GALILEO: Fell asleep to the sound of a fieldtrip going by.
INQUISITOR: The tiny voices of a hundred kids chattering and
showing off.
GALILEO: The sidewalk’s crumpled though, in the dream, the
one I got around to having, or was having, then, if time was something I could
recall as having a structure to it, you know, in the logic of dreams. A starry
messenger. A phosphorescent blob. The misty tint of rubble-strewn rings,
moonlets and gaps and aggregates of icy particles and complex patterns of
brightness.
INQUISITOR: Eight of one, four-less-than-a-dozen of another.
A gravitational hold of jealousy and mired ruminating, and the exuviations of
centuries being washed and swaddled by scavenger galaxies. I take what a red
dwarf gives, Hertzsprung-Russell wise, and concentrate on the low-mass
instincts you’re better off not preserving in the long run.
GALILEO: Sure could use a yardstick that measures
wakefulness and doesn’t compromise patterned sloshes through airy dews. I got
me a decent head for figures. Calculations, the gyroscope-tilt measured curve
of space, proofs of objects bending dimensions. I cry and I pray. That’s about
all I’m good for. Clocks here chop off their own hands.
INQUISITOR: I’m betting those times serious enough to
consider would give you the shakes so bad that you’d never want to go back to
sleep, ever.
GALILEO: To get outside of my own skin. To be free of this
mangled, tortured body. The formerly easy comfort of kinematics and the
weakened substance of materials. We are less than what God intended. My barred
spiral soul gets shifted and set crooked.
INQUISITOR: Prisoners have their secret outs, their hidden
destinies that only they can see through.
GALILEO: A wink without a nudge curries less favor than most
spectral types would care to admit, though electron degeneracy still irks a
cautious would-be planetary nebula into a circumstellar envelope of misgiving.
Giants dance on the graves of mice. Untold familiarity wears its
nucleosynthesis like an iron halo. A Portuguese furniture salesman goes for a
dip in a hotel pool.
INQUISITOR: Tell it to me, patiently, stripped down, without
any of that gruff esoteric mumbling.
GALILEO: I fell asleep down by the river. I laid my head
down in the lilacs. The lilting voices of slumber carried my weary head away. A
float. A sumptuous gown of drowse.
INQUISITOR: Sure. Poppies and hushed glens and misty clings
to harbored dreams and nests of gold and the powdered air of escape.
GALILEO: To equal spring’s only business. Any lunkhead’d
know.
INQUISITOR: Okay. Spilled onto the highway. Leaked into the
water supply. Chambered just far enough below it all, right?
GALILEO: Sort of like, “Your tears will fall to make love
grow.”
INQUISITOR: Tell me more.
GALILEO: We push off to our own shores. The voices of little
children, their pattering steps that dance by on the sidewalk. A cluttered mush
to float around in.
INQUISITOR: Tell me less.
GALILEO: Merrier. May slips away. Deathbeds made. Hearts
shimmying no more. It’s shadows after the limelight. It’s the feel of dirt,
just dust fallen to the ground. Drink to swell thy head no more. Tolled-out
bells. Faced with never facing. Church has let out for the season. Let the
curiosities to the unknown.
INQUISITOR: The quiet challenges what?
GALILEO: What we dwell with ere the green-grass slap of
lasting takes a shot at our faith.
INQUISITOR: Aha! Shrill it is, and the land pours sea, and the
task of posterity’s grip is magnified in grueling jest by us takers.
GALILEO: And the amens never seem to come.
INQUISITOR: Heard that.
GALILEO: Deep enough in your cups to not be upbraided by a
selfish clock for the wasting of your hours.
INQUISITOR: Listening with a noticeable gawk/pout.
GALILEO: Heinzed to the point, as it were, or, perhaps, as
it could/would/should be.
INQUISITOR: And still he drifts off to oneiric escapades,
pacified by a gaggle of tots strolling by, purred past care and into the realms
of a, what, if not lofty lassitude.
GALILEO: It must be the colors and the kids…
INQUISITOR: Must be.
GALILEO: If we’d be grounded to the land more, if my old
friend Suicide Sam showed up for some afterparty dressed as a walrus, and if
he doesn’t look back.
INQUISITOR: On his one true love?
GALILEO: Just a face to face a face to face another face
facing whatever it faces.
INQUISITOR: So, struggling backwards, I see, as evening
falls towards night, the corrosive lap of breakers caressing shores lit with
less than a gaze could ever do, or undo.
GALILEO: Ownership derails certain privileges often bestowed
on the less crafty among us. Hearts shuck the stun from their own demise, you
know, and buttons don’t sew themselves back on after a fall.
INQUISITOR: Grateful are we to our own cherished pratfalls.
Again, there is a harmony threading through staying put, something that leaves
a cacophony of useless melodies bent on escape.
GALILEO: It must be the colors and the…
INQUISITOR: That soft padding on the street outside. It
wafts through open windows without all the hassle wind makes. It must be…
GALILEO: The sound of children playing. The certain crease
and dip and flail of it. Pillow soft, gone, almost abstract enough to be real.
INQUISITOR: It must be…
GALILEO: If it keeps you alive.
INQUISITOR: Or just not bored to death. Never proving a
thing.
GALILEO: Must be.
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