I sat on the steps of the arboretum, watching the sun set across a tree-peppered lawn
while red and yellow bulbs from the traffic passed by, a soft shush of engines audible.
I felt nothing yet.
Just nervousness, excitement, anticipation.
Butterfly.
Shivers erupted around me, and suddenly light-headedness struck.
The sprinklers in the grass, a dense mane of drizzle,
turned on and off with a ruffled, sizzling hiss.
In the flat distance, Fourth of July fireworks gave muffled thumps.
Foreign color creeps into my otherwise shadowed panorama.
Butterflies.
The stars are barely visible, the moon nowhere to be seen.
In a flush, my anxious buzz erupts into a fevered bewilderment.
The silence of the turned-off sprinklers is cantankerous.
And the flowers; so many fucking flowers!
Butterflies disintegrate into rainbow:
A merry-go-round.
With a circus pan of the camera, a sprinkler spits out cubicle patterns of fractals,
sponged into the two-dimensional grass.
Trees, infested with pink python elephants, Victorian straw hats
and
Weeping violins sit in the corner of my cartoon eyeballs.
Puzzle pieces fly through the wind like butterflies.
(I can’t have a goat-head on my sitter).
A sliding drawl of bass-line accompanies high, plastic tittering,
Bringing into frighteningly sharp focus a grassy dreamland
That is my reality, momentarily.
A knot-hole in a tree tunnels out. Rush through it, rush out the other side:
An ocean of checkered umbrellas. Is there anyone underneath?
Titan-like billows of blood-soaked clouds pose in the horizon, behind them depthless blue sky.
The elusive seagull on the horizon and a mysterious fly in my plane
conjugate together into two realities, between which I must choose.
There is perspective in nowhere.
Pink and Green cascade through me, meeting in a vibrant Hawaiian waterfall.
Waterfalls pools into a vivid prism.
Who knew I could die and love it?

------- Author's Notes -------

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