Before and After the War by Philip Butera

Philip M. Butera grew up in Buffalo, NY, earned a BS degree from Gannon College in Erie, PA, served in the US Navy then received an MA in Psychology from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He has four books of poetry, “Mirror Images and Shards of Glass”, “Dark Images at Sea”, “I Never Finished Loving You”, and “Falls from Grace, Favor and High Places. His crime novel, ” Caught Between”, has been published, and his second novel, “Art and Mystery: The Missing Poe Manuscript” will be available in the Spring of 2022.

Sometime during the night, while I was sleeping, my head exploded. When I awoke, I saw myself alone, dreams shattered. I reached for my hand, but I rejected myself. Thunder and lightning chattered nonsense outside, their bravado wrapped in cathartic accolades.

I shake myself once more. My body asks why? Is that me walking between the exploding bombs, unraveling before the alarm sounds? I see where I am still sleeping, wide awake in dreams about nightmares. Over the radio, theatrical companies announce the death of sanity. They say it was a waste of time. Even God walked off the battlefield. 

 “Didn’t you know?†Is the echo from an answer I had given myself many years ago? My reflection slips away from the mirror before realizing the pain inside me. Tears fill my eyes and roll down my face into the consequences I am to experience when I awake or when I fall asleep. Sad and sorry about my absence, I continue to sleep.

I am gone, and my lover is alone. We are just a discourse my friends are having among themselves. I contemplate the history of the scalpel. There is always something sharp to be appreciated. Things sharp make statements, create emotions, confirm punishment, and give reason to wonder, while blood becomes art. And art is the space between genius and insanity, an eclipsing river pregnant with tributaries, but creativity is needed, and thoughts become too precious to share.  

There is no revelation, only agony, and when you see yourself through my eyes, the night becomes paralyzed, and illusions are confiscated. I look at myself, drunk with ineptitude, filling no niche close to worthwhile. I sneer at the injustice of being me, though being anyone else would still carry the sting of insignificance. 

I am the softness of brilliant light on stage, leaving one dream to enter another. You can see me, frightened as I appear from mere rhetoric. I observe the sentiment. I absorb what rational thinking deems unfit. Then I am abandoned along with the reason.   

As dogs bark and cats signal angels to fly from this dream into holographic visions, backgrounds are wiped clean of erasing where every warm dawn shadows death, and interrogations are given of the dying who have never lived. 

Before being crucified by my comrades at the request of my enemies, I am questioned by my lover. I say, “My love crafts images,†there is only snickering.  

My lover, smiling with men lined up behind her, states, “ You could not get my nakedness out of your mind.†This is true, and either way, naked or serving the powerful but illiterate, nails are pounded into every sentence I make, and when I protest that I could speak for myself, a spike finds my heart. It is not bloody, more like a short story no one will ever read.

Introspecting on a reverie, I insist you wrap your bare legs around my face. The smell gives you away, just as I did. We stampede with Disney animal characters on the outskirts, with Wagner on loudspeakers. Being with you un-imagines all my thoughts. You are enthusiastic. Telling the philistines war is a game of penalties when suddenly a fragment of barded wire embeds itself in my eye. My mouth opens, and toreadors exit giving me the sight to hear all my mistakes crying to make me whole again.

In pain, I think, I think about thinking, I ride the Ferris wheel with vengeful gods, who tell me about the boys they bed, and I tell them about the merciless gods I skewer and feed to honeymoon couples who wake too late to understand their sanity will shortly be wide-eyed sadness. The wind whirls, suppressing evidence, revealing deficiencies. Repelled, I retreat into the disillusionment of being alive. I recognize the sea and Jesus walking on it with my mind open. My queries ride the waves to him, but his replies smash into broken walls disappearing between the acts of knowing and the impossibilities of understanding. 

Traveling quicker than false definitions, I shed my old skin, casting off the sins my mother said I never made, but my father laughs. He knows his son is an unbearable anchor tied to him. I am not the cleanliness of hope but a forever waste of my mother’s milk that could have been given to a radiant sister who always created smiles but died after only living two weeks. In a jungle where words never connect and time is a blind gladiator, there is a progression of written waste. I look for the sun at night to save the spurned, but I am trapped. I, as for me, inside coils, inside roseries, falter to recognize my presence, just like my father.

