I asked Ben the Coffee Pot chef once, "Ben, give me five words. Five words from the top of you head. Right now."
ambiguous - paper - unicorn - boiled peas - cocaine
So with Ben's five words I began a stream of consciousness essay. That is when you write what cones to your mind a you jot it down, without a re-edit. It doesn't have to make sense, no story line needed, etc. My essay turned out to be like a dream or like a poem. So just go with the imagery.
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My Stream of Consciousness Essay
Blue doors of aspen opened a field. A feudal field of behemoths roaming. Each animal with their own name. Names like Lust, Sloth and Jealous. But they didn’t stop at seven. The seven fathers kept overgrazing, they kept breeding younger more bellicose behemoths. They were called legion, for how many they numbered.
Squinting my eyes, the animals unfocused into ambiguous dots and their pigment blanded to unfocused white. Snow they became. Snowflakes, made of spiral notebook paper with torn fringes, meandered their way towards no direction in particular. Each unique in childlike design dusted her navy knit beanie, brown locks flowing like a stream from under its broadly weaved strands of yarn. Blue eyes piercing the night brighter than snow glare or a glitter path of a gibbous moon’s birth. Like the one that sunk the USS Indianapolis. She was elusive as a snowflake in a drift. A caliber of woman that is as fictional as the mythological unicorn or the biblical leviathan.
The gibbous moon collapsed under its own tension. Strafing ships with light like Japanese zeros and torpedos into the horizon of mountains. Peaks that rise out of the sea beneath my hiking boots. Boots that I’ve never seen. Four winds chase the moon that shrinks. Snowflakes follow and the tide recedes from under those peculiar boots. Blue Eyes eludes with the crashing moon to a rocky mountain unknown to me.
And I am alone. Again. Standing still.
A lab of yellow mixed with mutt named Ode drops a flounder on my left. A Snoopy fishing pole becomes tangible in my right palm, its line sunken into self-illuminated cresting waves. A tug comes swift. Dragged along rocks and coral, my palms desire to release but they cannot.
Dragging becomes submerging becomes drowning.
A chaotic struggle to breathe again. Below the crests, Death is there wadding by a slender-spined porcupine fish in a household fish bowl. His name was Gob. Death, dressed as Uncle Sam, spooned boiled peas into his fleshless jawbone. He looked downtrodden, more than usual. He hasn’t been the same since his wife passed. Monoceros was so lovely. And there they waited as my last breath lost the ability to sustain.
Pain is what I felt.
And then, as that breath ceased to exist and vision deadened to color and structure, came another breath. One as pure as new life. One single breathe of sentience. Death grinned and Gob grimaced. With all my strength I plunged un-deviated to the bottom of the darkness. The darkness from the culmination of all seven seas. I dove swift. Past the Indianapolis, past sunken ships of forgotten epochs, past orthodontic circus clowns on tricycles and Johnny Depp nose sucking lines of cocaine on the clear pane of a glass bottom boat.
At the bleakest of bleak was a hatch, only made known by a rising fulfilled moon cresting the great sea’s trench. A whole moon submerged making silhouettes of sea creatures. The hatch was blocky with a metal loop waiting to be pulled. Mighting it open I felt the suction of the hatch. Water spilled into the sky as I crossed the transcendental threshold. Surfacing upside-down by the shore of a shallow spring-fed stream. Raising my sopping body from the water, my wet clothes became dry. Dry as the soil. Dust in the sky was thick with gold, infused with the pigment of a western sun.
And there she was.
Picking figs from a summer aspen tree and barefoot on a flat semicircle stone. She graced the loveliest red polka-dotted dress that I have ever known. With a barefooted hop into thick blades of the greenest grass, she moves to the stream’s shore. She moves to me. “I see you.” I muttered, for she has captured me with a blue gaze. She answers me with grace in her diction and outstretched open palm, “Would you like to dance?”