mute ripples to mist-ness

cryptic messages from the ether fuse into a

misty medley that has been through a chopper,

images that are all heat and no light, baring

fears and novel experiences, a struggle to

inchoate more and more mist×ness, a figment

with its own set of rules and possibilities, deep,

strange, phantasmagorically told stories,

kept unaltered the sacred old word,

jumbled together alongside the edges of

vestigial echoes of mind-wandering mode

to interact with and inhabit fully while we

are spending nights inside strange alleys, 

shaken by an earthquake, shattering

our frustrating ephemerality, mixing freely

visual representations to match the fear that

emanates through blurry, fragmented bits

and a rapid spread of sharp sparks,

thinking fondly back to our days of shuddering,

when remembrances were metaphorical

mirrors; faint, fervent debates, a battle that

made it difficult to separate sleep from waking life,

to shift through dozy neurons misfiring that

remix elements we pull from memories,

what can be observable, quantifiable, testable,

the kind of transference of emotions, forming

novel connections and fragments, synapses

that seem to capture our disorientation

and cause a sort of temporal whiplash, they

sound like we are living through a storm

primed with odd little stories, all along adding

new elements and story lines to thin spaces, have

lost control of our homes to crowds, moving into

elegiac placeholders for the emotions we felt,

products of a partially coherent neural imagery,

the dream-heeders of old re-awakening, conjuring

of new worlds and adventures, within pages of fake

beautiful leather×bound books, discovering

the soul in the machine all along, lurking behind

the windows of a softly lit library, persistently

unmoored by the dissonance of forgetting,

we feel desperately responsible for what

perhaps symbolizes the need for

omens or communications from realms above,

with less deliberation and more intuition

intruding into and coloring weird story lines,

brains belaboring on a problem that vexed us, to

fend off creepy threats that are approaching, to

grapple with the patterns that connected us,

given to “practicing” new behaviors

that we described as post-apocalyptic

with nonobvious links to the pathways of signals,

novelty and hyper×associativeness aside,

the unheard parts of ourselves are allowed to speak,

what derives from our waking lives, to crawl into

half-remembered nocturnal adventures, as

disorientation, emotional lability and amnesia

add crescendos to themes and similarities with

exaggerated vibes of isolation, of abandonment;

granted, a terrible plague has been ravaging the world

invisibly attacking the people around us, it

blunts the emotion of the original vision, making

a record of our “mind-wanderings”; while awake

we use mirrors to look at something immaterial, 

we carry vestigial echoes of our origins,

often with a sudden and alarming realization

that a catastrophic event put out the outdoor lights,

random motifs stand in for a supposed deeper meaning,

loose bits and pieces rattling about in our brains

reassembled with several ingredients added,

monsters lurking just out of sight, opening a window to

a waking up that brings instant recognition

to a system of thought that can get stuck in analytic ruts,

within patterns, we might find meaning, delving into

some of the most isolated places of all, locales that

might seem idiosyncratic and incoherent, full of

bizarre, arbitrary-seeming contents, preparing the path of

shock of different life stages mirrored and

being swept away by tsunamis of fleeting noemas,

dismissed as un×rigorous at best, but chock

full of words related to anger and sadness, truly

a side effect of random neural firings, embedded in a

repulsive rheumatoid body, a mind prone to

have wild mood swings, emotions pulsating

beyond our own control, beyond our oneiric openings

and our very own odd non sequiturs,

the relatively noisy signals sent up from the brainstem

full of unexpected details and events,

we rarely even remember the next day, for all we know

humanity could slowly be blinking out of existence

despite reverie×scapes unfolding inside individual brains,

a halo of a crown of spike proteins on a stylized canvas,

the most bizarre and nonsensical elements

that shake people into being startled,

not ever feeling as being in a cozy den on a riverbank,

seek out the most distant place of solitude,

a horizon-scape of fast-fading memory

infused with the after-fluidity of glowing oil lamps,

we are really surprising ourselves anew, given over to

the navigation of new realities, with a sense of

being held in prison or marooned on a spaceship,

where nothing can possibly be predictable, explicable,

couldn’t see head-on the endgame of perdition,

flail hopelessly through morning recitations that

happen inside someone else’s head, but still

a realistic, flashback-like trauma, a whim that

could be both random and deeply meaningful,

without us having these virtual simulations, or

spending our nights inside the entangled theater of 

premonitions, vivid-but-strange visions of doom,

patterns that betray a preference for abstraction

a window, albeit a very strange one

for the solace of those living closest to trauma

but still being offered intuitive connections,

a purposeful path to a creative process that does

not feel so strange or non×sequitous but

dredges the conscious memory for tangible shards,

accessing an experience that’s purely subjective,

swells of new levels of anxiety, sadness and anger,

storylines that are fundamentally meaningless,

neurons that move memories from short- to long-term

as is common when the body is fighting a fever, do we

find more empowering endings to our traumas?,

when people are amazed to see so many data points

weaved into brand-new, complexly rendered stories,

us overwhelmed by unseen horror outside,

a natural experiment of collective experience, that

leaves fearful reclusives curled up in bed, overwhelmed

by a dreamlife of collective catastrophe, do we

wonder about what happened inside dreams?

why people are so startled or unmoored

given to seizures bizarre and subjective, cradled

within elaborately coded wish fulfillment,

to create a haven to process memories as they

cobweb the neurons like scary swarms of insects,

convert the mind into a musty, obsolete library,

a toggle in and out of the precarious visions’ worlds

which creates a feedback loop of intense pathos

and tends to give voice to the unspeakable, as it

repeats again and again with few alterations

the most bizarre and yet the most verisimilar of all

theatric dramas that defy narrative logic

weaved into phantasmagoric stories

which cannot begin to restore the savaged id,

feels as if we are wide awake through starless

nights that offer time for slipping in and out

the hidden recesses of our psyche

making the best of a bad job

of what happened during waking life,

a subconscious primed to believe in portents.