Croc

California summer days enter winter bright
as an angel in a roomful of purgatory.
Stuffed deep as a bad feeling into the third floor,
my head submerged below cubicle sightlines
in a grey fabric fog color of horror film sets
when the creature roams a vague netherworld
and villagers disappear in a cloud center of revenge,
grey as the 'good job' narrative, grey as sidewalks,
a grey injected into the vein each paycheck.
But I am no dead log in the negotiated river,
having climbed so many walls of experience!
My eyeballs once ricocheted off a ceiling
loud and clickety clack as ping pong balls
from the way she did the Louisiana python thing.
Rode an astral drug elevator one Tucson night
straight to Reno and back so real I phoned the casino
to request the winnings I left in the sports book bar.
Drove a rental car straight into the ocean at Daytona.
And maybe Cathy’s got a mystery mass in her breast
Elaine’s sister is chasing a soldier to the coast,
Robert will get fired for sleeping with the woman
one floor below (fire, moon and star tattoos!),
but it remains the stuff of Tigres/Euphrates Rivers
10,000 years back when we first sat still as this,
when all adventure stopped and we waited
on clouds, on approval, on luck, on storage
(farmers, office workers eat the same dust).
No more! I’m the guy who’s lost his identity
to free up awareness, the guy who shut off
the lying, treacherous snake king voice,
skull emptied of its rabble...my quantum field
in a bone temple, organic mass draped off it,
opening the processor to neglected info
so that I may one day stop the world
(vision that sees past movie screens).
You hear the same story a million times,
and, c’mon, man, all meaning ends.
More stories about bags of meat?!?
I am not me, nor ever have been.
Slip to pure listen to escape thought:
computer fan, office weather machine,
electric thrum, gurgle of computer keys,
Robert whispers junk, the light unaware
this old buried thing is coming for it.