Theaterland

CW: self-harm, strong language

“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”–attributed to W.C. Fields

Belief, however nebulous, is a truth only cogent enough to serve those who would make the absence of that what is unthinkable to all but themselves.

**

Let the viewer understand that this fictitious staging, this gamiture, is only one’s plight who is to be sentenced in that denatured assiduousness for relinquishing themselves to be insubordinate celebrants who think themselves burlesque tragedians, but grew trite overnight, sophomoric, their deposit of fame imagined a blinding arpeggio toward a distorted farce brought by only the pusillanimous dive into the thespic opening farce at the last picture showing. This is a tale about a vessel who was too brittle for love but nevertheless thought themselves powerful enough to sustain a lifetime of plaintive goodbyes. What is the self if not but the figment of skin? A man is nothing else but another contrivance in the plotting of systems. Let the stage begin its exit. Enter left: SEPIA PSYCHOSOMATIC NOSTALGIA VERDANT AND LOUDSPEAKERS UNDER FUNHOUSE PARQUETRY; A CHOLERIC MINSTREL PAINTED IN SCALING EPIDERMIS AND SCARIFIED DIRT CONVULSES WHILE NARRATING THE SORROWS THAT HAS MADE THE STORYTELLER SO HORRIBLE AND SYCOPHANTIC EVEN WHEN DENIED AN AUDIENCE TO PARLAY HIS INSALUBRIOUS ENCOMIUM  

WELCOME AGAIN PATRON TO THEATRELAND

How does one sparkle up, despite swollen goose smiling bent-toothed wings afar and trembling limp? Shrouded turnstiles and playthings enter disrepair. Despairing, the scripted chiffon of the lone harlequin figure caught in the stillness unlit at a hollow pedestal. Where words echo like electrical sassafras buzz and fade that notoriety traced off a sordid afterglow. The diminished lustre welcoming you back, returning to face the worn out tinsel town chintz and kitsch. Another quaint, anachronistic stay at this blown-out Tartarus once fabled, now apocryphal. Enter, take your ticket and sign away your many cares! Hopeless attractions surface above the maudlin sigh! So no need to cry, youngster! The dead one is never really dead. The fairground excursions and shavings of the good days are now sterile, dank piles eaten by the absence of spectators. The margins of marquee letters cram the establishment’s name against the cold reception purview sky high.

THEATERLAND

 So it was ordained as my axiomatic birthright for me to survey the world and all events therein and all the faces belonging to the multitudinous people observable within it as underlined minutely to my perception would be archived within my memory and documented pristine as if lambent in having been filed inside myself. I knew it all, but would never endeavor any part of my imparting a silver of it for what dissimulation would endanger the rarefied, implacable status unique to my personhood. All the answers were there for me without even an inkling toward investigation or ratiocination that the normal person would undertake as the cornerstone that would consume many lost by obsession searchingly, only for the sagacious among these unfortunate members of my ilk; soon I swell so high that I imagine aviation after uncovering nothing but a nebulous facsimile of the truth as a harmonistic whole.

Dressing up the movement in the Stop and Go of flakes shaken slim off the bend to nowhere.

This last night the stage shudders the situation, and I am less believable than voices sung by California raisins.  

**

When you hear the music and can’t believe it was even real.

Never knew what I wanted. Doesn’t know what I meant. The appeal peels fakeness and presents it solicitous like a flutist that is angry that no one is remaining to care. Atonal lullabies and long goodbyes.

