Madgyn (Open)

1- Microcosm

"All I want is a Tennessee bottle,
all I need is an Arkansas bride
A place where all I can see
is the Ozark Mountain sunrise...
and 500 miles to hide my lies"

He had stepped out and walked away from
Carlysle without looking back, without any clear
sense of where he was headed until his
mind had found this small nest of shadows
that had begun to come out from beneath
the bridge-- the song sounding tintingly from
the old small alarm clock radio as the young man
that lived there stripped naked before wading out
into the cold water...

He reminded him of Li'l Sam--
sent to be hidden among those
other savages and vermin
of Carlysle; perhaps fortunate
only that he had met the criteria
for admission into the research

Craven for touch, sound-- stimulation
of any sense that he had left that would
not deny him access to the world around
him... pan-sexuality... Mama's little
defect...

Li'l Sam fed his heart to the spoils
after she had died, the son of another man
and his pretty mother's knee-jerk reaction
to never love a poor man again.

The patron usurper, a man of the city
and means that spared him no moment,
save that Li'l Sam was a fair more complicated
mechanism than he would ever suspect.
Upon the day that he discovered Li'l Sam
had become the somewhat lesser willing,
secret, companion of his more powerful cousin...

Carlysle did very little by the way
of helping him muddle through--
marked for derision, as well as put
upon to surrender himself to those
attentions skimmed of darker hours
and secret places

There was even a point that Manny
had begun to wonder if ol' Doc Carlysle
was fucking him as well, as those attentions
that he left obvious may have been
appropriate for a younger boy

It made Manny uncomfortable to
think it may have been like that;
that those times that he had sat
the boy up on his lap might have
been anything other than what it
seemed... Manny alway felt that
he had lived too long

Dreaming too near the edge of the world...

"So, what part of Hell are you from?"
A tall, older strawberry blond woman
stood over him, wearing a colorful
weave jacket and a socking cap--
wearing a sort of thinness
prevalent to the streets, it
was her eyes set in hard, though
not wholly unattractive features--
taut and tanned, her teeth turned
and stained with tobacco, among
other things... She considered it a
moment before handing him the
joint she was smoking

It was then that the flood-gate
of memories, inundate by the
river and November rains were
broken-- the lowland reservation
had become like a lake bed

Grandma Stillwater had told him
that their family had taken the name
of the town that had been built in the
place where their people had once lived

Outside their backyard of the trailer-house
was a cemetery and church built by the old
Catholic missionaries that had come to explore
an unsettled and wild new place, within the
new world...

Manny's only recollection of this
mostly came second-hand from her.
He likely had a hundred others of those
stories she would tell, of how her
father was near as anxious as the whites
for change, though she doubted the
changes that came were the same
that he may have wished

"Memorae, memoria, memory"
a softer and unemotional voice
struck like the chime of a clock
as Dr. Nathan Carlysle's face clouded
over, as if submerged under that
muddy water deluge... Of course,
he had not been there when the
North Fork Dam broke

"What the soul remembers,
what the heart remembers,
and what the mind remembers"

"Somewhere that no longer exists."

Peace
Po