I'm waiting for my teacher to wake and teach me some language. I lost mine in an unfortunate incident. He just went to sleep so it could be hours 'til he's coherent. Maybe I best close up here myself. What do you do--pull the plugs out of the wall? Pour something somniferous into its guts? Some infusion from the night garden, maybe. Although they never worked for me.
Maybe this box has a switch, like my teacher's. Flip the light off on the ceiling above his head and he's gone.
Right now, I just want to find the SLEEP button. The one with the little sheep on it. Or thought-balloon full of zzzs. Maybe it will be round and white with numbers engraved into a talc-y surface: 714. This I know: I want to get back to that dream I was having this morning.
About a house like a hotel or city, with a garden or pool on every floor. Wide hallways like boulevards; swinging bridges that crossed construction into older, darker wings. The boulevard split into narrower corridors, some completely open to the side of a lake, then woodland, the flooring in the hallway more organic now, soft with humus and moss. I took a set of steps that appeared to lead back to the core of the building with wooden risers, solid walls, a Persian rug or two, but instead entered a second endless hall, past what looked like a series of bedrooms, some empty, some inhabited. I wondered if I should toss my bag into one of them; lay claim. The hallway turned and zagged up then down ramps, a small flights of stairs, and through a long, low-lit tunnel, until emerging into an open area divided into ancient laboratories. The shelves, which smelled of linseed oil, held inscrutable old instruments. Boxes on the floors and lab benches overflowed with parts looking vaguely electronic, others held blown-glass forms and old brown bottles with indecipherable labels. I'd noticed a shimmer of wildflowers as I passed the lake; I scanned the lab benches and glass-fronted shelves for something vase-like: an old Erlenmeyer flask, volumetric flask, glass beaker, even a glass reagent bottle or separatory funnel, a porcelain crucible. I noticed a row of old bell jars, the kind made from warbley green-tinted glass, the kind I used to grow delicate formations within, so long ago, with a different name, and I wondered then, with rising hopes, that maybe, maybe, one of the people passing through here would know how to find them--
I really need to find the Off button for this machine. A storm is heading this way. If I wait long enough, lightening may knock out the power, put it to rest. Me rest. Everybody rest. All resting within emanations of our own making--REM, Eminem, S&M, Auntie Em. Go and get 'em.
2 comments:
When I read this I am reminded at how thin my own writing is and how transparent the images are I describe with words. It's no wonder I resort to so many photographs.
Up in the middle of the night, nausea and worse slowly giving way to the Pepto-Bismol tablets I took a short time ago.
I've read your post three times now. You have a gift...
Steve Williams
Scooter in the Sticks
steve: thin writing, thin body. People--and my kind--are ga-ga for your blog. The nausea is in your head. You're so full of **it.
Maybe a sudden blast of flotsam and jetsam and you'll feel better.
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