I DON’T KNOW A SINGLE THING ABOUT WRITING PROSE BUT I THINK THIS IS IT.

For whatever reason, every day when I think about the universe, I think about what it contains. Its innards. The universe is in the way horses sit, things that drape, canopy, a really, especially good bowl of macaroni and cheese. The friends that say goodbye. The way the sky gets so richly blue after sundown in the winter, giving backdrop to the skeletons. I’ve stopped closing my blinds because of this. Let the window grow black, knowing I cannot see a thing out. But everything in the room is very, very, visible. I don’t like to be watched. I like to be seen. By the sky.

Because we are looking at the same sky. Definitely thinking different things. You, well maybe you know about the atomic, molecular composition of the universe. Can name all the stars. The only thing that I can name is that clusters of branches sometimes look like starbursts. What I would imagine they’d look like. Rays, strings, and beams shooting from a centre, circular, straight and never touching each other. I wonder if they ever want to. When they get tired, dim.

Another thing that I think about often is how hearts only ever stop when they die. For over one hundred years they could never halt. Something like feeling that someone is looking for you. Gazing up through tufts of pine. Squelching through mulch. Musing about where you could be in a misty room full of house plants, airy grey light striking through panes.

Tonic spasms. Mostly of the mind. Topaz. Mama’s birthstone. The sound of a trickle. Tracing down images on a ballpoint, or in this exact instance 0.7mm HB, to a magnanimous point. Center. Of the starburst or at least what I think it is. What all these images mean piled together. I don’t know what any of it means. I have been at this recent constant loss for what it all goddamn means.

Like for example, all of these strange dreams I’ve been having. The path, tunnel under vaulted deserted bridge, leading to the creek, lake, jungle like banks. That I know for a fact lead to secret places that only I know. An unkept, weed-infested backyard on a slight slope. The sunroom. Everything on a hill. Everything a chase, a mission, a pocket, a poke.

At things that give. That are already dimpled. A crater containing a playground. The wallless treehouse, with two king sized mattresses as floors, littered with scraps, tinker trinkets, and taxidermy bugs, where Maya Angelou lies. For whatever reason, Maya Angelou’s death bed is this tree house. But she is there. Leading to myriads more worlds. Contained like a filing cabinet, layered like sedimentary rocks, piled infinitely. Eighty percent giving way to urgency. Biking back from the path to police officers scattered all over tight blocks of city. These are only a handful of my dream worlds. They very relevantly don’t make sense. On

May eleventh twenty twenty five I wrote :

“Had a dream a few nights or so ago that I was on a university campus. Mum and I were under a massive bridge or something like that that covered a massive clearing? I don’t know what you would call it and it was cobblestone and everyone had wings, aliferous I tell you! Especially the people coming out of churches, angels? Some had animal heads.

One was a winged lion. They zipped by so fast in the car it almost seemed as if we were up in the clouds. Maybe my worlds will come true. The angels were academics too”. See, I have to tell you all about my dreamworlds because they mean something. That I suppose I'll never figure out, but they also take structure that is limitless and that makes its bed in a universal home. See, they contain also :

Elderly hoarder home of rocks, shells, crystals, pill bottles, that my digital camera got lost in, for whatever reason, leading to a tightrope suspended above a bottomless pit strung across circus tent panels. A dark fork in the road with monkey bars in the way of crossing each path. This resides somewhere in you too. This I know and you’ve just gotta trust me.

These things are not explanatory, yet they are the closest thing I’ve got to pure magic. Where do they lead to on palpable dirt? Where do they go when I die? Will there be constant motion? See because this is motion :

Tomorrow I will wake up in the inkiness of unlit morning, at a bus stop next to a gravel road. Looking to the left, the tube of darkness encased by the lop of treetops. Looking behind, a dilapidated shack. A barn. There is a sheep, two pigs and three horses.

You only know this because I made it up. I made it up. If I told you I slept in the hay the dream-night before, you may or may not believe me. A metal fence surrounds it. Sarsaparilla-red. The elderly gate creaks when you open it. There is muck that blooms in the rain, at the joint of metal and soil. It must be shovelled by the farmer boy who walks to the scene from the half ring of the woods that backdrop the skeletons. The edifices barely standing.

They are, though, bent and bruised; but there. Farm boy takes a piss in the shack sometimes. Sometimes when you blink the barn, the shack, the boy, disappear, and in their place is a farm house completely lit up from the insides, innards, like a beacon telling you not to wait for the bus. To come back.

Which, is unsettling, since you want to go back, but you’ve never been to this farm house with soot-black shingles, eaves, gut-silver gutters, walls the colour of yellowed teeth, wishing it could be bone white. But you have.

Been here. Blink again and it’s just the quaint scene of what you know is your somewhat-home-that-you-remember-but-this-is-the-first-time-you’ve-been-here-since-you-woke-up-standing. So it must not be home.

But it is. Slightly shaken and turning around with a jump at the mustard yellow school bus, pulling through the tube of darkness, you are blinded by the triangular beams of its headlights. Headlights subsiding as it pulls ahead of your planted feet, halting for you to get on. You pull your bus ticket out of your pocket, dropping it into the slot in front of the faceless bus driver wearing a black hat and mailman blue shirt.

The bus’s interior is that of a city bus. Ahead you can see that what would’ve been to your right is the curve of the gravel path, meeting another hollow tube, outlined with green tips, the way that hairlines do to foreheads. This is like a synapse. A cord through two eyelets. Mouths about to kiss, that don’t.

This bus will take you to the busiest four-way intersection you’ve ever seen. It’s slightly lifted, slanted, on a hill. At the top left corner of this plus sign, top centre of this ex, there is your next bus stop. It is the foreground of a rambling tunnel. The underpass of the world. Some strange, unlit substratum.

Hopping off the bus, you wait, anticipate. The next silvery sliver of motion that will pick you up to take you into the city-city. Screeching to a halt, the overground subway pushes right in front of you. Your reflection in the folding door, signalling for your entry. No ticket.

The interior is like the bowel of a snake, and resembles a carpeted party bus, tube style. The seats contain the galaxy. You stand. You hold. Grip the blue handles above. It speeds on in silver splits. The soup in your thermos sloshes with the motion. You can feel it climbing the hill. Tunnelling out of the rocky, green splattered tunnel, zooming through on the raised railway.

Now visible is the planet conquering metropolis. Spanning straight to the horizon in all directions. It floods, it takes, it steals, and it is all that is left, leaving any sprout of earth behind the tunnel.

The buildings resemble hot air balloons, gilded temples, mosques, synagogues with their wisps of rounded tower, and the candied cathedral of Moscow. Prone to provoking megalophobia. Some bob and float up and down, up and down, like oil in water. The rest are tins of titanium, glass. The roof tops that are flat create another world, terrain. The railway is elevated high enough that it’s almost visible from a birds eye view. Deserted. It is deserted.

You know that if you stay on the train it will take you to a planet that has been completely flooded. Familiar caves, where semi-submerged bungalows have been built. They sit. Patiently. Like the belly of a ship. Perpetually, transiently  out at sea.

For whatever reason,

you are.

You are between both.

You are between.

You are between.