primitive darkness

one day, they'll find a way to record dreams and put them up on grainy projectors in auditoriums. my dreams would be in hi-def-technicolor-buena-vista-warner-brothers-restored-to-original-glory. if i watched my own, would i dream them again? would there be sequels, twists in the plot, re-runs? would people like the stories that come from the border between headland and heartland, soulville and spirit city? would it influence our own mental thrift shops -- elements, people, and illogical sequences like estate sale lamps, shrunken sweaters that belonged to someone else? spectacular light shows of flora and fauna, thoughts like burrs clinging to subconscious wool, later spun into elaborate tales. nonsense is practical, reason is upturned, fears take supernatural form.

dream material seeps into waking life. it shows up in poetic moments, coincidence, archangels and bona fide villains. characters cross over from the mind's directorial debut. they make demands. they obscure road signs. they leave trail markers. they fight imagined evil -- tigers morph into humans, the humans hang signs around the dreamer's neck marked "primitive darkness".

paranoid schizophrenia -- a tidy seam, a red licorice split down the middle of what is real and what is imagined. and what is distilled from the imaginarium of the unhinged? black crystal bubbles that shatter prettily against the sunny bricks of sanity. back away slowly, hands up, weapons dropped, escape is hard-won from a black hole. extraction -- carry anything that will fetch a price, ignite sleeping dragons, aggravate the ether tigers. waves, olas olas olas, to wash away the path of tip toes fleeing in the night.

why should light retreat from the dark? dark calls light dark. dark consumes snuffed out light. fading light is more wholly devoured by so-called primitive darkness. retreat invites attack, attack yields exhaustion. mao said: when the enemy retreats, we pursue. sun tzu said: do not pursue an enemy who simulates flight. a simple event becomes an insidious network of trench warfare. extraction rattled the chains of zealotry.

beauty is demonized. budding branches, frost-defying blooms, vernal magic -- the number two -- all targets of a bitter patrol. mother nature is now a saint stripped of title, a ribboned harlot, a devious queen, a scheming temptress. locks turn. the scent of loss meets the eye of memory. sterile isolation breeds scorn as furious as the passion it despises. blanks filled with damning ink, blood dripping on the page in razored streaks. resentment: the kind that comes from a heart-shaped box heavy with the entrails of the innocent.

neighbors living side by side. truth chocked up to false beads strung meticulously on an abacus of obsession -- this date, this time, this injury. normal constructs of law, morality, good conduct -- all incinerated in the fires of synthetic brimstone: jesus freaks on crusade.

match up: religious zealotry in the ring versus moral turpitude in the opposite corner. both fighting blindly. both under the banner of murky prerogatives. fear fighting itself. truth defending freedom. a clash of raw struggle for dominance. good versus evil, tiger versus dreamer.