To the Artist's Page                 To our home page

To Luke Buckham's previous piece     To Luke Buckham's next piece

counterclockwise

in the dream that made me snap up in bed, my eyes connecting immediately with my fishtank, i am walking past the dairy coolers that i walk past every day at work, but this time there are some kind of leeches plastered against the inside of the glass doors as i walk by, and i keep smiling at my fellow employees and customers telling them that i'm very happy. when the fish stir my vision i realize that my dreams have been intensifying since the wall started to pucker, the tan-colored paint bubbling softly. the landlord said that it was the couple upstairs having sex in their bathtub and splashing water onto the floor above my living-room wall, but a leak like this must be internal, the waterpipes themselves bursting like flowerstalks. do flowerstalks actually burst? i am using very flaky poetic imagery lately in my conversations with myself, which is strange since i have never read poetry.

i had figured out at some point that all i had to do to rise to the position of manager at the grocery store was to act assertive all the time, whether i knew what i was doing or talking about or not. it worked, and i managed to hide my nervousness about being an imposter for a while, then i realized that most of the other managers do the same thing. this gave me an eerie sense of easy command and unshakable stability, and i started to fill my house with bright fish and exotic birds to try to bring some color into my home, to invade my own sense of inevitable safety. but they never come out of their tanks and cages, even when i open the cages the birds often continue to sit inside, occasionally dropping disturbingly dry and unhealthy-looking turds. i thought sometimes when i was very stoned that the fish actually cared about me, and i was wrong--they didn't, and don't, especially now that i have stopped feeding them and they are floating belly-up on a thin grey film. there are two workers who look at me when i tell them to do something with faces as unimpressed as these fish and it makes me want to belittle them but i don't know how. they are two old black men who always discuss history together during their breaks, this week they kept talking about some culture called the Moors or something, who raped or something and pillaged and painted themselves blue, never leaving their horses except to rape or something, and it upset me because i felt like the two men knew i was listening and were sending me an obscure threat.

i have stopped watching television since the rotting of my wall began, and increased so rapidly, the plaster getting muddy, strange white-green mud, the landlord won't fix it and i feel helpless. i have dreams where i stand by the wall and it starts to disintegrate faster than usual, and there are horrible faraway plops as soggy chunks of plaster land on the sidewalk outside, making the puddles on the tar slightly milky and dusty with it. a ragged v-shape is torn in the top of the wall near the ceiling and weirdly in the dream i am tall enough to see through it. i am obsessed with my apparent inability to decide what to do about it--i want to call a repairman but i feel like my landlord should repair it, i shouldn't have to pay for something that's not my fault, and when i wake up my girlfriend is lying next to me but she is a statue made of milk-cartons, the ingredients obscured. i have stopped drinking milk and begun to think that the newspapers in the lunchroom at work! (i have cancelled my own subscriptions) are threatening me in the vulnerability of my newfound sense of apartment insecurity. since i got my job as manager i felt that i would always be safe, but the bubbling of the wall disturbs me, the other evening i kneeled next to it and actually cried, and imagined that i could see my girlfriend's face through the crack. they (i don't know who they are, i think they might be the two black men from work who are always talking about history of something) have nailed her to a pinetree that reaches up to the third story where i live, her hands crossed over each other, the one slim nail through both palms, i can feel the nail going between my own handbones and a bedsheet is tearing behind me or inside me.

i have never been depressed for this long before, i thought that the hard part of my life was over, but then this wall that reminds me what a little boy i am, unable to deal with important issues that affect me. yesterday i was bending over a cash register at work and i felt the two black men behind me, derisive, and i was afraid that i might like it if they entered me from behind. i wake up in the middle of the night haunted by this, strung up on the pine trees by this, and now i feel ridiculous at work, as if i'm walking through a world that has already died and am the only one who knows it, because i have seen this unexplainable decay and still the water comes out through the pipes, soaking me when i want it to, but now i know that it can go wrong, that an elbow joint somewhere in the circuitry of the walls what i'm not familiar with will burst and a tile will be knocked out of the wall and hit my face while i'm washing, knocking me out, and then the landlord will find! me naked and say cruel and embarrassed things, the shower curtain wrapped around me and making me look like fish innards pulsing. i only know how to spread more plaster, and that would just drip away. sometimes i see her face through the crack, i swear, and i think it may have been a week since i've returned her calls, or anyone's. i am afraid to show my landlord how angry i am about my destroyed life, i'm afraid to be honest, it embarrasses me and i can smell the plaster in my dreams like sidewalks of green chalk and quicksand, no vines anywhere to grab onto, fishtanks emptied into darker soil, the glass rectangles sticking out of the earth like the beginning of a landfill in an unlikely location.

clutching an old photo of old friends who i haven't spoken to in a decade, the smiles made meaningless, i am made dizzy by softening chalk of the crack in the wall, think i hear the plaster splatting on the walkway, and i fall forward with an empty vodka bottle in my hand that i seem to have finished drinking weeks ago, but i can smell the wet freshness of it's alcohol, and i fall forward into the wet plaster, my face leaving a very timid imprint, a mask, a shadow, and i fall to the floor, too late to see it's soggy representation of my features, the rug scratchy but soft, the water beginning to invade it's comfort.

To the top of this page