I stood there, naked and ignorant in a vast field. I had no concept of vulnerability or invulnerability. I was swinging my severed umbilical cord above my head like a lasso getting ready to capture the world. Lions stared from within tall swaying miles of grass, and I saw them but my father didn’t. I walked a short distance, maybe a few feet, before my legs stumbled and I fell. A burning sensation came to within my stomach as my lasso dropped beside me. I was hungry, I’d come to learn, and so I started prophesying in cries. My father, never before having been a father, soaked a rag in whiskey and shoved it into my mouth like a lollipop, or a gag, or a John Steinbeck allusion. I fell asleep and woke up wrapped in a lion skin blanket at my mother’s funeral.
My father knelt beside her grave for hours until stars started to become sensational streaks across the darkened sky, the sky I thought would last forever. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, shuddering with coldness and tear. “What is this world?” I thought. “How come no one comes by to shove a whiskey rag in his mouth?” Then from his pocket he took a magic bottle, the spring of common answers, and he emptied it into the man inside the shell. A transformation seemed to occur; a warmness, or a complacency.
He stood over me, looking down and smiling like the moon. He said, “You will be a great warrior someday.” Then after pausing with reflection he then continued, “Just don’t forget that the world is a warrior too.” Then he turned and his footsteps faded ever-so-slowly away until they were gone forever, except for when they enter in dream.
The lions came back for their skin and pride. One unrolled me from the long fur in a ferocious tug, and so I spun out within a blur and landed on my miniature feet. At this, they roared and so I roared in return. They jumped back, and so I started picking up pebbles and throwing them at their long noses. They circled around me in astonishment; astonished that they had never before encountered a creature so raw. That’s when the biggest of them all grabbed me with its mouth by the back of my neck and started to run. The others followed.
I cried when I found out that a grave wasn’t completely synonymous with a bed, and I cried again when I found myself at similar bedtime stories. But, this was just the beginning. Clutched in a set of lion’s teeth and soaring through the fields, I had only the brief concept of flight. I would grow and grow.
I moved in with their manes in an abandoned skyscraper once built with diamond money. I, like the building, was more of a remnant with each passing day.
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Ten-thousand dreams I dreamt
Until all of the plotlines had worn thin
And I refused to ever go to sleep again
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