March 30th, 2008

But to Francis, “your tail curled in mutton milk, you weren’t a savior!” Oh indeed, the tendencies that followed his ridiculous tirade, I could barely stand with these tremors reverberating through my body. I sat down, clutching my sides, tears running from my eyes, I tried to focus in. It blurred around me, I couldn’t help it; couldn’t you feel the tension dispersing? Rushing from the scene in fragments, these were fragments, and I was the centrifugally charged orb. You can’t trace these things: our feelings sliding by like stars in hyperspace, while we slip into the river . . . its surface holding an undertone of current as we backstroke through it, like windmills on a fluid highway. [We are flotation devices strung together, bobbing on the wake.] George hit a rock and Mary, our caboose, she broke loose. We watched her glide down an off-shooting stream, us waving good-byes and gargling mineral water, her wide-eyed and terrified.

The waterfall was our downfall, our five hundred foot freefall. I watched Francis the entire way down. I can barely remember hitting the water, only the sound of splintering bone as the surface broke; it was gravity that pushed me through. (Am I one with it? Are we mutually exclusive? I am the republic.) “Meet me at the crossroads, I’ll be the one with the cigarette in my mouth.” These were my last words to Francis. Our eyes had been aligned, I felt fire slip between us. I wonder if it was the water that we were afraid of all along. To be honest, it happened all too fast.

My parents told me I was the first colored in town to go to the all white school. I brought my crayons and painted a portrait on the back of the bus seat. The other children giggled. Purple was the primary color, I was always secondary, red was tertiary. The little girl sitting next to me flipped her hair. I watched it sail in the wind of our open window. It spurted yellow bronze, flowing in a slipstream like an ejaculation into a void. I was lost in it until we reached the plantation. Oh! the fields of Elysium, she led me through them by the hand. We lay on top of the wheat like a bed of gentle needles supporting us tall above the dirt. The sun glowed orange through closed eyelids and I could feel a smirk growing beneath my nose. It wasn’t the same by the time I opened my eyes, the light had sunk into the ground and the world was a shadow. You feel a whip across your back, I feel pain searing into my mind. Sometimes you can hear death, but only through mediums, never clearly, never unobstructed, unadulterated. I thought I heard it then. It might have been an illusion, you never can tell, but the world exploded and I was back in my locker between a damp towel and a sweaty jockstrap. “Please!” was my plea, but who could hear? I will rot, fine if I rot, I must rot, fine if I rot, fine, fine, I’ll rot.