A Billion Burning Dreams

a billion burning dreams S teven T. Licardi

For those who heal and for those who hurt.

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I Left My Sanity In Venice I left my sanity in Venice. Screamed it into a pillow and I can remember the easing pain as it passed between my teeth. I vomited up the baby with the bathwater, all the glue that held my soul together. The best of me spit out and sucked up into the down. Featherlight. The final quill that broke this idiot’s heart. Too weak to care, too worse for wear, too drunk on drying tears to apologize. She cauterized the wounds that I let bear. A threadbare, skin-bound book — a diary of a man left scrawled with confessions

and Rorschachs. The ghost of me dressed in cotton sheets with holes cut out to see what I couldn’t see.

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I abandoned my sanity in Venice, into emptied bottles of champagne. Rolling around the tiled floor of a hotel where we stayed far away. I left it on my lover’s tongue. A tab of acid to dissolve everything. When a stranger asked: “How long have you two been together?” I had to prove them wrong. The side-shot glance that betrayed the prior few weeks spent bathed in gasoline. Cerebrospinal fluid set ablaze. Finally. An awkward exchange that proved we were a mess wrapped in cellophane. Preserved to be dissected. A show to be reviewed badly.

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I left whatever semblance of me that resembled something good rotting in Venice. Buttery flesh falling from bone in the waters that erode its canals. A steeping tea bag of dried up love letters

that taste of ink and no amount of milk and sugar can remove the bitterness.

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If I Looked Like What I’ve Been Through If I looked like what I’ve been through, I’d have the face of a woman and a man contorted into a kind of in-between: Delicate and masculine with eyes that pierce and lips that tempt, with a jaw of glass that slices like obsidian, and a brow that collects beads of sweat, where ideas fall to their deaths. If I looked like what I’ve been through, I’d have a heart where my brain is supposed to be. I’d have a brain where my heart is supposed to be. And they’d constantly be switching — feeling, thinking. Fighting for what is right, neither able to decide who is winning. If I looked like what I’ve been through, I’d be wrapped in a three-piece straitjacket with cufflinks. Dressed to the nines in a canvas tux with the images that cloud my mind painted on. It’s... a metaphor for my artistic fervor, my former affliction transformed into brilliance, no less insane. If I looked like what I’ve been through, I’d have cuts so deep in my wrists that my hands would bend back as if attached with hinges. I’d have Bible pages rolled up and tucked inside the veins,

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unfinished poems and dollar bills that I’d unroll from time to time to remind me to hold on. If I looked like what I’ve been through, my blood type would be ink and you would see it coursing in sentences and verses just beneath my skin. If I looked like what I’ve been through, my skin wouldn’t be able tell you what race I am, but you would still judge me. I’d have the misplaced morality of a Christian, the pantheon of a Hindu, the hope of an Atheist, and the history of a Jew. If I looked like half as much as I’ve been through, I’d only be half a person, an incomplete masterwork, a magnum opus loaded only with dummy bullets. I wouldn’t have half the passion that bleeds like beads of sweat from my gaping pores in rivulets of syntax that I dab with loose-leaf paper to preserve what I’ve been through. If I looked like what I’ve been through... you wouldn’t even see me. You would only see the things that make me me ,

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but they are not me. You see, I am so much more than just what I have been through. I am infinitely stronger.

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Dear Anxiety, Tell me what jilted tastes like. I want to understand the mark of your genius, the codex of your strategy. You have always had the upper hand in this civil war of silence that scuttles brain with grapeshot volleys

behind the whites of my eyes. You captured the flag long ago and claimed it as your own when I was a child. Do you remember how we used to play cops and robbers in our neighbor’s backyard? You were always the cop — keeping the peace, protecting civil liberties and freedom. Now I think you were the robber all along. Stealing away intimacy. Safety, comfort, sexuality. You got good at burying bodies, at planting evidence. A crooked cop, shining the brightness of my light in my eyes

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inside the interrogation chamber of my mind to try and convince me that I was guilty. Dear Anxiety, I’m beginning to think that you love me.

