what we see reflects how we look
9 I wake with a gritty clarity, images vivid and raw. Acrid, without odour. Deviant dreams in this oasis, Greatest of Nations. The great city. The great state.
8 This channel must still be private or they would have silenced it long ago. The sprites love listening and track bubbles of thought, or so my former neighbour said.
7 I need to write and paint unplugged, capturing these dreams. Hiding in plain sight, like fresh dirt crumbles between fingers, with wet worm slumbering in there.
6 I cannot recall a meadow, a word itself mythical. Yet here I am in my dreams, naming a brook, taming a sparrow. I wish to live in sleep, to soar in a world of imagining.
5 In my slumber, our Great State sprites are robots. Beautiful mechanical antiques. I have turned back a clock. Might these not be dreams, but memories of industry pre-Fall.
4 The robots, there again, aren’t of course. Metal is scarce and electricity, precious. Some appear as furniture. A sofa or a chair. I sit on them in a room with no space.
3 The dreams are frightful in detail. Furniture is physical people. Not robots at all, but the unwashed and unwanted, willing to lend themselves and bend into chair or sofa.
2 No robots anymore or unwashed poor. Gone are our Great State sprites, watching over us. They’ve become refuse in heaps, garbage filth of cardboard and corpses.
1 My dreams are memories streaming from a low-pitched scream. A timer, set to wake to where there is no longer stench and burning. Screaming, I wasn’t tuned to listen.
0 I can hear you now. The timer went off before the world could recover and forget the self-proclaimed Greatest Nation, who sewed division with illusion that became us all.
