White Room Dreaming – 2008
I
There is absolutely nothing happening in a long line of nothing happening. Void of thought wandering she sits blank, waiting…
One frozen eyebrow slightly lifted, the space where her brain is stands empty.
“I like the sound the quiet makes.” The thought roars suddenly: an express train, leaving only invisible gas on her grey matter, soon dissipating. Again virgin parchment and room in which to drown.
“I like the sound it makes when it’s loud”. This time sonic booming, a tinnitus hiss imprints the following: “I like the sound it makes when it’s quiet too.”
After only hiss remains and she listens to its wave motions, as she begins to fade in and out and in and out and out and out and…she is dissolved. The drips begin.
At last something is happening.
II
Rippling past I slip, casually glancing off crystal exteriors. Blinded, foaming expletives and falling…swallowed by my own reflection, I am absorbed.
Frozen carcass, abattoir-hung, I drip. Drip the sweat of the comatosed, the almost-dead.
I await tears. They don’t come.
III
Back to the wall, incessantly screaming, gargoyle-like expression in the whiteness. Drips resonate loudly around concrete and iron, her voice barely heard.
No one is listening.
The poetry of breath’s cold clouds have replaced the void in her brain. She contemplates heated forms produced by a mouth wide, oval, nostrils flaring.
Her head tilts upwards, catches glinting surfaces and receives the communion of falling drops. No salvation is offered, however. It is not time.
A wispy thought appears momentarily in her exhalation: “When.”
IV
It strikes me as odd- a singular word with so much weight. Other whens (attached to tears) flicker and sink black and white before my dry eyes.
“Never ever” wrestles its slimy way towards my frozen exterior. My face contorts, arms pinned, shaking. Lips cramp in an inaudible attempt to negate.