From the Heavens

From the Heavens

Mark Coleman

  You do all the puzzles in reverse. Trying to put all the collage pieces back into the garage sale magazines. Stacked up on a table that’s otherwise uncluttered. 

  In a dime store, staring at nothing in particular. Looking past the items on the shelves. Either that or looking into them. Wanting to understand the rug on the floor. Wondering if the key to your own heart is in its pile. 

  You know it has to be somewhere but you’re having difficulty finding it. Did the valves fall into the couch like loose change? Was it left like a penny on the railway track by a kid overcome by curiosity? 

  A woman tied there. Hollering out in the silent movie. Forever frozen. The intertitles somehow seeming out of place. Unrelated to the action that preceded them.

  Playing with your food in the diner. Pushing the peas around in the gravy. Your actions resembling those at dinner when you were a child. Never wanting to be there. Dreaming of far off places. Wanting to grow up on another continent. Another planet. 

  Australia’s quite a ways. So’s Mars. Either would be preferable. The family a couple tables over. An eight year old in the grips of something that he can’t understand. His younger brother just wanting to get home and play with an older brother that he looks up to.

  Leave the homework undone. There’s a whole life ahead in which to accrue knowledge. To learn how many stars and stripes are on your nation’s flag. At the moment, the information is disposable. Meaningless in this endless childhood.

  We all carry pictures of ourselves in our wallets whether they look like us or not. The height and weight are incorrect. We are so much shorter. So much lighter. We could float off like balloons. Dirigibles carrying a faint light within their cabins. 

 The passengers not talking to each other. Not looking at each other. Out the windows all they see are the endless walls of the tunnel. Riding through a manmade night. They never see a pasture or a single flower. 

  In the bars, they don’t care that they’re turning yellow. Don’t care that they’re becoming sunken. The grapes of their demise between their toes. 

  Putting the last of their panhandled change into the jukebox. Buying memories in the form of music. Maybe, it’s a song they made love to. Maybe, it’s a song they fell in love to. Something they can shyly sing into their beers. Young again for five minutes or so.

  Down there somewhere, they swim without wrinkles. They beam out from senior photos, and smile in their yearbooks. The future laid out like a red carpet. They step onto it. Apprehensive at first but with each step gaining a little more confidence.

  Reno is bolder than the rest of us. He drinks whiskey out of his water bottle. We drink vodka sometimes with a packet of ice tea thrown in. Turtle and his girl shoot up in the park. Ask me if I mess with it. I don’t so I just chew on the cotton.

  On the wet side, they’re all screaming. I can’t take it and have to go dry. It’s only slightly noisier here than in the chapel. A mattress on a concrete floor that hurts your hips and side. You almost stayed out. It’s a nice day.

  You lay on the mat unable to sleep. Turn over on your back and stare at the ceiling. Think of the girls you’ve been with. The singular attributes of each. The backpack you use as a pillow that you’re determined not to lose or get stolen. 

   Passed out on a mattress in an alley. You were drinking a handle, talking Cool Hand Luke with vets, last you remember. Hanging out with Birdy. Shaking and vomiting. Waiting for 8 o’clock when the liquor store opens its doors.

  Sitting behind the bushes drinking your traveler when detox materializes. Thrown in the back of a van in which you’re tossed around. Intake at Denver Cares where they’ll let you have a seizure and possibly die before giving you medication. April telling you that your tremors are just anxiety and that you should go read a book.

  Raid the ashtrays early in the morning. Throw the refries in a Ziplock. The sweet, longed for drag. Outside the bar smoking without shades. It’s such a nice day. You decide to spend it walking up and down the steps of the Performing Arts Center. At least until the 11 o’clock feed. 

  Someone’s brought Howlin’ Wolf to the line and a few of us sing along. Finally able to breathe. We’re clumsy and we step on the notes. Picture ourselves on stage belting out all the songs that touched our hearts.

  I wonder whether they’ll be giving out clothes today. I hear around Christmas they give out sleeping bags and tents. Don’t know where. It’s just what I heard. 

  On Sunday, they all come out. You didn’t get a three dollar Easter egg. They ran out before they got to you. Handing out lunches and Bibles. You consider using the pages for rolling paper.

  Sitting on the steps at Civic Center. You give your food away to a newly homeless teen who asks where they were giving out meals. You didn’t want it anyway.

