Escape Pod

 

Escape Pod

 

It fucking sucks to live in pain.  The mind wanders elsewhere. On days that I am getting annoyed by every little thing and I want to control every situation, I pause. My mind is just drawing me away from the agony. Hush, little mind baby, don’t you cry. The pain is the core issue, this other shit, it doesn’t matter.

If my reality is suffering, I slither and slink away elsewhere. I listen to these podcasters, these folks putting themselves out there, the ones getting paid to create, I pretend it’s me. I’m so happy cuz today I’ve found my friends, they’re in my head. I feel like their peer, what they’re doing isn’t so hard, I can do that! I see how their brain works, they’re not smarter. Not more educated. They don’t work harder. Are they luckier? What is luck? I can get lucky; in fact I’m up all night to do so. Pull a four-leaf clover out my ass.

My body doesn’t work. I’m ugly and olden, wooden stiffness. Hands shake like Michael J. Fox. Breathing sounds like broken box fan fins sloshing sludge. Stomach bloated with something I shouldn’t’ve ate. It was “edible” in quotations, in the sense I put it in my mouth. Neck of Frankenstein. My eyeballs not present, looking at the part of the brain I’m trying to access.

Elsewhere the other place.

I pile some comfortable distractions on top of me, the real me. This isn’t Luke this is Anthony. In my mind I’m the adonis who women want to feed grapes to on a throne, men read my self-help books. My place is quiet and large, I make awesome stuff that you praise me for. That you kneel and cry as if you witnessed the Statue of the Madonna weeping blood for. Money comes easy, and the drugs come cheap, and I stay skinny cuz I just don’t eat. To look at me, I’m inside a pod garishly gargantuan goggles on my head. Beard has that yellow brown sheen of an outside person. Covered in dust, cobwebs and Dorito crumbs. I’m unconscious, not dead, not sleeping. Just not there. Someone knocks hard on the side of the pod. “Your time is up, please vacate the chamber, return to the harsh fluorescent life on the grid of graph paper.”