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The Nature of the Phoenix We think we know the nature of the phoenix: Wings outstretched to carry fluttering forest fires, clouds of billowing cinder extended from brimstone skin. Gooseflesh bristling with phosphorus feathers. The majesty of a beak cracking atoms in the atmosphere — lightning bolts to strike at darkness. The throng of a thunderbird. We know only the vibrancy of the immolated raptor, black talons clawing at empowerment. The eagle whose eyes pierce possibility. We see only the chick that trundles from the heap, its womb an urn, to burn brighter than a thousand suns. Its egg an arid desert, scorched planet, cracked salt flats. Its cradle a pyre. We think we know, but we don’t know the transcending ache: The utter agony of unfurled flesh;

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to taste the char of former embodiment; to choke

on plumes of smoke. The tortuous tumult of spontaneous combustion, internal organs blooming fire petals. The whisper of painful secrets through gasping dragon’s breath. The cataclysm as volcanic veins flay outward, magmatic blood projected through thermodynamic pores. Seismic pulse frantic. The inferno of a swan song silenced. No, we cannot know the cruelty of self-actualizing self-destruction that brings an afterlife before. The plight of pyrotechnic personhood, black powder dust-to-dust. A Viking funeral for a birthday. To rise from the ashes means the choiceless murder of the self, to be one’s own mourner,

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pallbearer of the candelabra. An arson suicide. We think we know the nature of the phoenix, but no one knows

the nature of its pain.

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Enigma Machines My DNAwas constructed from forked, binary tongues, the Morse code of typewriter keys, like Fred Astaire’s feet, tapping out fairytales to my zygote. Has anyone ever captured the sound of disappointment? You can hear a pin drop

in the atriums of an empty heart, but I guess no one ever told you how silence can kill. I have heard 10,000 symphonies exploding in the span of your long pauses, waiting with baited breath to feel a nibble from your interred affections. Some nights, I dream of conversations yearned for while seated on subway trains, sipping coffee that never tastes the same as how you fixed it. I take it the way you won’t take me back: Half-and-half, bittersweet. I caught a glimpse of the nape of your neck and swear I felt my soul leap out of my skin,

travel gravel distances, only to transcend regret inside your navel.

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I thought I French-kissed those selfsame tongues that flicked my double helix into shape, a spiral staircase skyward, pining to get you on your back and paint a Sistine Chapel on the ceiling. This is the upper echelon of our make-believe, the mythology we have written in codes too precious to crack.

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We Often Cross The Lines We Draw He’s his own butcher. He sections himself off by cut. His worth determined by the delicateness of his slices. He’s a pig for the slaughter,

but everyone knows him as a dog. He’s his own best friend, because only he knows his secret. The diagonal lines that mark his thighs. Highways to heartache. Runways for the planes that never landed carrying all his pain. They crashed in the sea of tears he sheds sometimes. There were no survivors. He dictates the blade with a scalpel’s precision, a surgeon’s keen eyes trained to distinguish vein from artery. His artistry is incomplete. Made of misplaced media. His skin a canvas on which the paint is spilled from within, but there’s only one hue

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and when the work is finished he calls it, “Regret.” And yet, the heat released when the epidermis is cleaved, like cleavers falling in his mind to tenderize his peace, is addicting. He finds relief in the release of adrenaline, the power when his fear is eased gives him a false sense of control. But when he runs out of room on his thighs, he moves to wrist. Harder to hide, but he can’t resist. So he cuts. Drags the razor, or scissor, or anything in reach, across the space between his hand and elbow. No one will know. He’ll keep it up his sleeve, the same one he wears his heart on, until the blood seeps through to the surface, like his pain. Derelicts strewn among the wreckage, but pain always sends search parties. Searching for survivors

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across infinite square miles that these new highways cannot stretch to reach his happiness. Set aside your cutlery, my friend. We’ll preserve what’s left without pouring salt into your wounds. By butcher’s hook or crook, you’re gonna get through this and when you’re fixed the person you are will hang the person you were from it. And the scars will not haunt you like ghosts, but watch over you like angels.

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Dear Anxiety, You can’t drive a knife into my heart by stabbing me in the back. I’ve been living off secrets and panic attacks, cuticles and paranoia. Biting the skin from my bottom lip — banana peels strewn across my path — to keep my self-love bruised. Begging. This David and Goliath match has set everything on fire and neither of us is willing to let the smoke settle to see what’s worth saving. Old Friend, you have been living on cinder and kindling, yearning for the taste of kindness, for the blood of your sibling. Perhaps the point is to forgive instead of kill. To comfort instead of destroy. I always thought you were a monster, but now I think you’re just a boy

who was never understood. Pinocchio was made of wood and his nose grew when he lied, but he wanted

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so desperately to be real.

Maybe you are made of lies and you grow every time I tell myself that they are real.

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Mania-Melancholia I. There is a stormcloud that follows me around, a shadow that sits inside my shadow. A veil that blurs the world into a stupor; a filter, static and grainy. Rose-colored glasses with lenses so dark they make the eyes wish they were blind. This storm holds no rain to nourish, only murky uncertainty. It sulks — pregnant and bloated — with doleful diseases, stillborn spirit that blots out the eyes with ink so they cannot see beauty, love or any semblance of vibrancy. My sun has been punched out. Bruised so black and blue that it cannot feel its own light; that it wishes it were the moon so it could sleep.

