Time spent sleeping equals one-third. Time spent dreaming approaches infinity. Where would you be without infinity?

Windswept fields of green swayed beneath a penetrating orange sun. Shadows cast resembled Medusa heads, snakes squirming on the backs of my eyelids. We stood, staring, transfixed beneath this dense canopy of strawberry cough. Penetrate. The roots grow deep in the darkness. Our souls intertwine in the vines of time. We fall, silently accelerating past Saturn, Neptune, stopping for a sec at oblivion then dancing on the surface of the seas.

I’m under.

My pen refuses to write down here.

I’m over.

Now my paper is all wet.

I’m the table. Carve your confessions against the wood grain.

We’re under.

Gargantuan sea turtle, a big mother, coming up on our ass fast. You’re you, but you’re not you. You’re you looking at you outside of you. We’re all doing it. The water’s fine, but this mutant ninja creature looks hungry, and you know how poorly we all swim. Go to gasp for air and you’re a goner. Instead, we dive to a depth Leonardo couldn’t possibly imagine. He doesn’t follow. He’s forgotten.

It’s nighttime in Baghdad and crumbling buildings burn red in the incessant firefight. Bullets leave eternal flicks of light wandering the universe in search of an enemy, a witness, a sympathizer, only to mix in with the rest of it all in one big fuck you to confirm our existence. A red, white and blue fuck you flies by on its way back to New York Harbor. Fuck us all, then.

All I see are shadows. The light is far too bright to comprehend the objects before me. They’re human faces. They’re Rubik’s Cubes with wormholes. Separate. I’m just an entity clinging to a heartbeat in this hell called happiness. My dreams lure me from cyclical enslavement to jump the troughs of light. Red to violet, then beyond. Wavelengths without a line to waste your life waiting in. Wavelengths with popcorn vendors who call out: “Free for all!” It’s mine. It’s yours. It’s ours. But the popcorn will run out, won’t it?

I’m under.

I can’t find a pen.

I’m over.

No paper? Then I can’t write.

You’re the table. I’ll carve what I want on you. You can’t stop me, but you can carve back.

We’re under.

Our hearts stop. Your nails lose their grip in the earth you’ve clung to for so long. You fall. For that brief instant you feel yourself floating downward, looking back, up, wondering when the image of the fading cliff will turn from the painstaking descent into peaceful nothingness. Will it be black? Or a dull off-white in the next stage of existence?

The child’s eyes stare back at you with an innocent, inebriated longing. He just wants to watch the soccer game. It’s tied – you can’t pry him from this. He knows nothing more than placing the ball in the net, excitement – but the men are after him. You know they’ll corrupt him, label him, package his thoughts, then send him out into the world without a clue to who he is. You have to save him.

But he’d rather watch the soccer game. Popcorn vendors stroll by in the aisles, never ending ones that seem to ascend to the heavens. Now all the kid wants is popcorn. He doesn’t understand it’s run out. He can imagine popcorn, so he knows it’s there. It will always be there. It doesn’t occur to him that the popcorn can disappear. It’s the image of popcorn that’s in there forever. Will you rob him of forever? Or will you hand your forever over in a giant fuck you to the rest of the universe? It’s yours to hand out. No, it’s ours.