One of those things, where you think you’ll wake up
because you don’t want to be doing what
you’re doing, and there’s the disconnect,
boundless and traveling at the speed of touch,
between the doer (you), and the being (you).
Being: closer to benign than anagram
almost allows. I’ll not bore you with the details,
dreams so tedious and meaningless, but
here are the main ingredients:
tunnel, door, brick, step, post, gun.
Here’s the plot:
door opens, gun fires, body falls.
Here’s the explication:
The tunnel is simply a means of transportation,
and the brick, dimensional for mood.
Step might have meant stumble (man’s fall?)
or goose: so hard to discern,
but post definitely meant to convey
atmosphere. Or local color.
Or something phallic.
Meaning shifts so fast –
ephemeral, heliocentric;
what is today a minor glory becomes
tomorrow’s faded wick, lights
out, oil away.
Door is there to open,
gun is there to fire.
By extension, you may extrapolate
that there is a trigger and that it is pulled.
There are no characters, per se,
well, except for me, and the person I shoot.
Does it matter whom? This is child’s play
after all, more along the Chekhovian third act lines
than an act of violence, although again,
we are trapped in the means of interpretation.
Say we are at a diner, with a chiseled Formica
counter, and pie cases, meringue 6 inches high.
Are we fooled by appearances?
Are appearances fooled by us?
Is it still retro-cool if the meringue is bakelite?
And the diner’s a converted church reformed?
What matter how fast the bullet traveled
if it’s fatal? We are traveled at the speed
of touch to reach this place, nod between pull
and such, or push. Is the gun real?
Or the trigger? What
matter? What matters is the force
of the finger, the desire at the post
to see the other fall.
Wake. Play. Sleep. Dream again.
And linger at the moment, at the step,
looking into a mirror at the top of the ache,
and look again at your finger: here is
where you break.
© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved
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