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.