shoulder: ex-library copy of The Art of Astral Projection, trench knife, Tingsha, concealer, mascara, vermillion lip gloss, the looking glass, three hits of LSD (sugar cube), two grapefruits and a half gallon of tap water. You slip a pair of horn-rimmed shades onto your bang-swept face and say something like, There, that’s more like it. See you in the next life, brown eyes.
* * *
Atop the scissor-blade grasses singing by the Tumtum tree you sit and sway alongside the next- life leaves bleeding prism-scales as the puce-purple-pink wash of light feeds into the charting stars. An orgasmic fizz of sugar dissolving. Relaxing from tongue to toe you release your cosmos of all tones and ride the wabes on wabes on wabes on
* * *
womb and mum stripped away, a carnival
of light, ozone, new air, scimitars of sound striking out of your sternum to bounce around the blue room. Black ink falls out of your face like a labyrinth. You’re on the wrong side of the room again, tangled up tight and swatting at the skein. They take your vitals and suction your throat. Swipe, scribe, nod and swaddle. Your mother’s hand in my hand walks me through her world of wounds. And between bound fits of vomiting she continues re-moaning encoded messages as they come booming out of her bottom brain. Behind the blackout curtain they lift her organs off the table and stuff them back in the way you came out. They sew her up slow, her body bleeding all down the table legs, the doors, the walls and windows, down the latex fingers and blank faces of mouthless MDs with buffered phrases leaking past their masks like, Hang in there, mama. You’re doing just fine, mama. And, Sir, there’ve been some complications. Sir, your daughter. I abandon your mother’s grasp as they lower you into my wooden arms. Holding you flush against my bombed out trunk I slip inside your bending eyes where wabes in wabes in wabes in rippling rainbow-wrecked polybodies in 10D blast out tonal bundles of pure light synching up the thrumthrum strings of impossible patterns wobblongonging longonewobbles—pulse is stabilizing—and there you are again (remember me?), all mimsy and a-tangle in the manxome maze, nine-eyed, toothless, waiting to unleash the vorpal Word.
* * *
After Words ~ Membering Re?
Celia six ways one:
Metra, mater, major, minor, mind or matter.
No matter, she’s all music in the grabing field.
Psst: spun florets = octave wabes.
Yes, she breathes. Next life.
Cosmos of all tones in the wabe and womb. Again?
Jesse Kominers lives with his wife & daughter in a house that defies time & gravity. His work has appeared in Burnside Review, Meat for Tea, Thrice Fiction, Sleepingfish, Hypertrophic Literary, & elsewhere.