Room 102

I blame the moon, of course.
She zeroed in on you, fattened and bored
and made you go quite mad.
Should you have noticed my recent bouts
of temper (although I am sure you did not,
insignificant as they were), forgiveness
would have been foremost on your mind.
But that bloated orb with her beams of
delusion had other ideas and I fear
she may have ruined you.

Then there was that earthquake
in that place. You remember the one?
Perhaps you don’t. Understandable really,
given its effect on your reason.
Say, wouldn’t it be some kind of bittersweet
irony if it was tearing down bridges and setting
them aflame at the same time as we… never mind.
I can tell you what it wasn’t: it wasn’t my doubt;
that could never have expressed itself to you
without my explicit awareness and consent.
Tectonic shifts.
It was the earthquake.


I have also heard that something was in trine
with something else. Jupiter perhaps.
Or was it Mercury? You know how these planets are.
It must have been on that day when I most assuredly
did not convice myself there was someone else
and that noise was not what was left of us
going tha-thunk
tha-thunk
tha-thunk
down a very steep hill and into a ditch. No, silly,
it was the planets trining. Or whatever you call it.

Your mother’s new hat cannot be entirely discounted
either.
One never knows with previous ownership.
Not that we are the types to believe in curses
and bad energy and the like. But that hat
came into our lives at exactly the same time
as I most definitely did not make any kind of
drunken phonecall to any kind of ex because I wanted
someone to reassure me I could be loved when
you wouldn’t. How else to explain that argument?
It seems to me that cursed hats
are an overlooked threat.

Other factors must be considered:

The soup that may or may not have been out of date,
the birthmark on your hand or the freckle on my knee,
the Moroccan mint tea,
the something-or-other in Mongolia,
the bird that landed on my fence and looked at
me funny,
or the fact that I love you so deeply and dreadfully
and desperately so that it wasn’t me
It wasn’t me.
It wasn’t me.

The day of The Fall was not accompanied, as one might expect, by ominous snarls of thunder and dramatic smashes of lightning. Nor were there any omens to signify the Coming; no sudden visions from otherwise ordinary people, no Wizard of Oz-type voices appearing from thin air. Of course, there were all the usual wars, murders and natural disasters which many tried, after the fact, to use as clear examples that we were Being Warned (cue incessant calls from certain quarters for us to “Repent!”, coupled with even more incessant denouncements of everything from sex before marriage to high heeled shoes), but as earthquakes had parted the Red Sea for Moses and war has been our favourite sport since the first caveman made a spear, these “examples” could be safely dismissed as the desperate ramblings of those whose lives had been so much better before there were answers with the potential to prove them wrong.
No, the day of The Fall went largely unnoticed by most, creeping so gradually into the collective consciousness that by the time people realised what was happening, it already had happened.
It had happened before, albeit on a much smaller scale. But that had been… well, a bit of a disaster, what with the giant hybrid babies and all.

If God is the God of the Bible,

I declare war.

Assemble the masses, let us rise

to heaven under cover of darkness,

rifles strapped to haggard backs,

grenades slung low round waists

He made.

There, comrade! Fire!

Do angels bleed when their father

lets them die?

If God is the God of the Bible,

I demand an audience.

Our army will burn through heaven,

making a deceiver of the God who promised

no suffering there.

Yes, we can create too.

And when the screaming angels

who have drawn their swords to us

so many times for infractions

their father created us to commit

ask why,

I will reply:

“This is in the name of

The smashed tomb of my Christian

aunt, and the cancer that ate her womb,

the ripped hymen of the four year old, the gold

children dig for at gunpoint aching for water

that isn't there, the hair on my arms that stood

up when I heard the screams from my screen

of the newly homeless because wind and wave,

not sin, but wind and wave had slaughtered

their parents and this is also in the name of

the flesh eating parasite and of the blind

and the paralysed and the free will that

is not possible if God is the God of the Bible.

This is in the name of

the neutron, the atom, the proton,

the hydrogen and carbon that cobble

intricate being never seeing that they

leave no clue as to consciousness,

as to soul, that makes the whole of who we

are; of who the rapist is when he rapes, who

the thief is when he takes; the majesty

of the ocean and the horrors that feast on

tiny shoals who know no other purpose

to this life than to swim away, swim away!

Then die, chewed in the maw of that which

terrified them since birth. This is for mirth

that can only be known through the comparison

of sorrow and comfort that only shows its

sweet relief after fear. You hear me God?

You hear? Face your creation

and tell us it was no mistake. For this is in the name

of all that makes us ache and sob whether we

keep the faith or not.

Take your best shot, Father, take it now”.

And God shows Himself.

And there before him,

I kneel

in spite of myself.

And I weep.

I weep the tears of a million lost souls,

knowing that all are mine.

I see what I can never comprehend

and I know why.

He reaches down to

clasp my face in His hands

and I gaze up at Him,

the tears and the snot and the salt

upon my lips

and I say

“But you knew, you bastard.

All along, you knew”.

I danced because they told me to.
The steps were clumsy; skirt-rustled trips,
Clouts of indiscretion and the mired hopelessness
That propelled them.
I danced because they told me to
And when I was done I stopped.

That’s a lie.

I danced because I wanted to
And sailed through stages and
Earth.
I fought with Finn McCoul, fed fire
To masked Greeks. I bruised bone
And tore ligament,
Fell and fell and fell.
I told stories words could never tell,
Shot soldiers stage-left, loved princes stage-right.
They applauded every time.
Stood to clap.
I ate the air and savaged the norm,
Smiled and cried and bled.
Cardboard spires watched me leap
As him, her, him caught me.
I gave life to things that had no name,
Filled all that was empty inside
Just by moving.

I danced because I wanted to
And I stopped long before I was done.

Miss Princesscharmin got a call,
Her handsome Prince had had a fall.
From a witch he'd eaten food quite rotten
And landed right upon his bottom.

Our Princess set out on her quest,
Making sure she looked her best.
She was in a tizzy and a rather foul mood
How dare he eat another woman's food?

Battling dragons and fearsome creatures,
Stopping to apply touch ups to her features,
She found her Prince upon the floor
And kissed him once, and then once more.

He woke, quite startled and a little shaken
'My Princess! Let's get to some hot love-makin''
(I won't describe the very next part
in case it harms the weak of heart)

Now, I'd like to say they lived Happily Ever After,
Their lives fulfilled with joy and laughter,
But six months later our Miss had fits
When he left her for a Princess with bigger tits.

Maybe she was at peace,
dimension jumping in dreams,
grateful for the apple and the rest
from endless dishes and tiny stitches in tiny shirts.

Did our Prince stop to consider this?
Would he have if he'd known, could have bitten
into his own enchanted fruit and seen
the years spread out before him
like a wrinkled sky?
Most likely not.

As Snow White slumbered, free from
the tethers of insipid genres,
he kissed her.

What if that kiss had shown her, in
her heightened state, all that would be?
The entireness of it sandwiched between
one glimmer of lips to lips...

could it be that she was awakened
not by the kiss,
but by the horror?

But awake she did.

Perhaps the horror
was better than sleep.

Ah, you are not a fellow Wordeater I see,
so I do not know how best to explain this to you:
you who thinks only in the tangible world
of your own five senses.
You, who argues this did not happen "to me"
when I can assure you it did.

Try this:

I was buried, ensconced.
snuggled on a bed of enchanted stars
as a tapestry already in existence
weaved itself anew over my hungry flesh.
The heavens engulfed me in a blanket of bliss
as the grasses below bent to the shape of my song
and even the angels fell silent to listen.

And then...

Peter came back
and Wendy was old.