Johny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

The air crackles with his blue-tongued lightning-haloed angels.
His love is the twenty-storey leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart.
He forgets not his own.

The red box I see from the corner of my eye commands my imagination. It runs, wildly and twistedly and turning, leaps off cliffs and into notebooks, pools of ink, tear-smudged words. I yelp and run faster, hamster wheel threatening to break, I am horrified. I am unable, and I am paranoid. It is being fed, and within me becoming alive- a living, breathing symbol of this, this thing I cannot quite explain. Or even see.

The memory throws up high and dry

A crowd of twisted things; 

 

A right here, a left there and an infinitude of wrongs, where can we go but charge into our own follies and wish for a moment, then run again and crash headlong into a pile of thorns. This crown on my head, circling me and glowing, this halo really just stings if you come forward and look close. I am gold and fear, the culmination of a paradox that grew by and failed itself as all paradoxes do in the end. And I? I was lying there in my own dreams, within the not-at-all real and the stark squalor of immediacy holding out my hand and waiting for Johny Panic. But He never came, as they never really do. We waited.

I have seen eyes in the street

Trying to peer through lighted shutters, 

 

So the red box, this absolute, utter, bleeding reality of us. It really just belongs in the sewerage of our urban hopeless states, when night after night after night we toil for love, lay bare a shoulder; and then more. We never quite get there, but they tell us again and again-

He forgets not his own. 

(The title of this post and the beginning is Sylvia Plath's work. The verse part is from Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night")