Abbatoire

Horrible things that drift in and out of the brain...
We open on a cat in a golden room, diamonds glitter in its mouth; there are fangs in every mouth, a gross set of fangs in every mouth. I speak to it, in a language only we understand, and I tell it about insurmountable sadness, about the great peak that lies above us, hovering over us, a floating mountain of black charred bloody knuckles; I speak to it about the rain soaked streets in cities that I will never see, and I wonder if, from some high view, I will ever see it... wrought iron and cobbles slick with the sweat of some unseen god, and the cat and I wonder aloud if we will ever know what lies underneath those streets;
-the cat sings out a song and the notes stretch on to infinity, and I cling to each one. read each one like a book. I look into each note for a sign from the abyss or the heavens to dictate the next motion, the next electrical impulse that moves my hand from one place to the next, waving or clawing at the white sand of some never ending beach. The world in each and every note, I try to make sense of it, but there is no sense in it and logic spills out of my mouth in broken silver teeth. I want, somehow, to codify all of it, to bring all of it together into one place. Darger and Wilson and Jordan, my Triumvirate who see past the delicate layers of reality and see the pink threads binding it all together, like the Captain's brother from another universe, another universe altogether and I breathe on it, like an iron lung, Thomas sings the same song as the cats and I want to tie it all together, to bring it all together in a small pocket of my own.
The blackness that begins in it, by She, by Alice, by the Queen of This World, who will go by Maria; Maria Callow, eyes of shocking green, the white skin of a white sun and she sleeps and she dreams; While I sit in whitewashed nostalgia, decades past and worrying about the footsteps in each moment of two decades gone by, Maria Callow exists somewhere and she dreams somewhere and that perpetual ache is so degrading, so crippling that I cannot express it, I cannot begin to express it, the loss and the shift and how I killed so much of me just to survive, like cutting off gangrenous skin to survive and I let it slough off, dead and charred like the mountain that hovers over the cat and me. The Mountain of Bloody Knuckles.
-So Maria Callow dreams and I dream and one night, one fair night, when there is a horrid full moon, a horrid full moon that lights up the dreams and one by one the threads of both dreams are stitched together until I am standing there with Maria Callow, the non-existent existent Queen of This World and she has that look in her green eyes, still, and I tremble at it, I tremble at the loss, at the missing, at the sheer agony that's still left behind, and I have nowhere to go, nothing to say, no way to articulate it and so I just stand, waiting for the numbness of sleep and it never comes. There are claws on Maria Callow's hands, but she wields those hands with such surgical precision, I hoped to feel nothing.

There is a Pantheon, of course, And by necessity and reality, Isobel stands at the pinnacle, at the top of some ethereal steeple, and she stands on the bones of the goddesses that came before. But those bones dream like people dream, and there is blood and life in those bones, in Athena and in Maria and in Minerva and the sunburst form of all them, the fawn and the silvermoon and the doll and the doll and every sacred inch of white skin that stretched across the sky, blocking the sun and casting it all in the dull haze of almost winter, that morning of gray that holds every breath in our hearts - like her voice, like all voices, wrapped in mummy gauze; Cleopatra, Cleopatra, for one night she held the world in her hands; and then she died; horrible horrible asp. I cannot tell you how to believe in things, that things will be okay, because they never are. All of them, everything clad in skin will die and so the vines will rise up over stone after stone, like they did over the tomb of Cleopatra, of the giant, the white feathered angel who was no angel, and the Tempest, the ash-fueled Tempest,