Bold New World: The Coffee House Notebooks

By Alex Freeman

Imagine, for a moment, the instant in which a schizophrenic realizes that he is not, in fact, a schizophrenic, that it is human society itself afflicted. Contained in these pages are the living and the loving, the poems and the paintings, of that schizophrenic-in-remission, imagining a society sane.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Freeman
• Release date: Aug 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310009532

Alex Freeman

Alex Freeman is a clinical psychologist, a health care worker-to be, and an impassioned porn writer just taking her first steps in professional writing after several years of writing purely for entertainment. With T.C. Mill, she has co-edited two anthologies of passionate, cutting-edge erotica with the New Smut Project.

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Writing, for me, is a gift of living shared with others. What the words convey, how they convey an idea, is, if nothing else, a transmission of vicarious experience. Experience, as the essence of living, allows you, the reader, an opportunity to live as you might not otherwise, in an alternate universe, a separate reality, a novel time, a bold new world.

Words do not have to leap from the page. Sometimes, they should dance. Or run. Occasionally, a line should uppercut you in your easy chair and knock you onto the floor. The method I employ is not really a method at all, but it is a process. I call it prosetry. Prosetry bears the melody and rhythm of words through the lines of poetry, and carries the paragraphs of prose on the backs of the windswept wings of a chord held to the period. Synthesizing poetry with prose is often easy enough, while maintaining the old rules of poetry with lines of prose can be much more daunting.

Art, art of any type or medium, however, has the freedom to enjoy the purity of mountain top air, the rush of a free fall, and the anarchy of limitless creation. Sure, fumes from the city below can pollute the mountain air, and gravity dictates a survivor to pull a rip cord, but whatever limits exist in these pages are all self-chosen, self-imposed, and expressed freely. It is not in the breaking of rules, but in the simple disregard for the authority of those rules that allows rhythm to percuss through the prose, sculpture to shape the form of a poem, and the blank pages to develop into a canvass now framed by the device you are reading this from.

Prosetry, then, is the way to bring new living and experience to you as you rise from the floor and regain your place in your easy chair. Writing in any form with prosetry is successful if, for instance, upon reading the words, the threadbare sandpaper of the hotel towel dragged the droplets of water across his mosquito bitten leg, you subconsciously reach down to scratch your leg and simultaneously twitch with empathy for this poor traveler. It is my sincerest wish that, upon reading the various offerings of my blood-ink contained herein, you can travel to new places, unique times, frozen moments, and even blush in some places for voyeuristic guilt. It is my sincerest wish that you live through the course of these pages.

So as I sit here in this coffee house, addressing you as if I know you, I know that my words might fall flat as a page, ringing hollow and empty. If that is the case, please accept my gratitude for attempting to consume this offering of mine, and my apologies for failing to deliver anything more than some notes jotted down in a jittery moment of hyper-caffeination. However, if even one bare-knuckled line connects and drops your jaw, please share the link to this EBook and allow others the opportunity to live vicariously through these pages. Because, well, sharing is caring.

Thank you for allowing me to share these words, these notes, these experiences with you. Humbly, I am very much obliged for the care.

Quite Sincerely,

Alex

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Dream Guardians

Protect me, she said.

Protect me in my dreams.

She looked away, through the window, looking into forever.

Protect me in my dreams, she said.

As a single tear hung motionless,

perched on the ledge of her nose

sparkling like a pierced stud.

She looked through the window gazing at nothing in particular

but my return

Protect me in my dreams

Would that I could kiss away that tear

an ocean of longing

compact as a single drop

set to fall

Through nightmares

Protect me in my dreams

while I sleep

while I rest

protect me in my dreams,

she says

As she stares into the blankness

the bleakness

the emptiness

on the other side of the glass

Protect me in my dreams

she says.

Leaning over to wipe away the single suicidal tear

I look deep into her moist forevers

I say the same

though while I wake

always on the ledge

an instant away from a razor's edges

I say the same

While I wake I say the same

Protect me

Protect me in my dreams

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Truth Against the World

Schizophrenia beats dying alone

Eyes glued open in front

Those behind watching the

World in an apprehensive

Tribulation of withheld

Respect and understanding.

Lunatic: minority of one

Searching for nonexistent

Words to communicate the

Torrential waterfall of

An overactive consciousness

Watching with the supersane

Chipperness of a true nut

Seeing bridges in the wind:

Reflections of Irish rainbows

Close your third eye

Make an ultimate wish

Dream a little dream:

Better, not bigger

Waking brings the nightmare

The sense of falling through

An unjust reality of

Self-interest and greed that

Persecutes idealism of forethought

In exchange for embeddedness

In the cyclical continuation

Of the Cave of delusions

Issue the writ, I charge,

Of habeas corpus: why keep

Them shackled to the shadows?

Is there no court of Justice?

Courts - but no Justice

Jury - but no audience

Ears - without hearing

Eyes - without inspection

Minds - washed tabula rasa

Pleas - but no definitions

Bound to accepted labels

And me - living of schizophrenia.

