When I fly through the cloud
in the video game, somehow
the game doesn't know what to do.
I am exposed as a brain in a vat.
It looks like I am trapped in a tower
of beer at the Arizona Pizza Kitchen,
but someone must love me very much,
or I am being used in a scheme to skim
the recipes I come up with in my dreams.
When the lights go out
they go out for a couple millennia,
and then I don't really care what happens next.
I am flying on a plane through the international dateline,
a couple people vanish in first class and
I ask the stewardess if I can have their seats.
I heard that the Bermuda triangle has been
hovering in Buffalo for the past 20 years,
says the twilight man beside me.
The movie on his laptop looks abstract from this angle.
It is a movie called "Magnetic Basin."
When I arrive on the tarmac and
descend the stairs onto the airfield,
I feel exposed. It is winter in the city.
I am trying to find a place to go to the bathroom,
as I think about Modigliani in turn of the century Paris.
How will I reward myself when I am normal again?
Thunderstorms mean someone is trying to get
at your snacks, I am told in the vat.
After a struggle against my own foreign limbs
I realize that during rest I am
propelled in a mysterious direction,
but you have egg on your pants I am
told in the vat. It must have come
from the man sitting next to me, I say into the liquid.
I ask to be kept central to my own story, but I find
that I am becoming more and more of a minor character.
I make a break for it by closing my eyes.
I spend long hours at home with books
about yarn and cabinetry. I am coming closer and closer
to realizing my dream of becoming
a single note sung out into a wide valley
by some 17th century village child.
To read more from C.S. Ward, click here to purchase jubilat 22.