  Andrew gives you his shades. They’re so scratched that you can barely see out of them. But they suit the world outside just fine. 

  James is in the hospital with a wired shut jaw. Got jumped. We’ll all die out here eventually. It’s just a question of when and in what order. 

  Dismissed. Broken, we sit with our eyes fixed on young couples feeling out the intricacies of a new love. Trying to make out the sunshine that’s pushed farther inward with the passing of each year. It’s somewhere down there but it’s dimming. We’ve tried to pry it out with our grandfather’s pocket knives. Tried to will it out to guide us down this ever coiling staircase.

  We are unlike others. Those who think they’re entitled to happiness. We’d settle for some kind of contentment. 

  A broken dish. An unknown, useless piece of hardware rusting away in a junkyard. A pawnshop full of wedding rings and heirlooms. Memories that will adorn a richer man’s house. Hung like a painting that can never be restored. Never finished. A vow recited with so much heart in it. Now a lost piece of paper. Perhaps, in the bottom of a drawer. Perhaps, in an attic where the dust gathers on the trunks. 

 The spinster goes to pull out an unworn wedding dress from the time her life almost changed course. Finds that it’s been replaced with a shoe shine box and a bit of polish. Doesn’t know what to do with either of them. Goes to throw it all out the window, decides against it, and begins to smear the polish on a canvas. Hastily sketches a few clouds. Birds falling from the heavens. The unrealized human faces. 

  The fog rolls in. Brushes away a few tears. Retreats. Pulled away by an unseen hand. Some take the turn too quickly. End up down there by a sea that’s taken so many. Some smile up at a life well lived. Most don’t. The world knocked them about. Left them stained with stolen blackberries they never even had the chance to taste. Lips curled this way and that in the eternal struggle with themselves. 

  Always trying to find the key. Knowing for sure that someone has a skeleton. Someone has to. But that someone only seems to come in dreams. The palatial welling of pride when she takes your hand and leads you down a populated, paraded street. The people around you finally smiling. Waking a shadow in the distance. Here the swallow can’t fall. There’s no sound of thunder. No flash of lightning. The rain comes in a soft patter. The puddles don’t intimidate. You look at her and wonder if those eyes can hold back morning. It can’t last. If their was any faith left in you; you’d pray that it would. That her fingers would never stop running through your hair. That your fingers could forever be filled with her and no longer with the pebbles of yourself. A self that continually disappoints. 

The Tree

The Tree

Mark Coleman

  The tree leaks into the river as the soldier bleeds out on the battlefield. He can’t hold in his intestines. He can’t read or write. He payed the only person that he thought of as his friend to pen love letters to his girl back home. This friend deserted him. No one is at his side. He remembers being at his mother’s death bed. Holding her hand.

  The general’s harsh assessment of the casualties reduced to nothing but meaningless numbers. He is, of course, among these. Buried in indifference. A population of vampires thirsty for blood drank him away to 137. The hatched lines of fives running towards an uncertain release date.

  The prisoner marks off these repetitive days with the shank he will later leave in an innocent man’s heart. A heart in which a young wife resides.

  Her sky blue eyes pondering something after their bouts of lovemaking. Something far away and detached from him. But still there with him at the same time. Tethered out of an unspoken need. 
  He certainly needed her. Constantly sought her approval in everything he did. He feared rejection when he got down on his knees to propose. Their wedding was out of an unpublished fairytale. Uncollected in a supposedly comprehensive collection. 
  She always seemed to be questioning him. As to what, he could never quite tell. Just one of the many things she would do that twisted him into strange, foreign knots. Like the way that she would stand over him in his study as though posing for an invisible photographer. 

  The tree grows on. Trying to play the harp of the heavens. Beyond the fence built from its own fallen a game is being played. The children are cherubs who lost their wings. Lost their balance on the clouds and fell down to earth. Onto a sandlot of disappointment and future regret.

  At first, they think of God. Their cruel master. Constantly amusing himself by creating his marionettes. Pulling the strings tied to their arms and legs. Then they just throw around the balls. Laughing at their first attempts at pitching. Their uncertain, timid bunts.

  The balls lose their stitching. It gradually unravels. Like unlacing a boot. Grow into one another. Become a centipede of massive proportions. A creature that feeds off the bark of babes. Especially, those still relatively new to the world.

