Prose Poem - Nobody Has Ever Died of a Panic Attack

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Nobody Has Ever Died of a Panic Attack

she says as she strips herself, sits naked on the edge of tub and trembles. It is soothing-cool and solid against her thighs, but she knows it is just atoms jostling together, and that there is no real reason (indefinable facts of quantum physics aside) that they should not simply choose to slide apart. Her nails slip across slick porcelain as she grips tighter.

Three Pieces of Advice to New Dishwashers at the Eldorado Hotel

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It is easier if you can be friendly
to the face of the embittered French-Canadian
(with the gotee)
who owns you.
Do not tell him you are a poet:
once
he was a poet too.
Smile and say - Absolutely! Right away!
(Inside your head you can
sentence him to fifty years hard labour
in the stone mines.
It helps.)
At any rate, after a month he will stop
making you scrub the ceiling
and the grungy wall behind the deep-fryer.
He will,
I promie,
stop laughing when you burn yourself.

Sometimes it is easier if you can be angry.
Mopping the long linoleum floor
at midnight
when your hair is thick and wet with
steam and sweat and grease,
it is easier
if you can hate him.
Or someone.
Anyone, to be honest, to whom
you can direct the thought,
"I'll show that so-and-so
I will get out."

(It is easier still
if that is true.)

Missing In Action

A short-short story I wrote for my fiction class, ages ago.

Missing In Action

She cut her heart out in the morning beside the kitchen sink. It was the only sensible thing to do. Afterwards she lit a cigarette and smoked it standing up, and the grey ashes fell onto the grey linoleum floor without a sound. She flicked the butt into the crowded sink and it hissed.

Once upon a time the floor was white and the dishes got washed twice a day and she didn’t smoke because of the children.

Once upon a time, before Jim got shipped overseas and the phone calls stopped coming and MIA turned out to mean something. After that she stopped noticing colours, and the dishes didn’t matter so much, and the kids smoked pot and locked their doors to keep the smell inside.

Last night’s coffee catches like sand in her throat. All the sugar from the cracked tin on the counter doesn’t help, and the milk has gone sour, so she drinks it black and bitter and cold, and the caffeine makes her shiver.

Six steps from the kitchen to the living room. Today her feet drag and make it seven, and her trailing toe snags on the unravelled edge of carpet.

Three more steps to the bathroom cabinet with the little bottle full of nothing-matters.

She cut her heart out in the morning beside the kitchen sink because the dishes weren’t done and she didn’t care. She cut her heart out in the grey morning beside the dirty dishes because last night’s coffee choked her and there was no sugar left in the world.

She cut her heart out because it was broken anyway.

Afterwards she smoked a cigarette and went on with her life – what was left of it – and nobody noticed the difference.

Definitive Proof I am Living

See? When I pick
at the sensitive slips of the skin
at my fingertips,
I bleed.
You see? When I breathe
in the cold, it is there
in the air,
to be seen.
You see? When I sleep
and I twist in my sheets
I am dreaming.
Please.
Doesn’t that mean
I am here?
Shouldn’t pain
be proof
of living?
Shouldn’t the wonder of warmth
and the depth of my dreaming
(I-think-therefore-I-am)
be decisive
definitive
proof?
I breathe and I bleed
and I dream
but still
I wonder.

poems

These are a few poems I found while clearing off my desk (a monumental project, believe you me) in preparation for moving out.

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Taking Responsibility

Am I right to believe
that the butterflies in my stomach
belong to you?
I suspect you set them loose
when first we met
for fear
I should forget…
now, in the absence
of you
they are fluttering
to death.
They drift
to the walls
of my insides,
crumble to dust
discreetly
one by one.
they are making me sick
and sad
and lonely,
and you see,
I do not want a stomach that is full
of dead butterflies,
my friend – you’d better
come
collect them.

The Frustrations of Dealing With Me

It should be simple when two people
have this peculiar electricity
particular to
us.
It should be as simple as one plus one –
you and I together make
a certain something
which is certainly
something more
than nothing,
although
that is the only certain thing
about it.
This should be simple but you see
it’s not
particularly when one of these two people
is me.
You see?
I am incapable
of making this easy.


(This next one is still a fragment. It needs another stanza, and I'm not sure if this first one should be in past or present tense. It also (as bloody usual) needs a title.)

Inexplicable

What is it I need?
I have fallen out of the habit
of breathing – all the clovers
on the lawn
are four-leaved
but they bring only
grief.
Sometimes I wonder
why it was
that the Tin Man wanted a heart.

