Friday, April 30, 2010

Sleepless in Reno (written Jan 2007)

This is on my Myspace blog...decided to share it here for those who haven't had the chance to read it.
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Some situations in life take on the shape of colors and sounds, surreal to the touch and alien to the ears yet you have no choice but to feel and listen to the echo of the cosmos deep within yourself. It's an interchange of threads masking themselves as one thing or another, even though they may not necessarily be one thing or another, but in the interest of normalcy and the maintaining of the status quo, the mask stays and everyone pays the toll that comes from driving on the freeway blindfolded. The headlights flicker past as I drive hazily through the fog, asking myself if I am going too fast or too slow. I know where I'm going yet I don't exactly know where I am.
It's starting to rain. I question my perceptions as my eyes are flooded and my body strains under the drip drip dropping of the water. I walk, purposefully in no particular direction, inhaling the sweet scent of despair falling from the sky. I stop, standing in a puddle of blood and look up into the gaping maw of suffering and stare into its deep gray eyes. I ask myself if there is anything I can do except suffer along with it and it responds that my presence there is enough to keep the worst part of it at bay. I stand there and bleed, as the rain washes everything away, chilling me to the bone.
I am awake again, my back up against something cold, brick walls staring down at me from every angle. My bare feet tingle as I start to walk. The night sky shines down upon me, clouded and dark yet strangely comforting. I travel for hours, days...I lose track as I wander around trying to find my way out. Slowly, though, I notice that everything is getting hotter. Without my realizing it, I collapse as the heat consumes my entire being. As I fade slowly away, I see flames coming at me, slowly and full of intense burning beauty. I feel it caress me as I my eyes close and my grip of reality slowly blends into nonexistence.
Outside these walls the city sleeps. In a few hours people will stir and go about their Saturday as people often do. It is all in the spirit of normalcy and what the majority has decided for themselves even though the majority doesn't like the way things are going. I walk among them, blinded by the morning sun and delirious from lack of sleep. I ask myself questions and give myself the answers I want to hear, even though I know they aren't the right ones. I'd like to think that I have learned a measure of acceptance, a measure of understanding as to how the world presently works. I realize, blinded as I am, I understand things from a different point of view. Is it wrong? Is it even right to think of it as wrong? In all this entropy is there ever really a true order to the way things really are? I stand awake and ponder, staring off into nothing and everything, sleeplessly wandering through the spider web of reality. I tear through the delicate threads, with no regard to what once was. Can I really exist out in between the threads, or do I have to fall back into the pattern that I pretend to know?
I have kissed reality and have been caressed by her. I have been beaten and scarred for all my days, yet I come back to it all with open arms because that is what I have been put on this earth to expect. I'll be outside again when it rains, without anything to hide under or behind. I'll follow the threads past the signs and I'll take an exit to someplace I've never been, just to taste a different color. I'll lose sleep and I'll become lost in the very unreality of it all. What else is there to do?