TEMPLE HQ
THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!
11-18-2021
Relax on the grass in the end of summer half-heat where the hazy freedom of pure humidity drops all foggy and still over the opiate-latchkey times, relax on the grass with the sun drawn down and blue coming up still illuminated from the horizon, stars showing up gemstones on an ocean’s surface, astral currents running across. Look up from the grassy hill, dew soaking into our clothes, fall backwards, hand in hand. Play a little dance of mutual desire bounced off each other’s defenses. Relax a laughing kiss in the moonless starlight.
I love you, brother.
Run with me, through the green turned nightly blueblack, turf grid of cul-de-sac hedgerows and lawns, over wooden fences, alleys with NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH signs nailed on every scrap of post. Run through the emptied parking lots, streetlights on streets no one walks down, paranoid houses looking nervously into the darkness of their two lane roads, lights playing off in tiny moonbeams, teenagers huddled up in bed with the blue light of a cellphone, parents asleep in front of the headache, night drawing down a darkness that only grows more abyssal as electricity drones on, the hum of power lines, dropping of gutters over plastic siding, the moon coming down between stars barely visible, streets barely named as cars sit brimming cold with the battlescars of the interstate. Through the unlocked doors, through the side-entrance cut through scaffolds and glass, and into the still illuminated, the still clean, the pool - after dark, after students, none left in the school except my brother and I -
- poured through the openings to someplace secret, our journey ended faces danced by rippling blue lights within the water. I sat on the edge of the mopcleaned tile, smell of chlorine wafting foggy while my brother knelt idling his finger on the surface. Light danced off lamps over the warping blue of the surface, a sapphire trapped in the depths of the city’s most fleeting affluent outskirts. Glass entrapped the room like a greenhouse, heat spilling still residual off the asphalt cooling in the deep dreamblue and hellblack of the quiet night, only the drunks and masturbators awake in the diseased incandescence still burning off the humming powerlines.
“You wanna fuck in here?” My brother said. “I heard a tip about it. They said it’s magical here, awakening passion between us.”
“Like lovers?” I said.
“Like dreaming. I think that was for first kisses, though. Not us.”
We sat on the edge of the pool, hypnotized upon the water. “I think it could still apply. A little.”
“It feels too much like masturbation. The two of us. Even at this place. There’s not enough space between us.”
“Remember, we’re inside this gemstone.”
“Gemstone?”
“The crystalline structure, the light, the magic of the water. It’s like we’re enthroned below a pyramid. All the powers of the Earth come down the mountain, tumbling down, salt as silt when the floods come each year. We look over the ground and find crystals from the heavens, rain over the peaks of the gods, and we strike them, a tuning fork, and the sound… we inhabit that sound…”
My brother folded a paperboat, setting it adrift in the subtle currents of the water. The night blackened to its final depths, the blue velvet light shining through from the bottom of the water keeping us in magic.
“I suppose.” I said after a long silence. “I suppose we could make it happen.”