In This Place That I Call Home

My brain is a perennial abode, housing Venus flytraps that snap at the frayed edges of phrases and pictures, clutching onto those buzzing sentiments with two dripping incisors. the makeshift gears that calculate numbers are bound with Red Cross gauze, allowing steam and equations to hiss and mingle and slip through spongy crevices.

Ever since I was little I would view the world with a unique scrupulousness, constructing reasons and stories and plans for whatever was in my peripheral vision-

A woman wearing a butterfly print sweater, holding a beige umbrella in the middle of a bright August day: My mind would become a tilt-a-whirl, rolling around my skull, doing ecstatic somersaults as if my eyes were spoon-feeding it some sort of sweet ambrosia.

A young boy staring forlornly at his plate in the midst of other crackerjack kiddies with hedonistic ideals: Me, firmly understanding his disapproval and wants. My brain, floating in a gelatinous pool, soaking in that knowledge with a relaxed grace.

My mind hosts its own recreational picnics. Doo-wop mantras find their way into the stocked shelves of nothingness, stocked to the brim with flea market junk and upper crust marching orders, jumbling it up even more, so that in the middle of the night I awake with a start and feel the blinds behind my eyes go up and down and up and down.

I don't know whether it's honest or whether it's merely a jaded expansion, displaying white cylindrical light fixtures to "mod it up" like a bad film set. I don't know how it functions. Does it use a sparking electrical outlet or a weather-beaten rodent that keeps the excercise going as long as gouda is suspended in view?

I live in my brain. It's philosophically ancient and nebulous and sometimes the A/C goes out, but it's the troglodyte's dream cavern. An instinctual Kangaroo pouch.