phobe

The hebephrenic world exalts beneath the solace of winter sun. Big, deep blue seas and chunks of land, anonymous from the dizzying heights of the moon, all smiling and floating and growing closer and farther—we stand upon a new continent, we name her Ebb. Beneath us is the sea, and she is Flow. Around us are a thousand myriad specks of birds and barren trees, where in years golden we were gorillas and space men. I fell in love first in the place where a duplex now stands. A 40 watt bulb illuminates the corner of the earth where I, thirteen and stalwart, hit my very first—alas, my very last—home-run in the corn field behind the cemetery. Spin goes the world—‘round and ‘round ad nauseam. Above it all, a choir of Seraphim lift their heavy hymnals upward and raise their timeless voices—oh, and those voices! interwoven little tapestries; each a part of a whole in that anatman agglomeration of sound and bliss!—to Whomever, they sing:

"Faster, faster, we need another master…"

Some days I wake up some place where I wasn’t when I fell asleep. Sometimes I get lost on the way to the door. I blame tectonic shifts, or light refraction. I get dizzy lying down. Thinking back to times incongruent. Something about leaving my bike unattended in the rain and those rusty brakes breaking hard on a hill, and how silly things looked in the slow-motion spin as I rode the air in two small flips over the handlebars. Coming-to lopsided and scatterbodied in the poor lady-with-the-apron’s front yard, and how she tsk-tsk’d beneath her breath while my bundle of papers lingered uselessly around that twisted clump of metal, and my big old loose-tooth smile as I said “thanks, ma’am, but I ought be going home” seemed so disproportionate.

I caught tadpoles where they put a townhouse. I fell in that puddle twice—once after a first kiss, and once after breaking up, oh, you cyclic baptismal mudwater font!—and now a bastard and his car are idling there and looking at skin magazines and talking about the girl in 44B; I threw a milkshake at her house once, after a night of feeling shitty about myself. Now there’s a privacy fence. The neighbors complained after T. ran over the Virgin Mary with his mountain bike. We mostly laughed despite ourselves on the hill where they put a parking lot. They cut down the dogwood in our old side yard and put up a billboard. I picked blackberries in the summer of ’96 with a friend I lost in the fall of ’04, and read The Classics under a deck that has succumbed to time. I live in the country that once was lost, but now is…

Our yard was so much greener when we jumped off the roof, hand in hand, as fearless as lemmings, saved by the tightly-stretched tarp—still warm with Summer—that refracted us like sunlight. One high, one low, all in the shadow of the Great Blue Mountain, until sunset came and the lightning bugs emerged, and we looked at stars through the crooked lens of an age-old telescope. A herd of comets roamed the prairie sky. Two ante-meridian and frigid, wrapped in our bear blanket with hot cocoa and toast. They took down the sky and put up a mirror. Here's us. Pinpoint and fractal. Here's us. The burned out light of stars long gone.

Here's us; a million years ago.

The world spins on, despite it all. It spins on dharma axis and resolves itself daily with the stroke of a clock, the beep-beep-beep that brings me to the place where once I’m sure somebody did something, and this mirror is haunted with ghosts. From way up, though, it’s all a big mottled kaleidoscope train wreck, the Earth. But from way down here, we are all microscopes.