Prose Fragment: It was...

I have made it somewhat of a rule not to publish any of my fiction on Welcome to the Interdome; not because I shun the blog format, but because this is more of a personal, narrative space for me than any of my finished writing is. Besides, I have Brute Press for that (though the poor beast has been a bit neglected of late in actual posted material).

But, I stumbled upon this fragment in my own personal data cloud and for the life of me can't remember or find any note relating to what the purpose or direction of this prose might be. And, as opposed to some of my other fragments, I quite like several bits of this. So, why not throw it out there?

Here: enjoy a bit of disjointed, unedited prose--think of it as unavoidably intentionally poetic, though not intended it as such.

I should add that I never write "this way". I typically write what I feel to be very direct, very transparent and lucid, though dense, prose; I don't like writing that is purposefully vague and bordering on meaninglessness. I consider this a flaw of my training in philosophy.

The title of this fragment is the file name under which it was saved.


It Was...


Somewhere in the universe is a writer that cannot sleep. And I say this after all the people are dead.

Tiresome, wakesome, troublesome truth is in insomnia. No sleep is a passing symptom--soon recovered, soon relapsed--suffering and celebrating: out-of-desire-made-dreary-in-duty to a deeper, underground, transcendent, NOTHING.

Nothing to do with sleep. It is the big, fat, dead gray of the difference between before the sun and after.

I press the button again and again and again. Out comes the most horrible, piercingly drab monotone beep--it is the sound of nothing. I hang up and look at the phone, expecting it to exist for ever.

That phone is the lord; cower in fear, launch the blasphemies that have been carefully sculpted over thousands of bloody short lives, praise its name and its pure holy tone. I reach to press it again, but my hand is thinking, thinking of nothing, and it knocks god to the floor; it clatters and its battery skitters out on the concrete.

"YOU SHOULD REALLY GET SOME SLEEP"

Nothing to do with it, not me or anyone else. It's the corpse of a whale, eaten by sharks, finally on shore. The journey is complete, and it was dead long ago. I've been awake the whole time and finally getting somewhere.

If I slept, who would know? Upon its single axis gravity foot the world spins free of the constraints of my consciousness. Sleep, wake, sleep, wake. How many days have passed? How much rest do I need? What do I do to need more rest? What do I do to get more sleep?

These questions are futile. The answers are easy.

There once was a writer who traveled the entire world in a paper sack. The sack was as big as a full-grown child, and he would ball himself up to that size and crinkle the worn fibers down over his head under the paper mouth kissed the floor. From inside his bag this man could fly anywhere that he chose, as long as the bag was there and he was inside it. One day, when feasting with emperors and dancing with queens, he hiccuped on the wine of some exotic locale, tripped, and split the sack wide open. He tumbled out of his tiny corporeal ball, and laid across the floor, stretched out like a whale on the beach. Home isn't home if you know you can never leave again, and so he cursed the journey as much as the destination.

Both the journey and destination are cursed if they're one and the same. Insomnia, and its twin, the increasing, daylight now, are the spawn of that unholy lord.

"YOU SHOULD REALLY SEE THE BEACH"