Waking up this morning, after 10 hours of sleep my neck is scrunched, immobile, and my temples ache. I am thoughtless. I look at the time: I awakened at 6:30 and thought about getting up, then passed out and the next thing I knew I'm here gaping at my watch, 9:38am.

I can barely walk.

I am flush with some kind of fever, my joints stiff.

It takes forever to think about the obvious: drink water make coffee eat something

I am tempted to return to sleep.

I go out on the porch to fetch the paper and, delighted by the cold air, and sit down on the wicker chair to read. With each of the graphic cages passing under my eyes I have increasing success decoding the news. Even so, it's all lines of difference. The world turned and little of import makes the news beyond the patterns of the everyday.

I finish the paper and return to the enclosed heat, then the water, ice for my neck, and blessed coffee. I listen to meadow birds with the parakeet and complain about the overcast skies, the tornadic and suffocating overcast skies.

Can anything of hope survive?

Two paper daffodils stretch against the house like buttery loudspeakers, trumpets of an obscene beauty.

Redemption.

You are a child.

It is August, the days agonizingly long, you are alone.

The only world you know, in the locust buzz, is the world of stubbled grass under your bare feet, the telephone pole, the Michigan dirt and gravel road, the sidewalk and the sun.

You are bored, your mind wiped clean of any possibility.

You look up at the sun, wide-eyed, watching the bright intensity sear itself into your brain, blinding. The pleasure of that, the dark pain, your eyes burning like stones. The molten plasma warbling fire. This is somehow God.

You turn away and watch the grass sear into burnt field.

You turn cold, shivering.

To warm yourself you lie down on the sidewalk, the shadow of the telephone pole slicing your body.

The pavement is blessedly warm, like a stone oven, warming your calves, your arms, your hands, the back of your hedgehog skull. This is what it is like to be thoughtless, alone, outside of time. This is what it means to be alive and not alive. The sun glows in your eyelids.

There is nothing in the world that matters.

Later, you realize that you know nothing. The world is insensate. There is nowhere to go, nowhere to get outside of this time, this world, this interregnum.

Where does thought begin? From the mind? The body? The world?

And when and where does thought end?

When you fall asleep, thought seems to simply fade away like a curtain draped across the mind. Until you activate the REM cycle, and the images flicker and morph into some kind of apprehendible theatre, watching yourself think and feel. But otherwise you are where? A cocoon? A coma? A sentient being removed from making sense.

Is the mind like the quilt you cover over a bird's cage, so that the mind hunkers down in darkness, clenching its claws around the perch, and broods, save for the fluttering spasm of light or sound?