Seedheads

How do you experience experience? Is it like a multi-sensory movie moving past your eyes in real time? Or is it like the view outside a speeding train? Who’s in charge in your head? Who runs the decision-making center?

We’ll see when the waves break apart on the last rocky cliffs. Was that the cry of a gull? Down below in the tumultuous chop, you see for a second a human hand in the surf. Was that the flash of a face?

Oh fuck, say your guts and now you’re running, running as fast as you can down the steep cliff path. Your sneakers skid on the loose gravel and gravity tries to take hold. Will you let it? Or will the balance tip so you teeter and topple back onto the hard ground.

It’s good to feel the firm reality of hard facts under your fingers. It feels right to press your check against the hard-packed dirt of everyday life and smile and say thank you. The faces in the waves down there are dead dead dead and it’s no good tryna save them.

Don’t fall off the face of the earth in pursuit of illusions and shadows. There’s ten billion lies and only one truth. Don’t trust yourself to keep going? I’m never gonna give up rooting for you. Yeah, you. You sitting there, staring down the barrel.

This is my soul under an electron micrograph which is you. You’re an encephalograph and I’m lying still for you. How much of me would you like to see? I can open my metaphorical legs and symbolically spread myself ajar just for you.

I can utter guttural grunts and oinks like pink pigs. I’m on all fours and I’m bellowing for you. Oh reader. Oh reader. Yes. This is all in your head. I’m coming into your head and having a good nose around. I’m opening doors, looking into closets and under the bed.

I’m a missile on target and I’m aiming for you. Let me pick you up and nurse you like a baby. Bet you’ve never tasted anything quite like me. What the fuck is it, you wonder while trying to get me off your fingers and outta the back of your throat.

The next day in the shower, however, I suddenly pop into your head and you’re surprised just for a second. You knew this was coming. You knew this was what you wanted before you’d ever once seen me. I am the truth and I’ve been here for years.

I was here before either of the humans I’m playing with now, a lot longer than their hominid ancestors, a lot longer than mammals and fish. I was here before the vents blew hot air into the dark water of life. I was here when the universe was all in the point of a pin.

I’m pre-Big Bang and I’m waving hello. I use a human hand and four eyeballs and a funky apparition called Truth. That’s not my only name. I got about a trillion. Actually, there’s no word for how many I am.

It’s hard to put into human terms. That’s why I use metaphor. The truth is a jazz trumpet playing too long. The truth is phthalo blue and yellow ochre on a pre-stretched double-primed canvas. The truth is the wind blowing through the barley. Listen to the seedheads rustle and shake.