when he was young
barely twenty and thinking of nothing more than
college, and the feel of another body against his own
in the dark and the glittery glow of the clubs,
they branded a name onto the fairwhite skin of his chest,
rocked heated iron back and forth across his flesh
and the pain came in waves.
his skin was pink and red and smoking black,
with a hint of white bone beneath
and he dug his fingers so deeply into his thigh that it bled for forty days
and every night for the rest of his life BUT
he did not die.

and they called him superman.

he looked into the mirror and saw the brand
the black against the white of his skin like somebody
had been drawing on him with coal
and he thought: this is wrong.
this is not my name.
sweat and tears clutched at each other
like sisters and brothers alone in the silence
on his drawn face,
and he retched red white and blue
until the floor and the walls and his skin bubbled with acid BUT
the brand shone through,
and man said ‘it is good it is good. will you fight for us?’
his mind was weak and he spat the last of the blue into his fingers,
flexed them and said ‘yes.’

clark kent remembers long nights in the city,
away from the dance clubs, away from the lights and the laughter.
superman fought in the back alleyways
killed crime like it was one bad thing
instead of a million desperate people,
and the darkened alleys were always full of dead bodies
even while the city morgue stood empty and still,
man's voice echoing inside, 'good good good'
clark kent remembers the feel of polyester against his skin
where they tried to hide his brand with fabric and neat stitching.
the air when it rushed past his thinly-covered body.
he watched the criminals purge their stomachs as they died
remembered the feel of skin corroding everywhere
and felt naked.
they deserve it, man told him.

clark kent remembers: adventure! excitement!
justice! like a madman’s laugh.
card dealer, fate weaver, jackblackredqueenace?
sorry. wrong. you die tonight.

clark kent is old, now,
but in a way
superman is even older--
like he has been there forever, just waiting to take form.
the polyester is stretched like his skin and the brand on top of it,
his fingers are calloused and cracked,
and kryptonite doesn’t seem to hurt him anymore.

‘will you live forever for us, superman?’ they asked.
his throat was dry
it would yield no more
and his fingers were burned, and he said ‘yes.’

the house is on fire, and the polyester suit is burning like the devil
the streets are flooded and the morgues have left the
back alleyways.
somewhere in the middle of america a man huddles on his lawn
he cradles a child in his arms, beside the
metal jaws of a death machine.
the child spills red from a jagged wound,
its eyes bleed salty blue
its skin is paper-white and its heart is fuzzy and
catches beneath its ribcage.

clark kent is a naked blur in the air, headed for the edge of forever
clutching at the horizon
and when the world screams ‘save us!’
he says ‘save yourself. superman is dead.’

superman is an idea
a whisper in the air, just waiting to take form
he can’t die.
he'll live forever.

but clark kent is free.

Date:	2003-08-18 19:58
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	nervous

Title: In The End
By: Allie Watson
Rating: PG
Original.
Feedback: would be most welcome.
Note: As far as I’ve researched, John Cage has written lots of music, but his most well-known piece consists of 4’33” of silence (or no noise but that that is natural to the surroundings the piece is performed in), so that’s what she’s playing on the piano.

---

She lives in a house that is cold and bright in the summer and hot and damply dark in the winter, and she never uses the microwave that is gathering dust at the top of the steps leading down to her basement.

She doesn’t like depths and she’s afraid the microwave is going to kill her with radioactive waves-- she read something about that once. And aside from those more logical reasons, she doesn’t like the way the microwave hums when you turn it on (she plugged it in once, after she got it as a gift from her aunt), like something large and angry and eager for blood beneath its nails.

Her house is quiet, and still. Sometimes, when she closes her eyes and strains her ears, she can just hear streams of air slipping like ribbons around her, brushing against the stone walls and settling into the spaces between the dust particles on the rug.

When she’s alone in the house, the only other thing she can hear is the gentle buzzing of the fish tank and, if she listens with her mind, the sound of bubbles plopping gently into the air like raindrops into the ocean.

And, lately, the rushing of existence in the goldfish’s throat.

---

She never named the goldfish, although she did try. Names didn’t seemed to fit him-- he shook them off, refused to let them glue themselves to the scales on his back. Found himself unable to carry them with him for any length of time, like baggage that he couldn’t help forgetting about every time he turned his attention, momentarily, to something else.