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II. This is productivity. Endless energy. The kind of certainty that turns dust

into a masterpiece. No time for time. No need for sleep. The unstoppable fury of a billion burning dreams. The kind of fuel only blood can be. A high only a god could reach. I wrote a novel today— three-hundred pages in an hour. I invested everything I had into a promise

no human being could ever keep. Nothing matters.

Everything is possibility. I can transform anything into anything. Monotony meant to feel divine. I erected a kingdom today, but tomorrow I will burn it to the ground.

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III. My sky is a schism. The kind of knife that has two sides. Sometimes it slices with such precision it segregates, takes away the things I need to feel.

Other times it minces life so finely I can only taste everything with misplaced clarity. My inner light can burn so bright it blinds my eyes or flicker so dim they squint and struggle to find anything worth saving in the dark.

IV. I am a sky. Sometimes I feel endless, parsed out into an incomplete forever.

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Just inadequate enough to wonder, to question. One number away from infinity. Other times

I feel congested by gray, cumulonimbus guillotines that slice and cut away, that prune,

that shut out everything. A fine line of firmament separating the intoxication of my sun from illuminating the world. These fickle clouds — my clouds — can be corralled, contained. Lassoed with a leash

to be kept at arm’s length. The light that hides within is a tool,

a gift that can guide, a fire that can ignite and consume everything, but only if I let it.

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Cognitive Dissonance I traveled six hours Upstate to find a lackluster escape from the rhythmic monotony of my daily delineation. I had strayed quite far from my journey attempting to create a new path, as if running away would vindicate me of the certainty that I was lost. The hills came like birthdays: One after the other. Coquettish weather of snowfall, sunshine, snowfall. Sunshower flurries of woebegone adventure convincing me that I could see the forest for the trees. My place in this vast ecosystem has become so independent, so far removed from symbiosis, that any semblance of courtship has been collapsed into that catch-all phrase: “Networking.” My life is an in-joke whose punchline has consistently been missed, almost as much as my lips wonder where all the others have gone.

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I can see the forest in the far-off distance, where a tree is lying through its teeth and when it landed flat on its face the whole god-damned world heard it fall.

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Splitting A grain of salt that sits on the soul. Itself, an opened wound. The sting of my own secrets emerges, a jack-in-the-black box. A shadow on a spring. I sense my mother in my disposition. The dismissal of backhanded transgressions. Passive aggressive expressions passed off as if shields would not weep if they had eyes. I share her pain-impregnated laugh, the screams that sink in the corners of her mouth. She was a kind woman. She raised me right. Spoken as if she weren’t still alive. How many times must we die in each other’s arms before we can be called a family? This house is infested with sabotage, self-fulfilling prophecies that profess:

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This is all your fault. Guilt stowed away for safe-keeping in a vault no one can seem to find. When I fall apart, my heart reaches for protection. The solace of affection — a path of least resistance. I wish that word held more F’s than my father would utter on a daily basis. Chewing on his bottom lip. Rawhide that never gave him any comfort. At least we have that in common. A grain of salt is all it takes to season a cut of meat that didn’t ask to be here. My father was an amateur cook, an amateur father, who did the best he could. He told me once:

“The greatest gift you can give your kids is the ability to learn from your mistakes.”

Well, perhaps he can help explain my own.

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Dear Anxiety, The self is born perfect, but buckles beneath the pressure of circumstance. A soul circumcised is not allowed a certain degree of pleasure. You wear the skin of my Father.

Flick tongue of shame behind teeth of doubt. Snakebite angst — a Devil lurking

in Paradise. Old Friend, you have held my hand so tight, for so long that yours became my own. Fistful of frags, trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Rock-hard. Lapidation — the lapidary by which I have etched out the god in me.

Lapis lazuli filed down onto damnatio memoriae . Dear Anxiety, if I could marry you I would.

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Commit to your ugly. Rubik’s Cube zirconia promise ring for the moments when I feel

most alone. Continuity reveals the diamond clarity I have been mining for. Dear Father, my anxiety has all along been yours.

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Drowning In Our Attics She told me: “Sometimes I think you’re a storm and I’ve just been trying to capture lightning in a jar.”

Paraphrasing does no justice for the brevity of bravery imbued in her words. She spoke to me. You see, storms are not meant to be subdued. Just let them roll on like stones collecting no moss. Spewing frogs never to be kissed or turned into something sovereign. A plague. Solemn. Somber. Like… thunder or a million other metaphors for that which we have yet to understand.

