Test Pattern
It was a room maybe the size of a television from the sixties I was floating in.
The prickly static needled my skin and the floating
wasn’t that concentric feeling of flying
carefree through a technicolor dream,
effortlessly
slinking like a liquid snake through the sky
with a weightless body and a wandering mind
soon awakened, refreshed and at peace—
this wasn’t that at all.
In the hiss and spit and clamber of a thousand rattlesnakes,
the static was all that existed
louder
building more.
Floating in the air over a marginal bed in a beachfront hotel in Daytona Beach
eyes on fire and sick from red tide I hovered
engulfed in the static like sonic molasses,
jaw clenched,
unable to yell,
suspended from invisible wires
in a rancid smelling block hotel room laced with railings of salt crackly iron
in the brisk toxic off-season of 1971.
With thin gritty white towels pushed into cracks against the creeping algae
like cotton caulk the wall unit blowing rattly
corroded air that was too hot
against blankets that weren’t mine,
with my uncle and my mother—
sort of between fathers at the time.
I was asleep for weeks in the matter of five minutes
four years old in the Bayside Motel
when the local station shut down for the night leaving the television,
stifling the rabbit ears for a few hours
drifting off
to the star spangled banner
the roar of jets
and burning eyes from two types of tears
swarmed by my first of many night terrors,
choked by the blooms of algae and poor decisions,
it never really felt like I woke up at all.
