Out of the fog, he stumbled
into kaleidoscopic clarity.
Out of amnesia,
out of Dreamland,
out of imbalance, he waffled
into equilibrium;
from Out of Time, he crawled
back into temporal being.
He uttered his way out
of silence into speech, of sorts.
The curtain that had
hidden his processes
lifted, revealing an expanse
of heretofore neglected
associations from childhood.
The scales fell from his eyes,
the crust of his mind
softened, like ice cream
melting on the counter.
The dense smoke of his
previous approach wafted out
the window of cognition;
clarity guided his delirium
towards the firm ground
of reasonable behavior,
that idol before which
his hysterical brainwaves
had washed ashore and knelt
in abject slavery.
The forest of misconceptions,
foreboding approximations of his
worst suspicions, precursors
of long foretold anomalies
only now became clear,
only now assumed form.
He saw how his past efforts had been
pathetic but effective attempts
at self-delusion, fruitful
Only in the short run.
He saw that now,
as the bright sun of logic
shone down upon the green wisps
of calculations growing from the
fertile soil of the pasture of
his mentality. His desires,
his ambitions, his hopes, all of that
seemed inconsequential
as his now free mind soared
like a hawk over the meadow
of his truer self and swooped
down upon a panic stricken
rabbit of doubt scurrying frantically
through the tall protective grass of
hesitation and reconsideration.
After an extended silence,
after a long drawn-out pause,
after much reflection and serious discussion,
with himself, it’s true, but that counts
for something these days, doesn’t it?
After a pause to sip at the fountain
of inactivity, of reception and leisure;
after doubting its very significance,
after waiting to see what would develop and
after seeing what was developing,
not rushing into anything but just flipping
the dial and trying to relax and calm down,
after just reading instead and,
when tired of reading, watching and,
after tiring of that, sleeping and dreaming,
but not writing the dreams down,
just dreaming them as cushions
to sit his foibles on when they
grew tired of standing in the
hallway of procrastination.
After all of that, finally,
anti-climactically one night,
he just sat down, opened his notebook
to a blank page and started writing.
