I am dreaming about tripping. I am tripping more explicitly than I have in years, though the ritual passage from one hand to the other by way of gift is somehow dimmed. At any rate, I am grateful. The trip is in progress. Still accelerating when it is rudely interrupted by the fat man upstairs.
I ought to be incandescent but I am not. The grey creeps in and out my lids as stitches. My vision adjusts. Calcifies. Ears tuned to the sound of a television racing engines. Cupid bubbles detonating. Hideous tiny wingspans calibrated on radiator shards.
A fluttering of lungs.
I sit on the edge of the sofa. Feet planted in a rug. Not so much antagonized as exhausted. Ashen. Gutted. Bitten.
I open my mouth on a yawn.
Slow dive down an aperture shrinking on an aqua hole.
The last I remember is bra straps snapping. Swim suits. Polka dots. Betty Boop on steroids, kicking out a sushi arch.
Lose one life.
Snatch.
It is not as if I have been getting any.
Anyway. I sit there and consider my current predicament obliquely. Watch myself from somewhere in the vicinity of a ceiling rose vibrating. The walrus padding back and forth between armchair and set. Hoovering up filigreed leftovers with his snout.
I fish a cigarette out its pack. Cough into the corner of my hand.
"Fuck off!" the fat man sings.
All manner of tenants locked in on themselves. Pulling on moustaches. Tie-dyed hair.
"Prick."
The fat man upstairs is much like those pallid anemones below. The same native tongue. The only thing separating one from the other is floorboards, my flesh between, stacked one on top of the other like the raw ingredients in a bologna sandwich. Gnawed at, chewed on, regurgitated. Served up to the bins.
An oyster tattoo laced straight through the hambone.
An inferior performer.
I sit there. Acutely aware of my bulk. The unwashed smell on me.
Well. My breathing is riven, the timbre inescapably jazz, post-op bop, lurking under the corner light, magus to the mild. I don't believe in original sin. The ubu frère is sanitized, gone, his blemished skins sparkling to the wind.
I open my nose fully just to catch the faintest whiff of him and in return receive nothing. Not one jot. Every inch the liver spotted ghost exiled to the eaves. Hovering there intangible. Stitched in tissue silhouette about the cornicing, an overhanging in tablature. A weevil blown ice sculpture.
"Bastard. Snidey fucking cunt."
It is conjecture, of course, as to that which has brought the fat man to such a pass. What is certainty, however, is that he did not start out so thick around the ankle. The neck now gathered in a wattle.
