What He's Thinking When He Thinks About Relationship
It’s not that I want to build a time machine. It’s that I want to be a time machine. I want to peer at myself peering at myself as I walk out onto the porch for a smoke. I want to clap my warm hand on my shoulder, ages 8, 12, 17, 23, 37. All the mad years. I want to feel my hand’s large warmth warming my shoulder even as I feel my shoulder’s curve filling my palm. I want to use the iPhone 200.
Some time travelers are charming but wacked from all the time in their heads. Some are truly insane, madness and genius shot to the sky like a rocket. I like them both but I’ll settle for the kind that simply steps into a machine and leaves the planet. I’ll settle for being taken, as I used to beg the stars from my bedroom window in that time. Call any vegetable and the chances are good the vegetable will respond to you.
Here’s the thing: I don’t know what’s in her head. I don’t know whose fault that is.
So many continuums. The cliché space-time obviously but also heart-mind, man-woman. Continuums of acid, of guitar string, of the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, which continues and continues. Maybe I don’t know what continuum means.
I would visit PKD pre-1974, post-Lies, Inc. We’d smoke something, maybe. We’d ponder the deranged God and the hive mind he will later call the Empire, how to escape what we’ve tricked ourselves into believing is determinism. I would watch him and know that VALIS is coming, that blinding pink light of transmission. How could I help but kiss his face?
Smoke curls behind me through the door to the kitchen when I want it to go out the screen into the yard, away from her. It curls and floats, a continuum of trail. Is marriage empire or a way out? It is probably my fault.
Here’s the thing: I don’t want to be bored in my life.
Time does not mean to me what it means to her. She counts it. I neglect to notice its passing. She thinks about minute particles of relationship. I think about the technology and philosophy of escape. Still, I cannot help but reach for her, and she cannot help but reach for me. Our warm hands cover all selves.
Some time travelers are charming but wacked from all the time in their heads. Some are truly insane, madness and genius shot to the sky like a rocket. I like them both but I’ll settle for the kind that simply steps into a machine and leaves the planet. I’ll settle for being taken, as I used to beg the stars from my bedroom window in that time. Call any vegetable and the chances are good the vegetable will respond to you.
Here’s the thing: I don’t know what’s in her head. I don’t know whose fault that is.
So many continuums. The cliché space-time obviously but also heart-mind, man-woman. Continuums of acid, of guitar string, of the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, which continues and continues. Maybe I don’t know what continuum means.
I would visit PKD pre-1974, post-Lies, Inc. We’d smoke something, maybe. We’d ponder the deranged God and the hive mind he will later call the Empire, how to escape what we’ve tricked ourselves into believing is determinism. I would watch him and know that VALIS is coming, that blinding pink light of transmission. How could I help but kiss his face?
Smoke curls behind me through the door to the kitchen when I want it to go out the screen into the yard, away from her. It curls and floats, a continuum of trail. Is marriage empire or a way out? It is probably my fault.
Here’s the thing: I don’t want to be bored in my life.
Time does not mean to me what it means to her. She counts it. I neglect to notice its passing. She thinks about minute particles of relationship. I think about the technology and philosophy of escape. Still, I cannot help but reach for her, and she cannot help but reach for me. Our warm hands cover all selves.
