Monday, April 25, 2011

Mad

Have you been mad lately? A coffin of shrieking nerves gasping for air? Nightmarish tears no longer offer the same condolences as last, last year. A numbing that vibrates from your heart valves to your fingertips. You go through the motions, everyday routes, but all you see are blank faces. No hair, no eyebrows. No nose, ears or lips. Just eyes with different colored pupils. Eyes that look away even when you try to make contact. Like you, they hurry about. But they seem to walk with purpose, a rendezvous at a coffee shop or maybe a reunion of friends in a foreign land. They used to look at you when you yelled in public. Gradually your voice started to disappear. You become somewhat camouflaged, a chameleon in your surroundings. They become utterly transparent, wispy apparitions of your stolen belongings. Are they envious or spiteful? What you do is none of their business. Vice-versa. They pay no attention. Lonely alleys are safe havens where you feel normal. Perhaps this time when you merge onto the street they will have faces again, you tell yourself. Disappointment after disappointment, alleys after alleys. Instead you try to read their eyes, a new language you must conform and adapt. You thought it was Morse code. But they whisper through glances as if you are prohibited. As if you are a different painting of terrestrials. All the vehicles that you see are fixed in motion, like they have stopped at a red light or forgot to foot the pedal. But the lights are always green and the drivers turn to look at you. Somehow they find a way to single you out from the others on the sidewalk. Naked and infamous. They should really advertise you on a billboard or perhaps on that great big monitor in Times Square. Like standing on the mound at the Yankee Stadium but hearing no cheers after you have pitched a perfect game. No more pick-up lines or orchestrated symphonies found. No more Broadway shows and opera performances attended. Where is the poverty? Where are the ghettos? You go beyond extraordinary lengths to recover a past that may have never existed but you believe it did. You swear that they had hair and eyebrows. They had noses, ears, and even lips so soft that you knew they possessed an intoxicating power. A catcher of the mind and a snatcher of the soul. But now, they capture nothing. Just disciplined lines packed into cart after cart after cart after cart after cart. They fall asleep standing in the carts and they blink their eyes in the carts. Music blares from earphones that rest on your chest as high notes and heavy bass strive to destroy the void that just keeps filling. Next-station announcements are no longer made. Only the flickering dot on the map overhead. Just like that red dot, they avoid you, letting you have your private circumference. No matter where you stand. Even the little ones stare sometimes. There’s no point in telling them that it is impolite or that it is unfair. Because maybe, this is the terminal station anyways.

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