#i should be like locked to a chain in the yard long enough thay i can go to my kennel for sleep or whatever

[mewhenifreakit]

feeling normal

[bspoetryandart]

Madame Psychosis

Chapter 1: Bound, Homeward

      “I had the strangest dream,” Cade said; though I should say ‘I’ being both narrator and subject of this escapade.  But ‘I’ is not objective and neither am I, nor was I when I awoke to the gentle rocking of the room as it passed by clouds outside, the light fixture on the ceiling swaying and tinkling in crystal gaudiness above the sheets around me.  Or he.     Cade awoke on the bed before he met the old lady he made the comment to and sat up on the sheets.  He wouldn’t know for a little while longer about the old lady, seeing as she is in another room that sways like this one.  But now you know of her while he does not, so you are no longer objective either.  Please save your judgement of him until you know more of his story.     He pushed up under the sheets and they slid from his torso, his naked skin, nearly naked body save for the leather strap around his arm. His clothes puddled around a scuffed guitar case on the floor beside the bed.     He stretched his sinews toward the ceiling, arching his back, mouth yawning open as his fingers ran through short wavy locks the color of a fine temple floor, that cigar color with the thousand year shine.  He scratched his hair and then his cheeks, scruffed as they were with that same brown that gently lined his arms and dusted his chest and crept in well groomed fashion up toward his navel.     The fan overhead creaked louder as the room swayed wider but he didn’t try to look out the slat window over the bed at the moving clouds. He scanned the walls and their water stains like ivy growing up past the mouse caverns of the baseboards.  This wasn’t the first time he’d woken up naked in a place he didn’t recognize.     He dropped his legs over the edge of the bed, shucking his sheets so his moist oyster flesh felt cool in the breeze from the window. He let the belt on his arm loose and flexed his bicep, clenched his hand, allowed reality to once again flood his veins.     In the clarity of waking he remembered dreams or realities or intertwined snippets of either and both that he would rather have forgot. Situations and people too odd to be real.     Cade stood and stretched again, rosy color coming back to his skin as strength returned to his limbs and youth flowed throbbing through his body.  He took the loose sheet from the bed and wiped the sweat from his body stained as it already was where a little of his sea-saltiness wouldn’t harm it any.     The guitar case though scuffed and rusted at the hinges opened without so much as a squeak and he riffled through his cleaner clothing to pick out what today he would wear.  In his idiosyncratic way he picked out a shirt and socks and drawers all of the same color.  Today would be blue.  Aqua blue. It would match well with the tattoos he didn’t yet have.     He dressed the same as you or I, though you do not dress as he so you don’t dress as me although we both go one leg at a time. But the way he dressed was not like you, not as simplistic as that.  The clothing of his body was like a dance, the tensing and flexing of his muscles in rapid succession such a sensual thing as the cloth rose up his skin to hide things in a way that made many want them to again immediately be revealed.     He stepped into his jeans and tugged on his shirt; pulled on his socks and slipped on his boots.  Put away yesterday’s sheddings in the case and clasped the latch.     And then opened the door to the rest of the house. 

