Article and Art by William Compton
Gramma died for the fag in her hand, in an all-consuming sense
Went out in screaming color
Black lungs and the teal ones, please
No new lease at the first scary cough: a last trip to the Gulf for a better porch to smoke on
That’s screaming color
It feels like Grampa’s been dying my whole life
And fighting to live the way he did back then, fighting an inevitable conclusion
He fights to be at home. Well, he’s not anymore.
There’s one way to win the fight against aging
Either way, let decaying be a smoothing muller
You can fade to black or go out in screaming color
There’s who I am, and there’s who I want to be. Gramma never called me Will, but you have. I’m William to my mom and my sister and my dad. Writing my own name as Will, or saying it, is starting to grind. A process of hiding, or, more namely, dividing into who I am and who I am to you. It occurs to me that I left William back in Wichita. And it might not be true to you, my being Will(iam). And if Will is a third person, and William the first person view, the screaming color and the fade to black can coexist: who I think I am, versus who I must be to you.
Recently, I’ve been a loser, doing all the same things I’ve done the past two years when I didn’t think I was a loser at all. You can’t hate small talk when you hate Big Talk, too. But I do. Big Talk at my lips is an incessant shake in my spine: it is to William Compton as oil to wine. Will getting slippery, coating his mouth without tasting. Big Talk wilts William down with acidity.
Right now, Momma needs Big Talk about the fact that her dad is dying.
She says that my nose is a perfect replica of her dad’s. I say that my pride is just like his, too.
Pride grips life and grips continence and rips cloth, wringing out more.
I’ve never forthright lost someone, or gained someone either
Don’t let them in, don’t make them leave
Spools weave between each other seamlessly
Weft by weft, fading tapestry to black.
How do you put your finger on the trigger?
Then pull it
I was sad Gramma won’t be at my wedding. She appeared in my dream the next night. You think I won’t be at your wedding. I’m just a sleep away. Gramma’s having fun as a ghost, making the whole family believe in them. She tickled Grampa awake one night.
Swapping ghost stories is somehow as cheery as she makes it. She’s working hard, too. Curing things. I was knocking down death’s door before she bumped me in line. If I never made it to college, it wasn’t going to be because of my grades. I haven’t smacked my head on the wall since she left. Apparently, that’s the power you get when you become screaming colors.
If — in a metaphysical way — we die for our descendants, if we die to drag their falsehoods with us, I wonder what Grampa has planned for me. What’s the final word on fading to black?
The real fear here is that there isn’t one. That can’t be true, can it?
My nose is like his, and my pride too.
Is Grampa fading to black because that’s all he’s ever known? The process of fading. He was born in the 1930s, a boy who greatly loved to sing. Who would he be if he had been born as me? The son of his own daughter, the end of what he started. What if he could complete what he began for me? What maddening colors could he be, and how do I become them?
I know it's fucked up to use these deaths for my extended metaphor. But I really need this. Recently, the present has been entirely preventing me from living in the past. And I certainly can’t see what’s next.
I pray for clarity: hear back I can have it for the price of sincerity.
I’m a pussy with the men I like and the friends who hurt my feelings.
Hardly inspired enough. Look around at dystopian dealings.
What am I here for?
To be fun? Appealing?
Or to be heard, whether whispering or screaming.
They’ll taste weed and coffee, and they’ll get good head, but I won’t let them give it back. They’ll get support, but not someone who sides with them unconditionally. And they’ll get loving eyes. But my eyes are meant to look sad, not loving. They can have my body, but it’ll always look like an artist’s will. I’ll love our home, but I’ll always love Wichita more. I’ll love them, but never more than my oldest friends. I’ll draw them and enshrine them in my writing. But they’ll always know that I love my pen when it gets bloody. And they’ll wonder.
My love life is scratches on a page, scrawl on the wall.
Perpetual reflection. A protagonist’s action.
The first rule of pyrotechnics is to have the fire extinguisher handy.
Still a wimp when I can always just have a bowl?
Why do we lose to the things that we lose to?
My Grampa’s in a facility
Fuck it. My poor Grampa’s lost his damn mind.
Rambling, obsessed with catching the train to Hutchinson
Where his mother’s buried
With once again being his mother’s son
Legacies crash down around me. Dig in mulch, but neglect the tree. Tulip bulbs are sights of memory, not Gramma’s full face staring at me. Gramma is my aunt at the wedding ceremony.
Oh, to be a '60s girl in a nice dress
Oh, to be twirling
To be in love with a good man.
What have you been working on? Hopefully, a very sensible degree to tide me over to fame. Sensible. Makes me shudder with anticipation. Sensible. Do sensible men like curly hair and tardiness? How sorry will I be to him? As sorry as a '60s girl in a nice dress? Will he like my books?
Screaming color William C allows a charcoal suit strapper to stand next to me. Should I really try harder to get the hooks out? Let's flip the coin, spin the tires, burnout.
God, Gramma Terrisa was a betty in the seventies. And she barked when she was mad. Her too-old husband under her thumb the whole time I knew them. She died in her sixties, which is starting to seem quite young. Left grandbabies unknown, and her babies hurting with the suddenness. But she lived in screaming fucking color. And so what if she died that way, too?
The screaming color or the fade to black.
Black slacks, smacked ass, a singing gig, bury Gramma next
And be perplexed by the position she puts me in by dying for my sins
To un-bin the screaming colors of my soul
Unfading. I turned to black too young
To screaming color I go.