HOSTAGE

Writing from 2005, about 2003

Would you believe it if We told you We were vampires once? Our hearts burned and beat faster once. Organs made a little more of crystal every time We fed ourselves. Would you believe it if I told you there was a time when the sun rose just to spite us? But soon enough We learned to exhale the same thick white matter, laugh, cocoon ourselves in the darkening brilliance of our minds. Vernal equinox, supervening on the cicerone of bathtub gin. We devised such brilliant plans to guard ourselves from the light.
Night was made of color and light once, the blackness only the backdrop. Armies of our shadows and the Blade Runner pace of neon lights and seas of lost, electric faces.
Our uncanny city became our new playground. Ascending dressed in dark, pariahs, if looks could kill you'd all be dead, and the most skillfully crafted masks you've ever seen. Capsized into idolatry, they became the lies that We believed.

The doors of perception to our world scattered in various hidden places. They are the lies that we believed. The city streets cracked as We trod, love lost to us in eternity but the heavens still sparkled with blue light and orange stars for as long as We remembered to look up. Being pressed farther toward the depths, to us heaven only looked larger.

Fantastical relics of what were once human bodies. What had We become? Metropolic arteries. Asylum stilettos of obliquity. We drew our nourishment from a different source and it showed in the glaze, the emptiness in the brightest of chemical fires in our eyes.

The shuddering facets of life shone like slices of a diamond for us. Fearful, brilliant, wracked, wrecked, wicked, enchanted, hysterical pieces of mortals.

We were never cold, We dreamt in colors no one else could see when We learned how to sleep. Dreamt in colors when We ran like the persecuted from the Arms of Morpheus.

With souls that never thought twice to look askance for something more (oh, we had everything), We continued rising onward and upward into deeper spheres, out of the planet’s clockwork towards the call of voices that stunk like death and vanilla and we followed like Jesus until long after the fruits of the Earth were of no use to us.

We forgot how to scream when We needed to the most.

The spell so entrancing, mistral alembic, We forgot how to breathe until Earthly things became of no use to us.

Glitter in eyes and cracks in hips that skewed our walk just the way We liked it, turning the pavement to sludge with our bodily frames that grew so unfathomably small that our desire to disappear lost its place to hide.

The spell, the night, the fire, the gods, the thirst, the heights, the clear lifeblood disguises We crafted so lovingly with every last drop of magenta consecration. All ravishingly masked, such beautiful lies and most  violent of secrets We died a thousand deaths to believe.

And dreamt in colors, only when we learned how to sleep.

All dreamt in colors we died a thousand deaths to believe.