12:17- 12:40
Reflective surfaces washed out like a freeze dried landslide, all raincoats and hands jammed into pockets, the skin of wrists is not visible anywhere, rainy day attitudes with slippery floor dreams, dangerous in their intensity and focus, every sign in a foreign language is a warning, though everything is foreign if is unknown, the danger of knowledge is in the realization of all that will forever remain foreign no matter how hard attempted to assimilate or learn or grow. Those are called the 'unfathomables' and they haunt the educated, surrounded by dusty books and growing spiderwebs, the sour mash breath of a fire breather, the countenance of the condemned to suffer by the words of philosophers at their prime, all coaxing and jousting... "your revelations are but sad trash to the extent of our collective knowledge and what you strive to say has been said countless times in the volumes of history," so the intellectual mind suffers to the point of extinction and writes a book about it, to add to the creative pressures of future generations. To justify his existence.
Blue speckled umbrellas, shared yellow ones stolen from U Village at the bottom of the 45th street bridge, that ramp with so many white dipped peaks scattered about, transient in the clear days, the reflective glow of triumph to life oneself to that impressive height, to collect ones thought in a rhythm enough, with the motivational vision of future success.... blind ambition to create a collected thought... red umbrellas spread open wide, one has an image of smiling sun with black glasses on, others huddle together under one, shared with mutual human warmth, the cultural boundary unaddressed to my American culture, singular cover, the rain doesn't care, these scattered colorful umbrellas like flashes of images in dreams, softly shifting through the esoteric gloom of it all....
I walk through this campus of lonely Bumbershoot nostalgia, those gorgeous notes serving as a backdrop to my companionless exploration. There the crowds thinned in the falling rain, afraid of the elements, the natural power of water to carve canyons and smear off make up and pretense. I float through these crowds like a soft fragrance. Obvious ghost metaphors available but inaccessible because I've said them all before a million times, like a corpse that keeps dying over and over, with diminishing agony, though still hurts.
In this fugue state, like someone cast adrift at the mercy of ocean currents after a shipwreck, I walk aimless to find a place to haunt for awhile, eat something slight, drink a cup of drip, feel the weight of my sensations pour out like a sieve, a broken dam, feel them in the moment, gone and forgotten, replaced by strange approximations of what it was I actually felt. In this retrospective I lose the passion I felt, the eyes burning with fury and concealed warmth, the passion of umbrellas as personal flight devices. I am an umbrella. Let me provide you shade and comfort.
