imagine


... the huge yellow bellied bird flew directly at you ... it was early afternoon ... bright ... yesterday had been dark ... the clouds had let you sleep ... not today ... the festering open sore on your ring finger from the burn of many days and miles ago worried you ...

... the bird flew at the window ... you gasped ... it wanted to peck at the sore ... you clean the sore with your tongue ... you’ve been told saliva is the best medicine ... you don’t remember who told you or if it’s true ... still you suck the sore ...

... mosquitoes silently sucked your blood at night ... you wake to mounds of red blotches ... don’t scratch ... press your nail next to the redness and make an exclamation mark ... you’ve been told that helps ... actually you just made that up ... yet you believe it does help ...

... how much of everything you say is made up ... you peel away ... this is what comes back in memory ... let time slip away ... the will to stop dying ... you don’t care if you made it up ... you just care that it’s a teaching ... 

... you want to sleep as the sun shines ... a young girl told you as a child she caught dragon flies and cicadas ... placed them in a jar together ... watched as the dragon fly was devoured wings first ... all the kids did it ... you can’t sleep ... the dragonfly was a dazzling friend of yours ... 

... the bed creaks under your tossing and turning ... do they say that in Korea ... the restless state not able to sleep ... tossing & turning ... the yellow bellied bird that flew at you was in Paris ... will it fly at you in Seoul ... you are drenched in sweat ... turn the air conditioner on ... relief ...

... change your clothes ... sleep comes even though the head throbs from the coolness ... are imagined communities like invisible cities ... 

… you imagine … once long ago on a ferry you imagined an invisible city … a city where the inhabitants walked & ran on the edges of their island ... it turned out the edges were the spine of the land … the rhythm of the feet created a vibration … the vibration stirred the ocean ... the water flowed between the vertebrate filling the air with song ... the song created a dance ... the dance inspired a text ... the text requested a form ... people shared stories ... the spine of the city trembled releasing the spirits of the place ... the ancestral spirits invited the people to fly & so they did ... in the sky they found three caves ... the sky, the spine & the ocean circulated within each ... the people connected the caves ... one sky, one spine, one ocean, three caves ... 

... the ferry landed and you never finished the story though you never forgot it ... you thought about today ... visiting Inchon ... the staircase ... you saw golden dragons ... your purchased masks from the Peking Opera ... you saw a man walking on the street pick up a pigeon ... you wait for the yellow bird 

::Note:: ... one cave is the cave of memory ...

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