  Men using their severed legs as crutches trod upon the broken branches. They try to judge the distance through empty sockets. They didn’t lose their eyes they were just forced farther up and into their minds. What they see there bleeds. Screams and writhes. Convulsing the past comes crawling into the infancy of petite mal. Soon it will learn to walk. The closer it comes, the steadier the gait.

  And so the orgy begins. The fish take in with their blank, soulless eyes what takes place upon their riverbed. It’s hard to sleep with twenty thoughts spouting the tributaries of Styx. But everything must multiply.

  Fucking in its crudest, most primal form. A division takes place. The unborn, barely conceived child becomes the parent. Watching the mechanical coital movements of his subjects the emperor becomes hard. His egotistical cock throbs within the hole they’ve drilled in your head.

  This is the way of a godless liquid world. Flowing on whether we want it to or not. It will crush us or pin us down and keep us in its collection. Bloat floats past the portholes we stare out of. Men with death and hate in their eyes bear down upon you. Waiting patiently in their distortion through the peephole.

  You lock and bolt the door but the ants still get in. Dying in pools of semen. There is a continual ejaculation here. The nectar too sweet to resist. Everything ripples.

  She doesn’t recognize you. You don’t recognize her. You don’t recognize you. The gap between all involved seems to expand infinitely. You were once inseparable. Love was a word passed back and forth freely but with conviction. 

  You invested a world of adulation in her. Worshipped at her feet. Necking in your car at the lookout. It could have been a funny and it wouldn’t have mattered to either of you. Spooning in the movie theater. Feeding one another popcorn. Everything saccharine. Everything so pure. 

  The children on the sandlot become vicious. They take turns braining each other with the bat. The wood splinters as do the flocculent bones. Kneecaps and elbows are smashed. Obliterated. 

  The balls have all gone off in search of their centipede seams so the wingless blemish their conscience by playing their game with the weakest angel’s head. All innocence is lost under the surface of the sky. 

  Its hair is flaxen. Its cheeks are rosy. The eyes carrying that ever present tenderness between its long lashes. The lips untainted. Slightly parted as was usually the case. Always seeming inquisitive. 

  It is you. Constantly heading farther away from me. Spinning moonshot. The stars such a great distance. We tumble upwards. Wishing to reside on their soft, wished upon points. 

  In fall, the leaves suffocate us. In winter, the freeze over takes us. In spring, ardor begins to set in. In summer, we sit here and dream. 

  We patiently waited and believed we were rewarded. Wanted to believe. Even if it was just for a little while. 

  So, we planned for a future that did not exist. It was a blameless sort of ignorance that led us astray. For all we knew, we’d be together forever in some forgotten bower or cave. A place known only to us. But so it goes. The tree grows on and on with or without us.

Portrait of a Lady

  Portrait of a Lady

Mark Coleman

  You stare at the portrait of the lady in profile that could have been painted by Egon Schiele. Or so it seems to you. Others might see the ability of a realist to capture the very essence of his subject. The light in the eyes that those others would claim could light up a room. To you that light is composed of malice. Not mischievousness. Malice.

  The eyes that turn toward you. That follow you with the ghosts of a million Eva Brauns. The wry smile on blood red lips. The tip of the tongue caught in the vise of pearly white teeth.

  Once you thought she was beautiful as she stood before you in her half slip. Nipples pert within her cotton white bra. Inviting you to bed her. You ached all over with longing. Positively shook with it.

  She knew as most women do the desire that was consuming you. Knew damn well she was pretty as all Hell. Nebulous in her sexuality. Angelic in face. Flaxen of hair. Her beauty at the time had seemed incomparable. Women of any other hue and measurement simply did not measure up. Placed against her they were nothing but girls swimming in women’s clothing.

  Girls who would steal their mother’s lipstick. Digging through their purses for rouge to highlight their cheekbones. Making a mess of their faces in the powder rooms without realizing that they were doing so. Thinking they were dolling themselves up when, in actuality, all they were doing was robbing themselves of any natural qualities they already possessed. 

  Moths they were, fancying themselves butterflies. Caterpillars yet to cocoon. Looking like coal miners’ daughters on Ash Wednesday. Never solemnly sensual. Always putting on airs of joviality. Gleeful as though they were dressed up for their coming out parties. Presenting themselves to society for the first time only to be nailed by sailors on leave and then left in the lurch. 

