In Hawaii, You Can Feel the Contours of Tropical Darkness by Philip Butera

The lonesome feel the contours of darkness. They follow the aimless corridors of nighttime, never understanding their direction. They see halos and pass neon names on gravestones, with the same thoughts circling their minds. They bump into themselves with disinterest. Not wanting anyone near, having conversations about how a warm wind trails the hurricane and ocean water is less cold than eyes that never catch your glazed glance.

It is night in Hawaii. Drapes are pulled tight, someone’s God hangs from a tiny nail on the bathroom wall, telling me this is where living ends and misery begins. I hear voices from other rooms talking about what might lie beyond the words of prophets who speak about being one with all possibilities. From promises to comparisons, Prometheus never understood the lyrics to any Dylan song. He just hummed one Cole Porter line about getting no kick from cocaine. When my mind was given back to me by King Kamehameha, I felt like an Indian Mongoose resting in rotting pineapples at Hanauma Bay.  

The implications are clear. I have plagiarized myself, withdrawing what I can’t seem to hold dear to my heart. The original saying, I need you is like a furious torrent of lava from Mauna Loa, unaware its destination is itself. Like me running into misfit mariners at Pearl Harbour. They carry those glass wings that emerge from definitions of self and selflessness.

I beg you, use the gun, squeeze the trigger. Concerns about apostolic logic cannot prevent you from appreciating the outcome of brain matter converging to conceive the child we spoke about when you walked me to the gallows. We had just returned from the back street brothels in Waikiki, where the sex experts needed help because aesthetic notions can take the place of sustenance when money is used to barter for expectations.  

You had me strip down to my elemental thoughts, then the whip you used to contemplate discretion slapped across my back. The ecstasy of pain drove me to believe in foul characters in adventure novels. All my blood funneled to a chalice used to make discoveries about what nature has rejected. Then your other lover, the one with blonde hair and thick greedy lips, called my name. It was my turn to be chained at the pillar. Your smile rested atop my agony as the tacks dug into my flesh, exposing my emotions. I screamed I love you before my self-torturing romanticism gushed to liquid hatred. I had created myself a proper noun now, but verbs were needed for me to become an attendant of God. The God you said made you orgasm just by holding your attention. In the end, the native young and disfigured anti-heroes confiscated my errant ideas. Whores from other small islands shifted me away from myself. I had become who I believed could not take my place.

Under blankets, martyrs told me to slip away from my intellect and float past the first signals but to introduce myself to myself when the horses are in the stretch. That is the only time dice rolled, honestly, and bullets are aimed straight at the riders. I came to see if there was a movement of the soul when Poe’s eulogy is repeated. But I was alone and only offered likelihoods that Van Gogh may have never painted anything while he was sane.

On Sandy Beach, you were naked, playing with the oracles of Delphi. I was locked in an instant that burns without fire. Your mouth was open, and your legs were spread. Surfers from Maui sang Gabby songs to contain their laughter. Moby Dick swallowed Pele. Then the sun defied logic, and I shivered. All the rules about wanting to be one with unpredictable spirits became vapors magicians use to distill moments from seconds. 

Behind Heartbreak Sanatarium, I caught a catamaran to Suicide Manor on Desperation Isle. The Samoans have had lobotomies and can’t feel the nooses around their necks. They just punish the quarry. There are no guests, no jukebox, no phones, and no witnesses. Each room has fire ants and scorpions to keep away the rats. I was tattooed by a woman without eyes who told me never to watch the waves; they are made of misconceptions. Copies of “The Kingdom of Evil” were everywhere, even in the galley where rum and bread were sold. Mango-covered fishing hooks called communion are placed on slack guitar sheet music and forced down our throats. My nurse, who was naked from the waist down, was obsessed with Frankenstein’s monster. She had knitting needles through her neck, and she repeated lines from Mallarme’s poem:  

“And I feel that I am dying, and, through the medium

Of art or of mystical experience, I want to be reborn,

Wearing my dream like a diadem, in some better land

Where beauty flourishes.”

