And Last December . . .

Conor, I got it. An overcast sky on a warm day in December, the grey billows overhead floating like glaciers across a sea of thought, a faint breeze moving you towards the blinking lights of tomorrow's beacons that always give you a dreamlike form. Time's no longer caught in the circles that turn like gears on the clocks and seasons, just a steady impetus flowing past unpredictable sights in a land simultaneously recognizable and alien. My hands have been reminding me of continuity, the thread that holds each moment together on the bracelet looped around my ankle. This moment is coming together, a darting finch, wings cutting through air, a definitive train of thought, the emissions trailing away behind, the past lying beneath the surface like the previous coat of paint, the present cracking with every additional layer, yesterday's colors gaze like eyes through a fissure in the fence, they watch you. There's a tree in my mind, bony arms stripped and reaching for the sun, an intrinsic awareness that life flows through light, I'm the wispy consciousness wrapped around a tree of the mind's eye, giving it the pain of thought. Logic. Logic. Logic. Logic. It's all too sterile. Pull out a pack of cigarettes, place one in you mouth, and take it out again. Stare at the tree. Wrap it in the tendrils of thought. Then put the cigarette back in your mouth, taste the touch of saliva that rested on your tongue moments ago, notice that it has changed, it's tepid now from its affair with the external. Logic. Crack flint with the flick of a metallic gear, hear the click resonate, see the flame, hold it to the tip of your cigarette and breathe in, taste the all too familiar rush of smoke, at once new and old, time on a series of circles, but you draw the circles, don't look at the clock, forget what you know about seasons, a warm day in December . . . December . . . you're on THEIR circle. Logic. It's the past sleeping atop the present, my hands still remind me of continuity, I'm the thread that holds the moments together, wrapped around the tree that I haven't taken my mind off of, a finch singing from within the tangle of arms that reach toward the obscured.