Because sometimes even nice dinosaurs need to roar.

Paradoxodynamo
JCD Kerwin

I am suspended. [I have suspended time.] I can move the pieces of the universe around with my fingers and feel the earth ripple beneath my toes. The world is slow-moving and the freeze frame rotoscope turns around me. I can feel the planet breathe.

I am organic machine. I’m flying in and out of your aviaries like a mechanical bird with a ticking heart—nickel-sized—ready to fit inside your pocket. I have no particular place to go, but I want to hide from the everyones of the world. Let me bury my head in the sand. Let me tick away in the dunes.

Let me dream, invisible.

I am ten thousand voices screaming directions to a mannequin. I close my eyes because when I open them I might finally be real. Do you ever fall asleep at night, wondering what pills you have to take to wake up normal? Do you ever look in puddles and spy dogs you weren’t really meant to be? I laugh over coffee as Irish blue hues say it’s all because I’m a writer. You can act like different people when you’re a writer. You can write fifty different ways when you fuck words all day, having had a bittersweet love affair with them for years. It’s okay to be so many people, then.

But it’s not me to be them. “It’s not me,” I want to say to that Irish grin. “Don’t you see? I smile three ways and you think it’s okay because you love who I am inside. But sometimes I don’t know who I am, so how could you?” (They just smile, but I don’t think they can smile wide enough to save me anymore. I might need shock therapy instead.)

I fade, sometimes. I drown out existence with methodic reverberations. I run with my eyes closed. (If you listen with your eyes open, you suffocate.) So I walk around the city, holding out my hands. I hope if I touch so many ghosts, I might start to feel their heartbeats through my fingertips. Maybe I’ll start to feel connected to the same oxygen-breathing creatures I walked forth from murky waters with, once upon a Mesozoic time.

If God were here he’d laugh with me, I think. I’d buy him a drink and he’d flip quarters into shot glasses while telling me I’m right: It really is a big fucking joke. He’d tell me to have a laugh and to suck down my Jack before it gets old. Then we’d throw crumbs to the pigeons and he’d cry when the taxi cabs and buses run them over. He’d pick up the bloody messes and eat the carcasses, making them whole again in his form. And I’d stare while he’d put a pair of Oakley’s over his without-a-color eyes, kiss my forehead, and light up a cigarette for the way back to Heaven. He’d give me a thumbs-up, tell me I’m a moron and that it’s all okay, and I’d believe him.

I scream, voiceless. I make a billion mirrors shatter because I hate to see myself in their reflection. I’d rather stand myself atop pedestals in my dreams, and follow voices of gods superseding fairytales my mother sewed into my pockets when my eyes were full of stars. They tell me I am dynamite. So I’ll let loose the vibrant chromaticity burning inside of me and it will set the skies on fire. I’ll make the Aurora Borealis explode in the chaos saturation of my soul.

But I’m not dreaming in the cosmos; I’m stuck in grey raindrops, and that’s okay. I’ll just grab a five dollar fedora that some old man wore in some other life and follow my Chucks to wherever I’m supposed to go. I can’t be certain about anything, but maybe when I finally decide to stop thinking, the stars won’t seem so damn far away.

Nov., 2011, rev. July, Nov 2012