Electric Delirium (ELECTRIC DELIRIUM 1.5)
by Jamie Grefe
Hover in the wisdom of a stroke, peel back layers of enigma, finger spread hope over my skull-face. Lips stuffed blue with an opened fly. The light burns: in this spring light girls swarm; a bleating jumble of excuses, dig in to the decayed minds of the wise, traces of hysteria dictated word for word, edited in ennui-coated blasts suffered in the humiliation of waste. So, Rosaline steps high-heeled to the bus stop: lunge past vomit, stuck meat chunks embedded in shafts, to windows at four in the morning, deranged--in heat; she is considering, as is often the case, conventionality, ramifications, consequences, again, or the causes of lucidity. It's all there.
Tucked-in shirt, buttoned to the neck. It was raining like bits of skin or sun. Unzip. Unbuttoned. Flat-backed, I am roped in the plastic pod, a shell. (But, how do we actually feel when we are not permitted to feel a certain emotion due to the fact that the others around us fail to perceive the performance of that emotion as a valid display of an acceptable emotion?) This, is the question written in dried white across the train's interior. (Are we attentive to the obvious in the most beneficial ways?) It is on the girl's fingers. Leopard print: orange hair, an endless tunnel in the chatter room of this boxcar. This is when Rosey stands, pushes through, moves to the doors, and spits a stream of saliva, lets it drool down the monitor (a flickering advertisement about manners) to lick a phrase in red on the screen: electric delirium. She's bored by all this chaos: people, noise, food, stairs, shops, court, traffic, meat, glasses, suck or drown a weeping ape to bits, a fish, a snake, a boy, a world, a diamond letter.
We're moving. Black hair on the stairwell. Flowers dribble from girl chin. Cut. There's a sign, Rose, written across the marquee: Ennui, a homage to your perceived uselessness. Cut. I wrote it for you. But the bus windows, the capsule she rides across town in, the windows of that ship are steamed in sunset rings like Saturn exploding: steam-men and women reduced to the essential jabs of mediatized dread, the dread of beginnings, a love affair, town to town, spinning unstable like a ring around Rosaline's puckered mouth. She prefers to sit on the floor in the middle of a black rug or dangle her head from car windows, bark traffic down to sand pebbles, inhale the city life like a flapping salmon on a plate of haze. Here's a handshake. It's an excuse, an explanation. Yet, she has grasped at the bar (where is the stool?) the evening of his going away, pulled tight to fingers, warm from the dipping stick: stink lip sucks lip. How he waited in drool alone in a hotel room, love-drunk to the top of the tip, while Rosalind and Rosea bound a college sister in their dorm, reading intently of the quieter therapies in fake Japanese accents. It's a kind of Orthodox Tantra, a new wave of leadership theory, without end.
Rose, silence her desire when she, in this moment of desire, has passed into the grey and dawdles in the margins of such a hurtful unconventionality. Bend her astray from such a becoming. It would be a horror show: intimate, endless, and bloody, just the way she likes it . . . far away from you is where it should stay.
We're moving. Black hair on the stairwell. Flowers dribble from girl chin. Cut. There's a sign, Rose, written across the marquee: Ennui, a homage to your perceived uselessness. Cut. I wrote it for you. But the bus windows, the capsule she rides across town in, the windows of that ship are steamed in sunset rings like Saturn exploding: steam-men and women reduced to the essential jabs of mediatized dread, the dread of beginnings, a love affair, town to town, spinning unstable like a ring around Rosaline's puckered mouth. She prefers to sit on the floor in the middle of a black rug or dangle her head from car windows, bark traffic down to sand pebbles, inhale the city life like a flapping salmon on a plate of haze. Here's a handshake. It's an excuse, an explanation. Yet, she has grasped at the bar (where is the stool?) the evening of his going away, pulled tight to fingers, warm from the dipping stick: stink lip sucks lip. How he waited in drool alone in a hotel room, love-drunk to the top of the tip, while Rosalind and Rosea bound a college sister in their dorm, reading intently of the quieter therapies in fake Japanese accents. It's a kind of Orthodox Tantra, a new wave of leadership theory, without end.
Rose, silence her desire when she, in this moment of desire, has passed into the grey and dawdles in the margins of such a hurtful unconventionality. Bend her astray from such a becoming. It would be a horror show: intimate, endless, and bloody, just the way she likes it . . . far away from you is where it should stay.
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I appreciate getting to read this hallucinatory prose of a slice of unconventional life. Many phrases cajoled me into reading them over and over. Thank you for stretching your writing style beyond the mundane while writing about a bus trip and human secretions.
Thank you, Tantra. Your comment is invigorating. Sometimes these bus trips are quite overwhelming. I appreciate your attention.