Seasoning

We cook with silence
in the kitchen – it clings to our fingers
like bread dough,
pools on the polished counters and drips
to the floor
slips
to the door.
It has become
the one ingredient
we use in everything –
we used to say that was love,
and laugh,
do you remember?
Silence was stowed away at the back
of the cupboard of spices
half-hidden always
by thyme.
Now you and I
are connoisseurs
of silence,
but even we
can see
how bad it tastes.

dreams

A description of the last five dreams I've had. I'd typed them out to send to my cousin, so I thought I'd post them here and see if anyone had any kind of...I don't know...interpretation? I find them a little creepy, but very intriguing, too. Any thoughts at all? Does anyone have dreams that are remotely like this, ever? Mine are usually really intense, but they've never followed a theme before.

Also - I have no idea why the Almost Man calls me Kate. No idea.

Dream # 1

I wake with the memory of an old woman, some coins, and the words ‘the place where dreams are made (born?) and stories go to die’ in my mind. There is a terrible, lingering longing to find this place.

Dream # 2

I’m walking along a smooth stone road that passes through a desert. All is gray, and there is nothing to be seen anywhere but the long flat road stretching into the distance. The wind is strong, and in some places has blown drifts of sand across my path.

I am wearing loose dark gray pants that billow around my ankles, and an old-fashioned white shirt that fastens at my wrists with pearl buttons. One is missing. The shirt ought to lace up at the front, from about my navel, but has come undone. My skin is very pale, not tanned at all. There is a scarf around my head. Under one arm is a rolled-up rug, and across my other shoulder is a waterskin. I can hear it sloshing, half-empty, against my side.

There is no other sound except for the wind – my footsteps are muffled by the sand.

I am dreadfully thirsty and tired. I walk steadily, not hurrying, as if I know that the place I’m going to is very far away.

In fact I have no idea where it is, except that it is almost certainly not at the end of this road.

I am going to the place where dreams are made and stories go to die.

I walk and walk and walk, all night, but nothing happens.

When I wake up, I am refreshed, but filled with longing to see the place I am going in my dream. I have to go there. But how?

Dream # 3

It is night time. I am standing in the street in Dawson, and it is raining. The rain is beautiful – sparkling and deep black all at once, as it falls around me. It is like crystal tar. Some of the drops catch on my lashes, and I see the world for a moment in a haze of light. But more and more drops catch my eyelashes, and they are so very heavy, and so very dark that I am a little frightened. My eyelids are steadily dragged down, and I can feel the rain sliding thickly down my cheeks and my bare arms, and down my ribs, coating me. I don’t raise my hands to wipe away the water, but I try to blink it away and fail.

Then, suddenly, Matthew is in front of me. I can hear him breathing.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“I’m standing in the rain in the street,” I say.

There is a pause and a sigh. “How silly,” he says, and suddenly my face is in his hands, and his thumbs are brushing gently at my eyelashes, and I can see again.

His eyes are brown. My face is cold and his hands are soft and warm.

The rain looks harmless again, like crystal sliding down his face. He might be crying, except that the would-be tears run up against his smile, which is as wolfish as always.

“Come inside,” he says. “It’s warm.”

Between his hands, my face is burning. I want nothing more than to follow him, but instead I gasp out, “I can’t!” and tear myself away, and run.

The streets are slick with tar, now, and I slip but keep my footing. I pass lampposts smothered in black, oozing with it.

I must find the place. The place where dreams are made and stories go to die. I must go there because it is the only safe place left to be – the rain is painting the windows of houses black, walling them off from the world. I must go there, but I don’t know the way, and this is suddenly like the old dream, the familiar dream, the night terror. I am running and running, gasping for breath, and everything is crisp with fear, and somehow I am not moving, and my feet are caught in a pool of blackness, and I am stumbling, falling, and waking...

Dream # 4

I am back on the road. My feet are bare and blistered, and the sand-covered stone is cool against them. My waterskin is nearly empty, and the rug is so very heavy. It drags my arm down so that I must balance it against my hip. I have been walking for nights without end.

The moon is over my shoulder. It is a sliver of silver in a gray sky.

Nothing but desert forever, and the wind blows through it, and I walk.

