Love Clots

Love Clots

Mark Coleman

  The metaphysical terror that comes with falling in love. Waking up with hunger pangs. A parch for her very being. The horrors come with their cold sweats and tremors. Your mind goes berserk with adversaries. There’s a conspiracy against your bliss and blithe. You see it in every eye that caresses her.

  The co-worker that has the audacity to share a joke that you’re not in on with her. Her pearly whites and his porcelain caps forming a forbidden union. The shop clerk who takes a little too long over her. Helping her select the perfect dress. (Never mind, he’s probably a fag.) An affectionate water cooler touch on the shoulder over some perfectly benign banter. The shoulder that you had just kissed, last night. Whispering sweet nothings.

  You just keep hitting the call button so you can bask in the radiance of the nurse who looks like the greatest red carpet starlet. Her heart and shine is what you really want to buy a share in. This is a world where everyone is so busy fucking each other that no one stops long enough to make love.

   Holding hands in Palisades Park. Eating gobs from the same blob of cotton candy. That sharing of pink confectionary floss almost a kiss in itself. Broken down at the top of the Ferris wheel. The passenger car swaying as you rock yourselves merrily. No fear in it. Just a glitch in a lover’s afternoon.

  Maybe, a bit of necking. Or just a tiny, teasing peck. And sometimes it’s the Gravitron. The floor drops out and you’re stuck to opposite walls. There are times the Gravitron never stops. Some children enjoy this who have never known the slightest tenderness or affection.

  The arching amateur paint strokes on your hospital gown. The raised hatch on the hideous yellow socks. The “Fall Risk” police line on your wrist. You step on the floor and an alarm goes off. Its pig squeal echoing through your head.

  They strap you down because you wouldn’t stay in bed. You don’t bother to writhe. The television that you watch and watch without the least comprehension of what’s happening on it. The morphine that brings a moment of euphoria. You stare at the ceiling. They give you a couple more shots during the night, and the world almost seems like a place worth being in.

  Then, they take you out of the audience and turn you into the human pincushion. The pinheads laugh and dance. Their chonmages making them look even stupider. The barkers there are all full of jolly and good spirit with their promises of monstrosities. But just as in Browning’s film, the midget is humiliated and heartbroken.

  The almshouse is quickly approaching. It’s façade higher than any cathedral in the world. Icarus will always fall. I will always fall. Sometimes it’s in love. More often it’s into month long drinking binges. Trekking through a blizzard, half frostbitten, for the handle I so desperately need.

  The hurricane comes, and the fishing boats descend to the depths of sea and time. Where the fish have corkscrewing flashlights on their heads, and some maniacal king, who cares nothing for you, rules. His scepter is so bejeweled that it is the envy of all the angels. (The fallen one cries his lot into the flames of damnation.)
  His throne is so golden that God wouldn’t sit His fat ass on it. The women bow down to his maleficence and power. They wrought their own chains and they are proud of them. The clot in your hand breaks into smaller clots but it still hurts. The IV’s are out, and you can smoke. But something still seems wrong.