Weaving

I am at the counter tracing lines by the knife that guides slitting mysteries into the substrate fabric of a consciousness that is definitely someone else’s and definitely not mine.

I am face down in the couch trying to recall memories of friends saying they saw someone that looked exactly like me--the guy at the gym, the guy at work when I was in denial and decided only one could survive, the guy that Beth used to see at Temple parties and send me pictures of. do their fears taste the same or is that just popcorn lost in time.

I could be an archetype NPC of many names--different haircuts repeating a few lines and a side quest, offering sage advice, reading fortunes in a spiderweb from the corners of a dusty hut with a futile asterisk in the form of a wink that I’m not sentient enough to grasp. I am the reader and never the web weaving weaver distilling fate with rhyme.

I am in the car, always leaving, always materializing back at start straying from this one-bedroom apartment in minor subplots once or twice a week: 8pm, 7 central--same place same guy. scratching at the walls of my shortfalls hoping that instead of plaster and paint and sheetrock I open a hole of 1’s and 0’s like a DMT laser experiment revealing a source code only Neo and Smith could see.

I’m in the shower with all my shower thoughts pelting skin naked in hot rain. if I collect all of my doppelgangers to one room we might be able to make a simple life-altering choice about moving/dating/living/not living/short breath at bedtime, confronting the regular acts of violence and abandonment I used to encounter in my dreams from 2010 to 2020 when everyone took turns at dying and I got bit by a snake covered in heat and venom inducing alternating views of concrete and humidity.

I am in bed with Fox to my left and I can just reach him if one of us is uncomfortable enough.
relief in the dark under the weight of two blankets that I’ll throw off in frustration when I can’t fall asleep, sitting on the edge of the bed finding a grip in the fitted sheet and quiet review of things I’m grateful for flipping through the notebook in the nightstand defining two good things each day--
12/23: Superheaven – Ours is Chrome
11/21: poetry night at Char & Stave
10/18: went to Mt. Rainier in the snow
11/28: showed Conor and Liam how to shoot pool
11/9: finished Twin Peaks
--I lay down counting back from 100 hoping I don’t reach zero.