Remnants

Looking back helplessly at every foible like Epimetheus. Born like a weed in the steamy morning, I was an aimless crude creature spinning flamboyant cobwebs like a confident fool. I slathered prismatic patterns, grinning like a jester. Then, civilization impounded the measures of my dreams. I became an embarrassed lying chowderhead concealing my crayons. I lacked language, locution or parlance. I sat absent, a prisoner in rote computation. My night dreams merged with day-dreams. My solo island became a continent. I tried phoning out with phony phonetic fumbles but everyone could see. So I slipped away, deserting, fleeing, riding the rails in boxcars. My passage through nocturnal town and village untraceable, uncertain, preoccupied with the pigments of my polyscope. Later I reappeared, reconsidered and revised, replicating the decorations of acuity, imitating profundity like P. T. Barnum. My spectacle drew crowds until I was discovered. My retreat and retraction now heavy with fatigue, I know not the lens of my psyche. In sobriety, I recall all my splinters and ruptures. But my rearranged reissues of adornments will persist until I am expelled. Published: The Opiate Journal, July 2020