In the end, she didn’t call him anything at all, just watched him a lot from her perch on the mantelpiece and wondered what he was thinking.

She asked him, sometimes, out loud. As if maybe he would answer and she would suddenly find herself enlightened, or just comforted, for a little while.

She learned that the goldfish would never, ever answer, no matter how many times you asked what it was thinking, and that was enlightening enough.

The goldfish used to have a square tank. It was lined with blue and green fake pebbles along the bottom, plastic plants weighted down with cement, and the goldfish liked to swim in the third corner counting clockwise.

One day she wrapped her arms around her legs and chant for it to stop again and again until the words mixed themselves up like too many tongue twisters and she had to climb off the mantelpiece, because she was so dizzy the world was spinning around her like an egg, all off balance and ready to crack into a thousand streams of blurring colour.

She bought it a fishbowl, so it wouldn’t have any corners to swim in any more.

---

She goes to sleep at exactly eleven minutes past eleven and dreams about the universe.

It’s like a rubber band, except everywhere, with no spaces for anything to slip through-- a big, flat, black rubber band, speckled all over with dots of light and bursts of life like staccato pulses without any rhythm at all.

It’s stretching out and out and out until she thinks it’s going to snap or freeze or simply stop existing from the strain of being too much all over the place, but instead it slows down to a crawl and starts to change, subtly, while she watches it. All the greens and the pinks and the purples go bright and desperate, neon signs downtown in the early hours of the morning, begging for just a few more customers before dawn breaks and respectability is restored.

The universe turns itself around and starts rushing back in towards a center she didn’t know it had.

It’s tinged all golden around the edges, as if a billion suns are snapping out or falling behind while the baby stars are speeding towards a dot in the distance like it’s the finish line for eternity--

AND IT IS.

But the gold is orange and yellow and the goldfish is eating the universe and it’s rushing like a tornado into its stomach.

She’s sitting in her living room, on top of the coffee table, watching infinity disappear into the goldfish bowl, and there’s a 7-11 across the room, behind the bowl, where two store clerks are offering money to anybody who will pull out their eyes and throw them into the spinning remains of life, so they’ll know what it looks like.

She wants to tell them, “You’ll know soon enough,” as the universe pulls itself into the gold throat like a long scarf and it’s a magician’s trick backwards, because they’re next in line, after the rest of the world has threaded it’s way into the bowl, but the dream is over before she can say a word.

---

Rick comes over the next day with a bag of rice and an embarrassed smile, and wants to know how she’s doing, and does she need any help around the place.

“No,” she says, “I don’t need any help. My goldfish is swallowing the universe.”

Rick laughs. “What’s this about?”

He doesn’t believe her, but that’s normal, because Rick has never believed her about anything-- he's got too many memories of her mind being mixed up and twisted about.

Rick doesn’t understand a lot of things, but he doesn’t understand this most of all-- monkeys typing out the works of Shakespeare by accident, people in comas waking long enough to spit out premonitions before sinking back into oblivion, the chattering of wild rhythm that sometimes interrupts even the most steady stretch of music. Rick doesn’t understand things that have no explanations, things that deviate from what is considered normal.

Rick doesn’t understand that sometimes, despite the years of being labeled disturbed and mentally stunted and incapable of thinking properly, she’s right. Sometimes she’s not just the little girl who thought she saw death inside her closet and tried to talk to him, or who claimed she caught a fairy in the backyard when she was seven but everybody else said it was a firefly.

Sometimes, when a person says their goldfish is swallowing the universe, they really mean it and it’s really something heart-wrenchingly surreal and completely awful.

“Come see,” she says, and he must note the fear in her voice, because he softens, suddenly, and speaks like she’s a kid again.

“Hey,” he says, “don’t look so scared. Your goldfish ain’t doing anything with the universe that anybody else isn’t.”

“You don’t understand,” she says, and she tugs him into the living room and shows him the bowl.

The bottom is littered with the usual pebbles and plastic plants, but among them, perfect and horrific as the shrunken heads she’s seen in documentaries about Rainforest tribes, are little miniatures of the teacher’s pets of the world.

Eiffel tower. Statue of Liberty. Mt. McKinley. Half of the alps up against the wall of the bowl and the sunken remains of the Titanic right beneath the fish.

“Those are good models,” he says, peering into the bowl. “You get them at the fish store?”

