The 2nd Day: Part 1

The first day never woke up, the morning decided to sleep in.  The sunrise appeared before me as a timeless turn style, baring no disguise nor shadow on a sundial. 
When Razmataz and I first noticed the day we padded ourselves within the rusty backyard playpen, the creep shack.  A one hundred year old monument to an undetermined dogma that barely held itself upright in our backyard.  We were staples in a drag club can can line up of a block. Our rainbow shacks gave the backside of the poverty line the eloquence and detail it deserved in teal and pink. A strange magical tattoo that kept the rafters of our creep shack intact and caught in time, like a spider web of scars cradling a century of hurricanes, parties, torture, and arson. The caterpillar coated palms on either side of its broken doors shaded the mosquitoes and wolf spiders, giving refuge to the lonely and the poisonous. It was in the creep shack we were cold brewed in a vat of our own room temperature stench dunked in a broken jackoozie.  To my right was a rusted rocking horse and to my left a bar that held more roaches than liquor. Still stewing at a heat index of 113 we mired ourselves in a roux of high fashion petrochemicals, substituting our reputation for dreams.  Shrinking ourselves to bath toy size each afternoon we made an olympic venue out of our domestic garden tub.   We were pruning our memories when Chase found us, the dream catcher.  At 5'4" he towered over our finger length appendages.
He dreamed us up two chain ropes with kevlar ends to light on fire, he kept dreaming till we had new genders and new lovers with which to dance out the dawn.  It was the queerest event in town with a catalogue of Archee Mcfee style rubber duckies. Eventually his dreams began to rub off on us like the stank of sun screen. We dreamed an audience for our performance featuring various feats of coordinated aquatic fire dancing in our white trash bird bath.
Razmataz loved the flame, he bent gasoline on water like a dance party with the heat.  It was our inconspicuous privilege to have tea parties with death in this way.  Meanwhile our conspicuous luxury began to buckle under the warping ceiling.  Morning's silence stole our whispers.  I remember the moment well, comfortably seated in excess against the haze of afternoon sun like a hand over my throat.  We felt preparedly detached when we tuned in the old radio my Nana gave me.  A vintage wooden box atop four spindly legs with a record cabinet and six dials.  The character alone gave it an anthropomorphic quality I'd previously only considered possible in psychedelic musical numbers performed by kitchen wears in Beauty and the Beast.
The radio waves could penetrate the bermuda triangle that had formed angles along the bathtub tracing it to the floor blades lined with fire ants and up the corners of the creep shack.  The sky had been blushing pink with embarrasment.  How did it stay dark for so long? Why couldn't it remember it's own constellations?
The radio spoke to us from it's plywood underbelly with fuzzy inhalations,
"The US has left the UN peace treaty"
"8 children died at the border today during the opening party for the new embassy"
"Korea has reunited"
"This is war"
"Then they broke down our door and the SWAT team took our father."
We saw two frogs fucking something like humans in the corner of the shack as we lifted our heads to gaze upon our yard.   It was a peaceful, quiet, burning hellfire.
Fire began dripping from the sun, we held out our hands recklessly.  Grasping for the pellets of gold as they melted our hands to the peeling jackoozie paint, its watery insides evaporating into the dew as we filled the morning with its own heat.  The kind of heat that plugs your ears and lungs; a heat born without shade.
Our neighborhood's neon houses cleared a pathway through the underground swamp fire, and the rusted pony began to have a seizure.  We watched as the flames swallowed possibility, tied to the tub by our shrinking ability to recognize escape. I told Raz, "Well, an infernal oasis is still an oasis."
We were kept alive by the technicolor coat of gasoline wrapping the shack in an electric blanket.  The dawn moved through us in waves of a transient adrenaline rush as it broke over the clouds. Those seeds of flame became us, they outlined each pistol whip and embrace that surrounded us as the residents seized each other in the darkness that began to collect in the heat of mid day.  It was all a routine we forgot each day in our annual vortex to madness. The palms shed roaches, metal peeled off it's own skin, and the trees kept trying to pull their feet loose as if the side walks were mildewed socks soiling overgrown kleats.
