Ephemera

Beyond the horizon an event occurs, born from the strengths of insight and memory.  It's man, for the first time glimpsing a realm afar, glancing skyward into spacious caverns that glisten with vanilla-faced diamonds, a surfacing of expanding globes, all containing original kernels for the vault of thought.  He sighs, he ponders, he searches for more in that everlasting fire, for something so immense that an infinitude of lives couldn't possibly piece it all together.  Out there, beyond the confines of his planet- where monkeys screech and hyenas howl, where the sun circles 'round his formerly geocentric kingdom- all speculation surrenders to fact, ideas are discarded by the hollowness of time, beliefs that for centuries resembled the rise of civilization fall from Elysium in a shattering crunch, to shake him off his pedestal, that he may witness the divine, to inherit the myriad possibilities spread out before him in sequences of scope that contain more things than his short life can observe. 

Before him the waters stir, churning earthward the residue from whence he came, embodying some latent soup that held the ingredients which brought him forth, out of Eden and into the mystical light of the seraphim, bound by matter yet liberated from it in ways unavailable to his primitive brethren.  He's scavenged the world and found all that he wanted; now he looks skyward, where everything he now wants mocks the futility of having it all.  It measures his life in grains of sand, in specks of dust corrugated from the principal elements, tossed about in the clay like something that shouldn't have been created, yet was, in all these series of improbable happenings.  He's a lark in a meadow surrounded by dark mountains, domesticated beyond turning back, catapulted from the jungle out into a playground of stars, where he searches for more, for what he considers an eternity, and will never come close to finding.  The magnitude of it all is overwhelming; he can't process it all, like an insect trying to understand why the sky keeps turning the creamy galaxies, without caring what he finds, until something even greater than himself lays claim to their dynamic and wastes away at their splendor. 

 

On the bus I sat reading a book about a dog who wanted to be human.  I heaved a sigh and thought why, foolish dog, why would you subject yourself to a life like this, waking up to an alarm every day, reading about all the madness in the papers over morning coffee, groggily making your way to an office or a place on the assembly, or [in my case] the indelicate station of a hotel front desk, where for eight hours you have to pretend you're someone you're not, plastering fake smiles for partying orcs and the walking dead, something scraped from the surface of a soporific sphere dangling from your hunched shoulders, just barely hanging onto a last thread of life.  Why, oh why do you look forward to such a meaningless existence, when the only time you'd get to play would be during a brief segment of your childhood, when there are no worries and nothing holding you back?   

The bus hit a bump, I nodded off and slipped into a dream. 

 

Come with me into the screen, we'll hang out for a while.  Even if it's nothing, even if the air we breathe is artificial, we'll make believe it's something, built from dreams and limited by touch, elevating us from chairs that keep us glued to the chord.  Look at all the faces in the feed, dressed up in smiles and candy-colored emojis, eliminating any trace of strife, announcing to everyone they know that everything is fine, that everything is as it should be, that it's not simply an epidemic of self-consciousness that's infecting the network, but a bona fide funfest for all our friends to watch.  We must show them that everything we're doing has nothing to do with the interface, for that is the dreary prison of the bored, who camp out on the dial pathetically wishing they were somewhere else, somewhere we are.  We must do everything we can to impress them, for the more they watch us the more they want to be us, and it feeds our egos unlike anything else.  They, the disenchanted masses, wait for some exciting news story to fill up the tab, a story like ours, exaggerated by interjections of wit and pomp.  We must keep providing them examples of how to live, lest they forget, or worse, we. 

 

Everyone in the gym is staring at something on the wall.  They're all lined up like an army marching in place.  They've all got these watches on that tell them how many steps they've taken and when to keep moving.  They're all keeping count of their calories by logging every meal onto an app that tells them if they're still under the day's limit.  Nobody's lifting stones to build a temple or running to help a stranger; all their energy is spent on themselves.  Everyone's surrounded by people they don't know, only here to benefit themselves or impress others.  There's no interaction or camaraderie, just voluntary, soulless movement that's like factory work without a product.  The sweat smells of hard numbers and deadlines and broken mirrors.  Everyone's walking and cycling and running for that invisible place on the wall, going nowhere. 

Images float past like shifting glass, my unearthly sorrow drifts through the atmosphere, being absorbed into something more friendly, a break in the continuum that swallows me whole, transports me to a place in the sky where spirals of joy elevate me beyond the recognition of self.  I've become a fixture on the ceiling of time, limitless in understanding, embalmed in holy syrup slathered across the firmament, wrapped in sequins of meteoric diamond, swirling in a nebula burning with newborn stars that ferociously announce the dawning of a new era, every semblance of death banished from the interstellar frontier, blasted in phosphenes that dance across my eyes, spinning through this joyride, this everlasting trance giving me a chance to consider all that's transient about life passing through the mainframe gripped by my bionic hands.  A supernova tosses me back into the sea, once more a slave to the galaxy's anvil. 

I'm a child again, on a boat tossed upon the shameless ocean.  A choir sings the wisdom of a moral life, systematically entrenching itself on the blueprint of my psyche.  My soul, my soul, take these dreams and make them whole.  Let me suffer, like Christ on the cross, that I may stumble through the storm and into the eye, that I may witness the journey's end, the holy grail, the conclusion of the story I've seen so many times before, in lives past and lives that could have been lead, spiraling around a kaleidoscope of metaphors. 

 

Sing brother, sing mother, rise from the seats to sing, hallelujah. 
Sing wife, sing baby, sing to the savior who's come, hallelujah. 
Consecrate the machine, baptize the computer, rise from the seats to sing, hallelujah. 
Raise the curtain, right the ship, lead us through the forest of sin, hallelujah. 
Praise the son, praise the daughter, sing through the cycles of time, hallelujah. 
Blessed are the dreamers, blessed are the inventors, reveal the artist's work, hallelujah. 
Let him transform us, let him deceive us, enter the screens and preach, hallelujah. 
All of my children, all of my family, dance in the light and dream, hallelujah. 
Praise the creator, praise the destroyer, lift this anvil off the ground, hallelujah.  
When we get there, brothers and sisters, my children of the book, 
Let us walk hand in hand in the light of the rising sun, hallelujah. 
Wherever you are, wherever you go, whenever you sign on or sign off, 
Remember, I'll never forget about you.