When I told her I understood and would take her to Kilauea, she basted herself in misconception and dived into a vat of water that changed to wine. She was served that evening after prayers. I requested what I liked before, her vagina. But I was told that treat was saved for the sailors who walked on water.

When I was made to confess, I asked about you. This articulate man with oriental eyes told me everyone, had you. They showed me movies of you dancing with Bacchus and a mighty ram trailing behind you. The man held himself with both hands and asked if I wanted to taste you by kissing his genitals? I screamed, “Stop imitating me?” There was thunderous laughter, and a deep voice said, “Do you really think anyone is here?” 

 Coming towards me from Hana, I saw Blessed Mary’s cousin Elizabeth. She offered me her small breasts, but the sustenance was gone. I asked about her sexual preferences. She handed me her tongue, unzipped my torso, and entered. I felt her removing the barbs you carefully placed when you said, “I needed you.” 

When I told my analyst, “I feel more not like me than like me,” he had his young assistant fold his toilet paper, wipe him then flush the toilet. After tossing a wet paper towel into the waste bin, he looked at my reflection in the mirror and said, “Obviously, you have an idealized vision of yourself.” His assistant told me to lay on the wet floor. She handed me her panties and dragged adverbs across my chest. They left holes for conventions of the past to be released. I could not cry; I could only cast doubt on my existence. I was hypnotized by watching the removal of my psyche. It was placed in a coconut cave where abstract poets fought off protestant explorers. 

You met that couple from Eden underneath the new Colossus, connecting Lahaina and Kaanapali. I was at sea with Kurtz searching for the end of the heart of darkness. You confessed the husband, Adam, was dim-witted. He did not attempt to praise your beautiful breasts when he undressed you. He just brought you fragrant flowers and asked about life outside the garden. While listening to a Tahitian choir, Adam delicately placed small vegetables between your buttocks then buried his tongue so deep inside you. A snake rushed from your mouth.

On the other hand, his willowy Nordic wife, Eve, wanted to experience all of the excesses beyond danger. She refused to be a saint because the crudeness of their thinking was disconcerting. She alluded to the price of disenchantment – her one son killed the other. Without regret, all her lips were soft entrances into evolving deprivation. They swallowed away any plight replacing theology with the emergence of art itself. 

I was at the back of the Luau. Against the wall drinking Absinthe, a dash of Pervitin, and female ejaculate in a chipped Waterford champagne glass when Eve, Lady Macbeth, and you strolled into the nightclub. I immediately knew you were about to commit crimes, so I put tiny bubbles in my ears. With collective charms, you were dangerous sirens, temptresses looking for prey. Lady Macbeth’s long naked legs, Eve’s greenish-gold eyes, were center stage, and then there was you, my love, with an inviting mouth that could suck a heart from its chest. You three lured all the men to your table. Eve encouraged them to masturbate as all of you began to sing the sweetest, most enchanting sounds ever heard but never to be reheard. The men died as they lived, one indistinguishable from another. 

I slipped into the Ladies’ room, where women were enjoying each other in positions Fellini would have loved to film if it were really happening. I was out the window, rushing through the alleys and into the arms of a haole nurse who sucked the liquid from my ears. She played the ukulele beautifully. She told a story about how the world is divided into clowns, butchers, and artists. I would have to make a choice.

That evening as I waited for you to arrive home, significant errors continued. My crestfallen alter-ego spoke about a solipsistic, not an indulgent, frame of thinking. You stripped off your blouse when you unlocked the door and called me a child playing out Freud’s infantile regression. Your pouting pink nipples held me, and I wanted some logical mode to stop misleading myself that you even existed. We were having sex. Your mouth between my legs when I realized you were not who you thought you were, neither was I. We had become either Aquinas and Agrippina or Burroughs and Hypatia. 

Polynesian gladiatorial guards stormed in. Mahalo’s from Cicero began to arrive, but Father Damien intercepted them and suspected me for Queen Liliuokalani’s death. I was taken to a palace where my existence was denied, leaving me to ponder whether my indifference to myself is a state of mind or am I a minor character alluded to in Treasure Island.