 I was the watchtower alight and aloof, an untouchable beacon surfacing tall perched above the seeming dimness of someone else stuck stranded, everyone drowning beneath a capricious sea only tamed below my unblinking mind’s benediction alone. It was all mine until I became complaisant, conspiratorial in my absentminded upkeep of my extravagant comeuppance. I was the narrator of this woodwork scaling into rust, this carnivalesque long farewell to reality that was my retreat into that blank pocket of magic Theaterland, once a beacon of soaring effusion, a repository for my illness to make pout and shout sentiment aloud; expand where no one stood watch below from not only my own constructions but of the crowd’s residual parcels answer me in hollow praise which lifted me in time small enough a window to encounter this aromatic pleasure that I have burrowed myself madly within for years, monomaniacally, ever since all the part time friends went elsewhere and the fairgrounds became my forgotten skeleton at the shoreline. A dockyard I lift my fetid imagination above, importuning the skies for sympathy where inside me, there was nothing but gearworks switching off gentle manipulations beneath my dilettantism. My fakeness was my only heirloom. That once gave me strength. Gave me a tinctured tinge of hope for my poverty of the wit and soul, my paregoric for my stagnation made garish under sealift treetop bluster crash layers upon layers of soft tessellating waves like tectonic plates of ruminative onanism tempestuous drifting in blemished rags against my archipelago of lipstick vermillion conceit.  

**

The focal point of this exegesis lies squarely in the middle, so in a thematically appropriate fashion I shall inaugurate the treacherous tale of my involuntary rift, a transubstantiation if you could indulge the quasi-religious embellishment, from the tenuous tethers of the Earth’s gravitational pull by beginning one year apart from the catastrophically astral occurrences endemic to the present year.

 My half-wit resplendence approaches clairvoyance about rise and decline soldered in line, asinine refinements, drooling gossamer chowder upstate; creamy, it bleeds primly inside the ornate inventory among the damaged goods tossed into my mind. Extraordinary. 

Understanding monastic seclusion kept the boundaries of my knowledge open and shut. I began to substitute the roles of the production by transposing my delusions across the embankment and concession stand, recording the transference during the beginning of this ongoing hour of operation soak in irrelevance until my mental constructions materialize into gallimaufry once dead things, long since living but freshly dead things that became sacrosanct to my art, my nostalgia, my protracted peroration where I once gave myself to the embellishments and invectives I once dreamt from sampling insanity at wondrous bordello night alone. Sweet memories of self-abuse are only livable at Theaterland.

Where I sustained mutilation telling myself that I belong, like a tawdry exhibition.

After having sustained the interim of this last week, it was only upon reflection as a derelict long isolated and forgotten heaving applause at the famished concession stands and warped pitch spunk around the Ferris wheel lowland glaze; that I remembered the first noticeable highlight during this desultory, overlong period of my you where I was starting to augment my taste to a sour range, having been closer to the source of the indigestion in stomaching myself as a whole person, an individual that someone could describe as having some quality other than conspicuous lack of importance commonplace to many. 

Given as I was to throwing epithets wanton against the faceless wind, I can recall for as having been wrought-meat and bone at a near six foot tall how the complexities I was endowed with were consigned strictly to the datum of my physiognomy and its own maneuvering, whereas the ebb and flow of my psyche was always made from a coarser, haphazard material. I was terminally dense, obstinate as stone, thick in the saying of parlance.

For example, one would be remiss in not observing the astronomical undertaking I underwent during the one week where I had inadvertently swallowed my own throat and pulled down my tongue along with it into the ropey maze of my guts, tumescent with constipated bowels and parasitical agriculture indigene to my own abdominal substratum. 

For six days, my eyes were bulbous and widening at the cliffside of my sternum, my palate dangling helpless at the summit of my solar plexus. I thought I was emperor but I had nothing but disfigured bones left to stand fitted within admiration’s scale. I was magnifying my myopia, lengthening my rehearsals where I would soliloquize with my solipsism. 

The hive of lies gathering facades and shape, inside me richly fermenting gravity, now ever closer like the taste of my own ambergris, and soon became a creature dunglike, a breastfed mollusk sedentary yet scheming always for expansion. It would not be until near death where I would realize how empty my routine was, vacant like the diminishing returns, the echoless auditorium ringed in my mendacity. 

**

"Incredible!" the newcomer exclaims across the chainmail balustrade, greenhorn when his astonishment could no longer fend for itself and laid itself at rest against flotillas of phantom waistcoats which wade westerly. The newcomer is white flaming pillars at the dockyard, incredulity breaks uphill stream.

