It’s like I picked up the wrong head at the hat check window
and suddenly I’m the medium who can’t see ghosts any more.
I used to think in fractals, now it’s whole numbers, like everybody else.
You’d think as compensation, my common sense would have increased
but I’m computer dumb. Give me a set of directions and I can follow them,
unless you’ve left out a step, in which case I lock up
and give you the Windows Blue Screen of Death,
or if you leave me a choice or alternate steps, I will go back and forth
until time runs out and then pick one at random
and make up some implausible rationalization about why I picked it
in words that come like ketchup from an all but empty bottle.
It’s all in black & white and blurred around the edges like a TV flashback
or an old horror movie complete with fog between you and the monster,
you’re always map-less and lost, the compass spinning,
always that vague sense that something is very wrong but you can’t tell what
just like it is when you’re bad stoned and don’t remember getting that way,
and you tell yourself the whole thing might be real interesting if just you went with it,
but you know you’re lying, it’s Nightmare City and you’re only in the suburbs.
Everything is oddly askew, and the color is off, and you stumble into things
like in the hour immediately after impact, when you don’t even know
you’ve been repeating the same three phrases for an hour straight.
And when it goes back to some semblance of the old reality,
you could almost laugh at the irony of it
if it wasn’t permanent.
©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS
William John Watkins 