Delirium

Delirium

Mark Coleman

  Disappearing like a shut-eye nightjar on tree bark, I sank into a soufflé pillow. Dreams came barreling up from the cellar to meet me. Twining about synapse latticework. Images of death and dilapidation fluttered beneath my eyelids. Skeletal visages both human and otherwise tottered to an unlit region of my subconscious then came howling back at me.

  Dislocated jowls swayed like hanged men. Sinister pop-eyed cuts with a perpetual stench on the breath screamed indecipherable obscenities and threats at me. Fecund runes into the furrows. Buds opening in yowling prematurity. Grimoire pages browsed by the phantasmal wind. A few variegated autumn leaves spiraling their way to a dusty parlor floor. A light dash of sorcery from the French windows. An eye wide at the porthole. A fish finning it back home only to find teeth there.

  Dolls in pink crinoline skirts, their beady, little eyes throwing hateful flashes, curtseyed before receding into their recursive, stucco abodes. Shredded nighties on the carpet. Girls having precociousness forced upon them let their pussies do all the screaming. Frogging up ratlines to meet libertine acquaintances in logeing crow’s nests. Opera-glasses seeking out the ghoulish Lilliputian bosun walking bow-legged from the captain’s thorough buggering.

   A gray man in a gray suit sitting at a lunch counter with blood in his coffee mug, grins and takes a Bathory sip. The fedora upside down beside him has a daisy in the band. It makes one think of an assignation in a spring arbor. The book beside the fedora whose title is hidden must have an inscription if not an armorial frontispiece.

  Trilling birds shattering as dusk overtakes them. Pigeons giving voice to very human anguish in the bow-nets. The ruderal microscoped in their pupils. Showing little by little in the cracked façade and seismically shifting flagstones. Shadows without a source thrown haphazardly like fishing nets in a tidal wave. Mice eating ork ork laden cheddar, and promptly seizing out. Bubbling red squeaks at the floorboards and boxwood.

  The attic is full of strange, forgotten trinkets. The sagging sawhorse. The neglected rocking horse that has not known a laughing child’s embrace since close to a century ago. The medallion laying on top of a wedding dress in the cherrywood trunk. The cardboard suitcase with nothing but dust in it. The gem in the spider web. The tiara in the dark corner beside a trap that has never been triggered.

  Jellied eyes blown out the front. Tongues in formaldehyde losing their wag. Swagged out in purple. Regalia in the form of gold teeth and a cane with a chrome skull handle. Whores huddled together simply beaten in mass. Children in tricorn hats flying tricorn kites emblazoned with sickle and hammer. Agates in their pockets begging a game.

   In the street, the marbles scatter and careen in all directions. It’s not hockey, but the children are sick of playing on the sidewalk or the porches of the apartment houses where an embittered adult will kick at their humble treasures, or in a huffing fit punctuated with words like “fuckers” or “bastards” their shins which are unguarded seeing that they are still in short pants.

  Calling card jacks left on the dismembered, half-eaten boys. Letters laid out like menus mailed to their mothers. Sommelier sophistication in the cannibal. No bone through the nose just a splinter stuck in the gullet. Sweat beading the brow of a back-bent laborer. The tubers beneath taking in parasitic rot as though it were a ringed beau’s cock. A creeper cleft in two as though lightning had struck him. The skies opening up in a downpour of viscera. The breams in the angler’s bucket gape as their brethren are gutted. God shrills a cackle. This is the truth of the land He envisioned.