‘American Pastel’ by Vanessa Mia Matic
I suppose I was intelligible diabolic, fucked; doomed, a thousand methamphetamine blues in my suitcase. A cop wants to be friends, and tells me I need a nice rest. He thinks I’m some Hollywood actress carrying a fake ID and wants an autograph. What a weird show down. Scorpio valley, 20,000 yellow tangled flowers blossom. Each time the dust settles, a-new as it rises setting the sky in a flamingo covered fire. A queer man wearing flaming pink and a cheetah print scarf across his strong neck was telling a cop to suck a dick just with a cute look of his eyes, gently pretending to be innocent and obeying house rules. Taking orders from a pastel hotel. The cop, giving him dirt for being a fag, I imagined him dressed up in his wife’s clothes. I imagine his chubby legs making the stockings break. I hated those type of men; homophobic and probably jerking off in the mirror wearing stockings. They started taking my luggage in. The cop waved with a donut in hand, one finger in the hole.
Two magic hearts reddened by desert sands, space seems to fill endlessly like a dream. A fire to walk through, heat made me disintegrate. In this emptiness, the cacti never grow thirsty. I watched two degenerate lovers loose limbs taking a swim in the neon lined pool with meadow green margaritas in hand. They swam like predators, ugly alligators. I watched the setting sun my mind rotting like a three day old green granny apple in the trembling atmosphere. The air blurred from the summer heat, a wooden cherry scent fading into the lips I dreamt, circling the lake of my heart. Three days bitten and left to dissolve into sappy apple juice.
What lava-ridden memories seep like tar my brain loops over like Cheerios. I put the spoon into the milk, seizing the corners of my mind bending the spoons. Rainbows unfurl acid-like into spilt milk. From a-far I hear a convention and I had to be there. I was still sitting in the hotel restaurant, asking for another cup of coffee. My agent kept rushing me, his face caked with white powder. We were in the middle of nowhere. Why were they making me watch this political thing and pretend there’s poetry in such hatred? I started to itch as everyone began to look like bugs, about 27 of them in total, hissing like roaches. Their teeth sound like clattering sea shells full of bullshit and high self esteem.
Were they drug fiends, were they police? Or both? I scram out of the pig barn, jolted; finally back in the candy room a metha-dream, another me. Perfectly silent. I left before they finished talking about building some new property for neo-idiots like them. Someone keeps knocking on the door. When I open no one is there. I can’t seem to tell if there was anyone there in the first place, or, just my mind clouded like an ashen sky. Armageddon is coming, tomorrow will be fine.
My shades colored yellow-brown; stained like church glass and my head a heavy bowling ball. My right foot goes left chasing the other snaky one that wobbles like jelly. Letting the high take me in fear of aneurysm. I was suppose to be straight for this meeting. Some distorted song of sweetness plays as my heart gallops like a a racehorse inside; believing the chaos will save me with so much violence colored in vibrance. All these immeasurable destinies play out inside of me when I have to just do this one thing. A normal person would’ve had only a pain killer. Oh but the music and the dreams filled the accelerated moment, I am Jesus mutated. The melody is all broken, but it feels like me. A ‘’little’’ heartache but a whole lot to go on. I’m going to make it through this meeting. I pull my shirt down make sure I don’t look confused.
My agent sends me into the room with a lawyer and a deal to deal with. Glassy-eyed I almost start to weep or yelp like a dog. They’re giving me a few thousand to agree to a contract. I keep my cool like a panther, squinting at them I say “You’ll have to buy me drinks after I put my name down, after all you’re feeding a frenzy, you’re loving a beast.” They smiled and leaned back into their seats watching me like I was filled with stars. It was all packed up in a little leather suitcase, the deal, my signature, my dissolved fear, the romance of acceptance. They got me drunker than a skunk.
With each good thing seems to be some sorrow; like the belief of having everything. How many weird days have arrived without me knowing? My left eye looks ugly. I lost my snake skin shoes, my silver shiny ones too. My fucking damn favorite shoes lost in the mess of pure adrenaline. Time is jammed, the dreams are not true. Still, I was loving you. This one love I’ve loved all my life. No one knew. The love that brought disease to all my happiness.
I begin to wonder about the doom in our lives, believing that only tragedies exist. My un-luckiness that is a scripted verse, a heaven sent misery. It keeps the martyr in me satisfied. It keeps me excited about sadness, keeps me second guessing our capacities.
