Paul Ferrell

Vertigo

My addiction is dumber than yours. I’ll bet this sweating slab of body on it. I’ll bet you a single
disembodied head shot through a wind tunnel. Flashes of red and green. Hooked on incantations to
bring back your dead daughters. A syllabus for ghosts. Ghost language as useful as Latin is to a pig.
Ghosts litter the hallways. Ghosts loiter in the lobby.

I’ll bet my addiction can beat up your addiction. You can’t hurt what you can’t see and ghosts are
invisible. Molding heads from other heads. Life still happens while you’re thinking of someone else. A
ghost steps out of the bathroom, platinum blonde and gray. 

Ghost town covered in neon fog green like a bathtub of perfume.

Cut out of a ghost plummeting toward fields of rooftops. Revised structures as useful as a bouquet that
explodes in violets and violins. A peppers ghost so tall that no one minds dying anymore.

Ghosts are patterns or myths or enough pills to lounge in the fumes of memories, smiling like a hospital
and awake the next morning smelling like a hospital, brain blinking red and green in the fog.

You go to the movies. They are playing a cemetery called “St. Anesthesia”. Her face is silver. It’s a ghost
in a machine like a single frame caught melting on the screen. You reach for that cloud to grab her.



--
Paul Ferrell’s poems have appeared in Exact Change Only, Harpoon Review, Right Hand Pointing and The Rain, Party + Disaster Society. His chapbook, “The Cosby Show and other poems” was published last year by Water of Life Press in Chicago. He is a phlebotomist and rare sandwich collector who posts closed caption garble poetry images on twitter under the name “memoryagent”. He currently resides in Illinois.