Bleached Eyes
by David George
Spiral water wisp escapes the bog.
Colligated by a blue belly storm cloud
swelling with dark pregnant moisture.
My creation ready. Fuse lit. I smell humid sulfur
as the fire from my finger tips
snakes along from fuse into fuselage.
Nothing happens.
Pregnant underbelly grows lower.
I teeter forward. Unsure.
And then she soars.
Contrail corkscrews into roiling clouds.
My joy surges upward into the thunderhead.
But cracking the sky with a home-made rocket
brings the deluge. Thunderhead retorts
with a bolt of white hot electricity
following the contrail back to where I stand.
Attracted to myself the proximate high-point
made even higher by my creation.
So it strikes me.
Bare bone crashes against bare bone.
The sheer length of life gets shorter.
Electric tentacles dance on my forehead
then burn holes in my pants pockets.
Knowing everything there is to know has a price.
Coins falling from my pockets tinkle
As they hit the stones at my feet.
Tentacles leap from my forehead
And melt the money into faceless chromium blobs
Spackling the ground around me.
Slowly simmering into the earth.
Volatile air pinpricks my lungs
and flares my nostrils.
In total silence I touch my painless wounds.
Gashes on my temple. Holes in my hands.
A punctured ribcage. I think I am somebody
I could not possibly be.
Spinning around an electric shaft.
I see elephants rapelling from cliffs in Kansas.
A twenty-four hour cartoon channel
Shows continuous Scooby-do reruns.
Scooby and Shaggy rafting wildly down a flood gutter surge
Then docking in the desert for breakfast with the Roadrunner.
Spinning faster through another thousand channels
a phosphorescent face appears in the bluish bog haze.
I watch what I look like at thirty-five.
Joker cackles, spins the wheel, and shows me another face.
Blackness shrouded in a white hood and flowing robes
with a price tag dangling from his sleeve.
Electric sparks jump from where the eyes should be
and singe my brows and crease my forehead.
I mask my face with hurting hands translucent pink
from the empty white-hooded black face brightness.
I squeeze my eyelids shut but it's in front of me,
and behind.
Whiteness pours through the holes in my hands
around finger bones exposed by the light.
I lay with eyes bleached pale by the brightness.
Unmasked. Helpless. I shiver from seeing so many possibilities.
To ponder the effect of picking a different launch place,
in a different time.
I gasp from the odor of burnt hair and lungs swelling.
Ozone permeates my mottled skin.
I lower my hands.
Rain pellets pummel my face and bounce on my eyeballs.
I open my eyes.
Water drops blur my sight.
I see an angel with red wings
floating downward. Hovering closer but tentative.
Finally acquiescing, the angel delivers my rocket.
With charcoaled wings, and plastic red parachute,
set gently in my upturned palm.
and I wait for another bolt to strike.
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