The slut of politics come quarrel, machine guns and all.
America you have been pushed like a mental collapse of reality. Saints are letting you down. Not even the prayer candles will let you feel. An epidemic of tastelessness, fueled by pure massive crime-wave. It passes by with out knowing, the subtleness is in between all which is lower, middle, and upper class divide. This is manipulated tension, it is on the street all the time. Haven’t you walked downtown? Why are there homeless people? Why so many empty rooms and heated thrown out meals. What do you believe is Africa? Blood diamonds, cut and shown in your window display while a homeless man lays in front of it at night. I began taking antibiotics. Some sort that crawled into my lungs to relieve me from the out of breath state I became engulfed in. I wanted to be a revolution of lovers. Let our realities bend in freedoms only we can make true.
Seemed yesterdays were filled with maggots and the earth stood still, with all the noise crashing into us quietly. Each tearless cry awakened and our bones shaking like leaves, is it the fall? I am just one of the many flowers that rot here. I see the beauty between us light up the air, and can we go back to love again? Like caring for one another without all the ‘’pre-millennium tensions.’’ My skin a second skin to keep all the pylon filth separate but it keeps sticking to me like I am made of corduroy. Still I am strong enough to break you.
Suddenly there was my knife collection jammed into the type writer, no ideas, just puzzles, a wicked daze. My friend was there, I thought he was room service so I let him in. He took my junk and in a rage ate my whole banana cream pie. My insides in a heap of flames trying to exhale all reasons of why I was still here in the first place. I sweetly started to set a picnic basket on fire, it ended with someone losing the hair on their arm. So I began to relax and pretend I’m a mescaline god. The end of each non-ending is a philosophy for our deeds un-caught, un-trapped and ill-mannered like naughty children. We are bait of tomorrow’s, there’s no understanding in this cripple-crowned ideology by mythological bad trips. I said ”I’m not sorry, you stood too close to the fire. “Can’t you see I’m making a sacrifice” he was upset, clearly, one arm missing its fur.
“It’s ok” I said to myself. “Don’t feel to bad it’s only arm hair.” Helping happiness enter my fragile state. There’s always a bright light high-speeding obscurely reassuring me, my freak was just the one of many. Soon I’d be home safe in the freak-show but until then, this silkiness
of the sky tramples me in-ward with its beautiful melancholy; numbing me like heroin to a jazz player. I was dancing, crippling love in the melody. The curtains of our soul drew up like dirty angels welcoming me to some sort of short lived high, short lived dream. I rested my head in the pillows between two strangers that showed up. One was a junkie, his arm cerulean; his lips pouty like those of a YSL model. His eyes indigo ice flaming, covered by paper-thin paleness of his skin hued purple. The other was a cowboy, with quite long grayish hair he reminded me of Sam Elliott.
I was in between these entities, life was merely reality. Guilt in my words, I needed to leave all these parties, re-censor my thoughts, re-write this rational thought, edit all things like a computerized memo. That’s what they seemed to like, a collaboration of fluidity. Not too many troubles or mistakes. I couldn’t quite always get to this place. Like a starfish absorbing the water till bled dry by the atmosphere I smooth myself along the edges of another thing I have to do, sensitive to peoples energies. Sensitive for the desires and pain. I needed to get to that place, where it was easy. Just to feel a oneness where the whole world is a womb, loving.
My agent told me I need more molding. I got an ear-load from the editor too. The rambling of a maniac was also too tempting for them and they continued to pay me. I lived for romantic doom, the frightfulness of leaving home. I found home everywhere. Taken by the melody that belonged to no one. I’d light a candle in the hotel and pretend. This is what I lived for, dreams, not the sorrows, drugs, and thrills you meet on the road in passing. My eyes balloons, helium filled look for the ceiling. No body owns anything, nothing. They don’t own it. Not life. Not love. Just this obsolete death that is like a piece of meat in a pan. We were becoming non-human and I started to believe in betrayal and aliens. I was so exhausted by pain, my honesty was full of shit. My agent said “You’re fucked” he didn’t smile when you looked me in the eyes and said “You can start writing pornography, it pays good, I know a guy. You can put in the fiction for the wankers all the same.” “My god I am black powder, a fly, a human fly. Take my snakebites and leave me with the bit of literariness I carry in between my high, doomed romance!” he looked at me deranged “You’re not finished, just a little lost. The problem is we don’t know what the fuck you’re saying sometime. Like right now. You’re a little schizo but the genius is there, but what the fuck.” Smiling like a puppy I replied “I’m not done with the weird, the weight is out there. My hearts fucked more than fucked, and I’ll give myself to the devil the same just not the cheap romance novels.” My agent was my best friend almost. He loved the rage inside of me mixed with the pixie sticks he snorted every few hours.