My body surfaces in a barroom with a thousand stab wounds, yet one more is needed. As I am being stripped and whipped, I am told that love is just an equation of judgment. Standing in the distance, in her dream, not mine, a beautiful woman with blonde hair and large bare breasts, hiding a scar on her ego, deals me into the game. She makes me swallow my interest in writing and has me playing against all I’s I have told myself I am.

While I speak of the mental anguish in Crime and Punishment, all my cards turn blank, and with a fist full of undressed queens, the beautiful woman wins every hand. She says spending time between her legs is neither pleasure nor punishment, that at the furthest uncurling end of thoughts is something worth living or dying to experience. It was designed for adventurers who think the mind is too dangerous to think about. It is thought to conform to its own existence. 

When what you see can’t be explained and what you feel can’t be expressed, the inquisition begins. Deep in a pit during REM sleep, at the center of my being, Saint Paul looks back after matching wits with Caligula. Both men raped the words before they used them and left them for dead. Frightened that the sky would blacken and fall, I returned to my birth to see if I had awakened. What remained was a shattered mirror reflecting me as a teenager reading “The Bell Jarâ€Â  in the basement next to the furnace. My two brothers, whom I will never meet, are dead.

In my back pocket, there is a map of Baltimore where I plot to help Poe unbury his three mothers and search for Virginia in the city beneath the sea. When the haters of poetry arrive, I  state, “I am a prism, fractured, lost in segregated dreams.†Nevertheless, I am called a traitor, and I am named as a witness against all that prevailing tastes want to destroy, all art dreamed about, and all art that slays sanity. I state it was never an apple but a strawberry that Eve gave to me, aware of my enlightenment, hooves pound the earth, and a tempest rages from the observer I had become, but juries are deceiving, as Adam can attest too.

When I notice all the lyrical beauty around me has disappeared, I run to Raphael’s painting, “School of Athens.†An echo remains that we don’t know when we are happy until we are not. Hemmingway, fat, and American is what is left. Vacant, devoid, and not allowing words to change us, he wrestles Fitzgerald for Zelda’s thoughts on the ambiguity of summer twilights. They, those who have never understood that poetic art gives substance to the spirit, grasp space and want to populate it with colorless mono-syllables. As I meander from here to there on the outskirts of my thoughts, I spot Constable painting clouds in all my dreams. He stands on the shoulders of the darkness in me.

War is debated by those who never spoke the truth, not even when their portraits combusted but their images remained unscathed. After the accusations that artwork had become the chaos of human dignity, the verdict became law. Eve and me, I in my mind, and Eve, even with a touch of madness, knew rejection was neither a consequence nor an exertion but a risk to stultify language. We rejected the confusion, and with her buttocks numb from kisses, she shook me, “Awake.â€

I sit up on the bed. Eve takes her finger from her vagina and puts it in my mouth. I immediately dissect myself into feelings, images, and sensations. All pathological conditions, but I recognize I bathe in the celestial colors of ultramarine and vermillion. Both are superior in capturing false thoughts and curing mental malfunctioning. Perfect, I invite authors into my sanity; on skates, they cut deeply into my brain until what I have known becomes what I will eventually conspire to master. I set out to widen my duality. I watch myself and me, lear at each other, one thinking the other will not understand what I am shouting in my sleep without Eve’s confirmation that I am my own dream.

“There was a window,†Eve, now the Birth of Venus, states. “An interpretation in stained glass,†I draw concentric circles around celebrated passages of The Stranger. The sheer weight of incidental words is dangerous. They are melancholic scorpions and delusional black widows angrily attacking self-retribution. Endlessly destroying, endlessly maddening, the repetition continues, illiterate men chronicling their obsession with persecution, telling tales of stillbirths on the dawn of man’s conception. This phenomenon consists of overlapping light and dark, but vigilance is needed because omitting the truth is the same as lying. This consistently happens before and after the war.  

 There is a disdain for reasoning. What is wanted is closed paths to expectation. I rustle, feeling somewhat unearthed and fortunate for the ideas I am experiencing. Then through the tunnels, the abyss, the stretch of momentous time, I see you. You are Eve. All of your smiles now dispel all misconceptions. Your mask crumbles, and you escape. I see you, I see me, in the distance like it was, I see lanterns in the misty forest between the trees, I see you, I see me, I see us reveling in what can never be destroyed.

I awake, sweating, feeling traveled and tired. Sometime during the night, while I slept, my head exploded.