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I take pride in her assertion. Wear it like a badge of honor on a Boy Scout heart. A collection of merits not-yet mastered. Still missing the one for commitment. Maybe the thunder we hear are mere cries of agony. Rain, an offering of lacrimation: Here. Grow something from this. The irony is that the eye is always calm, because the rest of the storm is crying. Traversing the sky searching for answers to the questions it cannot articulate. Do not wait for me. The sky is vast and clouds collect like memories that will surely fade with time. Their sweetness, hidden beneath a rind of firmament whose bitterness

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must be survived in order to cherish the fruits birthed from it. Lightning never strikes twice. This, of course, is a lie. But no two bolts are ever the same.

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The Cure Mentality I was born a broken Tinkertoy. The pieces of my mind configured to not fit quite right. Great gaps separating synapses, whose dendrites reached like desperate fingers for siblings falling away. Those hands held secrets, the neurons whispering: I am not broken. Doctors tried to fix me, patch up the perfectness of my disorder. Fed me medications

that damned the divides between my skittering nerves, but they only served to flood the majesty of my Grand Can yons, because my mind wasn’t falling away — it was flying. When you strip away the bells and whistles of our brains — rearrange the cogs and play with the knobs — you’ll discover the world has changed. The mind is just a filter through which reality is fed. What you see is only one of many worlds I feel inside my head. This moment has a texture. Every sound has a voice. I can’t read the furrows of your face, because my brain can’t filter out the noise. Your social cues confuse me, but do you know all the names of the presidents’ wives? I can recite to you the history of music

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between 1932 and 1989. I obsess, I know… but there are patterns everywhere. Let me describe to you the streets of London, even though I’ve never been there. Don’t be scared; I’m not! I don’t talk much because my brain can’t stop to think. I promise you, I’m in here, kept warm by the stimming I’m swaddled beneath.

My mind is hyperaware of the world. That is the gift that I have been given: To over-perceive the subtle vibrancies that permeate this existence. That blue is not the only blue. Numbers have feelings too. I know I can’t control this world of mine, but neither can any of you.

Because I was born a broken Tinkertoy, but no physician could force my pieces to fit. The way the light dances off of my Grand Canyons could never be muted by medicine. You can’t cure me of me . My perfection does not exist on a spectrum. You don’t know the comfort of a repetitive movement! My light is always bright. Whole worlds exist between my gyri and sulci. If you’re wondering where I am, I’m playing there. I’m flying.

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Greenhorn I remember watching from a distance the tempests of inner turmoil tossing their briny maelstroms, sloshing saline deluges down your gasping throat,

until you were certain you could not breathe. This sea

sat like a cracked teacup inside your gentle chest, its waters for a moment calm, only to burst open with thunderclaps. Perhaps, you saw me as a signal,

a spotlight on a distant shore where your skin could dry. No longer pruned by the depths of the diagnosis that is not yours. You believed that for as long as you could remember you had no vessel, no means to weather this typhoon. Your sails all but folded. Although the winds would subside, the tide would always bring new waterspouts and no oar with which to swat them away. They say secrets are like oceans: The bigger they are,

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the deeper they tend to be. When you felt the light from my fresnel lens touch your clammy skin — hands groping at buoys in the darkness never able to hold onto anything long enough to stay afloat; clenched fists that held onto that secret so tightly they had forgotten how to trust — you let go. You began to see that the sea you were drowning in could fit inside a thimble. Nocturnal eyes that had only known the dark began to see a light. It came in waves, softer than the ones you had ridden — turning, tempting, a beacon beckoning, and you began to swim towards it. No matter how exhaustive, you fought against the riptide, knowing in your soul that this light could be trusted. I saw you from a distance treading water, floundering, but I have watched you learn to keep yourself afloat, because you cannot swim with closed fists.

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You made yourself a ship from barnacles and broken coral reefs, reached down into the depths of that sea and dredged up forgotten memories that the mind had disguised as bad dreams. You welded together a steel hull from their reality to guide you, to carry you, kicking and screaming: “You will not conquer me!” In time you will find a peninsula, an entire continent populated by peace, where the light that reached for you will still be shining. It turns at the top of a lighthouse that you were building all along with the hands that no longer grasp at secrets.

They are free. You are free. You will leave those memories shipwrecked on the beach, the sea will no longer swallow you, and you will learn that the light was always yours.

I was only its keeper.

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Steven T. Licardi is a NYS Licensed Social Worker, an author, spoken word poet, motivational speaker, and activist. As a child, Steven was diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum, which manifested as an inability to emotionally comprehend his own thoughts. He turned to visual art and writing as a means of coping with his experiences, which he now uses to inform his discipline as a therapist and a performer. www.thesvenbo.com

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