Four Minutes Nineteen Seconds

Seven times per day

Like a deaf-mute learning to speak

Trying desperately to be understood

It's All About Technique

Going in, the overly-sweet syrup sticks to your throat, clinging to every surface as it climbs down. Going out, static-textured smoke that smells like medicine seeps from your mouth and buzzes in your head. It blankets you, calms you down. Makes you think. Each breath like the beginning of some scripted meditation, some zen-like policy. Your brain settles but stays awake. You let the drawings of hands and eyes drift by, relieved that the messages are slow and creeping. Sound files clipping--they should be alarming but instead they feel natural. It all feels natural. You let yourself sink through the floor and into all the various stimuli, and you experience.

Siphonophorae

The nerve fires and has been firing over and over again like someone pushing a button in the back of your head--it fires over and over and compulsions are flooding from everywhere and while it scares the hell out of you you also know it can only bring you closer to perfection. Isn't that what compulsions are for, anyway? To remind you to do things that make you feel more complete?

Is there a connection? A way to become more whole? Something like the phrase "being closer to God?" It would be nice if the firing nerves could speak but then maybe that would be too simple and perhaps more than a little strange. There are compulsions to do simple things that should be leading to more complex ideas and revelations but somehow there's still a disconnect and you can't for the hell of it figure out what. Someday the firing will become clearer and in the meantime you can continue listening to the simple compulsions until something more concrete comes out of it. Then you might be getting somewhere.

Junction

Where is it all going?

It's silent in the underground, and yellow from the floor lamp with the bent neck--the one not quite broken enough to replace--and there should be noises outside but there aren't. It's black and gold outside from street lamps that could possibly be bent but-not-quite-broken-enough but you've never been close enough to one to really tell. They are very high up.

It's silent and there are so many words running across your eyes and you feel like there is something more. Whenever you feel compelled to let your fingers leak you know there is something more but never in your damn life have you known what it was. You wonder if you sit here in the yellow-and-black would the something more become something here. But then you think that would be an odd thing to see.

The purpley bugs that did such a good job of leaving you alone for months are back but shrunken, and they climb the walls tentatively, knowing you are now the one who was here first. It doesn't matter to you or them anyway. It isn't long until they're a tangled mess of legs between the whitewash and paper napkin.

Lines are being drawn and will be connected soon, you know. It's time to make a choice about when they connect even if it's far down the line. You sit and study the plastic slats of the blinds and hope that time comes soon.

Carousel Spinning

The sky runs clear for the first time in months, though the haze didn't disappear; it sucked right into your head and now everything seems hazy, even gravity. You float while you're grounded and dream while you're awake and no matter how much sleep you sleep in the day and nights you spend staring at the ceiling you always find yourself in that haze. You wonder how big your pupils look.

It's tough to keep your balance when clouds are stuffing themselves into your head and the days are flying under your feet like winding film but somehow you seem to be making do. It's not like how you expected but it's working, and maybe sometime in the next few months you'll have a moment to look over your shoulder and make sure everything's accounted for. But for now there's too much haze to even try looking behind you because you know you'll just get dizzy and fall over and then what will get done? Nothing because you're too busy being worthless when you should have been looking forward. You don't know how long the haze is going to stay in your brain but you resign yourself to the fact that it's not leaving and things still need to get done. You just hope you don't miss something on the way there.

An Ode to Flesh

He smiles with full lips and heavy-lid eyes, and the air crystallizes around you. It's cold and you both can feel it but it's not cutting, even as you walk against the wind and steel is groaning over your heads.

Unheed

Your pupils are dilating, watching the paint drip. You expect the cold snaking through the windowpanes to freeze the drips, but they continue meandering down the wall in front of you. Wandering away from your time zone left you feeling disoriented but somehow it doesn't seem to matter anymore. Ochre is sliding down the walls, one arm at a time. Along with it crimson, prussian blue. You're not sure what you did with your limbs.

The paint crawls into your eyes.