Night Walking Part 2 (Flipside)
In a rush I leave the house
I don’t remember leaving
Or why I was in a rush,
I remember feeling too close, too trapped
Needing to- the word is on the tip of my tongue
I want to flee this place
Although I have no reason why
I tell this to you as though I’m thinking thoughts
Rational
But it isn’t like that
I’m already on the flipside
It’s the land of magic in the dark
You’ve heard of the shadow people?
The Streetlight people?
They live close to us, a hair’s breath of a dimension away
Sometimes it starts with a magician,
Or a man who tries to touch my hair
Sometimes it just is
Equally placed between the highway and the river two forces
Pull
me
Towards them with equal forces
Freezing me in place
I know if I live
My head will hurt tomorrow
I am a passenger,
Watching, falling asleep
Occasionally jolting awake
Trying to pull myself out of the flipside of night
Opposites are not what they teach in school

The opposite of good isn’t bad
The opposite of white isn’t black
The opposite of night isn’t day
If that was true, we would live on a table
That you could flip with a finger
Maybe that’s where people get confused thinking
The world is flat.

The world smells like the chemicals from the fertilizer factory
Like hot rubber from Kal tire
Like manure from the nearby farms
I’m relieved when my body turns away from the highway and towards
The river
I walk towards the river, it is endlessly far way
Each streetlight flickers as I approach it and some pop and go black
My eyes burn in my head
My neck is on fire
When I fall, I feel nothing, though
My body is not mine here

The river has no birds in it
it is lower than before
So low I can see the muddy bottom
My hands are ice even in the heat
I later wonder if my heart was pounding to
Get blood to my limbs at all
Or was I just a meat puppet when I was flipside

Two whirlpools slowly formed in the mud by the bridge.
I looked up at the bridge
Streetlight people had gathered and stared
They were not captivated by the sight of me
More gamely watching to see if I may become of interest
In the center of the bridge stood a short man in cheap plaid

He looked like a man you would see anywhere in the midwest
In any ‘locals’ coffee and diner.
He wore a baseball cap and old man pants and I knew without
getting close that he was the sort who was always sucking on
His badly fitting dentures.

It is disappointing to see how pathetic
The Great and Mighty Oz is
Still, he was powerful, I had only to look at the eyes
Of the whirlpool demon
Inviting me to join him
To know the man was a strong magician

I forced my tired legs to bend on the same park bench
I had sat on when it had been the good end of the flipside
There was no doubt in my heart that they were calling me to die
I was he sacrifice for the arcane rituals that fueled
The flipside
I had been called before
I was being called again.

A hand reached in and pulled me out of the flipside
Call it what you want: a miracle, les deux de machina, a cheat end,
the hand of God
It is simply the truth
The hand of God sometimes comes down because it doesn’t want to let your
story end that way and the world has been written too dangerously
For people to believe that this is reality
not a fictional metaphor to describe street crime
Or mental illness
There is a flipside
Or call it a Slipslide away
A sidestep out of this world
Into a realm ever so slightly out of sync
Because for people who live on the edge of reality
it’s a delicate walk to keep from slipping from one reality into that other

There are many worlds, many dimensions
Streetlight people, cheap denture sucking magicians, shadow people,
Rivers with whirlpool eyes
Or it was a bad dream I had
If you need to say anything, say that
To help you stay sane and sleep better at night.