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Monsoons

I feel like the despondent shadow of a storm

Not even the rain has such a fragile shadow

Even with arrogance to storm on the sun

A bleeding sunset – an antithetical monsoon

Of supernova dimensions

Spinning the dying sphere into vertigo,

Forcing sunray showers of life

Into the deluged shadow of a twilight

Much darker than any moonless midnight.

Cold drops tickle your neck –

A distant prelude to the soft kiss of death?

Shadows embrace tickle and moisten

Where the water doesn’t flow.

Deep sulci echo for empty solace within

A limbic feeling that I don’t know exists,

But glows like the bleeding sunset,

Backlighting the shadows of a passing storm,

Stabbing the clouds with millions of nails,

Scarring the sky with veinlike canyons,

Coercing the dying light to give birth

To burning scabs that heal the damage

Caused by such soft hands.

On the great plain of this internal affect,

Lost in a directionless oblivion,

Where words have long since disappeared,

Where the deluge never ends – No, do not cry –

Since the sun never leaps from his cliff

And his wounds are a sourceless stigmata

That bleed skywards as the clouds bleed below

Forcing the thoughts of pain to remind

You that internal agony shadows ecstasy –

Showers an exoskeletal radiation of true success –

Much brighter than any cloudless summer,

Much warmer than any winter fireside.

What would the party be without the rain

To cast the shadow of enlightenment

And deluge the world with the love

Contained within the despondent shadow of the sun?

Lost beneath one skyless oblivion

Silence screamed from the dark brilliance,

Awakening from reality’s past delusion,

Immersed in the seamless azure wonder,

Reaching out into the mutual eternal canopy

To transmit a doppelganger There –

Alas – in order to be Here now

Beneath a cawing crowless shadow

Of an endless blue torrential clarity

That floods with a single cold drop,

Kissing the despondent lips of the Crow’s Apollo.

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Final Note

Through the blue smoke

Hovering still over

Red leatherette tables

Lit by crystal ensconced flames

The piano sang

One final lasting tone

And abandoned it to hang alone

In the crowded bar.

A single major C

Blew through cigar clouds

Exsanguinating

Over melting ice cubes

Into drained bourbon tumblers

Barreling into mournful falls

Of utter obscurity.

Like the teakwood chair

Sitting vacant before me

Joined only by rye soaked fumes

The C wafted away

Into the silence

Of a vapid audience

That did not care for the demise

Of art so recently died.

Alone, over a bone dry glass

Never to be refilled,

A cough saturated silence

Of a lonely room

Full of empty souls,

Both present and absent,

As dearly I depart

And an unheard pianist hangs his head.

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Knell

On the rocky shores of long ago

Steeped in sands of a forgotten glow

Tides drift off to drown below

A midnight dance they spin away

Twirling around on this deserted quay

Lost, oblivious, on this final day

The river Lethe injects the swells

With cacophonic voices that will never tell

Of all that was, both ill and well

All that is was vibrant bell’s toll

Both to fall and rise as the hearer’s soul

Not yet lapsed, still black as coal

On the rocky shores of long ago

Steeped in sands of a forgotten glow

Tides drift off to drown below.

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Cloister Fit for Two

A harmless golden blood drips

languidly from a bruising canopy

to nurture the night contained,

still, within the stone slabs of

Rappaccini's neglected yard.

I have taken a test of time,

Invested patiently to clear

the overgrown and vicious

weeds, restoring our

cloister fit for two.

How many times have I

strolled beneath a stigmatic

sunset to smell floral aromas

never known by another?

Within this reservoir of stone,

what fragrances could amass

whose simple breath gathers

in spiraling eddies above

tender lilac and silken violets

in patches along a cobbled

stone path - two breadths wide?

Meandering beneath ancient oaks

under a decaying light,

broken and battered by the leaves

of the wise beloved guardians

I perch in the center hemicourt

on a sculpted oaken tandem chair

staring at the hideous final

unplanted tract, left barren

but dreamed, patient for

a second - of time - worth

burying the knotted roots

that even time cannot untie:

an insidiously poisonous

thornless enrapture of one

Tyrrhenian glass rose, whose

eternal bloom banishes night

and gives birth to our sun again.

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Rivers to the Sea

I heard the rain drumming

On the surface of the placid river

Marking out a relaxing rhythm

That leaves you not-doing, like

Rocking on a porch sipping bourbon -

As sweet as a stolen smile,

As warm as a winter embrace,

With as much bite as your charming wit -

Watching blue jays pip

About and banter with the squirrels.

I sat on the soggy bank

Of the shady blue river

Sinking down into the mud

That clung to my skin like rich

Refreshing ointment,

As creamy as chocolate milk

Running down the back of

Your parched raspberry throat,

And felt like the world had arranged

A complementary day spa massage.

I swayed as though drunk on the bank

From the shot of free flowing rain

Pummeling me into the hypnosis

Of an I love you analgesia I

Found fluttering in the feathers

Of the river's rippling blue surface

That soars endlessly in

An eternal migration to

The infinite store of the

Vast Immortality deep below.

I'm left mesmerized by the