I am watching a group of people take pictures by the ocean. The waves began to move, throwing them to their knees, and they smile, feeling foolish for not watching the tide. The water grows thicker, taller, and eventually they are killed by the weight of a breaker, heavier than cement. I hear them scream and I place my palms over my eyes while others laugh, pointing at the cameras bobbing near the surface, the film ruined.
I covered my eyes, not my ears; I listened to them die.
I have had a night of intense dreaming, and I now feel intellectually and physically clean -- I read without difficulty, with understanding and passion. Paragraphs come without struggle, smooth, rinsed with Haitian water. I see myself as an adult woman, full of a self-empathy that is maturing into artistic discipline, and a personal form that is losing its markings of adolescence. I look forward to aging, because it is all I have left; I have developed enough to understand that life is a victim of circumstance and the chaos of my being-born happened almost thirty years ago. I should learn to stop suffering over it.
I woke and wrote and read, wanting words and my own imagination, which is made of beauty, comfort, solitude, femurs, murder, and blood. I wanted to talk about death because I feel it is a part of me as much as my legs and hands; I wanted to tell you about the nightmares of rotting teeth, the disintegration of health, the inability to eat, the fingers poking out of the jaw once the roots broke off, as if another person was trying to come out of my body, wearing my bones. Molding incisors are a part of my mythology; I am made up of the accumulation of genetics and cellular horror, and when I am quiet I feel a progenitor removing an abscessed molar or giving birth in a small stone home, staining the wooden floors red, listening to the dogs sniff beneath a closed door. The fairy tales of the future will be the translation of dreams and science, a hypnagogic, Jungian view of the soul being alchemized from the animal's experience. People will view life as if through a cathedral window, praying over the bulbs of flowers; magicians will be known for teaching their spirits to clean the petroleum out of food and water. We will not be eroticized without the thoughts of semen gathering into moles that can break the soil or cracking ovaries against the side of a glass bowl to find a small yellow bird singing. Culture and sex will be expressed with the telescope-eyes of the perverse, those who cross boundaries and their child-fear, who fall asleep and speak to the bears in Tibet, who are becoming bodhisattvas.
I look forward to the future, because it is all we have left. I drop the aversion to insanity to become curious, to give my vision of time so I may have a voice for the development of the years after my death, when I am an immaterial apparition of intelligence. I want my blood to soak into the soil so when a young woman eats food that grows above my body she dreams of sea foam bubbling from her mouth and screams coming from the ocean.