“I don’t get them anywhere,” she says. “They just show up.”

Rick turns and puts his arm around her. “That’s right,” he says. “Why don’t I get you some dinner, okay?”

Rick doesn’t understand why the microwave is sitting on the stairs. He takes it out and plugs it in, and uses it to cook dinner for her (because Rick doesn’t know how to deal with her, and dinner seems as good a solution as any), just like he does every time he comes over.

And just like every time he comes over, he fails to notice the way she trembles behind the sofa until he turns it off again.

---

After dinner, when she has made Rick unplug the microwave and set it carefully back in it’s place on the dusty steps, she sits and plays John Cage on the piano, her fingers arched onto the white keys and tremblingly still, trapped between the black keys which rise out of the piano like decayed teeth, and her hair swaying from her bowed head like she’s praying into the silence.

Rick sits in the living room and watches Jeopardy.

Behind him, the goldfish exhales stars into the water around it, watches as they swirl up in Milky Way spirals until they reach the surface and disappear into the void between the water and the air.

It hovers near the edge of the bowl and the round curve of glass seems to melt and reform and it’s like a corner, and the goldfish is swimming and swimming and swimming.

When it puckers its lips it lets the darkness of space trail out into the water like a stream of blood, and meteors flash by like hailstones, fast and dangerous inside its stomach.

---

She has taken to spending her nights beneath the coffee table in the living room.

She dreams of sunsets and shopping malls and the smell of the desert sand blowing into her nose and eyes, but when she wakes up her world is always the paint spiral of the universe inside a rim of gold and a flash of fins at the end of everything.

---

She’s sitting inside the psychiatrists office, and she tells him, “It’s going to end in a funnel.”

Outside in the waiting room, it is quiet and it smells of sadness.

Everybody in the waiting room has lost hope. They are sick, or they are so well that they can do nothing but think themselves sick, and they are waiting, truly waiting, not for the psychiatrist but for the world to simply end.

A goldfish flicks its tail inside a long, rectangular tank, and the Grand Canyon splits through the blue pebbles without a sound.

She tells you her name is Jane
And winks at you,
One sparkling button-brown eye disappearing beneath
Yards and yards of wrinkled fairy-dust-pink-peach fabric
(Not yet crossed with the razor blade cut thin blue lines of the
Barmaid, right across the room)
Before she sets your drink down on the table in front of the stool you’re sitting on
And walks away as the
Golden brown beer drips down the side of your mug
To land and sink and soak into the rotting wood.
Every doll in the house seems to have the same yellow hair
And the same blue eyes,
But she’s black and brown and off-white,
The colour of eggshells and curdling milk
And fascinating in her unwitting originality,
In the way she curls up in your stomach and
Settles into the dusty corners of your mind
Until you’re all butterflies and sandstorms
And you smell of sterilized needles and small town shops.
When she smiles her lips are cherry-red without a hint of gloss
Startling in their brilliance, bright against the
White lace of her skin and her teeth, glowing pearls that aren’t quite there.
Cherry-red, crimson or flame or rose, stretching on for miles
And the navy-blue stitches all hidden,
Far out of sight.

Ten million years later you’re in her bed
Breathing hesitance into the orange glow of the
Evening
Morning
Moment-- when the earth is still spinning, but one sun’s just sunk into the black cooking pot of the universe
And the other is still cracking out of its shell
the center of an egg all golden
And ready to be born.
Her sheets are perfectly plaid
navy blue green touch of red
And you wonder how many balls of yarn it’s going to take
To replace the hairs you’ve already ripped from her
Pleasantly pliable scalp
But there isn’t much time for thinking of that.
The in-between is fading fast, and soon it will be day or day,
You’re not sure which,
And things will be too real to carry on,
When there isn’t the blur over everything and there are ten million too-real laws
against hesitance and being bathed in orange light.
She’s digging her nails,
silver pins with brightly coloured tips,
sharp as bee stings
And the edge of time,
Into the smooth, live skin of the back of your hands
As she mutters something that sounds like
‘Raggedy-Ann’
Sharp shards of glass fall like imitation teardrops from sacks beneath her eyes,
Inexpertly crafted and incapable of catching the light.
Her head is thrown back in some sort of death cry
Although she’s not dead--
All she wants is someone's grandmother
a thimble and a button or two and a touch of good old-fashioned comfort
And when you rip open her chest in a search for some semblance of sense
You find the white cotton there stained
With blood from a heart she was never supposed to have.

