We Forget this Ever Happened

All of the neighbors came out the day she fell into her imagination. And all the news cameras and newsmen were there with their chomping bright smiles and slithery haircuts. They said on live television how it was a tragedy, how someone should have been watching her. On live television they said how they’d like to get child services involved but it’s nearly impossible when the girl is 23 and both her parents are dead.
  
It was later discovered that letters had come from both Dorothy and Wendy in the weeks prior to the incident. Be wary, girl, for even rabbit holes seal up as wombs do; squeeze you out of the best dreams like a car crash outside the bedroom window. Still, she had insisted upon prying open her own pupils and tumbling in gloves-first. So legions of disappointed firefighters sigh and lean on their shovels while she falls to her ego-death at the bottom of a well so deep it turns her upside down.
  
That day her parents turn on the television to find it will tune to nothing but infinity screaming by.
  
They die with their mouths open.
  
[Open your face and they’ll all smile back at you
Even the cop even the garbage collector]
  
We find now that our sooty, fingerless-gloved Artemis has taken to dumpster vegetarianism and is easily struck down by a song.

The sinister nature of this castrated city only comes out in the rain anymore; screaming sirens the tenor of red white and blue. Taste the times-- it’s  filthy-mesmerizing end and beginning, giddy urgency on the streets of Disneyland, New York.

And your compensation for this is: anything you’ve ever wanted, Architect.

The game is only worth dealing when they do it slick; the slow unlacing of esophagus seam by years of ribbon-grey smoke, the Velcro phantom pain of meat shorn from fresh-dead ribs.
  
[feels like absolution]
  
Trouble is, most of them know enough to only leave you dusk-colored souvenir bruises the next day,
A cigarette burning down in the ashtray to the inconsistency of clicking keys,
Random acts of effulgence
  
[do you understand?]
  
You see, you start getting such lucky hands that there’s no one left to play with. Like the mornings you wake to bloody paw prints on the window.
  
[I’m talking about god and God and my father again

This is what we call formula in the material universe

Sacred truth in some others]
  
She goes to shake the week’s rust from her joints, regretting those magic beans as soon as the subway floor begins to blossom. Then it’s two hours’ terror trembling in a phone booth that only seems to be bolted to the ground---spinning out in a whirl of Friday-the-thirteenth-full-moon February winds, flashing tow truck lights, screaming cab horns, cackling young mouths – the taste for liquor stalactites on pearly teeth – playing the ATMs like slot machines and the rail shelves like darts.
  
When the Earth slips back into its orbit spiraling fairy lights spell it out like constellations in her terror-wide pupils:
  
No, oh no, I’ve done nothing in your name
  
But I do see the shadow under each of your ribs
And the light beneath your fingernails
The crooked testimony of your knuckles
A thousand-thousand screaming faces with your palms knitted into their mermaid hair...
  
Held helpless against subway doors by the alloy timbre of your rat sneer
Vowels dissolving into gravel; steel wool and screeching trains
A quaver rolls through me right down to the tracks
Like the way you say your rrrrrrrs
  
[Try to focus as you fall. Fingers growing thinner with each life they take.*

*like when you were sleeping with toonies under your pillow]

I peel you off the wall like my shadow while everyone is looking and I guess then you buckle, paper in the searing wind I’ve stirred up over these worn-shiny wooden planks
  
because you’re just bathroom graffiti

and footprints

and echoes
  
You’re just Morse code remixes of an old Spanish spiritual
  
[I’ll prove it]
  
Deep in the jungle a man with twin tusks and hairy knuckles splits your skull over his knee, pries it open with a cartoon coconut pop and hands you half. The other half he babbles down gristly like into a telephone and it translates in your end to:  you have no idea what you are fucking with, little girl. This is a country you’ve never visited, colors you’ve never tasted; all the world’s pearlescent opulence collects in a droplet at the hinge of his jaw and I know you’re all swelled ribs and tongue-curled anticipation but you have no idea, little girl, of what exact-lee it is with which you are FUCKING.
  
So do you understand?
  
The challenge, he says, is to remain always completely immersed, unflinchingly connected and, most importantly, utterly unattached.

Especially on those days when the date stamped onto the milk carton is all that’s keeping the future tangible.
  
[Hint: Turn on the lights at 7 so fadeout hurts less and when you sleep don’t go too far.]
  
So, I’ve seen that girl of yours, how she slinks over the grime-sparkle hills like a spiteful hyena, smiling only when it’s perfectly inappropriate.

[Did they finally convince you that ultimate beauty can only slither slimy from the slick pages of the fashion rags...?]   

She’s got a clever doll face, I guess
And fits the clothes just like the mannequins
I heard the sound was grotesque when her hip bones sliced open her tights and spilt her true nature all over the baked pavement floor

but, of course, I wasn’t there
  
[Really though, why so smug, girl? Didn’t you show up naked and screaming like the rest of us?]

Just look at you now.

While he strums the highways, shakes the hills so that their brands break loose to shatter in the valley, drums the sun into the ocean I crumble like temples on film, like made up holidays in this pop-up book city and all its hacking cough winds and newspaper tumbleweeds. You’ll find me coiled around the railing to the fluttery brass, veins lit up like filaments, growing thin enough to walk quicksand.

[Come and sweep me off my fate.]
  
Yes, it is urgent:

The sundials have begun to tick backwards
as the transitional seasons choose their sides
Summer and Winter transmutate
Dusk and dawn turn over in bed

And so we grow from old to young
It’s the science of devolution
The laws of metaphysics

[It’s been a while since I’ve played head games with real bullets.]
  
It is in these mirror melting moments in all the bathrooms of Chinatown that I see I’m doing only that of which I accuse others
And I realize I’m just as vile as the rest of you
Maybe even worse
  
And I’ll ask myself later why I denied god tonight
And maybe also why he would waste his favorite song on me
  
At five a.m. all the wrong faces peer out of taxi windows with their eyes leaking out of their heads and I sigh
  
just me and the billboards again, I guess
the cop and the garbage collector.

Barely in time for the second resurrection a letter comes from Poprishchin:
  
My dearest Matryoshka,

I think we both know that you can't really withstand the gravity of a collapsing star, nor even dream of not quaking while mired in the very depths of those chill Gipsy blooz.

Listen: Hack the shit out of your disbelief
He gives eyesight to the blind but not the blind you think
Yes, it’s dangerous casting spells on the hopeless to make them fall in love with you
But I promise even the cruelest gods never serenaded someone with a joke.

I know, Alice, that he gives and takes faith with all the humanity of a scratch-off lottery ticket,  but find your comfort in newspaper missives from the stars ringed surreptitiously in a coffee stain or couriered by flies. These speak of inevitability, the gift of fate.
  
My silly Sleeping Beauty, pricked by a pen; would I lie to you? You know I am ill even when I cannot give proper directions to strangers on the street, so would I lie to you my darling, dealing doll?

Consider these things just enough to forget them.

All my love/Until we share a cell,
P
  
And the backwards postscript when you hold this mirror up to a mirror?
  
Unfortunately, the re-birthmark ink stains on your hands prove nothing but fingerprints.
Wrap your ankles tight, Gitana
This one’s going to hurt