Thalamus Brown, and: Hippocampal Lash

Thalamus Brown

Whenever light bends, a seance of broken appoggiaturas begin: Clouds swept in an awayness, pasted close to the horizon, smeared in a foreign color only seen through forgotten windows, linger like viscous smoke borrowing time. With arms akimbo, I stand as a dark fixture lost in a hurricane of brazen words that all too often starts as a whisper, ends with the simmer of a coagulating guillotine. Tales against my body he held like glass before accordion moons, played my bass curvaceous, walked through a pine of hips, and breathed underwater lotus lips—high low, straight up jazz, C major. Now, it waxes like wrecked after discharges, wanes like heavenly starlight licking the speckled face of ponded water.

A cigarette is the only staff unfurling my Red Sea. “Touch Me in the Morning” rains through hallways in my crimson mind, along lips that instantly open for the crossing of sacred smoke, down into sarcophagus lungs forever free, always me, where all of this is exhaled against coronary words still chiming my labia minora and gluteal muscles precisely, like a Howard Miller clock—

As if he needed to suture the sky, I watched him sow his heading. The shadow ahead of his stride, the wrinkle in his gait, his shopping bag stuffed with all of his clothes, exiting down through long cemented stairs of an old folks’ home, toward the Greyhound bus station, ever closer to years stitched with hieroglyphic guilt, Tutankhamun nights. Strange it was to see him shovel his feet through a stretch of gravel singing of dust and storm appurtenances, never to return, never to speak even in another time. Sigh. His melody was so leaf. . .

Passing subconscious stations chrome as winter, I often wondered if he ever heard Trojan women guiding ribbons across valleys. But then my only answer has been my need to look out cold window panes, where raw hides continue to escape the noonday sun. Peeking through sarcophagus smoke, I wonder when will they cease to orbit dark, female ceilings?

Hippocampal Lash

Upon my shoulder, like handkerchief to lips, struggling to wipe the moment clean,—it laid an improbable cause, my impetus, real. Neither a mirror abetted with smoke, nor a magnifying glass squarely tucked between two cheeks, lying. This was no fata morgana. No, this looking-glass wonderland didn’t need Alice. Nor did it dream Snow White. Instead, it got the whole of my narrative, my reasoning, my gonfalon, my wife, even the seed of my grandchildren. Everything of mine it had, to govern, into the red of an Amygdala-Blue. Well versed in the fluency of bled gold running like hot knife to buttered soul, my impetus took court,—spoke before a solstice Come-Monday. Do you believe the love of art is truly the extinction of personality? No other reason will due. Perhaps a political concept thrown before wolves. But wolves and philosopher-poets seldom mix. Except in the jaws of scorn, saliva regurgitated for the pure. . . marginalized. . . told you aren’t worthy of a community, foul beneath fowl, gifted with an aquiline feature whores would demand a price for three. That the naked truth being the personality of art is but gestalt on steroids, forever unrealized; addicted to a cursed eternity, lived as an intangible kernel screaming:

Where is it. . . ? I need more!