What Isn't There

Free Write/Stream of Consciousness POV

Stream of Consciousness POV Workshop.

Trepidation, mingle, completion:

Drew Valdez

I listen to the cars zoom past my eyes, their shiny lights blow up bright neon and zig zags over my face they become sunglasses to hush my shadows. Slip between the bodies incognito of each other. Voices range and extend, its rubber stretching and underneath the gunk is our memories, our stories. I taste the newspaper clippings in my mouth and consume all of its joys and sorrows. It crunches things within me that I wanted contained, obscured from naked eyes. Strangers don't get to touch me the way I need them to but, I comply where my body isn't my own. Pieces of me, glimmers the metal, water shadows morph into shapeless abstractions. Dry chapped lips reach for a kiss and the monsters reciprocate, receipts, engines of trauma. Black oil drenches me until I'm wet with miasma. A noose itching to hang you. Martyr dressed in silver. Everyone knows a version of you they wish to keep. Everyone spells the alchemy, its wayward scripture paints disfigurement. Blight defects perfection. A vanguard of unbecoming. Small bug bites leave vibrations where the body isn't supposed to move. It digs in as if it's too late to return. To return to the real.

Behind their masks, their walls are flimsy, clumsily constructed for someone like you, and that's why isolation feels so wrong and so trite. How are you going to be unfeelable, unfillable. Soft obsessions without tension. Do you feel everything and nothing? Cough your lungs out until the air electrifies sensors in your neurotransmitters. Brains liquify out the ear holes with hopes, and dreams. Church burning feeling. Remember the day, as if it's your last. Blown away, until vacant. Its holy sorrows are ashes. All night speechless, lips sewn at prime medial. We pray for what we won't become. We forgive the vastness, its aberration dignified. People kill you with their words before kindness ever sets in stone.

Below your feet, they slip and slide their legs through the doorways of your life. Dried fruit, withered, hanged their jewels from their jackets, chimes in a tunnel, people say, the silliest things when the world watches. On center stage their bodies tilt to the inevitable tunes of their listlessness. I want to feel where they don't live. Mannequins without faces, their skin falls into cups as they drink their fill. Fake, masters of make believe, they pretend to share memories, the letters taste of all things that belong in the gutter. Its sludge moves in symbiosis with others like them. They are the keepers of its synergy. Bodies heat, oil and slew down their necks, in completion, the rows wept. Our country made in heaven, abandoned dystopian. Pyres stand tall of tombstones and white flags. Thousands of names you'll never know.

There's not enough make up to cover up their truth, it sticks and bleeds the colors, plastic in syringes to fill, to fold. Speak tender for the hidden. My bark has layers like lawyers with papers, they pile up and up, its pillars with white moons that shine with the dark, and the dark is my honey. Drugs under the tongue, under the veins, under the sink where I hide and crawl through cabinet tunnels wood and misshapen homes with holes. I feel my ribs ache, dislocated in trepidation of change. Uncontrolled, wanting more.

You see the clouds, they form up through reptilian disposition. You want to feel nice, wondering heights. I'll make you a star sandwich, a home that will be mine, you drink, I pour the lines.

Bones tinderbox under their thumbs and we tumble, unreliable. Fingers cross over the eyes. Plastics drag me to gravity. I taste them trying to find you. Grim reservoir storages filled with bath water. They mingle their eyes as if connected by conditions. We'll meet in the middle of the circle, mitosis. All my senses tell me, I am dirt. Protection, a fallacy. Blood pours at every corner, as if I'm somebody's genius, somebody's failure. My hairs coarse and horns grown from the pasture. I believed in the Shepard. I believed that he would carry me home.