 It was raining fire, but the news kept going,
"It appears the world is consumed in what we can only describe as a volcanic act of endearment. Is this judgement day or have we all been saved by some unprecedented madness? No deaths have been reported, it is uncertain if they have occurred.  No trees have fallen, but it is uncertain if there are forests. We do not appear to be breathing oxygen. Tonight our feature act includes an American adaptation of Japanese Buddhist monks who will throat sing waterfalls. Your ears will be drowned in cooling thoughts. Don't miss at 9 sharp central time a full cast of recklessly drunk black men, they will be performing for a white female audience who will not admit that the stage exists, that this is a radio broadcast, or even that the world is on fire!  .......Edit: One death reported of a postal worker alone in her van, 45, no pre-existing health conditions..........  Up next on 'You're Fired: Nooses and News for the Now,' scientists interview and consult with police on how to control this information as the world rapidly searches for plausible causes of this week's latest natural disasters and inexplicable witchcraft.  This is Brownie Didactica coming to you live, raw, naked, NOW! Stay tuned, automated telecommunications will replace me with elevator music shortly."
The news scrambled our brains like cough syrup on an adolescent summer sun, and the neighborhood had the world regenerating inside itself with the electricity of a new mystery. We laughed, and then sighed for only the dead know life so playfully.
I could shed my opinions like a bad hair cut on the lonely bar counter, a thin comforter of blind conviction. I could bend gasoline with the rain, shrink myself until all simple feats became an inane circus trick, but I didn't know how to read the news. Razmatazz and I could only listen to it passively with wide eyes, passing coffee around our stank vat against a back drop of unsettling elevator music and abrasive talk show hosts.  I used to believe my wonder bread was baked with cheap trickery, that I've only ever been a flammable sparkle pony riding on party favors.  On that first day my hot pink wears were distilled in some wrongful artificial flavor that clashed with the color in my face. That flavor was my masochistic dogma, my religious conviction that I was not unlike the broadcasts that wrapped me in wet blankets as night approached, riding my back like the dialogue given to housewives in old cinema.  The waves of my self inflicted pin pricks were like a lugubrious jester inflicting stab wounds to distract me from the burning world I bathed in.   Politicians and celebrities were chanting on the radio so we couldn't see them looking in their mirrors at the thousands of side shows they believed would fixate attention;  the main event no one bought a ticket for.
As the day carried onward and we turned the remaining life in our sweat to a drug for delirium the media's power collapsed and broke like a tired economy under the weight of it's own fear mongering.  It was not from lack of resources as much as a porous respect and depression that left the electronic graveyards with out ears to hear a television die.  I stopped fearing my volume.
Then the stage pulled me back in to the creep shack, it picked me up and twisted my volume until my dynamics flooded the sorry synthesizer wallpaper of NPR, and I kept dancing.  I wanted to dance for Razmataz but I could barely see them, my performance and my ritual had become indistinguishable. I'd left my advertisements for self mutilation and wax coats in a dumpster around the corner to melt and mold in the suns piss.  The police here wouldn't even notice.  Raz and I hadn't been designed for a pub crawl resume or a scripted coffee chat in a rom com.  There's no reception ceremony or girl scout badge for the woke waiting on the networks implanted in our thoughts.  Santa stopped and pondered, he didn't care who was naughty or nice, he wanted the naughtier and the nicer.  We alone could appraise and inhale the dances of our expression and our disguise, our anger and complacency, as our feeling of everyone resonated our bones like a dead drummer. I danced the sunrises that grew up around Raz like a cure for kudzoo, because I couldn't dance around myself.  My body was rising with the saprophytes of fallen forests.  It was a dance with the only dawn that ever followed me, that never gave up on me.  I wanted to give Raz my eyes but I didn't know how, I wanted to dance beyond my flame but I was burning to death in a beige jackoozie.
Razmatazz smiled languidly at the performance as if it were easier than letting his face fall around him.  As he lazily coordinated plastic acrobatics in our all american baby pool the fear snuck in the backdoor of his smile.  The terror that I'll keep it saying it,
"Now, wait no NOW... how about now, so now really I'm so super serious, now I'm changing.  I'm a whole new woman."
He finally asked me,
"Do you need to be another woman?"
I found my soap box of expired neurotrogena products and stood on it in heels broken at the sole, finally peeling my skin off the melting paint of the bath tub.
"I want to hear the tree that falls in the woods, I want the news to dance with me.  I've been graciously featured in world events, even if only in its back alley pop up.  Now it's my turn, I'm calling the show up to my own stage with you.  Don't laugh! I'm experiencing my power with the radio rhythms."
