TEMPLE HQ
THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!
11-23-2021
Daylight breaks and awake fuck me open split egg-cracked over the rim of a skillet and dribbling down when the lawnmower starts screaming over the summertime humidity jungle forming in condensation raindrops I’m inside a snowglobe emptied of winter cold heating heating heating the petroleum burning and only getting hotter water boils in a glass my sweat is total my skin is red I’m already stewing and liquifying before the day began,10am.
Lawnmower screams through the thin siding of the house, lawnmower screams through posters mounted on drywall thin space with paltry fiberglass insulation and plastic trinkets spread across the bedsheet top and particle-board furniture old game consoles and a broken tv and last night’s soda and i reach for another coke and pour it down my throat reaching for something new, something powerful, something cold, a wind blowing to keep me away to deafen the noise to bring me peace.
Hot wet grass hot wet trees dry sandy ground muddy water in low points tennis shoes soaked throat in horrid summer trekking on my way looking for the wild gas station amidst the trees and silence and deafening groan of impoverished machinery gasoline fumes and croak of wild birds warbling barely the theme song to the diphenhydramine “700 Club” because it’s the only thing stronger than beer in this godforsaken wasteland beneath the powerlines and celltowers, wild birds warbling the phrase we hear drilled over and over repeated drumbeats into our skulls:
“My god is more blessed than your god” as if that statement could be read as anything other than its lowly status, a proclamation of defeat in recourse to an invisible superior. Their whales were imaginary, little toy figurines they held in grubby hands baking color off in the August sun. The grass went to their waists, high green what could have been a lawn, now a sea, depths at their ankles in the slithering of snakes and little darknesses they try to avoid. All around, the darkness of the pines. The sun made them pause, rays of pain shimmering down through gaps in the clouds. Her Daughter thought about the twins, where they’d be now. She was far too old to still be hanging around, the little audience sat in the grass to be the same height as the children bickering. Her Daughter and the other olders watched the children argue, their whales held aloft as they raised higher and higher hyperbolic praises to the heavens. The heat was silent, despite their resolve, their ever-increasing faith, the wind through the cracks of paint-chipping wood slatted together against the desert prairie to form an imitation of stability, an imitation of life in a place too silent in a place of emptiness. Lucy had found her heaven in the glass cube, among the clouds, Lucy had left the curtain behind. She was on equal footing with every whale, a little wave downwards from some coordinate. Her Daughter knew what Lucy could see, could find, that the sky was an ocean, that the sky went on forever. There was no globe, no space, only infinity. Clouds and whales, darting flashes of magic between the little neuron-chains of stars clustered when blue became purple and the moon reigned again. Lucy had found the sky as it really was, before we pretended an atmosphere, a celestial orbit, before when we knew what’s truly there, the reality, the pulsing vibration of reality looking up it the moon, the stars, the sun, what they truly are, a question we only delay and sublimate in the hallucinated results of our measurements and tests.