Part I
I am a psychonaut. Today I had lunch in Franz Kafka's head. After that meatless meal, which we ate with our fingers without noticing the mouthfuls, we felt giddy like children hanging from the ceiling—dangling lamps above the womb and semen.
[Truth be told, we only breathe words and nothing else. We only eat for the guilt in the food injected by the sanctity of matrimonial full stops because we have to live somehow; we ingest it by canvass of hurt nailed within. So we can preserve what little sense of self we have, we give them our middle finger, unified and synchronised, as they measure us again and again as worthless wasted wraiths. If we appease them, whoever you are that reads this, please know, it is only so we are left alone with the black blood of language disregarding the laughing corpse of Freud under our feet, he cannot explain us - give up that conception! And so we spit as one on that also. But that is Now. I am quite sure that you want to watch the rest of the psychonautic rendezvous unfold. Push me out of your way already. So...]
We stood in front of the window, naked; winter stared at us with mouth agape.
The churches of Prague were screaming again, pouring out the office hours with the injuries. Those workers were pickled bees in amber. We memorised their grievances as we had to wait whilst our flesh was stretching and swelling on metal contraptions, those expectation in mute lines of faces, the press of the shoes upon the floor. We watched them metaphorphose in silence as we knew in advance how patient they will be and how quietly they will watch us drowning, they shall even be so kind as to hold our heads under the water. [surely you will recognise that as a sign of human race's progress]
"That strange beat will always pump God in criterions of salt and we'll watch that grow colossal always", I told him right then.
"His grunts penetrate walls every single night!", Franz whispered to me as I squeezed his hand desperately in that ennui freezing us to that same fragile spot, yet again. As I felt his cold hand return my frantic shaking, tenderness arose from Vltava like mist and suffocated me with her pungent judgement. I told him "Let's kill the fucker right now, meine lieber."
Franz said nothing, only bent down upon the nearly black desk and passed me a note as a keepsake. Then he insisted on exercising, still naked, in that crispy cold that you can smell only in the cobbled city of tamed towers and mundane blissed haven.
At that moment I only had to look at him to see how superbly we can abnegate together with such explosive oneness. Only he and I can ever know the invigorating taste of dreamed up self-pain orgasming inside the flesh. I examined his translucent face with my lips, the darkness of his on the tip of my tongue tasted innervating. At the end, we still held our hands tightly, I knew that we both wished we could run as far away as we can, at that point he gave me one more shy look.
I knew he wrote with that look upon his face whilst the family threw the din of the bruising noises on top of him, evoking the highest consummation and death there could ever be known to a man. I knew then that I would love him forever.
It truly was time to go. Psychonauts must sleep, but before such an act could be done, I unfold the note he gave me.
"Don't worry, the machine will stamp it in fifty five seconds."
Part II
The second time I visited Franz was on Friday, somewhere near midnight. I held his hand, his body must have consumed several dying absinthe suns whilst I was away, the heat burning him was nearly as terrible as the visions in all those silvery shivers of his flesh translated into mine. The telegraph of pain within him was highly dysfunctional, my hand was the nerve between his breath and his brain. I tried to concentrate as I sat there distracted by my hatred of Prague during the time when you could hear ticking of blood... which was also the time when the mist would begin her idiotic self-pity and would be suffocating Vltava more and more with her wailing (or was it vice versa, fuck God if I know!). What does a fog know of tragedy tattooed into black veins of night?
I had drifted away, but he politely ignored my rudeness. Still, it took me time to understand when he asked me to have some dinner, he handed me a page covered in stark naked words: Straßen, schreien, leise sein.... I wasn't hungry, no, that's not true. I was more than unhungry, the thought of eating was making me smaller and smaller. I asked him if I could at least do that in Yiddish or Czech, but he wouldn't listen and straining him was so foggy. I buttered them thinly, cut them into very small pieces and swallowed them, their inkiness, their punctured flesh even though they tasted like rotten silence, like shrieking fragments of ice. He was so relieved I will not be marked so he smiled with an effort, so very touching. He knew I never cry. For drink he offered me the violin. I took that gladly and spent the night hitting its ebony neck against the floor till sparrows flooded the room and their wings covered the paintings melting on the walls. I never told him piano was my wine and my whiskey.
In the morning his hand was slow but screaming. It was shaping out to me the silhouette of John Dee crouching under the green colossal light of the Angel, Dee trembling in agony under that perfumed breath of God's sanity transmuted to his cold room. Murmuring the spaces of letters. I still don't know which one was worse than the other. I took my shoe and tried to push them alive out of the window, but I lost control of my hands. Unforgivable. But at least I made them go away from Franz's thoughts, hide in the dust underneath the bed. For the time being anyway.
But what's worse yet, I had to go again. I hope when I return his face will be just like it was when I went.
Like a child's river in the early evening of summer.
III Part,
the final
I'm late.
Franz is dead, the contours of his body are in the process of being birthed into a starkly dark river, his eyes are wild salmons turning up in the stream. They imagine themselves greenly smelling of God and they search for Him. His soundless footfall in His empty room in His empty, blazeless heart.
The window is open and Prague breathes cobblestones and rains wormwood promises, but she remains wrapped into her own flesh, a dark, ash-covered wing over her frailly strong bird-head. She feigns silence, but I hear a heavy strings pushing through her body, that thick, colossal weight of death, underlined by rhythmic fall of the feet, bringing notes down as a steel blanket over the horizon. The sound of a brief reprieve. After it, risen hands of the wheels inside human flesh, the anti-clockwork motion of future. The mechanical eyes of history in its breakfast—repeated ad nauseam.
I look away.
At him. In peace with his ceasing. The liberation of his adieu. I contemplate my own ink-stain, the way it spread and subsided like the procession of seas inside me. I can't contain the poison of crunching letters any more. I wish he left me a note what to do with it. I wish it would end now.
I wish it didn't.
Petra Whiteley was born in Czech Republic but England has been her home since 1993. She writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction which appeared in many webzines (i.e. Apt, Danse Macabre, ditch, The Recusant, Weirdyear). She was a regular writer for the Glasgow Review, Eleutheria and Osprey. Her poetry and literary criticism also appeared in print magazines (i.e. The Plebian Rag, Essence). Petra's reviews of CDs and interviews with musicians regularly appear in Reflections of Darkness. Her poetry collections are The Nomad's Trail (Ettrick Forest Press, 2008), The Moulding Of Seers (Shadow Archer Press, 2009), Exhibition Of Defined Moments (erbacce-press, 2011) and The Liquid Metropolis (erbacce-press, 2012).
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