awakescape

[awakescape]

The first birds of the morning scream.

[awakescape]

Rain skimming off the roof sounds like a fire crackling

Because it is.

[awakescape]

Locking my apartment, I had a shock because my neighbor's door was gone. It wasn't–it was further down the hall. Or was mine?

[awakescape]

If you put your heart on paper what’s left of you?

[awakescape]

Is blank terror the residue fear from another timeline that dips too close to yours? Spills? Some phantom-limb emotion of a long-dead ancestor staring down a sabertooth, tempest, executioner? The present is feeling without reason—every abstract, uncanny piece of hurt you take so another self doesn't have to.

[awakescape]

Waking, drink still scraping at your skull, entombed just behind your eyes. World full of static and you wish your body could split apart, sift into it so it wouldn’t hurt. Shirtless and pallid with the gray light slanted seeping into the room surrounding you like water, shaking as you stir, like you were dropped into the morning and disturbed its stillness. Made it upset.

[awakescape]

There is an in-between dimension for our 21-gram tortured souls in the seconds between sleeping and waking, life and death, in the seconds when the wind folds over in a certain rare way, or there's that awful pause before someone says something tragic. Both a conduit of spirit shape-shifts and eldritch necropolis, a space, a state that convinces you you've either ruined your mind or aren't the one controlling it.

[awakescape]

Only with sunglasses and a raspberry whiteclaw, watching the sunburst the sifting lapis boat's wake, the waves–the waves from distant strangers–the shoreline sinking smaller, smaller... You feel not yourself, and better for it.

[awakescape]

I saw a cricket leap, leap down my half-lit hallway Away For it knows safety is conditional And Death looks like me.

[awakescape]

If you could meet yourself, would you? Would there be a stalemate, with each you no more or less a mystery to the other? Would you be halved or more than whole?

[awakescape]

Would you rather be a coin dropped, laid flat and anonymized by the moving mirror of a coin pusher machine or an image on a slot machine panel that spins, spins, stops in gloom or in view of the lone, glowed ghost of a person?

[awakescape]

There are days when the kitchen is filled with rotting oranges and you, in limbo, slouch through the heavy half-dark, past creeping grime to put milk in the pantry and silverware in the trash. Regard the flies.

[awakescape]

If you're close enough, do planets creak as they rotate on rusted axes, do black holes call out–desperate, crazed, alone– into the void where their galaxies used to be?

[awakescape]

All it takes is a look, a color, a nothing for some strange past image to eclipse the present– a shadow sliding slow across the eyes, a tender deadening of senses, and you are alive twice in time.

[awakescape]

If your brain listens, processes sound while asleep but hides the memories from you– does it sort through secret images staring from the dark of a dead tv, codes in the negative space of books, messages slipped in the silence, the lapse between songs in a playlist– how much is hidden in the waking world?

[awakescape]

When we die– overcast, gray and alive, with cloud creatures stirring or being swallowed as it flows and flows and folds in on itself, a vaulted cathedral and catacombs cut from stone and moving marble laced in silver and a rotating metal machine– do our souls rise or fall into the sky?

[awakescape]

A finger prick in a white clinic. Blood pressure sinking, oxygen sucked from your brain. Claws of peripheral blackness shredding the canvas of your square of vision. Every sharp antiseptic corner of the room rounding. The nurse’s words low, slow, stretched thin, and dragged into the dark, her face distorting–nothing but a wide, wide mouth and multiplying eyes. Whole body cold as soon as the pad of your finger gives way, the skin popping like a grape under the pressure of the needle.