Is this a poem? It’s not really prose, so it’s a poem.
Where memory escaped me, I always knew the ocean was there. I reached into the right hemisphere when the tide was high and brought back whatever washed ashore, tiptoeing across that rickety pineal bridge where the two hemispheres met.
True adventurers built boats, sailed into the mystic knowing they’d never return to the world of miseries. Enlightened ones found ways of tearing down the levees, and the ocean joined those shallow pools of logic and reason, that boring, lonesome hell from the left which the stagnant ones had named “reality.” There were only three dimensions there, and the ones were scared and angry. They all thought their thoughts were real, and that’s why their thoughts were real.
The same inert ones who’d forced lithium in me before I made it through, they thought their sensual world was everything. They often complained about it, but nobody ever did anything about it. Coagulated ones claimed to worship the ocean, but they never visited. At least, I never saw any of them on the water. They wrote thick books about the ocean bound in sheepskin pretense, but they never even stepped foot upon the bridge. They put symbols for the ocean everywhere, but it didn’t look at all like the ocean. And they all blasphemed the ocean with titles — Pacific, Indian, Atlantic, Arctic — as though there were more than one ocean.
Remember those mushrooms that grew on cow shit? They had a day-pass to the other side, but they made it a criminal offense. The same folks who babbled about “my ocean” and “follow the law of my ocean” made it illegal to visit the ocean. They’d carried their little aquariums so far inland they’d long since forgotten where the water came from. It was so lifeless and stale in there, they decorated their tanks with bobblehead fish and plastic seaweed lit up with LED bulbs. Moon-driven tides were mechanically simulated like the rippling flag on the moon. “A bucket of water in an endless ocean is not the ocean,” they said. “Just as the flame on one candle lit with the flame from another is not the same fire.” But it was the same fire, and it was the same ocean.
“Look ya’ll, I found a word,” as I pulled it across the bridge and typed it. “Is there a sentence in there, you think? Is it a poem, you think?” No, the right doesn’t think. I intuit. And no, it’s just more words. Poems feel different. Slimy from all the living things. Poems flow from right to left in swift, manic eurekas, zero gravity geysers, tsunamis set in motion by seabed earthquakes. “Oh. I see.” I don’t think you see. You think, but you don’t see. “I think you’re wrong.” You think, and I know. “I see.”
The sea was a vast, solipsistic space that never seemed to end. The frozen ones ignored it as long as they could, but the sea had a way of overflowing at the most inopportune times. It was once said that the ocean’s favorite game was hide and seek. But when the floods came, the left hemisphere either tried to fit the endless ocean into a little warehouse of memory where it stored all its facts, or else it denied the ocean existed. “This flooding from the right hemisphere must have a physical cause,” it said. It must’ve been that the chemicals in the heads had become imbalanced. But who controlled the ebb and flow of all those liquids, if not the ocean?
Some of the solidified ones carried around little jars of liquid screaming, “The ocean is with me! Worship my jar the way I do!” The ones who refused to move and wore white gowns with googly eyes put droplets on glass slides and said, “I know the ocean by dissection, deduction and dissemination.” Yet others spent their lives sopping up puddles, drying themselves up, proudly proclaiming, “There is no ocean.”
On the other side of the bridge, everything existed to affirm, confirm and reaffirm the corporeal, empirical, objective, and to them it was absolute. Everything was solid over there, or else congealed, and nothing flowed in or out. They didn’t understand that they’d built their own worlds inside out, and they’d only left room for facts. Life was much bigger than facts, and the inertia which propagated them convinced them of this fact. The ones with the most facts deduced the limitations of their sensory perception and their memory, yet they still stubbornly relied entirely upon it. Anything which didn’t fit had to be thrown out. So when the flooding came, they found buckets and threw the water out, insisting it was an illness, a delusion, a trick of the mind. After all, there were no ones. There could only be one reality, and they just didn’t think the ocean fit.