When I woke up,
I told the nurse
with fake eyes
of North Texas green,
or maybe me just
being blurry,
that I just came back
from traveling on a
flying saucer with Andy.
We had our own personal
robots that served
cocktails & hors d'oeuvres,
rubbed our toes with
their metallic noses.
The planets we visited
lacked the dimension
of depth, which meant
that around midnight
in universal time,
we fell through everything.
The people we partied with
were all imitations of imitations,
so it felt like home.
On one star, beautiful
beyond colors, I faked
my own death, just so
I could be in the procession.
A child placed a garland
of eternal & transparent flowers
across my chest.
Earth always made me vomit
in green.
Just before we arrived in New York
Andy said to me: Don't listen
to others. They're just jealous
of our anatomically-impossible
dance moves, of our suspicious
antennas, which never vibrate
except in interviews.
I told the nurse
that our flying saucer
crashed horizontally,
& Andy became his own art work.
& as for me: I'm really dead.
I'm just hanging around
for the gossip
& a loyal chauffeur.
They admitted me to some
big shit hospital
where the windows breathed
outwards
but remained clouded.
The doctors medicated me
so I would not feel
the weight of the ceiling and walls.
I told them that it was
simply a case of the world
not giving back what I gave.
They shocked me
until I could no longer
recognize my old improvisations
in Andy's films,
or the way I resembled
a sexless snake
in my black leotards.
I could shed that skin.
Like a reptile,
I could go without eating
for a year. I could hold
my breath for the count
of never.
Mother came to remind me
what a waste I had been,
that paper clips,
absent-minded postal clerks,
the lives of mystics
submerged in water tanks,
were all fatter than I.
I slapped her
with my best butter-knife hand.
Joni Mitchell came to visit,
had us gather around
in an incomplete circle,
and she sang a song
with weird guitar tunings.
She asked for volunteers.
I stood and began to sing,
"The Lady Is a Tramp."
Even though my voice
shook and broke,
my head full
of goose-downy sleep,
deprived monkeys,
& the fact that
Sinatra never
crooned for me
under red-stained orange sheets.
Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poetry and prose: Avenue C, Cat People, and Anime Junkie (Scars Publications), and Tokyo Girls in Science Fiction (NAP). His latest e-books are You Never Die in Wholes from Good Story Press and The Truth about Onions from Good Samaritan. His latest collection of prose/poetry is Void & Sky from Outskirt Press.