PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

The sun beat at a perpendicular angle upon my mop of hair. I never washed it, not because I was a bit bohemian, but because I just didn’t care. I was to work from noon till 9. I walked up the steps to DJ’s, the sticky smell of barbecue chicken encumbered me.

It was my third job, and I was just out of high school. My last job, during my senior year, was at Bohregahrd’s Foods. I took my two weeks’ notice the day of Peter Roberts’…episode. Peter was a very eccentric character, and so I’ve heard he passed away a few days after the day he lost it. I had hoped that was the strangest thing I would encounter, but after that day at noon, I’d be calling Peter’s blow up mundane compared to what was to come.

I entered the familiar place to the dense chatter of customers, the thick dine, the low music, the clamor of the bar, the steam of the kitchen, the shattering of used dishes. Our restaurant was one of many chains across the state of Illinois, and also owned a chain of dish factories. Dishes, for us, were cheap and infinite. If they took an unreasonable amount of effort to clean, we’d simply throw them out. They always rolled in and we never ran out.

As I made my solemn way into the kitchen, I remembered myself. This was not me. I was not this waiter standing at attention, ready to work. As I moved the joints and knuckles of my body, this place my mind resided, felt foreign. I was not James Banks, I was mere abstraction, a vague myth, a legend. I felt my soul coil up, and sink deep into the peach-pit of this body’s heart, the center of it all. I felt the dense grip of gravity slowly loosen from around this waist, as the pressure of these feet on the floor faded, and I floated up into the air.

I watched as the body I had inhabited became smaller and smaller, as if a defeated ship, slowly sinking to its grave. Without warning, I was simply elsewhere! My five senses that interpretted reality were somewhat “unplugged,” it felt. Blackness pressed to me, blackness beyond its mass, beyond color itself. I was a feeling, as dry and bruised as any other feeling that was welded to my mind. I had now arrived. I was the Artist. I was a Painter in an old pair of denim overalls and a rag of a T-shirt, stained with countless tones of paint. I wore a black beret, and a neatly trimmed moustache. In my hand was a brush, my sweet silver sword which I wielded, pressing colors into the canvas, mixing the colors upon the wooden pallet in my other hand.

As I settled into my surroundings, I found myself upon a wooden stage, long and spread from wall-to-wall. I was in a giant coliseum, yet all my eyes focused on was the canvas. I was in my own body. I was my own identity and this body now was MINE! I heard the song of the ocean, sweeping forth the room, al around me, not just in my head. It seemed to travel in a caravan, as if just outside, on its way to see me.

I looked up to see a wonderful chandelier, of incredible size, suspended in space by a large silver chain. On three sides I saw small ceiling fans, which were large themselves, but dwarfed to the eye in comparison to the chandelier. I looked back my painting, and saw the finished image of the chandelier, and its triplets. The ocean sound became louder in volume, wisping through each molecular structure of air. I turned my head to see beyond my easel nervously, and as I did, I saw a crowd of what looked like 10,000 people making up an audience! They applauded me enthusiastically, as if I had just taken a bow after a spectacular performance.

I looked back up at the chandelier, and the three fans started to spin slowly but surely, and suddenly…I was nothing. I was the blackness that brought me to myself, the bleak conscious void that is the thought of all humans. I was back in the kitchen at DJ’s, the bustle of people continued in coarse annoyance.

“Table four! And Pronto!” the chef in the tall white hat ordered to me, shoving a plate of spaghetti in my arms. I took the plate outside the kitchen obediently, and I threw it at the adjacent wall malevolently, pasta and sauce smeared like paint, dripped slowly down it.