When the self-loathing peaked, my chest was ripped open, a needle was pushed into my heart. Blood was perfusing through tubes into a trough where honeycreeper birds feasted. Crimson colors circled my thoughts. There you were, sitting on a barstool, drink in hand. You pointed a finger, yelling, as usual, telling all you never liked the texture of me. You preferred your lovers to have physical strength, not a strength of character. Who wants to be with someone who thinks instead of one who feels reacts with intensity without pondering. With tears in my eyes from the rejection, I left to resuscitate the sad-faced animals going ’round on a carousel. Realizing my heart was insignificant compared to my brain, they asked the music be changed to Hawaiian ballads. The giraffe recited stories from Tales of the South Pacific while a lion impersonated Captain Cook. Afterward, I was brought to a ridge overlooking the ocean by the police. I was questioned by transient humpback whales, who found me unfit to be called insane.   

I recall the day we sought redemption. We had just returned from watching the sunrise from Haleakala. We realized everything about us was random and sometimes cruel. There was a note on the coffee table our dog could not take living with us anymore. She said the apartment either smelled of lust or combustive misery. Anyway, she felt like a Siamese cat trapped in the body of a dachshund. She was off to Bangkok for a species change. 

The last patron saint of discontent knew the world was terrible. Jung had become a photographer, sharing quarters with Strindberg, who identifies himself as Louis Armstrong, and Nijinsky, who wandered the streets at night in search of himself. In an awful nightmare, they all experienced the Dance of Death on the border of der Genius, and whatever remains, however, improbable must be the Truth. I yearned to be there. I no longer believed in wholeness or possessions. I saw a world acting on impulse. I insisted on entering the mind of God, and unimpressed, I replaced the delusion of words with a poet’s flair for the unimaginable. Angry troops immediately marched into my head and carted me to a musical performance of my demise.

   You were in the kitchen, rethinking Hon Chew Hee’s paintings. Colors from the inside of Kona winds filled your thoughts. We were past rejecting social norms, any norms. Pavarotti was singing Nessum Dorma while a coven of punchbowl schizophrenics sang Hawaiian wedding songs. The sounds of birds, ocean, and music perfectly blended because none of this existed except for the audience, who were Vietnam Veterans who were being lied to about their existence. 

I fell to my knees. When you lifted your sarong, your vagina was oblong, and your thoughts black. I looked for my reasons. I searched my mind for explanations about reconciliation, but they rapidly disintegrated, and only paradoxes remained. I ripped at your flesh, filling the gap between cerebral and visceral with images of surfboard artwork, something Elvis could paint but the Beamer’s would despise. The reflection in the mirror with a smug, indulgent attitude put it succinctly: punishment is always oversimplified. 

I escaped from Diamond Head again. The polyester Hawaiian shirt gangs were on my trail, and I stumbled into my tortured mind’s furthest dungeon from the side road. Where your words obliterated whatever it was I dreamed about that would raise intellectual verse to unforgivable ecstasy. You said I had the concerns of a genius, but I lacked the courage to grieve for my sanity. The compass you gave me before having sex with the neighborhood showed the effects of imitation. Nothing is real when imagination is a branding iron that your mind craves. 

All things are more significant than themselves. That is only true when you have little enthusiasm for what you have become. My legs are my pallbearers. When you said goodbye, why didn’t you serve me poison sashimi? Then I could have debated with the angels instead of that existential waitress with huge sunburned breasts you accused me of sleeping alongside.

Chuckling for not caring, enlightenment struck you. My fingers wanted to find that slit you continually demand, I lick. Mentally, I needed to see my blood cover the walls in that little grass shack, that record you played repeatedly. I was to be the next character introduced in the novel you never completed—a cross between Gatsby and Ulysses. 

With a choice of birth, rebirth, or demise, the Truth unravels and becomes utterly fearless. I will always be an unpredictable continuum and never at rest to give you what you anticipated. I am me, a vicious shark in the confines of a small mind. I am either going mad or returning from madness. My aspirations are as delicate as Hawaiian rainbows, but you,  with your bitter sarcasm, belong in a discarded script by Tennessee Williams.