I wasn’t unhealthy like that, I ate a lot of healthy things. Some narcotics, sure, from time to time. I felt they were giving me more strength for my immune system. I wanted to see what would kill me, but I’d rather find out a little later than right now. Yet, I kept experimenting, it’s like locking yourself with a stranger who becomes love, or love that becomes a stranger. Like all things in life there is only life or death. I don’t want to go ahead of that. Looking back will only leave you fucked and all I want is to fuck with the future.
A thousand jazz cords played like haze-water in my mind. Electrically reoccurring like Tesla coils.
Memories flutter like a time lapse.
I finally get home; the wild kingdom is on tv and there’s dinner. A believer in fucking; he had the same disease. I sprawled out onto the floor with sour twizzlers in my mouth. No one wants to be strung-out like god. People will laugh at us later more than now. We were all bad friends, gently screwing memories. I still loved this illusion of you, the believer, sex, madness, wealth, covered with myths and ideology. Everyone seemed to be speaking their mind until one was getting a better job. You weren’t real friends in the first place, money replacing hearts like a glass cocaine tray; more ass kissing. They kept at it on one another for another get together, spreading open like venus fly-traps. Mouths wetted with salted words, never with heart. I often felt it was all like that, and that genius of hospitality/friendship has discontinued like an expired pineapple can that you’d eat because it was still sweet.
I sent you messages that I never wanted a reply to, in fact I never believed you would; as often lovers who fall out never do. Never looking back in the dark corners or the houses of now someone else’s lights. I’d write about us like fiction, demanding that science could explain flaws. I never even liked such falsity. Even that was failure, cut-ups of heart materials threaded by what could’ve beens. All poked into me like needles in a butterfly display. Rearranging the stars. I began to dream angels of bent moons, circling around our feet as we dance with promises un-kept by whispered in our lips. A kiss was enough to woo me from this masquerade. Sticking soft dreams into me as to count the heavens that are in starry eyes. I went to check my mail I got a memo from my agent
“Don’t dream too hard” I could hear his raspy voice cloak me in despair and tenderness.. as if to say let the violence in you catch laughter and fire and do not become ash become flame. Quickly before I crinkle the paper I see there is more words on the back “But dream enough to dream” It was after all a meaning in a meaning, something like just keep going.. Him trying to be poetic, and he knew I would smile.. As I did.
To be in such blue I began to long for my love. The smell of cologne, the flame of blood that runs into one another and becomes its own scent.
Handsome darling tell me something real, you’re escape is the best deal. With some strands of gray that matched your shirt you pulled your hand away from up under my skirt. I saw them in the back of your dark hair. You were talking about looking younger than your age, living life like on this paralyzed stage. I don’t know why you’d care. . We were merely touching, breaking like glass. You said Oh at last as we wake up we begin to dream. What dreams I put into the stream turn silver. I can’t keep away from evil. Everyone’s long gone. There’s so much sin and desire; I long for you, I call your name like I call for fire. Where the movies pile up onto your eyes, they make you believe in money and fame, like those were not lies. Everything about me I don’t believe anymore. What is freedom? I began to see we settled for second best.
Try to tell me paradise is here. Holding hands that break between the orange peel of the sun. They choke the crowd, pour it out like the light. Where everyone goes back to being graceful and having some sort of temper that is manageable. There’s so much anger still, tensions they suppress. Just meet me at the corner diner and if you’re not there I’ll say I’m a survivor. My breaking heart will break no more. The wind will fade like everything else, I never saw you again. The strands of time are eaten alive, all the masterpieces include the trash, It goes by so fast burning skin so fine. Sedated presence within a suicide design. We seemed to give pieces of ourselves for thinking they’d become bigger and sometimes someone could come a-long only to cut you down into something smaller. Regardless about how good it felt to “make it” I never wanted us to care. I never cared, that might’ve been the difference in me.
