Fred Aiken Writing

could you spare a dime of consciousness?

I keep losing mine in the middle of my id and ego,

which I kept in my wallet in my back pocket,

but my pockets have holes in them, so I never know where my mind wanders.

though the stream of flowing, mesmerizing mind nuggets 

get tucked away in a field meant to go on forever,

yet typically ends whenever I get too nostalgic over the corner store

that my friends and I hung out at,

at which point I just spend the next few hours

scrolling through Buzzfeed and Facebook trying to remember how gloriously wonderful I am.

it must be nice to live in the moment,

or to be able to read David Foster Wallace without scratching your head

several miles per hour every other sentence.

I like to imagine an alternate dimension in which I’m either 

smart or zen-like, though never both,

or at least not at the same time, since I’m not certain what either

state I’d like to be in,

since all I know is the state I am in,

satiated in high notes bleeding from a chorus

made of claymation on a string of the most interesting images

ever conveyed.

they say you have over 80,000 thoughts per day,

but I could never count that high in one day,

so I tend to doubt the reality of what I know

and what I am as an illusion between what I id and what I ain’t.

molecular tidal tantrums catching visuals of 8mm

paintings playing back thousands of memories that should have been forgotten

in the ember liquid in aged oak on a fermented plank known

to hold the world’s greatest mysteries within its mist and vapor,

as the clutch to all that is known

gets broadcasted to the backdrop of an audio-visual conundrum 

in a vacuum where there is no audience, no one to see the violent

creation of a world meant to explore a meaning out of nothing

that’s yet to be understood,

or yet to be conveyed in a satisfactory manner,

so that everything, everyone, in their stick forms, melodramatic theatre,

can be laid to rest 

with the comfort that it will all be okay,

it’ll be okay,

it’ll be okay,

I will be okay,

as the circular motions of billions, turned to trillions, turned to whatever comes after,

years of going in the same circle manifest into the wickedest hatred

being played back by a million different synchronized rhythms 

zipping through space in a slow manner so it can still observe and enjoy the sights,

well, look at that, a comet’s tail writing French in cursive

across the sky, but it will never last, nor be understood