lies

 I had this weird epiphany in the hallway of Wayzata high school. I was trotting down the stairs, thinking about lying and lies and the ways we lie, gazing out at the blindingly white snow, the glint of the sun off of the rows of red and black cars, the nearly naked trees. The knowledge sort of punched me in the throat.

Everything is essentially a lie.

I looked down at the speckled granite of the stair case: lie.
The 90 degree angle of the shining, gray metal railing on the stairs: lie.

Our structured society is an illusion. Why do we accept that the long rectangles of "stairs" are stairs.. They aren't really. We have just accepted them to be... And it has closed our minds to other possibilities-- they are polished rocks, pressed into concrete, they are a floor hockey rink, a slide, an exercise machine, a place where people can lie down in neat rows, a back massager, a podium. Anything can be anything, but our language and our narrow mindedness prevents us from always seeing that. Why do we accept that the lines and dots of this sentence really are the meaning behind what I am writing? Why is Monday Monday?

The human race prides itself on being so much more intelligent and complex than our lesser animal counterparts. We have creativity! But do we really? We drudge through daily life, going through the motions of what is expected of us, empty and confused.  We accept, and become blind, lost in the word. If I am looking out at a sunset, and just think to myself, sunset, pretty, colors ah I am missing the moment. I am stuck in the neuron patterns of my mind.

I know this is a dead, lungs plugged, decaying, maggot crawling, festering, metaphor but we are all sort of chickens with our heads cut off. Our bodies are rushing around purposefully, muscles contracting, and our minds sort of follow behind, unaware.

In Spanish we had to draw a picture of an assigned word. Mine was la inestabilidad. I drew an insane man, curly hair alive, eyes shrewd, face haggard. He was bundled in a strait jacket in a padded asylum. My Spanish teacher looked at me like I am the persona con mucha inestabilidad, he sort of raised is eyebrows, pursed his lips down a bit, and eyed me quizzically. Okay.... He said, and dismissed me.

I don't think that drawing was creative. The insane person could actually be sane, and we are all insane. The world is instability; everything we deem order and structure lives on the teetering premise that we narrow mindedly accept. Nothing is as it seems.

Fire

I. Its base is transparent periwinkle. Then grey, white-yellow. It has no edge. 
II.  Singed eyebrows, too short eyelashes
III. roasts marshmallow- slightly golden or black, bubbling, charred 
IV.  CH₄(g) + 2O₂(g) → CO₂(g) 2H₂O(g)
V. The lava that comes out of the onion volcano at P. F. Changs. 
VI. blackness it its wake. Starves, branches bare, crumbling. Weeds spring, feed on death. 
VII. A protest, torrents of orange and red engulf a monk, legs a triangle of steel, robes turning to ash. 
VIII.  Casts romantic shadows on the walls, permeating pumpkin spice, midnight vanilla.
IX. Flaming bombs: the maimed limbs of fallen soldiers. 
X.  These sit in rows, under the shadowed dome. Eloquent, twisted limbs of naked angles. pools of inky wax. Weeping mothers light them. Jesus is serene, eyes cast down, palms out.  
XII. The soul of a hot air balloon, floating higher, endless sky. 
XIII. The cauterizer of a bleeding gash, the smell of roasting human flesh.
XIV. With a pop and the pungent taste of kerosene, it leaps out of a gilded lighter, I <3 Mom. 
XV. Dead, steaming, dampness. 
XVI. The skeleton of a house, melted iron. 
XVII. California's nemesis 
XVIII. The caveman's un-numb toes and strings of steaming animal 
XIX. A droplet of orange, shaking. Elongating. Growing and dying. The wind's tango partner.
XX. A throbbing lymph filled soar, stinging. Hastily inserted into a purple plastic cup of ice water. 
XXI. A god. Circles of chanting people, holding hands, dancing around the leaping swirls of orange.