I was white heat in the white lights, surging in a sea of hollow faces. It repeats, over and over, a crimson curse that wrenches my body and rots my brain. They crawl all over one another like salon bugs, massaging each other’s flaws, rotting with every line.They forgot I wasn’t afraid anymore. It was violent, a sinful smile, there were no more scars to place, no face to hide; a hated rock star, an infected messiah. I let you down once more, a scattered promise. Curation, loving a pretend love. A parade of extinct eyes, foraging into the abyss. Glowing embers with ashen tongues, licking the scent of sadness. Did I relish this madness, or had I severed the nerve that compels the blood to rush into a reckless heart?
My friend/agent came back, his shirt full of colors. His hair greasier than the meal he brought over. Somehow this restless sickening shiver came over me. It was as if I was flying 100,000 miles elevated through starlight and my typewriter was with me with some ammunition, a gun; A state tax that had your name on it, bankruptcy. The clicking of the keys as I began a new masterpiece, my agent marched me along like a race horse. I was pissing every five minutes. Writing more than 200 words per minute without stopping, dominating this world. Closer to heaven and the drugs of the moon. The extraterrestrial inside me a creeping disease working for the mistakes of us; explaining our godlessness and neediness. I was just bullshitting and taking my loathing out into the ego of my origin to be a writer. That was professional. I didn’t want to think about you, I knew how much you cared about watching me suffer each time the deal didn’t come through. Making me to be a cigar-girl in a darkroom that died like a James Bond baby. I destroy love like turbulence, it is what is stopping me always to be civilized and vile.
I became almost paranoid. Fresh blood, a few typed words. “Into me” I said “Into me.” Abducting all the energy like venom forcing myself for the exhausting sickness. The near death orgasm-reflex what a perfect absolution my whole body a rattlesnake striking at ghost faces of enemies. I placed all my stories of deranged youth inside of two days ago; where I fell in love with a French whore, he was very sweet. I no longer loved another, this was also platonic even with touch. The distance between our world was hyper-reality itself. It was a fiction, kisses were almost all like that handsome and dizzied. Love that repeats and drowns in vacations, those kind that you enjoyed because they made you sad. I just swiped their hearts like a credit card through mine, priceless hurt. I will join in on the music, sharing and caring. The tar of conversation where your friends try to say something dirty and smart at the same time. Nothing makes me smile that much anymore. And somehow I began to fancy someone new, again. I found him charming, I found him terrible, the quite recipe that always caused poison. We were likely creatures, it always excited me when someone loved the same music as me, the same books, and movies. They were bad and good like me, I knew this existed rarely.
Like all demonesses of vacation lovers, I counted the stares the foreigner gave, beginning to believe places I’ve seen were only a dream. His eyes closed imagining the ceiling filled with the stars that fly up from under my breasts and over my chest into the starlight up there where he is reaching towards my neck.
Fastening a noose that he wants to leave open just enough for breathing quietly within all the chaos between us. To think of why’s we have done things we have, only for the days to pass like extravagant leviathans in our sleep. A three-some of woes, a four or five when we are out on the bad days; With our cigarettes in hand and drinks. My switchblade hot to the flame in your throat. The inventiveness would surprise you, and over what each drink or accident could do. Like murder. Like love. Monstrous not surprising, medicine nibbling same as drugs. Then my arm a flame that is tied to the moon; It learns to lend and dance again. You seemed to notice the pain in me. You told me the ”truths” but I burned in a touch. That made you absent but I didn’t mind the cloaking of a performance like two snakes rattling onto one another in hissing kisses. I ate your tail. You were me, mine, I was you and you were I. Perverted, with unspeakable horror. I suppose that’s no love. And if it was, even the slightest.. How bitter it tastes, like a pear you cannot digest. All tears fall like paradise.
