Schizophrenia
Memories
become sand full of hourglasses.
One thousand snowflakes are one thousand dead cats in the Hudson River.
Memories hurt.
They are Michael Schofield broken out of prison.
Prison is the look on your father’s face.
We had the same face. I used to remember him being younger.
Once he was James Dean going bald and with a cause.
Now he is the weeping willow pretending to be a Christmas tree.
Trees are ebony towers to admire. They take the place of hands, and lips and voices. Sometimes they can speak but only when you aren’t listening.
I hear ghosts I met a long time ago. Their voices mix like bad wine.
They have a lot to say to somebody else.
Words
were daggers but became backfiring nunchucks.
Painting mosaics is more like scribbling outside the lines.
A car with no brakes and no gas.
An automatic pistol being fired by your shadow, armed with toothpaste ammunition. Nothing adds up because math can’t help.
Lithium is the iron curtain to save the free world.
Conversations are only permitted in dolphinese in the broken dunk tank.
Words twist like ivy at Wrigley Field and taste like blood if you impede upon traffic.
Fifty two card pick up and “will you marry me” mean the same thing.
She had no words for either of me, even if I remembered.
Mirrors
are grown in fields on the dark side of the moon.
They are sold to the vain but crawl into the vein.
They shout at jet takeoff volumes.
We use them as search engines even though they don’t have Wi-Fi.
They are the jealous, condescending friend we have to put up with.
A high school dropout who prefers to lean on a wall and do nothing.
Mirrors were made to be smashed. They deserve to go to hell but never do.
They join their cousins the broken beer bottles from West End in a cozy hole
where they can make out with nuclear sludge and give birth to North Korea.
Then they can go on vacation to the beach where they grew up
and create memories that disappear.
He told me who I was and wasn’t without speaking but he was wrong.
Now he won’t look at me and neither will she.
Two-dimensionalism is bliss.
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