I Died in My Kitchen

These god damned fever dreams coming at night, at naps. Lately I’m beached at dusk, briny coastal fog helping the sun get spent, while I’m eaten alive by a blackened, scabby whale’s liver. And ambergris – word from a dream – a putrid smell strong enough to be there when I wake. Unless that’s just me now, rotting from the inside out. Diagnosis prognosis hypnosis, waking is a kind of psychosis where I learn that I can’t see much of anything and then find out that I wish I really couldn’t. Half-blind is normal enough with my lazy left eye doing what it wants, but on a hungover morning with both eyes gooey and gluey from whatever it is in the booze or the body or both that does that, the only thing I can really do is cover that wandering oculus with a grimy hand and look around from my sticky naugahyde bed for whatever in the hell is making those noises. “I’m going to take this,” someone says and I wonder if I had asked anyone over. The smell is normal the hell is normal the visitor is not. I kind of fall up off the couch and plod pigeon toed – why is hockey on the TV in August – across my tiny living room. There he is in my kitchen taking things and stacking them on the table while I let the doorway hold me up. A conspicuous lily sits his lapel and whispers up at him. He grabs a picture off the empty, buzzing fridge and doesn’t ask who it is because I guess he knows and says as much: “Your mother. Homely, and your freckles are a tether to her.” He cocks an ear to the lily and tucks the polaroid into his coat in a pocket with my toothbrush. Beyond his bony shoulder my pills – due for a dose – stand soldiered between inert oven coils and I worry over having to shimmy past him to get to the orange bottles. Socks on linoleum, a sweaty, graceless glide through six feet of fear that he doesn’t even notice. I push down and turn and ask “Are you taking my dictionary?” The fridge stops buzzing. The Bruins score in the living room. Over the mute bay a fog horn gives its bovine low. In place of an answer comes an unexpected correction: “Those are your morning pills you’ll need the others now.” I know they are I just woke up – but I’ll be damned if it isn’t umbrella black outside the fire escape.