  Left to foot the bill for the hotel room, they’d slink along the corridors and retreat down the fire escape in nothing but their chemises. The sheer sort you can make out black panties and brassiere through. 

  The money that was left on the dresser confused them. They tucked it away down their fronts for a rainy day in another bar with an inn attached. An inn that knew it’s purpose. An inn with an innkeeper in the form of a madam. 

  Other girls were there too, of course, who fibbed their age and flashed a fake ID. Hoping to make a quick buck, they sank into the luxury afforded by their trade and never returned home. Some, as is always the case, were beaten. If thought aged, they were asked to do horrible things in front of cameras for the dough they so desperately sought. Thinking of their baker fathers in relation to the word would not even give rise to a smile. 

  They sought their father’s face in every man they met. Tried to hold their father’s hands again. Feel the rough callousness of skin brought on by endless toil. The hands they gripped instead only lead their own down the front of jeans where the zipper lay open. An expectant throbbing there.

  They’d look through the men lying on their stomachs and descry far off places as though through a spyglass. Oceanside resorts. They could feel the pebbles between their toes. Hear the seagulls calling out to them. Hear also the crashing of the waves upon the beach. 

  The semen they gagged down, they imagined tropical drink. However vivid these trances might be, they never truly entered cloud land. Their minds were still there with their defiled bodies.

  The sheets would be washed once a week. During this period, they would serve clients on nothing but filthy mattresses. Mattresses stained with blood where too harsh of a birching had been administered. Or, perhaps, a stabbing had taken place. 

  They all knew that their colleagues were sometimes murdered. A popular story went around concerning an 11 year old girl, who upon demanding an extra half dollar after being so severely beaten she could not see out of one eye, was promptly throttled. The man in question was of high authority and influence. His only punishment was having to leave through the back entrance when he was accustomed to the front.

  Another story concerned a girl of ripe age who had refused a homemade Spanish boot in what was dubbed the dungeon room. A room with rows of whips of every kind ranging from bullwhips to snake whips to cat-o-nines. Chains dangling from the ceiling. An X shaped rack in the corner with tan leather strappings for ankles and wrists.

  This girl upon refusing said punishment was dragged naked and wailing across a bed of nails that tore open the flesh upon her back. She was then strapped to the rack where the gentleman proceed to flay her. During this flaying, she was completely conscious. It was a slow and arduous task which took a number of hours before reaching completion.

  No one ever knew what became of the man or if they did, they did not let on. This particular instance of animalistic cruelty was well known but not spoken of. The crime being of such a hideous nature, only the bravest of girls ever entered the room again. A room that would been better sealed up as in a Poe story. But business must go on.

  And so it went on. Year after year in that nameless place where I saw her portrait. The portrait of a lady in the parlor. The lady I recognized instantly as my very own rubric for beauty. The lady who seemed to invite good will. Giving a welcoming sense. Hinting at festivities the like of which to be fair were usually of the usual sort. But if something else were required or desired that requirement or desire would be met. 

  The eyes follow me as I go on my solitary walks down back alleys. If I sit in a garden of roses, they are there watching. They are there with me in my dreams and haunt my thoughts. I wish to escape their cruel gaze but as long as others still see a skilled painter’s hand in those strokes, they will always be with me.

  

Into Perpetuity

Into Perpetuity

Mark Coleman

  

  The memories bloat. Expanding until you’re tearing your hair out hoping the roots have grown into your brain so you can tear that out too. The mind torments you with what you wished had died in the past. The ugly moments and the ugly people who inhabited them. Not that they were ugly in appearance but rather disposition.

  You never treated yourself with anything other than hate but went out of your way to treat everyone else with kindness. These people on the other hand had slovenly minds. They still do but luckily most are now out of sight. Unless, of course, you make the mistake of picking up a newspaper. Better to stick to those glossy, shallow magazines with recently diseased celebrities on the cover.

  Walking backwards. The erstwhile path is serpentine. It shakes it’s rattles but still you march onward. Sure, there are loves to be found in that direction but also heartbreak. Days you couldn’t get out of bed. Hours that never passed without a suicidal thought. 

  Broken by a world that you let inside your head. A gulag that there is no escaping from. A borstal that holds you indefinitely. There is no diving out of this gondola of poisonous carrion. Before you is the long nosed mask of the plague. 

