Armchairs don’t leak honey any longer, but water. There’s so much water. So much. Soil from flooding. Soiled from flooding. Monsoons create aeolian lakes all over the backyard, newborn landscapes the sparrows and squirrels jointly luxuriate in. Ice arcs into rainbows, an untrod path to skate down while inhaling crisp, clean midnight. Far, but closer than you think, piles of debris enter the scene. They float along, everything ever made pushed up in heaps, steampunk detritus, coal-stained machinery. Beauty morphs into rot; the calm sky peels away to reveal past storms that merge with future ones. Each and every single chair swells, roars as stuffed lions, balloons close to being popped. Appear in a car; drive down the freeway. Asleep, eyes open, brain informs: “you can make a turn.” Left or right, it doesn’t matter. Hands grasp the wheel tightly, swerve. This never happens when awake. Can anyone ever get that high, like a car flapping falcon wings, backstroking along with the jet stream? No desire to make it back to memory foam? Knead the world like a cat, see whether it springs back? The surface of our life is a hug, a last second of peace. The next moment is the breaking of an atom, the crackling of air, the swish of maple trees, the deepening of light, snow from cottonwoods, the relentless sinuses, egg fights and egg-throwing games without ever realizing how ironic it all is. And always will be.