Raz chuckled dismissively and asked if I wanted to do energy work with Jane Fonda work out videos while I was at it.  Failing to accept failure, opportunity, or even a joke I enthusiastically spent the evening publicizing my victim hood.  Events recorded, produced, and published on a device smaller then my hand had settings so I could emphasize the neon flame rain that drenched me.  What's more the device allowed me to record my skin as black or white on a chosen preset. I'd record anything, anyone, anytime, anywhere; as long as I was in the frame.  Eventually no one wanted to be in the picture since I couldn't fit them in next to my face. It got more complicated, my volume had grown so loud you couldn't discern my words over the distortion.  My radio even got so bad that I heard static between my rhetoric. I never wanted to be a TV, I'm much more modest than that.  I just wanted to become the half baked polaroids stoners had left in the sun of Audobon park, just slightly covered in duckshit, sun kissed and buried beneath the shavings of high priced landscaping. That's what I wanted, but I knew it wouldn't be enough for the audience in my head.  I owed them a show, I'd created them after all with the soul purpose of judging me when I failed to do it myself.  What kind of sick cruel scientist would I be if I deprived them of the judgment I'd bred them for.
I needed a grand finale. I put on a jumpsuit, I took the flaming medieval mace Jackie Chan left in my old apartment, and I violently pinned open the doors of every house in the neighborhood demanding they realize their radiant energy and inner peace. An old conman in a haz mat suit saw me from the street as I twirled a fire ball adorned in fangs and nails.  He followed me, clocked me once over the head with my own madness, and buried me alive in the last of the ice chest Raz and I had set out next to the bath tub which had now all but melted entirely.
The haz mat con man wasn't truly a liar. In his isolated ignorance he thought himself a heroin as he went about town putting out fires with gasoline, occasionally encouraging them like toddlers learning to walk using little grinning watering cans.  They were yellow and plastic with daisies on them. Training wheels for an armageddon outfitted in a radioactive summer.  He thought following me was an act of romance, but all anyone could hear of his epic tale was a sad and creepy yearning.
 "Today! Live!  Crying unheard stories, intrinsic victories, turning the tables of time and space till they're a symphony recorded on my station."  I put down my megaphone, pulled the plug out of the bath tub and watched as stagnant water abandoned itself spilling out on to the concrete.  It went on to the street, down the block, washing the flames and madness up around my ankles.  It was a flood that would have extinguished Icarus.  Chase had left me a dream before I'd realized he was a dream, I ran into the flood looking for Raz but I couldn't find him with my eyes closed. It seemed the porthole I'd danced into existence had closed it's hands around darkness.  It wouldn't even tell me which side I was on, which battle was mine, or which moment or revelation hadn't been in cahoots with another.  Rinsing, washing, repeating linearity until it was only a scribble and there was no road left before me.  No neon night, just a flickering sign, 'The Dungeon.'

I just need five more minutes to look at you

"Je t'aime"
I can't find those five minutes.
I know I just had them, they were all over my walls somewhere.
I can hear their details unfold years of fabric.
We use it for costuming on the holidays,
like the birthday I kissed your comic book mask.
I get these sensational indentations
opening the doorway to a set and setting
the sunset sister of aurora bourealis
where I drink pastels and needle my compass
as it points and laughs at my exposed atrium.
Low and behold I walk on broken glass
as it hollows a sculpture of my tendons
and mitriculates in my marrow.
I mourn this nightmare through sunglasses after our sun sets
so no one can see I'm blinded
by and by golden suspensions of evening
that relieve the horizon of winning and losing
as it opens wide and swallows the fear
shading my unhinged devotion.
Exile boils us down to distilled sand as we leak up an hour glass,
the metronome encasing this circus
that follows our outsides inside
along the small of her waste
to the foyer furnished in edwardian ground scores
where we sit neatly balanced between clowns and beasts,
giving us just the perfect view of the daisy field tattooed on your arms
gift wrapping my peaces in the isolation I fell upon,
a porthole to those five minutes
when I said "Je t'aime"
I say it again, but this time I laugh and pretend my words are but spiders in a vaccum,
wayward amputees, dandy lion seeds.
I found those five minutes where I used to keep my insides
in a heap on center stage.
Now we may continue with our main event, the side show.
I am that Persephone that kidnapped Hades from his own hell,
he's draped on his checkered kitchen table that stands planted in the daisies,
a podium from which we breath heavy invitations to dream
five minutes in our infinite hour,
before it buckles below a tired sky stretched across one sound,
Je T'aime.