After Edvard Munch’s The Scream

The man was in the mirror behind you, the mirror swirling with reds and blues and moldy grays. In the mirror behind you, dust motes sprinkled the lake below, singing with blues and grays and moldy yellows. Dust motes sprinkled the sunken lies in the frozen lake, the cruising sailboats above tranquil, oblivious. In the frozen lake lay the cruising dead, and in their swirling and fantastical tongues you saw the lies, the lies that molded and sunk and reeked of stained yellow memories. In their tongues there lay two men facing away from you, walking away from you, forgetting away from you as your mouth sinks and your gums polarize and your teeth clink chitter chatter like a multitude of crystalline water glasses swirling in an early morning cocktail party, where reds and blues and moldy grays wrap snugly around warm waists and choked hemlines and teeth. In the chitter chatter you hear the scream, the swirling scream, the molding scream, the teeth that scrape against the scream, the loneliness that chokes the scream, the loneliness that un-chokes the scream. In the scream there is a certain loneliness that reeks of forget and regret and all the swirling blues and grays and yellows; were there even yellows between? In the tongued, seldom felt loneliness, you see the two men tottering away from you and the churning, ice blue tomato skies, roiling and writhing and polarizing where there is the scream, the scream that burns and hastens and chitter chatters. In the two men there is hatred that peels and steams like the hors d’oeuvres at the cocktail party, hatred that swirls and churns and screams like the scream. In the hors d’oeuvres you find minced hairs that choke on your own screams, but not before the oblivious sailboats figure-skating on the frozen lake wave and swirl and dance in the unforgotten minestrone skies. In your own screams there is a gentle, wavering peacefulness that shivers and seeks, because she knows that in the still there is no light, and in the dark there is nothing and everything at once again. In the still there is silence that polarizes and works against the turning gears, silence that freezes and beats his fists against fear. In the beating there is light again because here there is struggle, and where there is struggle, here, there are sailboats and men and the scream. In the struggle there is the roiling waves, the steaming skies, the reaching waves, the opening skies, the swallowing waves, the chitter chattering skies, the joining, the separation. In the waves and skies the scream lingers and sinks, swirling, forgetting, frozen, as if the hands that cling to your face drag dirt-stained, tear-stained, scream-stained tracks down your mask; was there ever a time when fear was a melody? In the mask there sings agony, and in the tracks and blood and dripping, smoldering blood there is only you; there has only ever been you and the scream.