repost from another journal in another time
Where have I gone?
Sitting in that same traffic of SUVs and work trucks on that same stretch of highway, slapping the same spot on my face, struggling to open my heavy eyelids against the early morning gray. Everyday.
Knocking back the necessary No-Doze, washed down a warm throat with half a bottle of warmer fruit punch. Un-refrigerated. Septic.
With the windows open and the air conditioner on, windy in the dusty cab of my Echo, sleeveless arms cold in the September air.
Cat Stevens sings to me. Bob Dylan sings to me. The Beatles sing somewhere above me and beyond me, the impossible patterns of “Across the Universe” sliding backwards through damaged speakers, swallowed by the dash of my car.
Jai Guru Deva Om.
The Beatle-babble continues and my morning morphs and shifts, a small ball of mercury manipulated by magnets and rods. Super-real, unreal, surreal. Salvador Dali and David Lynch masturbating frantically, depositing their strange dream-seed into a dirty Styrofoam cup, stirred with the broken ends of number 2 pencils. I am become Eraserhead, melter of clocks!
I poke absently at the thumb-sized dimple under my lower lip. It hurts. The pain is sharp and phantom, no swelling or discoloration to indicate it. But it bears the unmistakable feel of a quill pressed through the flesh below my mouth, a tribal marker befitting a goddess.
My dreaming has seeped into my waking.
The purple haze of the dream smoke burns off when I reach the office, under the glower of fluorescent lights and corporate casual coworkers. I pour my coffee and sit smiling in my cube, pink tongue gently tracing that pain beneath my lip.
Sitting in that same traffic of SUVs and work trucks on that same stretch of highway, slapping the same spot on my face, struggling to open my heavy eyelids against the early morning gray. Everyday.
Knocking back the necessary No-Doze, washed down a warm throat with half a bottle of warmer fruit punch. Un-refrigerated. Septic.
With the windows open and the air conditioner on, windy in the dusty cab of my Echo, sleeveless arms cold in the September air.
Cat Stevens sings to me. Bob Dylan sings to me. The Beatles sing somewhere above me and beyond me, the impossible patterns of “Across the Universe” sliding backwards through damaged speakers, swallowed by the dash of my car.
Jai Guru Deva Om.
The Beatle-babble continues and my morning morphs and shifts, a small ball of mercury manipulated by magnets and rods. Super-real, unreal, surreal. Salvador Dali and David Lynch masturbating frantically, depositing their strange dream-seed into a dirty Styrofoam cup, stirred with the broken ends of number 2 pencils. I am become Eraserhead, melter of clocks!
I poke absently at the thumb-sized dimple under my lower lip. It hurts. The pain is sharp and phantom, no swelling or discoloration to indicate it. But it bears the unmistakable feel of a quill pressed through the flesh below my mouth, a tribal marker befitting a goddess.
My dreaming has seeped into my waking.
The purple haze of the dream smoke burns off when I reach the office, under the glower of fluorescent lights and corporate casual coworkers. I pour my coffee and sit smiling in my cube, pink tongue gently tracing that pain beneath my lip.