Marlboro Red

Rene dreams a familiar hell.

Sitting on the scorched sand, he is drinking hot tequila. An old woman dressed in

white linen is hunched forward, piling dead fish into a wicker basket. The sun sits on

the horizon, frying like an egg on a skillet. The low tide creeps away to expose a

thousand fish dancing the choreography of death, writhing in paroxysms, twitching,

asphyxiating.  This is when Rene realizes that the ocean is boiling—

this is also when the ants start biting.

He changes the sheets three times a week now.

He is losing weight and tufts of hair

and fistfuls of time.

Under the guidance of his therapist, Rene has been put to work.

Ordered to construct a “happy place”—

one that he can walk to in his mind, open the door, sit cross-legged in, and repeat a

special word, over and over, until it means everything and nothing, all at once.

Memories are the bricks and

the feelings those memories trigger

are the mortar. 

Understood?

Well, Rene starts building and doesn’t stop

until his blood-shot mind’s eye is staring straight

up the side of a tower it can’t see the top of—

one that is thrust through the glass clouds, through the ozone,

and into a heaven that Rene will never dream of.

(He didn’t even use a whole memory for the central beams,

just a part of a piece of a fractal of a very distant one—

the smell of his skin burning

under the heat of his father’s Marlboro red.)

Rene’s eyes dart, spin and roll backwards under his lids at 3 a.m.

as he conjures up a new hell.

Standing at the top of his tower, ∞+1 bricks tall,

he jumps and falls endlessly,

and never. ever. hits the ground.

See the therapist, well intentioned and well slept,

doesn’t understand that memories are a hard hard material for our architect.

Like limestone coursed with black veins, or granite, or quartz, or corundum—

perhaps most of all, like diamond,

which of course, can only cut itself.