Counterpane

Sometimes I really hate leaving things on top. As though if I just cover them up, they'll never be seen. Also, I have a paper to write and I don't feel like doing it. I know what a counterpane is, but I like the idea of using it as a shroud to keep people distracted a little bit.

I have a fascination with dark, uncanny things but only in fiction and art and only occasionally. Oh, I love my angry lovers in poetry, spitting curses on the women and men who reject them, promising to visit as a ghost when they're dry and barren. I like the disturbed, scary things there. I watch gollum-like creatures climb across Leonor Fini's paintings. Don't affirm life in my books, I want blood and upset. I want disorder and early sorrow. Contemplate your lilies elsewhere.

I really don't want awful things in real life. I am so rediculously positive it probably makes people ill. There is too much hurt in the real lives of those I love, I wouldn't want to add to it. I keep this in my fiction. But I like for everything to be a little wrong in my verse and prose. Crazy wife in the attic? Escape from a dragon's belly? Eighteen exotic cats? I'm there.

I have my rules, though. I don't want it to be trudgingly dull, I want it to be witty and fine, and I want it to be lively in its strangeness. I want it to smart, and sting, and not make me numb. I prefer strange to outright depressing. I probably am careless to say that I desire "dark" things, but I find the goings-on during noon to be most upsetting sometimes, for their wrongness. I live for stories that make nights seem tame, for the feeling that there is something wrong and I can't place what it is.

I want it to be something that makes me feel more alive, but as though the only way to feel alive is to bleed. Not the slow ache of a large wound, but the small, sharp pain of brief cuts.

It's only in spells, furthermore. Once a year I binge on the scary things that make me squirm. Sometimes I crave dark things, I crave dark glimpses into abandoned prison cells. The palace on the top of the hill of my town, the asylum, the unmarked graves. I want to get in touch with human despair, healthy things gone wrong, and unnatural lives. Is my list complete? Is my explanation clear?

2002-09-12, counterpane

before / after

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