Dream # 5

I am alone in a subway station, and I am studying the map on the wall, but instead of being two-dimensional, it is a three-dimensional model made out of brightly coloured yarn. Each colour represents a different train, and it is impossibly intricate and knotted. I am trying to find a train that will take me to the place where dreams are made and stories go to die, but none of the strings are labelled, and several of them change colour as I watch.

I reach out and touch a strand, thinking to untangle it, but it is so sticky that I recoil, and have to wrench my hand free of it.

As I do, the lights flicker off. I gasp.

From behind me, someone says, “That’s just a train leaving from upstairs. They take the lights by mistake sometimes. It won’t be a moment and they’ll be back.”

Before I can ask who the person is, the lights flicker back on. The platform is bathed in light, and I look around it for the first time.

The walls are gray stone, and a thick black line is painted on the floor about three feet from the drop to the tracks. The tunnel itself stretches left and right into blackness.

The model on the wall is the only colour. A ways to my right, a bench is set against the wall, and a man is sitting on it. He is wearing a wrinkled suit, scuffed shoes, and a shabby bowler hat. His newspaper is held in front of his face.

I look down at myself and see that I am dressed in a light gray sundress, although I feel very strongly that it ought to be blue. This worries me.

I turn back to the map, but the man says, “You’ll never find that place that way.”

I look at him again.

“What do you mean?” I ask. “Do you know something?”

He shrugs, and suddenly I am on my knees beside the bench where he’s sitting.

“Please,” I tell him. “I’m trying to get to the place where dreams are made and stories go to die.”

He grabs hold of my wrist with one hand and then lowers the paper slowly. His face is somehow very hard to look at. I look at his hand on my wrist, instead, and notice that his nails are dirty.

“Well,” he says, “I know a thing or two, but it isn’t free, is it? Nothing’s free in dream-time.”

I stand up and try to pull away, but he pulls on my wrist so that I’m bending down towards him.

“Everything costs, doesn’t it?” he asks. “Tell you what. Give us a kiss and I’ll show you how to get to this place of yours.”

His breath smells very strongly of fish. I lean forwards and kiss him on the forehead, but he snarls at me.

“How about a proper one?” he says.

His skin, although it looked gritty and wrinkled, was very smooth against my lips.

I shake my head and try to pull away again, and his expression becomes very ugly.

“Oh no?” he asks. “What if I looked like this, then?”

Suddenly the person holding my wrist is a tall young man with black hair and a french beret on his head. A cigarette burns in his hand.

“Hey Kate,” he says, and stands and pulls me closer. But his breath still smells like fish, and I lean away, upset.

“No?” he says, raising his eyebrow. There is a silver piercing in it, with a dice on the end.

“No,” I say.

Then he changes again. A girl in her early twenties, dressed in a low-cut black dress, with long wild black curls, has her hand lightly on my wrist. She smiles and slides her hand up my arm. Her eyes are all pupil.

“Stop it,” I say, and the wrinkled man is himself again. “Oh,” he says. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t kiss her.”

He sneers down at me, and then laughs.

“I know what you want,” he says, and changes again. This time the face is mine. It is like looking in a mirror.

“It’s really yourself, isn’t it?” he asks, and grins cheekily with my lips.

I stare.

There is a slight rumbling noise, from down the tunnel, that has been growing louder over the past few minutes without my noticing it. He hears it at the same time as I do, and turns his head, changing back into himself as he does so. The last expression I see on my face is a worried one.

When he turns, I am suddenly not-irrationally terrified. The back of his head – everything behind his face and ears, and under his hat – is hollow. It is as if a white mask has been balanced atop his shoulders. There is nothing but empty space where his skull should be.

“You’re the Almost Man,” I whisper.

At my voice, he comes to his senses and whirls around so that the back of his head – or lack thereof – is hidden.

“Fuck!” he snarls. “Every fucking time!”

Furious, he pulls me closer, still gripping my wrist. “Think you’re so clever, do you?” he asks, and leans down, and I can see the wall of the station through his hollow eyes, and am terrified. But the train is pulling into the station. There is a sudden rush of wind, and as it hits him, he seems to crumple.

The hand on my wrist slackens and falls through my arm, fading away into a dusty sort of nothingness. The rest of him follows, imploding into a wisp of ash that is swept immediately away by the wind, into the dark tunnel behind the train.

To the ground by my feet there clatters a white, blank mask, and the tattered bowler hat. His suit crumples empty to the ground.

There is a roar and a rush, and then the train is gone. It passes straight through without stopping, and it takes the light with it. I am left alone in the dark, and suddenly I am waking up.