Sisyphus and Flame
by Mira Cameron
1.
My thoughts tangle a surrealist prison cell. Vines dance their way up the bars rattling out enigmas
I can’t keep track of. Spears of light pierce then drain my spider lilied veins and I’m chained,
unable to escape or fit within myself, stolen from and split between any solid place.
I’m left to work towards myself but only I can say when I’m done, something I would love to do,
if only I could find myself. Most days I forget I’m here, caught examining myself perpetually
from the limited perspective allowed by my extreme separation
from any other.
My inner narration becomes an assuming animation of the world around me, braiding present
thought behind the pre-considered so I can wear a mask in reply. I feel fear and mock who I am,
or blur beyond point. I fall and begin a poor way to tell myself I love you. The world shifts in
constant reawakening.
I have to become as fast as it.
I want to disappear
so coat myself in the dust of a semblant desert.
Doesn’t work.
Can hear them chattering
the on and on of nothing
invading my pores.
“It doesn’t look alive”,
yet here we are
languishing,
hidden away in the nausea of a dead sprint.
2.
One night she dove into a bed of starcrossed poison; swam out naming it nectar and herself a god. She worshiped the temple of her dying body, entranced by the blistering scars splitting her skin from the inside out, the pain of boiling stomach acid making her feverish and blind, the sensation itself a route toward the surety of senselessness, the constellations that would shape out and guide her life. Soon, she was no longer able to engage with anything besides her cherished experiment with fire. There was too much honesty to the way flame moved across her skin as liquid as a kiss good morning, warmth tracing out the chimerical thoughts of the last night. Still one night, long dead, she realized the pain she worshiped was itself a numbing agent, a fail-safe that had failed to keep her safe— her worship of emotional intensity, a flagrant lie, a self-betrayal, lying being what she hated most.
3.
Where is there room for my final excitement in existence?
I’m asking for a swing dance between the devil and the dark
blue sea: suddenly boiling.
I’m caught in my own disbelief
— my urge to get better.
I get nauseous so try to focus on the charm of where I’m at.
Were we able to experience proper socialization? I feel exceedingly alone.
When you look down,
fabrications reveal themselves
to be translucent.
But we’re not light.
We’re the invocation of celestial intangibility left to wander a blistering expanse,
crumble and rot.
Is that all there is to fire?
Years lost, dancing in a canyon, self-determined trials meant to evoke a wild pit.
When desperate, hope fails to be enough.
4.
I would’ve rather have not been one of the ones who died in that class on delusion and consciousness, somatic dance, fucking Evergreen State: the astral body bucket in need of washing/ton state: a gray-water rain-barrel of gods’ forest growth— the drip of bark waking up each morning home curled into moss, the Cascade and Olympic horizons, cherry blossoms and pine framing the picturesque bay: the sea introducing the marsh to the ocean flirting with her. But then the father’s dragged out dying, the beggar’s sanitorium, deleterious malt liquor, an insane amount of red wine-prison trauma, five voices who screamed again and again, so loud I fell out of my head, until I was no longer able to talk to the government buildings or ungrateful dreaded dead fans burning sage, oblivious white spirit possessing property culture and life, bisexual students in worn out jean jackets somehow appropriating heroin, its radical wasting of ‘I thought I was punk’.
I still listened to tall tales wishing I had time to hop trains, not realizing to hop trains is to disregard time completely, which I’m too bound up for. I found out the Trader Joe’s dumpster could feed me pretty well and disappeared with blank bodies to feel worth. I went hitchhiking to meet a friend instead of taking Amtrak. I tried anything. I tried to find a place to sleep when I couldn’t get south of Portland that first night down I-5, making it all the way to the cement floor of a Reed College dorm after a few hours of hanging out, stoned in the library, reading Richard Bach while a girl studied next to me. Though by the next night I’d made it to the old friend in Klamath, where I slept before we left to camp out one side of the Mendocino road, spring warming low-land fields and our mood, with bats swooping over head, our fire’s glow hidden from the road’s eye by a rusted grill we found on its side at what we dubbed ‘bullfrog creek’.
What does a bullfrog sound like?
At this point, I genuinely forget.
That night, I dreamt myself on your mother’s doorstep, flowers in hand. I briefly met her before you stepped out from behind her to pull a canvas bag over my head, drawing me down, hostage, to be entranced in a world I could only imagine, delusion and gray sky enveloping further thought like the bag’s cord coiled thick around my throat, my body tossed into a riverbank’s patchy grass. You took the bag from my head to plunge my face into the stream of consciousness I failed to rely upon, then drew your blood to tattoo your claim of me as a body you might love but would ultimately own. Look, these were the times. I was willing to perish: to not understand why, to try to understand why and drive myself insane, dead set on my way to the breaking point of exasperation.
This is how we started,
this was the world I was
living.
Somewhere
communication was lost
before rebirth.
Still, I’m here.
I’m here, alive
feeding my ego each time I dare to eclipse it.
5.
I ask the stinging nettles for their blessing
while they boil into my week’s tea.
Crumple once-articulated prose and stir
counterclockwise until the piece is fully dissolved
to absorb forgotten depth.
I make enough tea to last the week
because I don’t hope to know the future.
I still like to be prepared.
There's foresight and there's a pattern
I create
that lights channels of outposts to watch
earth meet mossy slabs of stone, shifting
into the sky. God unfortunately
doesn’t function in a conversational pattern.
The spine cracks, and I lose my page
in nauseous repetition. I wander
until the tea is cooled off.
I suppose, but am I
Here I am!
And again.
This time quick;
then not for a while but not because.
I have all the time I need to find where I’m scattered
by the world’s mutation, not held by my own,
and even then, nostalgia will act like devil’s light
lingering after the glow;
and even then our ways to be kind will persist and hold.
I want to sink through the bed and linger in myself for the evening
until the world has no bars
and the air doesn’t carry its choking weight.
I can take daily steps then turn, guided by the seasons.
I don’t know
I tend to smile through.
Mira Cameron is a girl helping create, maybe anarchy, or a phantasia, or a group of trans people holding hands. She is playing in warm dirt and feeding as many as she can. Her writing has been published in ANMLY, , HAD, Anti-Heroin Chic, Discount Guillotine, and the Eunoia Review, among others.
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