I think I have been kept inside my playground for so long the lonelier I have become, that at some point I crossed a threshold and was suspended beyond numb, sleeping cold as a nymph in bottled lightning strike too many times The processional amusement shone frostbitten, aching props amid my discolored transpirings. A measure for how far it took to travel and the distance time will recite how faraway touch had withdrawn. My gateway into human candor crushed sustenance until my teeth began to ring in lines of newer xylophone notes swell and fold beneath my charlatan cravat.

Deep inside. So it is the fog kissed rain I have abstained from cheering. That darkling pit of longing that sits in a ditch without heat, like an avalanche breaking pleasure down and romance adroitly in refusal until all pigment is just powdery blemish. Injurious, no slave but my own largesse, a cuckquean flesh garnishes the broadcast figure so wetly it will often dissolve under the whispering of ephemerality.

**

I needed a larger shell to fit my olfactory garden suffused within the caverns of my entire being, a carapace voluminous enough for my molting recession of senses as I went idling deeper within the geyser of my egocentric arboretum for a bottommost prison.

My thoughts were pebbledashed across my quavering rhapsodies of flatulence shot out thunderously like miasmatic storm clouds formed by my gamesome fustian dalliance overdone until wellness was indigestible; years I was so languorous I would choke from my own fanned self-worship, gurgling constant in ruminative cage fight, broadcast exclusive beneath my private network wavelength of farts and belches sharing codified signs round and round and upward my shrunken shaft for an esophageal tunnel, caught in a continuous crenellation between collision and collusion alike, like body boxers of gaseous waste industrious in their spar within the tightening margins of my seismically deformed mind. 

 Indeed, there was never a denial of respiration clearer than many sunless midday afterthought I lived through alone and rose on foot as a small, perpetually discombobulated impish ball grasping away from its own bounce, dimly expressing malaise piecemeal quarterly a minute in stop-motion animation until brought to the forefront, each infinitesimal sequence of myself was poured exactingly into displaying motion; here was each day, each provisional minute quartered as barefaced minutiae suffocating clung ataraxic and yet strung solid within the seconds sequentially sidled alongside my physical lull in movement, each parcel of my entirety stentorian, poised and unable to recant when limbs and pate was fixed to whatever countenance or aversion of reciprocal glances thrown from my nimbus nothingness, methodical habitations of character take seeming shape from all these welted, knobby fields of pure clear lies seriatim and bejeweled around my crowned serapes, the masquerading of a bonhomie, the pretender that was me screened naked under a sky colored in a palsied wreath of a shadow cast in my empire of doubt. Everyone gave up understanding my persistence in expounding how worthless the personality that has covered the porous unbeknownst wrathful gap where since I was a child any domain external to mine, was perceived by my confusion of colors and lights as dim punctures both lardy and spun granulated circles above a bellyful volatile. All those pointless years convalescing, topheavy with logorrhea paunchy with rhetoric laconic yet paradoxically bombastic. Theaterland was my home where not even the pelicans bother to stay these days, hoping to steer clear and far away enough from recognizing the person uglier than the featured picture. 

 In those intervals of that week bracketed from mention, I was a ticker-tape unspooling tons of texture exfoliated by expletive until subsubmed at a sudden shuffle into footsteps plodding and lugubrious, my mouth agape as it fumbles the shadows of vowels without sound, congscenti adrift consonants mullioned slow as the mnemonic equivalent taking form, a speck of nerves now spoiled and lardy together as a membranous bubble swollen with paused air, internally combusting within itself imperceptible as if the molecular make-up of rainwater could crystalize the delayed time inside my mind into garrulous flotsam, a nauseating ichor with a viscosity similar in constitution with vegetable oil or accretionary matter; eczematous, a landslide mud-floored and tarlike from simultaneous immersion full alongside the realm of my glandular concavity at congruent ends seamed right underside the vanishing highway where my tongue was gone, the distance a chasm bunkered into a vault where I became once again a watchtower without structure, just a tall looming vestibule where someone was drowned aboveground trying to fumigate themselves across the view barred limpidly, a crescent radially removing its locus apace as it retches light suspended stroboscopic from reddening semi darkness for even a few blinks, moonlit and expressionless fitted underneath nightwear as the week I kept myself stuck in this stagnant wigwam developed an after-image possessing activity of its own. 

