on parallax (a prose poem)

when i dream, we’re born as riddles, clueless and senseless. we have no forks and knives at hand. we’re all omnivores at some level of desperation. trees grow back as quickly as we tear them down, like a gasping hydra. we have no eyes to see or skin to feel. we are a tightly wound bundle of cords and dangling nerve endings stung and stinging on everything they fall upon. we live like mangled cassette tapes, ribbons pouring out, rendered more and more useless as each second passes. we are cut open completely. we are real and free at last.

our world is rotting from the inside out and when the decay hits the surface we’ll all sink down like so many tourists on a planet of quicksand. ants will scuttle frantically by the disappearing notion of man. we will be an idea in the past tense. we will have been. until then we build cities and towers as altars to the gods of enterprise and when the gods are slain we tear the cities down for scrap and knock the towers over on a live news broadcast. somewhere across the globe a drunk in a burger joint watches an age of entrepreneurship topple over and crash. the civilized world hollers and cheers and burns unrelated paraphernalia and climbs and crouches among the ruins searching for bits of treasure or knickknacks that could pass for art. everyone who isn’t looting is watching and drinking and trying to muddle up the impulse to join the frenzy.

i want to be a skeleton. i want to walk naked and fleshless through the unclaimed forest and fear assault from any beast i never learned how to shoot. i want to be unarmed. i want to be helpless before the mighty work of coincidence and cosmic Dadaism. i want to think of pretty things to say with the tongue i don’t have. i want to feel the creak of every step as my bones glide together with the grace of two virgins trying to make an echo in a canyon of nothing. i want to crash and collapse. (to topple.) my bones will be scattered across the floor. birds will continue to shriek and screech. quadrupeds will hunt and growl and kill. no one will notice anything.