By Dana Jerman

Last year on Earth, a teenager laid down on the hallway carpet in the upper story of her parents rambler, staring out of the low-slung skylight, watching stars.

“I want to live there,” she thinks. “It’s there I’ll be free.”

It dawns on her that of course her yearning has lead her back.

It is where she came from, after all.

Electronic music pours thru her headphones and the constellations keep turning, imperceptibly.

I used to be her. Be there. Vinyl actress snacking on amethyst flints and sun-dried tarot. 

Introverted music lover looking for a good jam on repeat one could use to melt the air while sipping dreams.

Com Truise, George Clanton, Boards of Canada, Washed Out, Big Black Delta.

My story is also theirs, hers, yours. Roots as vibrations. Echo-narratives of beat-rackets cultivated into sequence and song…

I hope things never go back to how they were. That normal wasn’t normal. Lost to digitized history seemed to be leisure with gravity, interstitial tranquility. The accuracy of vacancy. Nilness.

I want to lose track of days and check the time for no reason only to be surprised at the lateness of the hour. Dusk looming, innocent as a satellite.

The drug of my sobriety pulverizing me into immeasurable bliss.

You feel this way too— now you can catch up to your own breath.

The antagonistic gut-check Trumpian anxiety pulled the false-info-wars plastic-choked floodwaters up to our necks.

Back down around our waists; we can see what black swill muck we’ve been wading in.

Society with its fad-driven demands and keening lust for novelty and progress, is not currently at our throats. 

The only things hustling now are plastic bags turning in the wind. Moving like animals, hunching over copper wasteland.

Silver Capri Sun bags face down in the street like discarded blood delivery systems.

Mini-prisms in mini-glints of dewdrops and shed feathers.  

I stalk around; a character in a scene from a J.G. Ballard novel.

Watching the sun come up through the twenty three story skeleton of the would-be hotel casino.

Biking across an empty overpass, spotting glimmers from dropped pennies and dimes.

Breathing quietly in the dusty fallout shelter of the modern world.

Same time next year, maybe we could all take a week at the top of March to observe the general strike holiday that this mad cash crop of blockchain chaos has afforded us.

In reverence, in remembrance, permitting weather, wether permitting.

Out of love and inspiration, for this hot, exhausted, grand and untamable planet.