Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 70
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Patchwork Dream
Passed-out on a beer-stained bed,
cat perched on his sweating head.
He descends into Morpheus’ realm of mystery,
escaping days of chemical misery.
Twenty years fall away from his soul,
four-years-old, grin filling a hole.
Wandering among patches that stitch together,
he giggles, wanting to run through them forever.
But the man with the bowler hat suddenly appears,
the man with the bowler hat, no eyes, nose, or ears.
“Randall,” he coos with unearthly joy,
“Randall,” he beckons, “c’mere little boy.”
A shiny black car appears directly behind him,
swallowing Randall’s peace ’till it rots inside him.
Into the black car he obediently and numbly falls,
as the bowler hat man’s singing forms wind-drifting walls:
“Rock-a-bye, Ran-dy, on the bed-top,
when the booze flows, the consciousness rocks.
And when you get older, you’ll feel like torn socks,
and down will come Randy, in stum-bul-ing blocks.”
Little girls play patty-cake as the car passes,
and skip rope on the green fabric of patches.
Boys blow-up army men with fertilizer bombs,
melted green plastic litters the lawn.
A limping dog runs up to the car,
but ahead of the car, it isn’t far.
Under the tires as quick as a flash,
The limping dog is reduced to mash.
“Sandy,” says Randy through a crushed gasp.
He holds the dog’s picture in weakened grasp.
“You had to learn, one of those days,”
says bowler hat man in a voice of glaze.
“You can live without Sandy,”
“Pick one of us, Randy!”
A trio of kittens peek out of a nearby sheet,
they gaze up at him from his stiffened feet.
He picks the black one from the group,
then it devours the others in a merciless coup.
Fur and bones litter the torn fabric,
leaving the victor a smiling maverick.
He strokes its head as it vibrates in purring.
A man stumbles outside, his speech slurring.
Bottle in hand, skull in the other,
wandering for a lost brother.
The fields mound up and turn to flesh,
female bodies coated in mesh.
“Now it’s getting fun, you see,”
Says the bowler hat with glee.
Cans of bud rain down from the sky,
car tunneling headfirst into labia pie.
Charging through the bleak, warm tunnel,
They filter down a dark, steep funnel.
The ride ends, the car isn’t there.
Little Randy is lost in misty air.
Shadows appear from different edges,
converging like closing hedges.
Stitches and seams run from Randy’s clothes to his skin,
while the bowler hat man floats with a lofty grin.
Randy cowers in mortal fear,
whimpering among cans of beer.
The skeleton Sandy is first to come,
Snarling and chomping the little one.
Hands from other shadows grab his limbs,
tearing and twisting the seams from him.
Jerked and torn with all their might,
Randy lies, wounds billowing white.
Teachers, family, bosses, and friends,
they were the ones tugging his ends.
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