Sunken Vignette #1 Poem by Jack Otterberg

I dream the dreams that can't be dreamed. the fog sniffs the road I walk on, as I peek my eyes through its thick gray body, past Knoll down to Q Street, where,
if my phone says I squint hard enough, I can see Lamar's Donuts. the urban crawl of cement rooftops scatters below the chain-linked sky, and in this life, I find it unsuitable for dreaming.

though in another, I may have been a newspaper boy hollering on street edges, poking holes in the air with my yellow rotten teeth, my poor man's gray-fabric cap slightly bending to the left. I can see it— I have eyes like porcelain, dead and pretty. the musky scent of smoke swells the air, which I then didn't think much of, but now it throws me into a whirl with how warm this mutated February day is.

walking to Andersen, whose gray-tiled halls are narrowly-packed so that I rub up on people I never meant to touch. touch, a foreign artifact. a sheen of sunlight sunken through window panes, spilling on my lap— touch. how funny things get when your boredom takes control. how the swollen Goldfish taste like a woman's touch, not the kind you bump into in cramped hallways, or forced side-hugs with overtly-flirty girls (who'd introduce you to heartbreak) .

I spent my last few months lusting touch. I've scoured over it on brick facades, my fingers scarred by its stony body. my feet coddle silhouettes when trotting down sun-blinking streets. the girls don't come to me naturally. nor I to them, apparently.

which frightens me most— being alone, sitting on a dusty tree stump in the low-humming prairie-forests of Nebraska, listening only to the twirling birds who speak loneliness better than I'd ever dream.

though I dream it well enough. my crusty eyelids swell with the poetry of forgotten gods. my hands are instruments of the sound my mouth cannot emit. so I sit here on this creaky auditorium chair, listening to Professor Shamrock explain how man's gargantuan misdeeds mutilate the ocean.

this brings me into a sunken fit. my serpentine-green eyes zip up, bottling the questions I've yet to discover inside me. but the dimly-lit room tosses its sleepy shade over my hooded face, catapulting me into daydreams. I could be a poet, if I strip my hands off, alchemize them into gold, and fold them back together. but I don't want to endure the hassle of change. though my soul is in constant transformation. always conflicting with the hesitation of memory. it makes things quite obscure— so that I don't know which voice belongs to me anymore. I'm lost. I'm a ghost-vampire— dead on the ledge of a life that wasn't mine to begin with.

*****

yes, even here in the mildewed edifices of Lincoln, I find no home. my spirit bangs on my body's thin bloody walls, cracking the edges of my skin apart until some dosage of reality seams them back in place. I do not belong to life. I simply am an alien trace of sadness. this doesn't make me better, either. I'd argue it makes me worse.

I'd argue it dangles my emotions out on a threadbare wire towering over the cracked ground below me. I'd argue it'll kill me.

I've known this my whole existence— scratching at wonder, wandering my vast umber-green backyard, searching for a place I could forget my identity. unchain myself from the noose of my own brain. it's like Plath asks:

"Is there no way out of the mind? "

now I'm not intelligent enough to answer such questions, as I write this on the dwindling 12 minutes left of Valentine's Day.2022 and the girls and boys abruptly spurt into adulthood, while I wear immaturity like a broken wristband. I look, out my dented window blinds, at the indigo streetlights flicking their hues across the pothole-drowned road. I guess this life has abandoned me.

though during childhood I felt in sync with the world— the oaks' slumped backs hunched over to let me climb them, as I sat on an iron-strong tree limb, peering at the owl in the distant spruce whose bulging yellow eyes knifed mine. I was one with the sublimity, the peace of nothingness. now I'm too busy being an apparition, stooped-backed, hurrying down the avenues of nowhere headed to nowhere.

I've been too many places to too many people— I don't wanna be walked on anymore.

in fact, I wake up alone, without womanly touch, but with everything else. I've got so much I had to invent my sadness. but the greatest blessing I've ever received was being nothing to everybody.