by Tomorrow's Man
the cloud above me resolves into a crow's wing,
the feather tips swirl,
the feather tips swirl,
the feathers tip, swirl,
and the low of the bird blood torrent
sweeps the trees down;
to black,
fade.
"Doc, I've been feeling peculiar lately. My attitude has been all haywire."
"Why do you think that? Can you describe this change in your attitude?"
"Well, it's like...it's like a strange mix of density, crunchiness, chewiness, gumminess, lumpiness, rubberiness, springiness, slipperiness, smoothness, softness, wetness, juiciness, tackiness, and bounce, with a bit of a creepy sort of mellow thrown in."
"Ah, not to worry; everybody feels that way."
Rider
He sleeps for one hour.
In the dream, the sunset is at the end of an eternal highway. It hangs there, coaxing out waves of desert heat. Molten -- his eyes, his hands, his jeans -- are coated in molten tangerine.
His ears are filled with thunder beneath him, the Harley. The world is heat and vibration, noise and melting orange miles, speeding by under the bike.
He smiles. He lifts.
He has begun to lucid dream.
The bike speeds along, and he speeds along with it. He is the Rider, even as he rises out of himself to see. His perspective shifts with a gasp.
The Harley is like no machine he has ever seen. The lines, the fork, the calipers. The raked billet. The headlamp nacelle, liquid metal, burning chrome. Alien.
He recognizes the head of the Rider, the hands of the Rider, gripped. He recognizes his Exception Evo sunglasses. His Buco leather jacket, with the bullet scar rip at the left shoulder. He recognizes the style and the smile – they all belong to him. He realizes, so does the bike.
He wakes from one hour’s sleep.
Scrambling to his feet, he finds the charcoal, a pencil, the grid paper, he finds the laptop. He carries them to the garage on a case of Mountain Dew and drops it all at the ready.
He works, and works, and works. He welds, he bleeds, he drinks, he builds. He finishes, wiping at a blue eye. A drop of sweat turns the eye molten tangerine.
The Dew long gone, he looks at his new machine. He looks at the bike from his dream.
Exhausted, he collapses backward, smiling.
He sleeps for one hour.
Excerpt from "After the Adrenaline Rush" by Christopher Albanese, November, 2006.
It is today, again.
It is today, henced four years.
It is today, I am in the sky flying away,
Heading set to: Here.
Leaving here, Coming here, now I'm here then and today
(A Spiral Somewhen)
Again
Four years back
Four miles high
Was what will be my latest evolution.
In 36 hours, I will be about to have been hit by the first of the Eleven Epiphanies.
Again?
I feel like the first echo of the thunder of the smack
the doc laid across John Coltrane's newborn ass.
I feel like the San Andreas Fault with a tickle in its gullet.
I feel like Icarus is sitting on the sun, tanned and laughing.
I'm feeling like all kinds of confident jazz.
Supreme.
Though it gets me closer to killed every day, I can't release the mantra: what I know is fire; what I blow is smoke.
What I know is fire; what I blow is smoke.
What I know is fire.
You look at me and it is exactly how I feel.
I am a bulldog with a mouth full of butterfly wings.
My head shakes in a spray of beautiful choking.
Applaud.
So I've had an epiphany
a leftover Buddhist philosophy
I've realized
I don't think I mind, really,
what's left
of
what I used to be.
I'm the smile of entropy.
Independance Day week comes to a close, my cat is in the hospital, and the country still smells like the waft of steam coming from the ring of drying skulls growing deeper and deeper around the waning immortality of the country's burning flag.
That hot smell out there on the summer wind, it isn't BBQ -- it is the flatulent release of a turning, waking beast.