A Threshold Drama

One day, I was sitting in Thompkin Square park, on a bench, contemplating life, watching people go by.

Yuppies and hippies walking their dogs, homeless folk scratching their butts, crack heads splitting their brains, rats running wild and free, pigeons expanding their digestive systems with pieces of chicken-on-rice remainders from the halaal carts and mothers walking by cautiously with their designer babies. In this moment of Arbercrombie and Fitch decrepit pittbul flashes of New York street passerby mania. I looked down at a pigeon that was hovering too close to me. This split second that earned a casual glance of meaningless transfer of information from eye to brain to gut to feeling of salty sweat evaporate in an occasion of summer moisture laden breeze.

The pigeon sneezed!

Yes, this split second, before which I was a clueless individual of the black hole of extreme confusion, concrete clash on natural cosmic methodology. I felt turmoil in my soul boundless of time, reason, urban vigour and human intellect owning the world ideology.

Yes, this split second of reality hits a wall of photosynthetic evolutionary animalistic surreality.

Yes, this split second of inclusion within the world of scavengers, oozing claws, diseased existence of this nasty carrier of nation full of ticks scabies mange and fleas. This rat of the aviary world that eats what it cannot digest, and digests that its system cannot even break down and finally breaks down the urban scavenger food chain. Lounging in the sunlight of artificiality and complex contriving maze labyrinth of New York City. 

Yes, this split second of homosapien partaking in mamalistic dwellings turned the order on its own back and the back into the front, the right into the left and left into oblivion as the aaaaa-turned-into-a-chooooo. I ejected from the park down a spiral of amoebas becoming reptiles, reptiles to amphibians, amphibians to dinosaurs and then a big meteorite hits. Smashes onto my forehead as my spine straightens and I see Manhattan, a wild green island morph into a giant Saks Fifth Avenue.

Yes, this split second of playing in my head: I woke up this morning, smoked a couple of cigarettes, read my book, checked who is popping how many babies on facebook, and who sat with a corona on a Mexican beach. I rolled my memories round and round in the skull which was now a wheel of Russian roulette. Just pull the trigger.

Yes, this split second I continued to wonder where the hell I was. Was I at dead horse point, swimming through the canyons, in a river writing with striations of deposited fossils of those souls that haunt the deep gorges of my gut.

Yes, in this split second I looked back at the time that I suckled the sweet milk of my mothers breast and scratched my tiny fingers on her chest to give me more, to take me back into the womb and give me the refuge of the most ultimate narcissistic woe that would be called my and only my universe.

Yes, in that split second I remembered when I roamed through those caves naked with a spear. Following that dirty hog in the tropical forest, grass under my feet and a thorn in my toe. I had to feed the family and there was a little one on the way. I let those wild dogs loose on those swine. 

Yes, in that split second I was soaring in the sky, circling that slithery cobra, my keen eyes following skillful mass, as it meandered in the river of its own body. And then. The moment was seized and it seized me and I seized it. A wriggling worm stuck to my fork tongue as I used my gecko glue secreting from my stomach on the ceiling of that house, near the tubelight, waiting for the bugs to fly to the light, and what do I find? A caterpillar. The field was filled with yellow lilies, and I ate them all. After all, I had to prepare for my cocoon.

Yes, in that split second those pieces of halaal chicken tasted so damn good. Specially marinated with the dust from many traveling shoes and trespassing bikes. The wheels of the strollers didn’t have much to offer, they were designer. What about cigarette butts? I like those too. The acrid flavour of the tobacco and nicotine are what a pigeon needs sometimes. If those bloody humans can have those, then so can I. As for eating my cousins, well, its halaal. My shrink tells me I can’t eat my own kind, I can’t really break them down, it oozes out of my feet.

Yes, in that split second, I got sucked into a world of no barriers. I was everything and nothing at the same time, everyone and no one simultaneously. A valid and an invalid suspended on the delicate string of nonsense. Such a long journey I have taken, from the deep recesses of the jungle. From the realm of not how and why and who but IS IS IS and more IS. Not tis my darling. It is IS. Not tis cos Shakespeare is dead.

Yes, in this split second, there was one and only one way to get to the other side. I had been manipulated. I was sucked into a vortex. I wanted to cross over. There was no other way, but to do one and only one thing.

So I did it.

I said “Bless you”.