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GRAEME HARPER
First brain, you say, because you have five? What then are the colours
of your others? I imagine a planet bright all the time. A candy world. But what
colours do you dream? And how does one brain relate to the other? Had I known
we'd discover you deep there in the sand, I'd have prepared some welcome. And
only in your dying breath did I see what blue thoughts you had, what red
feelings you wished, what green beliefs you sought to share. Up there, dark,
starry, perhaps there are others. Like you. Like us. Like another. Blue
brained, green brained, together, sharing colours, in brains, hearts perhaps.
Coloured hearts, each one having many, many and one. The colours of connection.
Blue brain, yes, and others, many coloured, more thoughts, more time even. How
human this all might be.
I have begun to exchange words, unintentionally. Reading a leaflet left yesterday afternoon in my roadside mailbox, my eyes see ''flowers" but my brain registers 'fountains". I read online of a 'rewarded cop' and ponder the horror of a 'rogue cat'. Where there should be 'weather' there appears 'wonder', and where someone has declared 'victory' I find only 'vicinity'. When I mention this in passing to my dentist, in that familiar moment when the numbness starts to take effect, he says I am likely a murdering creep, though I suspect he actually said I am a marvelous creator. The condition waxes and wanes. Sometimes all is as it appears, other times all appears as it most certainly isn't. I fear what will become of things or, more worryingly, if things will become of fear. What if my car is now a cow and my house is now a horse? What more, what if Lucy is Land and any land is Lucy? Love languishes as loosing and our future rots as fruit. I don't dare imagine what will become of kitchen appliances or the love I have for our guinea fowl (those newly minted gangrenous fools) or the position I occupy at school, where children hang on my every word and every word now threatens those children. All the adventures I bring them are now avarice, all the dogs are dragons, all the math is monstrous, all those great stories are gross stones. I ponder if clearing my mind with a brace of lizards would resolve things - though I am actually referring to a bottle of vodka. Or if some kind of consultation with a thermodynamicist would assist, by which I mean a therapist. By the time the afternoon has turned to night I am wedged into a coroner in the bed roam, my heart in my hold, my oars firmly shut, my loops folded under me, hymning hopelessly. What now? I weather. Weigh should I dough?