A COLLECTION OF RHYTHMIC PROSE AND POETRY
"The reader forms an attachment to the author/narrator as the parts meld into a story. The majority of the work is one - to two-page vignettes that create almost a novel in verse... Absorbing, an other...
Cassandra was my sister. She could have been a witch of sorts owing to her name. But she was my nurse sister, and it was she, Cassandra who, one day, asked me to recall the image of a thing I knew from youth.
A blue mass that floated above my head could not be touched nor changed with the power of thought. It's a solid and foam. It would congeal and had a taste of plasticine. From its grey box-like structure, it looked like the budding of a rose, a complexity of intricate design and pattern.
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It was anarchy and confusion set to music. It was a demented brain turned inside out. A garbage can and a radio folded backwards. It could enter and leave me at will and I would become this thing. It had a taste that touched every pore of my body and a mild cruelty of form and color that escaped examination. It could never be pointed to.
As soon as I became aware of its presence, it was gone and it was only after its disappearance that I realized it had been there. It was the most terrible of fears. It existed and I couldn't grasp it or describe it and my attempts to do so here are indeed very shallow.
It was my sister Cassandra who asked me one day to think of my father. We would sit in a small room speaking with him and I would lose his voice somewhere in the room and within the confines of the twelve-foot box, I would place him at the far end. He would exist in a world of his own, a world of miniature, and he would be forty feet away.
Cassandra smiled at me. She knew what I knew or at least pretended to. It was Cassandra who later asked me to turn my thoughts from my kind and loving father and reflect upon his somewhat less than senile wife, my mother.
It may not be accurate to describe a mother as fulfilling a basic function. It may not be human to speak of another human being as demented and as a burden to family and friends. It may not be just to say this and much more, but a bio-chemical reduction organism incapable of maintaining a constant thought longer than the sound remains in the air tends toward a mode of senility not commonly known. A woman who learned no love as a child could not give any as a mother. Her demands were slight, but they were demands; demands depriving my sister and I the ability to grow, denying us a quality of life she had never understood.
We survived and the few psychic scars have since vanished.
My mother would eat very little food. It was a wonder she survived to acquire such a pleasant senility at the age of sixty-five. In fact she ate less than the small canary she clutched by the throat one day, allowed it to utter its last "too-weet-eee" and placed it back on its perch as if nothing had happened. We came home that day after school, and she tried to convince us that the small bird was sleeping. She had tied a piece of string from its right leg to the perch, a small trick she said she had taught him that afternoon.
Chains of fears and childhood memories plagued my mother from her early days. She never talked of her past. I guess she never really thought of herself as a real person, open and independent.
In fact she could have been my father's concubine, a woman off the street who attempted to show us some warped form of affection but failed miserably. She was tolerated. Perhaps that was cruel, but we learned to respond to her in this way at such an early age that it was all we could do to avoid total domination by a woman who couldn't think, who did not know the source of her thoughts, who lacked any coherent rationale and as time progressed wanted us children to enter into her abyss of despair and self pity.