What were all these meanings hidden like spells. With all the references of magic that is in our last wish. Life’s a weirdo, you never know where the milk and honey may spill… If at all it ever does, you meet a bunch of sweethearts and a triple amount of assholes and losers. It never really matters much it all passes by too fast to remember why you hated or loved someone. Why those someone’s felt the same way about you. All I know is life’s a weirdo, I’ve been roaming inside it wildly. I live for the maddest ones. The ones who dared to care, dared to dance in anger and wouldn’t take it to harsh if you had a wrestle with them. That doesn’t often happen. I’m one who can take criticism and some harsh words and call it friendship too. That’s real, we’ve all went through temper and pain. I can’t figure why some people don’t have a sense of humor or a sense that an argument can be a passing thing which can actually make a better friendship. Life’s a weirdo thinking everything is normal and everything is strange. It’s like when a dude has to hate you when his girlfriend does but deeply regrets his own passions being so indifferent and visa versa. You know? It seems like the only realistic thing is color and music. After all we can only depend on the open road and the strangeness in the characters of broken people beautiful in being damaged, rarely despairing all our dreams but even in our guilt awaits freedom. America haunt me. I love you. There’s venture in the soft wind, telling you it is ready to have you each time. For the risks we take even in simplicity which is most tricky of deeds. I risk my soul for freedoms. They blame you in the end anyway, on your death bed.. Somehow.
Aren’t you my dear in the same strange dream that you’ve seen me in? I’ve felt love stricken by the sea, as I did by the lost lover I saw going in the opposite direction of mine in a speeding train. Life’s a weirdo and I’m friends with it. While I imagine my children seeing that decent photo of mine and believing all in me was obedient and well, not knowing the emptiness hell-like realm where jagged edges pierced me in the most vulnerable spots as I was least expecting but I guess that was beauty too. I only have confusion that’s all one has to offer, we never have all the answers. The ones we have aren’t our own. They’re maybe our parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, strangers, and friends answers. Looking at the celestial reflections in our eyes that was the only answer I could believe in this moment. As the quiet will surrender its thirst to be held like a flower blossoming without soil. Our ghost wings fragile and we prove this too often. Our strengths massive but passive, are we destined to fall to this earth and believe nothing? I can’t imagine that. But to laugh at the winking stars, to touch the ones we are haunted by like firelight. Rare are the moments that the city and too many crowds can show you understanding where water, wind, and fire will open you like a tangerine sunrise. Where the purple-pink grape and rosy colours fall in oneness. To belong to the nature. To feel your heart fold in its sleeve drinking a beer with a smile filled with dreams. Yet, I thought of Tom Waits singing “Did the devil make the world while god was sleeping” I looked at the fading sunrise and said it’s ok to be mean and free, mean as the world and free as the sea knowing it was more than me. A survival of the exhausted fire, let it once again devour gasoline untamed to touch. God-like prosy imagination where we dance with our fears in passions. All we need is infinitesimal starlight to give us the longevity spectacularly shining, love. Maybe I should start a cult. All my unnecessary predictions are hilariously bribing me into doing so.
I wanted so deeply to believe in a fairytale ending. The goodness in people. To believe in us. To believe in you. To believe in me. You wear the sunlight around your neck, I carry the tear-film and oil. Holding all the stars tied to these strings I have in my hand, in the black night I carry them along an empty highway to you.
Traveling America from the East to the West, from Los Angeles to New York, and whatever else road I took. I saw everything was a path that was blank, a canvas. Unpainted, waiting to be touched invisibly by me, and I could create what ever journey I wanted with a little vision. After that each dusty sunrise was a brighter southern glow a winter aching for the spring. I was driving up to the sun inch by inch, the bending shapes shifting in movement. Someone always said they would help me be me better. I was still waiting on that, like a wonderful car. Not waiting on enjoying the ride. I once looked up into the sky, a black crow hovered. I made cut outs in the sky, like the cut outs I made of time and people. The bird came so close to my face it looked human, larger than any bird I’ve ever seen. The sky was so dense with white sun that it blew the colors away, everything seems black and gray. I was laying on a picnic table cloth completely naked. Stretched like seeds radiating as a moon. All was filled with sounds of bird laughter. The stroke of genius was in the happiness of celebration. The melancholy of the white-out or the darkness that covered everything with nothing but unhappy stars that fall like butter from the sky into my midnight vodka. These stars they sparkle twice more with desire against the blur of the doubling of water making them dance into a drink onto my lips. Cold as snake. I am un-aware of change and time, it’s like a summer vacation. You are permanently filled with murmurs of the heart that you cannot escape. I suppose all my stories will be filled with love until I stop. But how does desire end? I imagine the world ending. After all I am the world my desires are are countless.
