Insomnia and a fond remembering.

Stone photograph—tattooed flesh; time binder: full stop. At age fifteen, with mind dappled with a few drops of the lysergic, the sky appears to me as a giant pinball machine, whirling and clanging in the numinous ever-there. My friend Brandon lays twitching and giggling in the mud. He takes great fistfuls of the earth and packs it on his brow; a blackfaced minstrel basking in the tailspin descent from grace, following some atavistic thread back towards devonian ancestry and holy diadems of clots and sumps of mud. It is beautiful, awful and terrible. His laughter is a dynamo crackling in the air. You can feel it on your skin; firework bombast and the firmament trembles, shudders, fragments. I watch part of myself drift away, a pallid, scumbled outline, and its leaving is anodyne and analeptic; it is like watching a childhood playmate turn and leave you behind, enraptured and lost in playground gloaming. The campfire curls up, helical and too bright to look at. A burning in of itself—the flames sputter, twist, and then they freeze. Sparks hang in the stillness like stars and nebulae; Time becomes fossilized, stillborn and adamantine and unmovable—frozen flame: full stop.

Something grinds against our world like a whetstone; a waterfall of luminous sparks fills the sky. Stars you can play with: clang! and clack! like pinballs and marbles caroming in the endless now-ever. Agenbite of inwit—the falsely imposed, imaginary chains are escaped, potential huddles breech born in my chest. I can feel it there. It whispers to me. Nothing is decided yet. An anabatic glory—how amazing it is, impetus for change and hope.

The book is still unwritten. Nothing is decided yet.

Come now: who of you has heard the trumpeting, has seen the welkin bow underneath that presence? Diastole and systole—it bends and breathes to rhythms of sex and war. Some of you have seen it, have heard it, have felt it; you know who you are. Look out to see in, and so on and so on. Fractal funhouse. Ontogenetic jungle-gym. Everyman his own heresiarch, everyman his own inquisitor. Mezzanine and cellar merge and fuck as I lie on my back watching the stars dance.

I stand up and wander past barbwire and tall-grass and sedge and gorse and needling palmettos. Each new object a new altar; I walk and bow and rejoice, a hallucinating gyrovague. Brandon sits on a railroad spur and plays a mouth-harp. Wiregrass and scrub oaks seem to react to my movements: the outer reflected within; priapic wand into vulvic chalice; both onanistic and corybantic. Proglottidean and androgynous.

Rebis.

The Aleph.

Indra’s Net.

The absence of time stimulates the proliferation of leisure. I run and scamper and climb trees and point with wonder. The chronophagic world escapes the eschaton’s bone-chariot. We walk without shadows and leave no footprints.