    The hallway swayed as well, the portraits banging like hungry dinner guests upon the walls.  It was a long hall, identical doors lining the sides down it toward the dark moldering bathroom as well as up toward the light.     He set the guitar case on the floor and closed the door, draping darkness through this part of the house.  His eyes adjusted to the gloom though his taste did not adjust to the faux wood paneling or balding floor shag; make no mistake, this house was hideous.  But one borrowing accommodations cannot complain: beauty is in the eye of the bed-holder.     The hallway opened onto the living room, wide as the rooms on both sides of the hall and long up to the kitchen, where the old lady stood percolating coffee.  Windows on both sides of the room showed the landscape trotting away.     The old lady smiled at him, waved him over with a cup in her hand.  He set the guitar case by the front door and walked toward her, the cadence of his heels the singsong one-two beat of a heart on the hard floors.  She sipped and closed her eyes with delight as he took his place beside her.     “You can always tell quality boots by the sound they make.”     He poured his cup, let the steam wet his face more than the balmy heat already had.     “Did you sleep well?”     He nodded.  Shook his head.  Nodded.     “I had the strangest dream,” he said.     “This is no place to talk of dreams.”  Cade looked at her.  What were wizened wrinkles from the distance were just distortions of the light. “Come, let’s go sit on the porch. Dreams need fresh air, and so do we.”     She led him to the door and he picked up his case, stepped outside behind her.  The swing on the porch swayed lightly to and fro and hither and back.  Beyond it the line of double wide homes moved on down the highway each pulled by its team of horses.  Her horses were magnificent and grey like her hair.  She led him to the swing and calmed it by sitting, patting the wooden slats beside her.     He sat and set the case beside the swing, looked out on the land as it went by, all the crumbling granaries and barns dotting the landscape in muddied green fields, left to lie, the detritus of tornadoes that spun along the ground twirling like a spoiled child’s top.     The roadside was littered with badly kept yards and their poor houses surrounded by dirty chain link fences.  Decaying once pastel lawn furniture waited beside rusting mowers and Styrofoam beer cocoons. Barbecues and kettle grills and smokers circled in an oil-stained driveway like war drums.     “What did you dream of?”  She sipped her coffee.  He looked but she made no eye contact, just watched the houses go by.     “It was strange.  I kept waking up over and over again in the same bed to put on the same clothes and leave for the same place where the same people said the same things in the same room as if the sameness of it all was the reason they existed.”     “Some folks call that normal.”  Cade gave her a look.  In his eyes reflected the horses pulling the houses up the road.  “I said some folks.”     “It’s surreal.  Like painting a new canvas yellow everyday and calling it art.  At least spit on the canvas, sweat on it, bleed on it- change that color.  Do something to avoid that monochrome monotony.”     She holds her coffee cup up in a toast.  They clink and the brown liquid swirls around in their cups in opposite directions.  Her eyes blink open, her feet touch the floor and stop the swing.     “Oh silly me.”  She stands.  “I forgot something.”     He watches her enter the house, turns back to the never changing view.  Cars grow cinderblock roots into concrete driveways cracked with age.  Grass invades garbage bins turned on the roadside, drifts of leaves slowly damply becoming soil beside them and their cat-tail guardians.     The door bangs open and back as she comes back out.  A bottle swings beside her, dark and green although it isn’t clear until she holds it up to the light if it is the glass itself or its contents that are emerald.     “I fancy some absinthe with my jo.  How about you?”     He sips, then looks slyly toward her with a half lip smile. Sips a little more to make room.     “My thoughts exactly.”  She raises the cup to her lips when the house hits a pothole, splashing coffee all over.  His jaw drops but then he joins the rumble of her chuckle as she hands him the bottle to wipe her face.  She sits again beside Cade, sets her cup on the swing and takes the bottle from him.     “The best part of waking up,” she states, splashing the anise liquid, the licorice liquor that reminds him at once of both Italian sausage and Thai noodles, into her mug, “is corruption in your cup.”     He holds out his mug and she doses it generously.     “How long til-” Her hand works its old lady magic, shushes him with a sweep.     “We’ll hit Benoit soon enough.  It’s a ways down once we turn off the interstate.  No need to hurry.”  Her eye twinkles.  “Or you got the same thing waiting for you to do it?”     He sips, shakes his head.  “Just some writing.  That’s why I’m there.”     “What kind of writing you do?”  He gives her a look like she might be prying, she volleys back a glance at the passing ruins.     “I deal in nightmares.”     “They follow you if you let them.”     “Not the good kind.  I write saccharine stories for Reader’s Indigestion.  Turns your stomach to read ‘em.”     “Ain’t nothing sweet in Benoit.  Or Bolivar in general.”     He downs the contents of his mug, holds it out for more. “There’s the Burrus House and its columns and comeback and history.  People like comebacks and history.”     “Ain’t nothing sweet in Benoit.”     He shrugs.  “And I like paying the bills.”     Together they watch what’s left of the suburbs go by. Wispy clouds roll past mountainous thunderheads like tumbleweeds over the desert-like bayou-land with its water instead of sand.  Even though it hasn’t rained the roads are wet.     “I’m not staying there, no nothing fancy like that.  I’m down the road from it by the tall overpass bridge.”     “Ain’t no overpass in Benoit either.”     “You’re right there ain’t but there is that bridge that leads me home at night, like a graffiti laden Arc de Triomphe beside that little stream.”     “Brown’s Bayou.  But that ain’t there either anymore.”     Cade smiles.  “You sure you’re a wise woman?”  She looks at him, scandalized.     “I never said I was wise, just a woman.  But tell you what, I never met a wise man neither. There’s just women, and there’s men. Anyone claims to you to be wise is obviously lying.”     They sip and watch people drive past them up the frontage road on an air mattress with an out-board motor.  Mud streaks their hands and faces.  Catfish flap about in milk crates.     “Guess that shit creek could be back.”     She pours them both more.  The air smells green like mold and dead trees.     “Thing about wisdom is it’s just a dream.  If we are just the dreams of ourselves and wisdom is the dream of those dreams how can anyone know it?  Can you find it, hold it, wrap yourself in it?     “Like the butterfly that dreamed it was a man. When it woke up it remembered what it was like to be a man, how it felt and tasted and touched and smelled.  It thought it could still become a man so it built a cocoon and folded up its wings and crawled back inside.”     She smacks his knees to lift his feet from the porch, starts to swing.  And swings some more.     He scratches his nose.  “Then what happened?”     “Well of course it died.”