one winter the man fell through the lakeshore ice and felt a god's cold hammer slam into his heart and his brain. in his terror he heard in the distant reaches of his memory his mother's voice telling him the story of the snow queen and the young boy with a splinter of ice in his heart. his sister saved him. the ice was above him like an endless window to paradise and he beat upon it with his fists as you would beat upon a rock. the water of the lake was like liquid iron. he began to want the darkness. he turned from the unbreakable light and floated towards the darkness as if he had found a way to go home at last. on the ice above, his gloves and his canvas chair. a tartan blanket for his legs. an unopened book.
the colour of her on the sheets of the bed. pale on the dark blue, she dances and drowns in your dreams. blood wave. star whisper. ice flame. she knows she is only in your mind.
WHO SAID that your heart is a zero - a zero expanded as the world - like that delicious raindrop summer that never existed except in your dreams of your dreams. the unimaginable zero summer. all of the things you ever saw and ever knew are melting like celluloid on fire while the obsessional music grows louder. carousel jingles. frantic, overwound musical boxes. fading away as if into intergalactic space.
a never ending chess game with your friends and lovers as pieces - their personalities, powers, likes and dislikes sliding and merging into geometric fields of influence in your tired brain as you slumber on the long train journey home. I have earned this. I have earned the voice that speaks like this, the vision that sees the world in this way. I earned it by enduring the madness that produces it. it is mine.