(prose? Or poetry?).
PRO-etry:
The house lights go down.
And Inside my brain... The universe is remade. The only universe I'll ever know...
It's a fact.
And with a leap... I could send it all flying through space and time...
Can you Imagine?.......
But sadly.. I don't care about that now. Instead...
I'm Listening to REM at a traffic light...
searching the faces around me...
still cars...
surreal....
silent of flickering light and sound.
paused like a film frame...
still stuck on the reel
that should be spinning around
the only world that I know.
But its silent.
the story's gone.
The song that's playing is Losing my Religion...
Which is not about religion at all.
It's an old Southern phrase.
A figure of speech.
About obsession.
If I'm losing my religion?
I'm selling everything
to get one thing.
And today.... (again)... I'm losing my religion
But... it wasn't always this way.
I was once devotedly whole
And wholly devoted to being.
I used to be ONE...
SOLID...
WHOLE... number of things that still remain with me today
though it's like bomb residue.
a virtual verity
in a singularity
with an explosion
that changed everything.
....and now I'm reduced...
like a math fraction..
like an animal urge...
Like the lowest denominator of a porn flick...
I've been reduced to this...
I've been reduced to a
...fleshly opaque smell
that lingers in the air like a a flower fragrance.
A garden-wall of memory.
A place..... once safe.
But now I sniff it like a dog...
with irony
I smell it like cherry blossoms
near a green car stopped at
the traffic light beside me...
a face
Partly veiled by strands of light
brown-cherry hair.
She is Sweet.
To me?
She's remade in film...
innocent in sepia tones.
naked like Hot cinnamon
with sweat.
and she's Salty.
Isolated...
And suddenly.. she's completely unsafe.
She doesn't notice me... that I'm watching her.
Her universe doesn't include me.
I'm absent there.
a ghost...
on the outside watching....
haunting.
Nor does she know my danger
my black-hole emptiness
How in this.... losing of religion
I can warp it... unreal..
Erase it.
Reduce it all like a fraction...
She....
To me
Has become my Eve
of alienation.
And I
Today...?
her serpent of random chance.
It Reminds me of a dream
I keep having
of my Father telling a story...
something large...
up on the big screen.
Something crucial about me...
and life...
something to turn the gears
flicker the lights and spin the wheels
and reels
with the substance of things that a Father might say.
But like Nietzsche.. my Father's dead.
(or at least... he's dead to me now).
He died a few years ago.
And so.. (in the dream) I never hear the words he would say
Like the wholly devoted Ghost..
he's committed to watching...
he slips back into the shadows...
on the outside.
And I'm fully unaware that he's there.
And in between us is air
and the things we confuse for certainty...
Clarity.
The Black box things that slip
through our fingers like smoke.
And then the credits role
And the house lights come up
And then there's the silence of things
that come at the end
while I adjust again.
to a dangerous
and unimagined world.
and finally...
I muster the courage
to stand from the theater
walk across that damn
sticky floor
and once more...
step back outside
into the so called..
"real world".
