Some nights I take the late bus, any bus’ll do, and stay warm and safe until the driver kicks me off, last stop and all that. I'm not homeless, least not houseless; sometimes I feel I am, wish I was. Quite unlike most of the others there with me, the dogs and lions sheltering from the rain with their cans, nailed up shoes and stories. It was one of those nights, rain hammering away to build the new day. The rain stretched on forever past the bus glass, behind my eyes a storm tapdanced away tinnily, musically. I think it was an egg of a headache, maybe it was the need for sleep ringing without my answer, but I couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't sleep yet. I knew I was awake as could be, but beneath the rain and above the engine a snuffling snore rumbled through the pews of piss stained seat. I looked out of myself and onto the bus that'd become empty without me. I was left alone at the back of the bus, with only the driver on the opposite end. A strange liminal calm had infected me from the sleepy sounds, and the bus, driving even smoother than it should, let me walk evenly to his cabin. I saw a man old as I was young moving like a dog in a dream, like a waking sleeper in reverse. A languid instinctual movement from his heavy lids to his frail fingertips into the station, sterile light and tiles amongst the dark and the dirt. I didn't have to be told. I stepped off the bus as the door opened for me.
The station fell away from me, the cloud to my raindrop; I stepped into a plane of glass all for me. I'd taken the wrong stop, the night really was darker than I thought. I saw no streetlights, no moon or star, no street or city. Against the wall of rain and a ceiling of hail I walked, letting the waters mat my hair and collect in my boots as I stepped.
The rain had stopped. The dark became a techno beat of reporter's cameras. To the Hague I came, with knots of sex and Unit 731 in my hair, puddles of someone else's tears deep in my shoes. Obligation or fear, there was nothing to do but to take my place on the stand. I stood like a target in a range, amongst a flood of strangers and liars. I might be guilty, I might be wrong, I know. Was it my fault?
“Why have you done this to your family?”
Spake the man upon the hill, Moses of the trial and Jesus to the sinners. A great white coat wore him, invisible to the naked state he stripped me to. All eyes on me
“My honour, your honour, I've only ever hurt myself. No victim, no crime” As the man in the mirror confessed.
“Pass on the pain, who gives the buck? Do you know what you've done?”
“By the day I was born I knew I was a bad man. By the tender age of five I learnt good from decadence and indulgence, a good monk starving on the hill. I will not be who I will be, I will be me”
“No remorse? No recovery.” My Moses unfurled a scroll of a jazz dancing ECG, of these little snippets of medicolegal mumbo jumbo, of numbers to merge and meld and forget, unfurling whirling to my feet. And of course, at the foot of it all, by the miles of cosignatures, was my bus stop, nothing to do at a bus stop but catch the next one. I sat down, watching the lights of lights camera action grow clinical and devolve into memories, the nervous sweat of my brow became the starved thirst in my mouth, and the dreamer roll up to the kerb again.
Unreality is what you unmake
The day to day as a trope tipbin
Reborn for a lifetime of flight and mushrooms
The groundhog day between couch cushions
Adopted into a family made of memories
Full of twins and the fat ass paradox
The clock runs away and around
Around around my eyeless mind
Mindless eyes
The megastore on the pillar of the world
Knick knack paddy whack wagon
Lynchpin off of 9th and hennepin
We bought, as a family of childhood fantasy
A TV block from the Womb of German Beer
350, 650, change with the electron spin
Quantum repetition addition addiction
I made make the right way when the world
The world came back to me when I least
Drinking the drawings of children
Amongst the eating RA intervention
I fly between the mousehomes
It begins again
Magic advertising I make dollar dimes
A phone call from outta the loop
Matrix, inception, something like Akira K.
Free as bug house squares
About how a wizard in a jam jar
Gets out of a pickle pocket rocket
I am two twins, a brother like a ghost
The water raised, remember doormouse flies
Rains are falling, save the city slogan
The fat ladies sing down the water slide
And slur swear declarations of love.
Larger than the dreamhold too cold
Love like the fires of a food truck
Carpeted in flies and filth clean as a whistle
Partyboat on wheels thru the big mac
Tell the truth with scales and such
The friend family
For the greater good
I make the wake from the cycle in cycles
Side A to the surreality Disc
Side B, tip of the iceberg stuff
Shopping with the mates. This is another no dream
I have a dream. I can’t
I take pills and my will becomes way
Swimming against the sky
Flying to topshelf myself self help
The distant call of dead birds
Dead birds
Dead girls
Moonlight in her hair, my body is hers
Head in her lap, pills in her mouth
Too much too young
Not enough meat on the bone.
He was a tom cat by the age of 21
Having loved and lost an eye and three fingers
1 more or less than the loves he’s lived
Like the girl of 2 minds and many moods
And all he remembers of her
Is a tattooed rose with no thorns
She’d gone the way of a rotten petal
Unlike the plastic flowers in his mother’s vase
In the downtown flat
Where he picked up half his years
Half of his scars too
Where there were 7 kids and 2 families
His mother was Belsen born and bred
On rations of a crumb a day
Such a slice of life, thin as a dime
While his father, other side of the coin
He knew himmler, was a Munich stereotype
And he stopped talking bout that
When he had his last drop of poison
He was the seventh son of a seventh son
And on the 7th of the 7th he snuck away
And found a family in the diamonds and the jewelry
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