Night Walking Part 2 (Flipside)
\nIn a rush I leave the house
\nI don’t remember leaving
\nOr why I was in a rush,
\nI remember feeling too close, too trapped
\nNeeding to- the word is on the tip of my tongue
\nI want to flee this place
\nAlthough I have no reason why
\nI tell this to you as though I’m thinking thoughts
\nRational
\nBut it isn’t like that
\nI’m already on the flipside
\nIt’s the land of magic in the dark
\nYou’ve heard of the shadow people?
\nThe Streetlight people?
\nThey live close to us, a hair’s breath of a dimension away
\nSometimes it starts with a magician,
\nOr a man who tries to touch my hair
\nSometimes it just is
\nEqually placed between the highway and the river two forces
\nPull
\nme
\nTowards them with equal forces
\nFreezing me in place
\nI know if I live
\nMy head will hurt tomorrow
\nI am a passenger,
\nWatching, falling asleep
\nOccasionally jolting awake
\nTrying to pull myself out of the flipside of night
\nOpposites are not what they teach in school <\/p>\n
The opposite of good isn’t bad
\nThe opposite of white isn’t black
\nThe opposite of night isn’t day
\nIf that was true, we would live on a table
\nThat you could flip with a finger
\nMaybe that’s where people get confused thinking
\nThe world is flat.<\/p>\n
The world smells like the chemicals from the fertilizer factory
\nLike hot rubber from Kal tire
\nLike manure from the nearby farms
\nI’m relieved when my body turns away from the highway and towards
\nThe river
\nI walk towards the river, it is endlessly far way
\nEach streetlight flickers as I approach it and some pop and go black
\nMy eyes burn in my head
\nMy neck is on fire
\nWhen I fall, I feel nothing, though
\nMy body is not mine here<\/p>\n
The river has no birds in it
\nit is lower than before
\nSo low I can see the muddy bottom
\nMy hands are ice even in the heat
\nI later wonder if my heart was pounding to
\nGet blood to my limbs at all
\nOr was I just a meat puppet when I was flipside <\/p>\n
Two whirlpools slowly formed in the mud by the bridge.
\nI looked up at the bridge
\nStreetlight people had gathered and stared
\nThey were not captivated by the sight of me
\nMore gamely watching to see if I may become of interest
\nIn the center of the bridge stood a short man in cheap plaid <\/p>\n
He looked like a man you would see anywhere in the midwest
\nIn any ‘locals’ coffee and diner.
\nHe wore a baseball cap and old man pants and I knew without
\ngetting close that he was the sort who was always sucking on
\nHis badly fitting dentures. <\/p>\n
It is disappointing to see how pathetic
\nThe Great and Mighty Oz is
\nStill, he was powerful, I had only to look at the eyes
\nOf the whirlpool demon
\nInviting me to join him
\nTo know the man was a strong magician<\/p>\n
I forced my tired legs to bend on the same park bench
\nI had sat on when it had been the good end of the flipside
\nThere was no doubt in my heart that they were calling me to die
\nI was he sacrifice for the arcane rituals that fueled
\nThe flipside
\nI had been called before
\nI was being called again. <\/p>\n
A hand reached in and pulled me out of the flipside
\nCall it what you want: a miracle, les deux de machina, a cheat end,
\nthe hand of God
\nIt is simply the truth
\nThe hand of God sometimes comes down because it doesn’t want to let your
\nstory end that way and the world has been written too dangerously
\nFor people to believe that this is reality
\nnot a fictional metaphor to describe street crime
\nOr mental illness
\nThere is a flipside
\nOr call it a Slipslide away
\nA sidestep out of this world
\nInto a realm ever so slightly out of sync
\nBecause for people who live on the edge of reality
\nit’s a delicate walk to keep from slipping from one reality into that other <\/p>\n
There are many worlds, many dimensions
\nStreetlight people, cheap denture sucking magicians, shadow people,
\nRivers with whirlpool eyes
\nOr it was a bad dream I had
\nIf you need to say anything, say that
\nTo help you stay sane and sleep better at night. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,441,5],"tags":[3019,4842,52],"class_list":["post-101405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marathon-poem","category-poetry-prompt-responses","category-poetry-prompts","tag-24-hour-poetry-marathon","tag-supernatural-poetry","tag-virginia-carraway-stark"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101405"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102743,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101405\/revisions\/102743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}