There is a whirly-bird crossing the sky, clouds-and-all, spinning propellers and vacating birds from overhead sheet of unnamed African-Blue. I sit at the coffeehouse parsing the ligaments of a dissected thought: we in the invisible undetectable rain of a clear day fall over internally at the thought of the thought of sadness: of the sadness that is at the heart of everything it is we do. The thought like the pinned cadaver of a large toad, forceps and blade readied in the mechanical hand, awaits unchaste obliteration: a desecration of the mortal concept. It writhes to life when linked to a tiny IV of Life Juice (.75 CCs) via membranous catheter, looks up to the surgeon at hand, to its pinned limbs, to one of the ceiling fans just behind surgeon’s head, to the pupil of the surgeon’s right eye, to the surgical mask of blue fabric which veils her exclamations. Someone along the plot might think this a bit of an amateur experiment. The Instructor doesn’t know. He doesn’t know he’s just a variable in the concept of the thought-as-toad-cadaver of the mind of the brain of the head of the body of the person who is me who is sitting here at the coffeehouse parsing him, the analog relationship he shares with the big picture. There are seconds of minutes ticking away from the clock inside, the clock that is the multiple clocks on the watches of the wrists of conversant patrons, biding their own—time.
The coffeehouse closes in an hour. People have begun vacating the -house, have left their napkins and trays of crumpets and local ANTI-HERO DOUGHNUTS for the employees of the -house to pick up and dispense into plastic tubs and clean and/or wash and ready for the next day, assuming as always that the cycle is eternally repeating: the fractal it is: if you go deeper in, you see all the same patterns. There will be a clap! and a hum and an “All-righty folks, closing time!” and the sounds of footsteps and lost conversation and clear-plastic cups hitting waist basket’s trashfiller, etc. There will be a great falling-out between the patrons and the employees as time comes to its inevitable surge of negative movement. Would we back up, see the sky again, its cloud-cutting whirlybird, the fly skittering along wood table at which I sit and parse, the people at the East tables at the edge of the deck having their own uniquely cherished conversations, we might even notice that we are ourselves dreaming: that we are not really even here, right now, in this setting: this place of places: this moment. That we are really in the mind of a writer looking to his screen as he types in the necessary words to communicate a thought: a thought of a thought of a thought in which thoughts take form as things, as people, and such—whether anthropomorphic toads or not. That we are nothing more than the variable in this one thought within someone else’s head’s skull’s brain’s mind’s capsular Imaging System, like bubbles rising to a surface through which the air can be inhaled, like the smoke the origin-thinker inhales to acclimate his bloodstreams with the need for a dose of nicotine.
Could you please turn the lights down, then? It’s getting late. I think I might let it pass over me like a ghost, or a shadow of a ghost, but that it is light: that it is the opposite of shadow: that it is somehow something like antishadow, the ghost which heralds the sunrise: the impetus for the energy which constitutes light: the energy of the finger which pulls the switch to initiate the light. I can do only so much to communicate to you the state I’m in. My head never seems quite right. Meaning, by head (of course), the “mind,” the “mind’s eye,” w/h/y. I am a courier from the deepest level of the original thought’s thought’s thought. I am happy to have you. For, without you, I would be just another black smear on a page whose canvas is the anti-shadow which began the thought-parsing to begin with.