The ground outside was littered with crab apples the day I found a dead dove in the grass behind the house—is their tartness merely a feature of our gustatory perception or is it absolute? This is the kind of thing. I can fight it or sit it out or I can reason and wait, again, for peace.

On the edge, or closer to it than realized, freely mistaking association for identity: near/gone, ok/not, me/you—who am I to say life is other than what one writes? This is my code, it’s what’s under the hood, my piece/peace for flexing fake emotion and unlearned nostalgia when my fuck-you energy is out on the town like an average dromomaniac splashing around in his own little personal puddle of poshlost left over from a three-days-ago downpour.

For all the effort at wakefulness, I find my solace lies in sleep—what depth is deep enough to escape the carnal thrill of words? I hope you’ll stay and read each line twice, once for identification and once for all the stories you’ll tell yourself later, layering response after response to question after question, need after desire onto person after image, brushing sophistries over underlying truth with the brightness down and exposure up and contrast set on apprehensive frequencies that cause the sort of muscle twitching we’ll all mistake for action.

The world is only as large as you can comprehend; I understand, now, what I was doing all that time when I wanted to be awake—where does this end, where does that begin? It takes a village to meet such needs and the body count is high and rising, overtaking composition on principle if not by sheer volume while, really, the only question worth answering is whether the headstand is for me or for the moment’s desire for inversion, whether what’s sought is an end or a beginning.

Originally published on Hijacked Amygdala.