An upside-down four-limbed octopus, I am.
Nerve ganglion creature of an alien planet.
Planet alien to who but me.
And why?
To giggle and be amused.
But isn’t this deadly serious?
Aren’t we here on a righteous mission?
Nope.
Instead, delight and play with the lights, the senses, the dance of days not changing so much.
And what is a day?
24 hours? Maybe not.
A chance to correct behavior?
Well, what is behavior?
A difference between one way and another?
No plus or minus, good or bad behavior.
Just acting like a monkey doing a dance.
For who?
For me. For everything.
The leaves are your audience. The sky the peanut gallery.
A clown for the ocean, loving to see me struggle in the whitewash.
Or pushing to score a goal on a frozen hockey rink.
That kind of faked pushing, on slippery ice, is just fine.
It’s a performance.
We all want to see what we can do.
Changing who you are – seeing what you can do . . . that’s it.
That keeps the face young and the sleep deep.
Sliding across a moving wave, gliding across frozen water.
Am I an energy source?
Perhaps one powering the pixels on a TV of some other dimension’s screen.
I dazzle.
You dazzle.
We dance in place and light up as an orchestra for some remote game consumer.
A god on a couch – Brahman – soaking in delight.
Laughing at how we pretend to grow . . . at our feigned importance.
Skin bag with nerves throughout.
Why give one little piece of a puzzle so much ability?
A singular point of failure in a stream of loud information.
Why have each of us process so much . . . so much farce. So much story.
So much bullshit.
Why run decades of similar ups and downs – the amplitudes of time – through billions of receptor points across the planet and the history?
Why have us scramble for resources?
Are the murderous and the cheats and liars more valued because they’re more fun to watch?
And what am I?
A recorder that’s wiped clean at its end.
Where does my experience go upon my death?
Where and when did my experience come into me?
How did I teach myself things?
I am something, I am.
I am a shimmering, pulsing lip just below a nose that smells woody graphite pencil end.
I am the dog scratching its chin and flapping its ears.
I’m none of it. I’m all of it.
What, if anything, is beyond me?
I am.