via Daily Prompt: Bludgeon

Bludgeon.  Sounds like a stew you might eat, or an old-fashioned death.  When savages were savages who didn’t know the art of killing.  Rhymes with dungeon, curmudgeon or maybe even illusion.  Like the one you have that all things were better in the past…

I’m being bludgeoned by this beautiful landscape skimming by–flaming shades of orange, vermillion, honey, gold and sienna, mingling in the fragrant ether of the melting sky.  Why are the trees so red today? Why are the roses so sad? Why are the zinnias and cosmos going on and on as though they will never end… still dancing budding smiling…  Someone has morning glories on the vine still climbing, the color of robin’s eggs.  And even they are turning red.

I have a scarlet Chinese lamp, ox blood walls, a rose colored kilm with vegetable dyes, made on a bloody loom.

My eyes are red from crying. There is a tiny rusted thread crawling out of my throat that seems to be sighing or telling me someone somewhere soon will be dying…

I saw a bird perched against the sky high on a stone above the church today, looking down at me sorrowing at the bus stop, across from the cemetery where a thousand dead souls are lying.  The plastic flowers are all red. The graves from the 1800’s when this was Germantown, and full of fields, meadows, orchards. The fallen apples on the ground like severed heads.

I am being bludgeoned by this landscape, this early fog this morning when I stepped outside.The silence so eerie, so still, the sea of cars no longer sighing like the ocean, and even the birds inside the shrubs seem to be dead.  The air almost asphyxiating, smelling of smoke, patchouli, lavender and fire.  The red lamp the red carpet the red walls my heart beating beating beating like a sheep, a cow, a pig going to slaughter, feeling already the final blow across their broad dumb smiling heads. Thump!  “Looky here” the cowboy said, “I’m dead!”

I am a ruby pear a cherry red plastic apple. I am a red rose blooming with fury this foggy November day.   I am being bludgeoned to death by all this beauty this sadness this madness.

The last thing I remember is Oscar Wilde, “Salome” red lips like pomegranates.  That juice father brought home from that Russian store on Harding Avenue before there was “Pom” and rock star chefs who threw them in salads with escarole…… those lurid plates of middle eastern fun…… pouring out the thick, rich, almost black liquid we tilted back our heads, and drank long, slow, and deep, and immediately had visions of crazy lotus eaters, love, death, and war on a merry go round dancing in our brains, panoramic views of Aztec maidens climbing one thousand steps to their long trembling deaths, waiting waiting waiting, for one more frightening breath …and then it’s over– beauty, sadness, madness.  Looky here!   I’m bludgeoned finally, to death.