Threw Sickness
by Jason T. Kocher February 11th, 2008 - Creative » Writing »
Mythological amnesiac, woodworked dilettante, and/or hapless banker found upon a lost highway. No beginning and no end, you know neither where it was you left nor where it is you’re going, yet feel the pressured approach of both, the time between, the time beyond, and the absence elsewhere of an unlisted dimension. Sleeping off the yellow sweat, you find yourself recovering from a bout with Malaria, and her little cousin Scarlet Fever, lucky enough to have forced the knives from their hands and thrown them to the speeding asphalt below, reeling and relishing in remorse and regret, wishing things would have worked out differently between the three of you. Like Allah’s oil, you’ve been chain-smoking your last cigarette for a period of time…better off not thought about. Veiled in the shifting sands of static, your radio emits only Fats Waller cover songs and an occasional French narrator, riddles in a foreign tongue. The ghost story loses its magic and replaces it with a newer more original delirium, as you pass the same haunting hitchhiker for the fourth time this mile, the same greys, shrouded, eyes in glass, flickering shoes, an ace of spades in place of a thumb. Teeth clenched tight around the misted and twisted smoke of a cigarette that you find, out of the corner of your eye, rests not between your lips, but rather maddeningly lies on an eroding deterioration of a bit of blue paper left hypnotically floating in the water, the rectilinear base of the statue…the nape of a young girl’s neck…a bit of stained string…Phillip Glass and the Mothers of Invention. Having driven over the black dog miles ago, your eyes are lifted from the road to the skies, in a movement tempting both disaster and, your only reference to this Surrealism, Salvador Dali, as you shape a new composition of Frau Isabel Styler-Tas with your hands laying the foundation above your head, and in front of your very eyes.
There are, sadly, other exceptions.
I’m Thomas K…and I’m not.