A second self I had thoughtlessly ate? It seemed a reality stronger to adduce as the contraction of bone and flesh shorn at an antagonistic length from the point of equilibrium.

So during that Saturday, deeply enmeshed within my diorama of impotent indwelling, the situation necessitated that I should divest myself in lowering my internal nadir so far below plausibility, that my taste could be rarefied if nothing else but as a bacillus of consciousness.

**

Corpulent and kept comfortably wedged at the rear end, gasping hotly amid burp or passage of fecal matter diffuse enough not to escape as something outside, erstwhile still barefaced remaining as I am looking vertiginous at a fixed and advancing forward point ahead queasily sans the vertical crane no longer there separating my head apart from my own derriere. 

This had become a feature inextricable to my attributes that coalesced with quick-stepping smoothness, fastening myself torturously as one so fatuous and rubicund with unsorted thinking but ineluctable as anything other than as a stench emitted nervously among anyone else to the exclusion of me, bent halfway above a commode for four hours. 

I had not only eaten but also merged myself into my neckline like a collapsed newel burning forever beneath the wadded folds of unfeeling tissue; a trammel of thin limbs, fawnish, between my position inside my surroundings, and the fairweather few I scarfed down in handfuls of time among them, as I provisionally call out for them, the onlookers who kept sight but have abandoned faith in me: people and places and things all heavy traffic diffuse, reanimated yet recombine with recrudescence like a autistimal fugue whereas all but my uppermost sliver of sight would file downstream and blend fulsomely toward my own self-possessed vomitorium.

It is my repentance that I too, the narrator, resign after all this unwitting bloviating, ready to let the production die. There will be no clapping here tonight. No joy or speechifying beneath the fluctuant mirroring of my belief in someone that was never me, so disproportionate that I looked past my own self as a second part, my desperation and monstrous mimicry of emotions, my repertoire, and for fucking what? So I would reach my nadir, insensate, leaden in hearing, my pretension stitched my bloodless lips a permanent muteness after seeing my words leave me, disentangling. I was separate from the construction, the edifice that I stretched my disease inside the Theaterland me. I was a part no larger than the ensemble of sandstone at my blistered feet. My wounds I thought were frilled costuming. How entertaining I must have been, if for mere seconds only.

It was yesterday, a grinding halt, a tepid and disastrous opening exhibition longstanding, that I lifted my performance and brought it aching in my arms into the enclosure of my rage. I set the last good performance stolid faced, and flare up pitching my empty oracular I once withstood alone and along mental gymnastic by veneer thought miraculous and said by no one but those vague specks that I realized were my enemies, my patrons who let me prostitute my selfhood raw and priced tickets until the foreclosure of my agony was only invigorated truly by only this recent vacation away from this torpid smoke and mirrors that I sacrificed vainly for Theaterland; the dazzling encore of watery fire, all those memories and renditions of memories that I had been now collapsing. I think the blood is cool like the saline foaming my tower of eroded piety at the coast. I cannot see past anything. No more make-believe. 

A paperthin apparition breaches a marble sanctum, seeping its tendrils through the creases in between crumbly plywood walls. The seas fall below the flaming stagework, the sounds of structural implosion ring faint praise upward the stratosphere. It features a bleached crater warping itself, form or archetype molting imitation sycophantically until reduced burnt vassalage from the sun's scintillating sovereign scaffolding roam arrays of ultraviolet light beams that kept the fumes brightening mushroom clouds. 

Fade phantasy beneath curtains drawn.

THEATERLAND