TEMPLE HQ
THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!
11-22-2021
Picture yourself on a boat on a river.
Lucy on the buildingtop downtown looking for spiders. Spiders across the sky networks transmitting something sinister gridlines etched into the globe’s atmosphere, world looking up in awe, world looking up in terror, prices are adjusted dynamically to account for changing market conditions.
Lucy on the airport roof looking for spiders. Spiders across the sky silverjets screaming passengers interior gutted to house billions over hundreds.
Lucy in the stormdrain looking for spiders. Looking for the ghost of a teenage girl hanging from the underside of a manhole cover over the bottomless pit. Knee deep in rainwater, flashlight shining up at bloody dress, pale legs, cold rainwater pouring into nothing.
Someone is rambling to Lucy, Lucy is ignoring, searching. Lucy has been awake for twenty-six hours looking for a staircase to the fluffy white clouds and now this bitch won’t shut up? Following Lucy around. Yammering about something stupid. This bitch won’t shut up.
Lucy lays down on a bench and studies the sky, looking for openings.
Lucy’s been awake for thirty hours. She can hear stray dogs chomping styrofoam cups as she walks on the rusted browngrass alongside the highway, huddled into her sweatshirt as spring nightcold stiffens. Headlights flash with streetlights in blinding screams at the edges of her vision, clouds billowing from powerplant smokestacks, and the hum, oh god drone forever and Lucy can’t take it almost driven to madness at the tone, constant searing tone of the substation, darkened in neglect of the night, working, horribly, working, regrettably, as always.
Lucy wakes up beneath a cellphone tower, frantic, in terror, to see if she swallowed any sim cards. Lucy can open a flip-phone and read every last instruction of its firmware, hex is pouring upon her vision like floods, like static, pouring on her helpless drowning body until she gasps open, clarifying it in slow slow literacy, drinking the ocean before it can make an abyss.