Notes from Palace Walls

Last night I crashed Daddy’s Tesla and the evening sky exploded into moonlight and in the

wreckage and in the radiance I saw rays of an archangelic clarity, the face of Gabriel, soft and

sovereign, holding golden lilies, saying I must reevaluate my definition of success.

I’ve been seeing the Madonna every night in my dreams lately, or at least some belladonna of

false hope. Her holy hands clench around my wicked throat and I suffer to be revived in her hold.

Oh god I want to be revived I need a life supply of lullabies not these silvery threads popping

pills nor the fear facing my sterilized sunset-colored impression of reality. It’s all pretend, my

friends are paper cutouts, falling flat at the slightest breath.

I am reevaluating my definition of success.

I pull hymns from my head that haven’t been remixed yet, they venerate the rundown cabaret,

shameless heartache, naked bodies thrown into space. Behind my puerile American dream it’s all

parting and departing, construction destruction reconstruction redestruction flames on the

mattress, on the walls.

Get me off this acropolis. In my alcoholic dreams of Her I unleash it: I am overloaded,

undernourished, treading undercurrents of an unremembered lifetime. When we’re dancing

mechanically on the rooftop I always ponder jumping off, setting my status to ground zero,

where no one can watch me. We’re holding hands they’re all colorless and cold, going to no

Heaven, overdosing in cities of gold. I float along these strobe-lit roads that go nowhere and I

can’t stand it. I can’t stand the palace. I can’t stand the drive.

But when we crashed I felt alive I was trembling all over heartbeats in my eyes and in the sky.

Insobriety. The taste of blood. Angelic devastation. There is no vision of prosperity, which is so

uneventful anyway, a term that manufactures success on cyber riches and swimming pools

filtered by dissociation. No it was a vision of sincerity and the Angel was promising me things

more beautiful than chandelier lights and as they pulled my limbs from the crushed and battered

automobile he showered me with lilies and as I gazed skyward from the stretcher he kissed

between my eyes, he set me alight, something shivered in the blue night and I saw clearly a

shimmering absence, they call it paradise