Philip received his Masters’s Degree in Psychology from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He has published 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 fifth, Forever Was Never On My Mind, will be out Summer of 2023. Two novels, Caught Between (Which is also a 24 episodes Radio Drama Podcast https://wprnpublicradio.com/caught-between-teaser/)  and Art and Mystery: The Missing Poe Manuscript. His next novel, an erotic thriller, Far From Here, will be out Fall of 2023. One play, The Apparition. His current project is collaborating with a British photographer, a French artist, and an American graphic artist to produce a coffee table book with the theme of feminine beauty. Philip also has a column in the quarterly magazine Per Niente. He enjoys all things artistic.

In Hawaii, you can feel the Contours of Darkness

A story that should be a surreal painting

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, and 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 thoughts were given back to me by King Kamehameha, I felt like a hung-over 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, much like me conversing with ghost mariners at Pearl Harbour. They are easily recognizable wearing glass wings that emerge from definitions of 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 replace 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 were aimed straight at the riders. I came to see if there was a movement of the soul when Poe’s eulogy was repeated. But I was alone and only offered the likelihood that Van Gogh may have never painted anything while 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 had lobotomies and couldn’t feel the nooses around their necks. They just punish the quarry. There are no guests, phones, or 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.

Rococo mango-covered fishing hooks called communion were placed on slack guitar sheet music and forced down our throats. My nurse, 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 delusional chocolate cherries 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 toilet paper, wipe him, then flush the toilet. After tossing a wet paper towel into the waste bin, he looked at my reflection and said, “Obviously, you have an idealized vision of yourself.” His assistant told me to lie 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 Christian mercenaries.

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 and buried his tongue deep inside you. A snake rushed from your mouth.

On the other hand, his willowy Nordic wife, Eve, wanted to experience all 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 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 out a heart from a chest. You lured all the men to your table. Eve encouraged them to masturbate as halo crowns appeared above your heads. Each of you took a verse creating the sweetest, most enchanting sounds ever heard but never to be heard again. The men died as they lived, one indistinguishable from another.

I slipped into the Ladies’ room, where women enjoyed each other in positions Fellini would have loved to film if “this” were really happening. I was out the window, rushing through the alleys and into the arms of a lily-white nurse who drained 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.

Significant errors continued that evening as I waited for you to arrive home. 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 was between my legs when I realized you were not who you thought you were, and neither was I. We had become either Aquinas and Agrippina or Burroughs and Hypatia.

Polynesian gladiatorial guards stormed in. Mahalo postcards began to arrive, but Father Damien intercepted them and suspected me of 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 if I am 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 and reacts with intensity without pondering?

With tears in my eyes from the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, 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 almond-eyed 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 local police. I was questioned by passing tourists, 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 identified himself as Louis Armstrong, and Nijinsky 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 where I was. 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 The Great Wave of Kanagawa. Colors from Kona winds filled your thoughts, and we were past rejecting any social 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 War Veterans who were again 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 appreciate but his audience 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 roadside dungeon. You were admiring your thighs as your words obliterated whatever 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 white-hot branding iron your mind longs for.

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. Why didn’t you serve me Agatha Christy inspired sashimi when you said goodbye? Then I could have debated with the angels instead of that existential waitress with huge sunburned breasts you accused me of having obtuse fantasies about.

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 on 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.