Over the Void (With Apologies to The Pixies)

The clock keeps on tick, tick, ticking and I think about thinking.

I juxtaposition my thoughts against my actions: One makes a glorious mountain and the other a dark desolate valley; One ablaze in sunglow the other fuming in dark ruminations. And I ask that aging question: Where is it? Way out in the water, I see it drowning.

Is it water? It’s so hard to tell when there’s no light. Perhaps it’s alcohol or gasoline. It certainly smells. The vapors drape their heavy tendrils around my nostrils like fish-hooked chains. Oh the cutting stench! A smell of dried vomit and stale excrement wafting from listless hours and indolent acts.

Act I: The clock keeps on tick, tick, ticking. I can’t think about the thinking when the clock keeps tick, ticking. Or thumpy, thump, thumping like a burdened train over the tracks. The tracks are disappearing over that swampy miasma. All aboard the time train! Next stop: fate.

Hey look down there! Beneath the strained struts and warped beams. There, in that bubbling potion, it’s my mind. Ah! But if it’s there then where am I? Am I not there with it in that poisonous froth? But if I know it’s there am I not here and it with me? Or does it remain, loosely connected by tenuous nerves across the void of air and darkness and time, still in that thickly pitch. Does my notice of it bring it back or is it just a self-awareness that there I am, in the moonlit waves of unknown horror, drowning. And time keeps on tick, tick, ticking and thumpy, thump, thumping over the void. And I think about thinking and thoughts and actions and mountains and valleys. Can one be there while the other is where?

Where is my mind? Way out in the water, I see it drowning while time keeps on ticking I’m thinking of thinking. That sunglow memory must have been self-delusion. You never can tell down here. When will this thinking of thinking move to thinking of acting and on to acting on thinking and then to thinking on acts. Or will I just stay in Act I while the clock keeps on tick, tick, ticks—like a buried head in my skin boring in for blood and who knows what else. Think about this while looking through a scratched and smog slimed train window:

Time, like a tick, bores.