Sudden awareness of futility. The tides come and go. With them, perception, solidity move as well. I am moved by pity and flail, as my assistance is seen, to help.
The shifting reality focuses on my tools. But rather than hands or instruments I see ragged scars where flesh is grafted to steel, the rapiers jutting out profanely from stumps. Too late to withdraw, the helping hand turns to a lunge, piercing the effigy, no where near complete, but recognizable. No gasp of pain or horror, just sadness. Or just a rippling trick as tide ebbs. The components again spread and detached.
Fickle senses are crude guests in this place. None are home here. Nothing is home here. As the stack starts to grow again, deft movements can be traced, but the owner defies identity. More acutely visible only obliquely. The author is anonymous, androgynous, ineffable. The sand rises.
With greater care I approach. Although, inextricably bound and sympathetic, one to another, there is no recognition. The construct moves, aware of its bonds and seeks me. Reflexively I hold it. Severing it again from this place. The dust swirls, in patternless beauty, to the ground.
Without reproach, senselessly building, the naught forms the intangible to shape. The shape, cognizant of its plight, voicelessly pleads. Struggling for dominance, the inevitable collapse forms an outline, one which I should know. My stare serves in the same place as the steel before and even the ghost recedes.
Number and time have less hold than the other hostages, I find myself repeating or, is this the first? The tide comes further up the shore, in its wake the limp debris of aggressors, spent propelling a foothold. In strength and light, blinding, dazzling, Escher's inspiration glows, as the building blocks put themselves together and it coheres! Large white tablets, small colorful pills replace the meaner constituents and it works. Unthinking uncaring, we embrace, I flinch, remembering a dream, but through some legerdemain, sensate hands take the place of my rightful tools... hazy, unsure.
Tugging, slipping, unsteady footing, rushing, foundation crumbling, apex, nadir, from the shadows both light and dark are indecipherable. The penumbra departs with tangible ache, insidious tendrils, and in their wake scars, phantom finger strokes.
At my feet, disintegrating, the corpse drags at loose clothing. Pooling around weapons that were hands. What has been dispatched? By whom? I see the phases as a kaleidoscope, each overlapping the last. Gentle caress, fatal blow, the same, some quantum leap, or hop, or tantalizing wobble.
Juxtaposition, disjunction, vertigo, dementia. Tides flow, reality comes and goes. Or goes and comes. Do I move or does it come to me? The only constant is the bleak, lightless void stacking silica picking out the pills, exerting will. Episode after episode. Are they one or many?
I stand. I watch. Inured, exhausted. Unable to tell if I hinder, if I influence, if I matter.
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