Marmalade

Two marmalade walls extending to heaven
Joined seamless and thick
They’re the yellow reserved for sickness and buttercups
No top no bottom no behind me either
Only artificial sunshine
Reverberate the howling
Emanating from somewhere deep in their bones
This is the rumble of mothers who’ve lost children
In delicate accompaniment to restless winds
Uneasy under the weight of surreality
They populate this dreamscape
Skin like marzipan-soft- frozen smiles
Reflections of before this nightmare
Rows increasing rows
Laid out before me in the eternity between consciousness and corner
Those walls seem so much further
Beyond the faceless ocean of fair skin raspberry lips
The panic builds
Immediate yet somehow beyond touch
Eyes, their eyes, how they call my sanity into question
So different now
The delineation of a socket coming into focus
And suddenly all is black
No lid no lash no eye only black and solid
Sinking
Somewhere into what should have been cranium..or mouth
It falls away and takes its pretense of a face
Effigies in wax straying ever to close to heat
Invisible to me but evident to them
Sliding down the world before me
Falling to where there should have been a floor
Leaving only the yellow reserved for sickness and buttercups in their absence
Maddening and towering onward, upward
Then
They stop
Mid slide a fault in the stop motion animation
They reverse
Pools of marzipan flesh leap from below
Climbing atop itself to build anew the face it was
Faster than before they melt again
Up and down the faces
Solid to liquid or somewhere between
Nothing beneath
No body no bones
Just faces rising and falling an infernal loop of the damned
Maddening their howls
Louder and louder
Crescendo silence
Suddenly, absent
All of the faces and all of their sounds
In ellipsis peace he enters my dreamscape
Black as emptiness and composed of sharp edges
His is not the placid smile of children’s faces, lifeless
He is terror
He is menace
He is crawling down my walls
And still he bears no name

-EJoveJohnson