seven stories
© 1998 Devon Koren

the world goes tick tock, tick tock in its cyllindrical shapes...i've spun time around my shoulders, draped them like shadows around me, and still heaven plays like a marionette on the strings of my heart, on the evil springboard patterns in the kaliedoscope...four more hours. i can still feel the caffeine as it hits my blood, it's only a pinprick but still even the heat could burn hideaways through my eyelashes and shorts...to wind up, to pitch, to throw a home run to the first field of forever and pick at the spikes on my ginger-ale sneakers and high-tale it out of there... maybe the music would still sound the same, even seven stories up, even half past the forever wheel...i'm turning. over and over the springs have fled, the floodlights draw in and my naked frame steams something akin to honey, with all of the sugar in my blood. glucose is warm, it gives the salty tinge to the sea, its been hiding underneath my flesh from the moment i first took air, and still, enough is never enough, if i want more, in my tea, in my coffee, i can drink it all down and drown myself in nectar and pepsi cola...photosynthesis behind the precious honey-bee in me. seven stories up, and i can almost see the ocean sometimes, just like poor dear edward in his nest above all nests....the birds are even lower than i, still with my eyes on their little gray backs and their vinyl beaks pecking, pecking the tick tock, tick tock of the ants, the ants with their phonographs and photographs and digital earthbound frames, marching in and out, hurrah, with a hundred or so broken umbrellas abandoned to the gods of the storms...shipwrecked, my feet are still missing the sea, sometimes they remember a time when they used to have fins, when they were scaled, when they could breathe aqua-marine and sing...really sing, pretending to jack-knife into the corridor, man overboard and my skirts take to the sail...i haven't found my fishnets, yet, i don't know where i downed the two-thirds airborne like the will-o-whisps on an irish midnight....one two, one two, the ants with their ginger-snap smiles, their clear-cut homoginized life, so smooth, so placated, the adventures drowned in fairy books and burnt in the fire of their high school career, oh yes, now this is the time to get serious, isn't it? this is the time to narrow one's eyes and pout and frown and slowly wriggle into the dead skin our parents left behind for us to wear, those reptilian hand-me-downs....so, let's get serious. let's get serious about the sun, the blazing solar energy which eclipses every so often and keeps all of the mountain fish warm. let's get serious about the single blade of grass on which we step and demolish the life of a completely innocent earthworm without even blinking. let's get serious about the apples, the scrunchy sound a single bite can do, the way the juice will trickle down your chin and you move to wipe it with the back of your sleeve as your eyes dart around wondering if anyone caught you in one of your less glamourous moments. let's get serious about warm bagels and cream cheese on a sunday morning when the rest of the world is away in their pews with their heads bowed and their shiny shoes on, but you, you just didn't want to get up this morning, so right around ten you slip into something comfortable and take the crosswalk to a pastery store. let's get serious about coffee in the middle of the night, the waffle house coffee, the bottomless ones, that pump your body so full of caffeine you can't even blink without feeling mild forms of electrocutioun. the trees, the branches to scramble upon in short skirts so that all the boys underneath can see what you're not wearing, the shots of rum in a new year's haze when your tongue has barely tasted alcohol before, swinging, laughing, the way air pushes into your lungs on a windy day with such violence that it almost tickles, and you can't help but to break out into smiles from it, hanging outside of the window at seventy miles an hour, yawping, bringing down the moon, the stars, those moments when you truly feel as if you are the king of the world....the soft velvet kisses first thing in the morning when your eyes and your arms are entangled with that which you love the most in the world, the way ice cream melts and makes your hands all sticky, the way if you don't watch your step you trip over your shoelaces, sneezing, the fact that one little sheep could take the life of a flower and estinguish the life of a star of one small prince, are these not matters of consequence? tomorrow doesn't exist, it never did, you only imagined it, in your memory somewhere where all of your dreams are kept, it's the same brain, after all...this moment, this minute, this flicker in the life of a star, this is all you have...the universe could explode, implode, spontaneously combust, and all of your worry, your nibbling on the edges of your pen stick, the misery you let in your heart and trudged through with bulky boots instead of taking the courage to actually walk on the water itself, will have achieved nothing, will end with a small little groan and then cease to be, and all you will have left in your heart will be the void and the darkness that always was...no. not me. i'm getting serious. with my thousand and one broken umbrellas and my crystalline snowflakes and the kisses of angels i will stand on the edge of my seventh story hideaway with all of the laughter i can muster and all of the bubbles i can send and watch the sun die...and i will not be afraid. this is it. this is all i have. alive. i'm alive. over and over i throw that word through my mouth, my tonsils, and still it tastes just as marvelous as it did only moments ago, alive, here, in this world, to feel, to think, to have story after story to collect in silver-spun yarns, spiderwebs made out of sticky fingers and tricks, everything now, i can send stones plummeting through the atmosphere, whatever i want, here, in this world, where my fingertips trace the frame of plush toys and concrete walls and felt tip pens and flesh and fur and hair and lips and stickiness and needle-pricks...alive. alive here in these clothes of my body, this ragamuffin girl with gingerbread curls all tousled and roughed-over from a stormy night's sleep...still, in dreams of heaven i only find life, running through the corridors of rain eating pizza and zig-zagging among the elephant trees, shoe in the mud, one squish and then the other follows, the splash of a puddle, the soaking wet to the bone feeling of being left out in the downstorm and loving every minute of it...yes, i'm finally beginning to get serious. i'm getting serious about carousels and video games and eating barbeque in strange little red-neck hangouts and making penny wishes in fortune cookies and making a diet of chicken fried rice and skittles...i'm getting serious about the winter and the snow and the way that scarves wrapped around you always make you feel warm, and how hot chocolate always singes the first layer of taste buds as it goes down, and that even in the plains of tennessee you can see the mountians...at least at my seventh story roost, where the pigeons play.