  They took all the bridges away. So, you haven’t the chance of following your peers off the Golden Gate. They shackle you to all the wretchedness they can muster. They feed your dogs mustard and laugh as they do so. The cats they nail to the balusters. Caterwauling without cease. Their eyes roll back in their heads where they too are forced to relive the nightmares of their lives.

  The stupid visit this wasteland and come back speaking of glory days. Touchdowns. Home runs. Notches on the bedpost. It’s all they remember. Their ignorance of the ways of the world is boundless. They flex their muscles and spend their every waking hour trying to suck their own cocks.

  The women go there to cry. To have their hymens broken all over again by lost loves. The lake of blood on a far off ex’s sheets. They settle into marriage without love or even compassion. The words become foreign. All they’re left with are champagne brunches with what they call their friends. People they actually despise. Those who remain single will wind up in back alleys with coat hangers up their cunts.

  One of two things happens. Both of which rob you of thought. Either you settle into routine. Jobs you hate. Houses you’d tear down with your bear hands if the termites weren’t saving you the trouble. Or you give way to capriciousness. Have as much meaningless sex as possible. Spend your money on all the shit that you’ve ever seen on a late night infomercial. 

  Sign up for cougar hook up sites when you’re drunk in a hotel on your birthday. Go and sleep with married women and hope you don’t end up a crime of passion. Throw bricks through your neighbors’ windows with messages attached to “GET OUT!” Paint swastikas on all the black churches. Tie the retarded to chairs and proceed to scalp them.

  And still you don’t believe that we are in the middle of a war. Droughts rob whole nations of their population. Children. Women. Men who only strive to provide and make a better life for their brood. The home front is not a field of honor. It is a field of agony and death.

  The cops militarize and swarm down like angry bees. Stinging no longer with blackjacks. Stunning no longer with tasers. But shooting their fellow man in the back. They’ll never die off as quickly as the bees, though. They’ll be acquitted for heinous crimes against humanity. Pardoned. Maybe, even given presidential medals of honor.

  The past slowly seeps into the future. Lynching parties become the norm again. We gather at the scaffold instead of the stadium. Though, of course, there’s popcorn and peanuts still to be had. Refreshment from the squirting neck at the guillotine. The head stuck on a stake as a warning to others. Infraction will not be tolerated. Compliance is a matter of national security.

  Protest all you please. It will change nothing. The fish will boil in the ocean. The Chinese will continuously jump out of windows from the stress of making your shitty electronic devices. The children who make the clothing on your back will, in their exhaustion, accidentally run their hands through sewing machines, and end up as frightening rag dolls. That is after they’re properly stuffed and run through the sewing machine a few more times. 

  Men trying to make ends meet at overly long factory jobs will end up with stumps where their hands used to be. A fourteen hour shift and two hours worth of sleep, and the circular saw does the rest. Our faces will melt and puddle around our shoes. 

  We will scream for mercy where there is none to be found. Set ourselves on fire out of compassion when it no longer exists. Mandated to turn stool pigeon, we will do so without a mouse’s squeak of dissension. Rat on anyone and everyone whether guilty or not. Bring assault rifles to peaceful protests. 

   Push pipelines through ancient indian burial grounds, and be forever haunted by our own ancestors’ ghosts. Apparitions as tall and weightless as skyscrapers will holler out our sins. Transgressions that we will never come back from. Blow off the innocents’ arms with concussion grenades. Tear the flesh off fingers held in v's with the hoarfrost in our hoses. 

  Poison city after cities worth of water until we’re drinking pure radiation and our own contaminated souls. Our hair will fall out. Our nails will peel off. Our four legged friends will vomit blood and so shall we. Until the whole world is swimming in its own sewage and scum. There will be no more drowning just dissolution. An acid bath of cruelty will strip us to the bone.

  You stare at reproductions of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, and they seem pleasant by comparison. A utopia compared to what we face. The indigenous fall off the globe. Security guards in the schools slam adolescents face first into the filthy, stinking floor. Taken off bleeding and broken to the ICU. Retinas shoot out by harmless rubber bullets.

  This is our very own horror show. The barker with his two headed calf has nothing on this. The mermaid beneath the plate of glass is such an obvious, idiotic scam. The snake charmer charming in every bazaar has lost his charm. The belly dancer is pregnant with twins that kick out their objections in the middle of her routine.
  No one else can claim credit for this mess. We asked and we received in spades. Welcome. The past is present and future. At least, until we finally manage kill off every living creature on the planet.