Temperature Rising

She said, “You’re like nothing else on this earth
And that doesn’t exactly make for good analogies.
Conform, darling.
What you are, maybe,
Is a slick sliver of graphite or a thick layer of dirt or a smooth lump of coal
Because you rub off on everyone
And you never seem to lose anything of yourself in the process.
Because you’re hot-- 105.5º and your temperature won’t stop rising
You’re like a furnace
Where does it come from?
Who makes your energy?
There’s radioactive material inside the earth but there’s nothing inside of you.
Nothing but a small slip of a soul
and a spreading void in the center of your stomach--
An empty space, filled with all the regrets you’ve ever had.
None.
The void keeps you strong.
You go to sleep at night and there’s a record player
Sitting by the side of your bed,
And it slides its jaw open in the unholy darkness of the night and
--you’re coal, remember, you don’t like this--
clamps down on you until you’re
struggling beneath the weight of a silver needle.
Maybe it was once a crude silver cross
Somewhere in Europe,
And somebody pressed it against the broad chest of a wild werewolf
And the werewolf burned in the heat from its own heart and howled
once, high and hoarse and harsh,
Before God came down and carried him away
Maybe that’s what it was, once, and maybe the same cross--
White-silver, engraved, awkwardly formed
-- was held up against a million other people
a million more tears.
Ten million more regrets.
But.
It’s a needle now, and it’s silver, so the truth is
It’s no good for playing records.
The only thing it knows how to do is eat away at common sense and rule and rage and kill, and it’s hard, because
You’re so tough.
The needle wishes it were easier to break through the hard black of your skin
As you writhe in its grip, changing from coal to human and never quite become either one in your distress
You’re too hard.
It gauges into you,
Long marks, deep and thin and smooth--
I paint them with fire-engine red lipstick
And pretend it’s your blood, but it’s not because
You haven’t got any blood.
Your heart won’t pump
You can't draw water from a stone.
Snow falls down around you, through the ceiling, and it’s cold and wet and melts on your skin.
107º.
108º.
rising, rising, rising.
A little closer to hell, a little further away from heaven,
A little less gold, a little more silver,
A little less pain and a little more anguish.
The needle pushes through you, slices neatly through your breastbone, cutting the whitepeach layer that covers it,
But your skin just heals around the slender slash of a wound--
The needle rests like a splinter beneath your ribcage
And your whole body twists violently,
You don’t cry,
And you’re everything-nothing-despair-hope-rock-puddle-silence.
You’re you.
You seem so happy, but I can’t fathom why-- you've got silver beneath your skin and hatred in your heart
And the void is filled with coal and nothing makes sense because there’s no blood flowing.
The temperature keeps rising.
109º.
We aren’t on the same page, here, are we?
I’m way back with Alice, my lips still chapped from the rushing of the air beside my face,
Drowning in tears
(hot and salty and they've rolled down your face before)
110º.
And you’re pages ahead, rushing through the story like there’s no
Time!
Talking to the Cheshire cat--
It’s me, baby, it’s always been me
-- who smiles a desperate steak-knife smile as little bits of him disappear
and disappear
and are gone.
Until only his smile remains, and it is more like a grimace, now, really,
And you smile.
Reach in and pull the silver needle out of your chest and push.
HEAT.
111º.
112º.
113º.
You don’t say you’re sorry, but your smile says more than words ever could.
‘I’ve got to keep rubbing, right?
In a thousand years, I’ll still be here.
I’m a part of the silver now.
Part of the mass hatred, the killing and the kissing and the loathing and the loving.
Part of the deceit.
Part of everything.
Got to keep rubbing off.
Have some of my blood.’
I almost admire the way you manage to make the white teeth flame silver.
114º, darling.
If you can’t go to hell, make hell come to you.

Date:	2003-05-22 20:39
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	uncomfortable

Well, here it is. Writing journal. Writing, writing, writing.

I don't really feel like doing any writing right now (hahaha. okay. crap pun over. you can look again.) but I guess I'll get around to it at some point, and whenever I post the first bit of writing, that can be the introductory post. Or something.

Teeeeeeesting.

-_-

(geek.)