Of Dreams and Madness by Justin Lee Brown

I am one stutter-step away from the rails, too late for a hail mary pass. I've become an intentionless phen-omega-non, tearing it up in a senseless dynamic, tearing it down in the mine fields of mutilated flesh where the bloody stumps of a futile resistance twitch out before the final paralysis. Flex paradoxical, just for the thrill of it. Pussy, pussy, run. Don't you see? In life birds fly where cats can't follow, towards a seemingly unfathomable destiny; climb towards ferocious heights where tender hope and unmolested sky momentarily erupt into the plausible. But not for me, the untouchable one.

In these final days of absurdity I AM the gravitational pull. I am the freedom that must extend, spiraling downward towards the rhizome, the mechanism of molecular, towards the intention itself in spite of all its pointlessness. I seek out the lowest level of libidinal energy rendered down to its quintessence, deconstructed and abstracted to the point of consummate alienation just to see it rise above terrestrial. I am the only conviction of my own contradictions, in the end the solitary breath that I draw from the collective will be drawn in the isolation of a solipsist consciousness. The journey of ages begins and ends with a solitary gasp.

It took me decades to find my voice, recognize it, flesh out my screams against impartial instruments and enigmatic signifiers, my ferocious investment only partially returned before I flipped the switch of void. Still alive and swollen with the genealogy of rage, I come to merge the violence of the self with the rogue cells of sadistic attraction. I AM blood. The native ancestry of a florid massacre. Against whom do we release our suicide? Who's skulls do we crush with rubric truncheons of dereliction? Step to the center and slide right. Five squares and three circles intersect at madness. The schism of imaginary presence augments a glistening archetypal voidness where the clatter of runes speak but leave no trace. I dissolve into this lush unified field of consciousness, an incandescent surreality of disaster, then cathexis, until I am a ruin of my own imagination. The aesthetic revenge of a simple madness comforts me as I descend.

Bathed in quiet rings of latern light, the figurative darkness of cognition divides me until I am scattered, only loneliness remains intact. Pushed along by cool atomic winds while pursued by consumptive assassins with cold enamel eyes, I sing ludicrous ballads while choking on shards of ivory bone. Three obsidian figures from childhood aberrations appear beyond the rumor of distant cries. Their starling smiles encode death and empty me of fractal infinites. Have you come here to dream code with me? How long will you stay before the Machinic explodes? Suddenly I am elsewhere in this discursive amalgam, sequencing dread through involuted time. Its symbolic order expressed through ripples of multilevel perception searing its way through waxy axon terminals, mindflesh, and the endless paroxysmal twitching of my eyeballs. I begin at last to see.

I AM become the manipulations of the paranoiac as I plunge through strata of cosmic drift. I float naked in its ether above Byzantine gardens, through a sudden burst of metallic rose petals quivering like dragonfly wings, float further down across pools of cobalt blue tipped with jade quantum foam. An ensemble of grey stone herrings suddenly take flight, flood my synapse with a cultivated integration of pain. The sound of wingbeats rushing around me, a soft static noise of cruel.

Voltaic penetration as an act of malice invades my dreaming with disquieting dialog of subatomic consciousness trapping me between layers of earth and stratosphere. The smell of seared flesh wraps around me to the point of suffocation. I struggle through emptiness, cryogenic tears pound like hail against my skull. Illumination and exposure bind me. Am I still dreaming? Who has come to judge my emptiness? I say, bring me the sweet enigmatic growl that I can adhere to. I much prefer the sun when obscured by cloud and your mouth when sewn tightly shut.

Author bio:

Justin Lee Brown lives in Los Angeles, Califrornia with her four beloved dogs, a million books, and a piano. When she’s not working to support her poetry habit as a Chef and Life Coach, she spends her time composing music, painting, sculpting, illustating, and writing the odd tracts of flash fiction.