Alice – Poetry, Short Prose and Walking

Message — #writephoto Messenger

If my imaginary friend had more brains I’d trust her advice, but when Alice tells me something I have to examine it from all angles, especially those angles I forget to check. It might be the best advice I’ll get today, but I really should be getting it tomorrow–or yesterday.

I once told her that a neuroscientist would likely think she was some configuration of neurons acting up in my head. She observed, “They don’t know jack. Do you really think I’m a figment of your imagination?” She expected an answer, and silence wouldn’t do, so I tried dodging the question by saying, “I don’t even know what my imagination is!” She didn’t think I had one either.

“What do you think that crow means in the sky?” Alice gazed at some bird.

“What crow?”

“The one in front of your face. And you think I’m in your imagination? You’re too dumb for me to fit in there.”

Then I think I saw what she was referring to: “That bird?”

“You better get your phone out before it’s too late–Ah!! Too bad. It’s too late. It’s gone.”

That saved me from getting out my phone.

“So what do you think it meant?” Her questions are not speculations for someone sitting in a parallel universe or falling through a black hole or bobbing back and forth in some time wormhole to contemplate. She demands real answers in the real world.

“Well, you know, it could mean anything.”

“Come on, brainless! Black crow, blue sky, flying by. What’s the message?”

“Do you know?” I might as well ask the one with brains.

“Nope.”

Linked to Sue Vincent’s Thursday Photo Prompt — Messenger #writephoto.
Photo provided by Sue Vincent for the prompt.

Keeping My Imaginary Friend Happy

What a sky-is-blue-grass-is-green day! I love sitting on this park bench with my imaginary friend, Alice. While I’m enjoying reality she’s telling me that if she ever hears another rhyme between “night” and “light” or “death” and “breath” she’s going to do something I’ll regret. Furthermore she insists I stop writing those happy-happy poems because as a fully deconstructed, beyond-whatever-existential adult she would rather have angst, dread and drivel smothering her than sentimentality. I tell her that I kind of like those rhymes. She pulls out some pills, “Here. Take these.” As I swallow sending them down, down into the depths of deconstruction she jumps up from her existential happy place and proclaims, “Haha! That’s arsenic! You’re dead!”

Then Alice cries, “I’m sorry I gave you that arsenic even if it was only imaginary arsenic.” “That’s OK.” (What else am I going to say?) She explains that it is all because she’s not real. That’s why she acts the way she does. I tell her, “Look at those atoms. They’re just empty space! They aren’t any more real than you are!” She stops crying and asks, “Really?” And I say, “Sure!” Then she wants to know about that tiny stuff in the middle of the atoms. She starts crying again. I tell her that tiny stuff isn’t real either. “Really?” At this point I have to think. I don’t want to lie to her, but I don’t want her to start crying again and for all I know she’s as real as anything else I can imagine out there and so I say, “Sure!”

I am hosting dVerse Meeting the Bar Prose Poetry today. The challenge is to write either a prose poem or a poem explaining why prose poetry doesn’t exist. Any similarity to real people in this prose poem is purely imaginary.

Sure

And that’s when Alice wanted to know when
I was going to grow up and she apologized
for giving me the arsenic even though it was
only imaginary arsenic and then she started
crying because she wasn’t real any more than
that arsenic and that’s why she acted the way
she did and I told her ‘It’s OK’ because what
else was I going to say and then I told her that
even atoms were almost all empty space, nothing
there, and she said, ‘Really?’ and I said ‘Sure’
and then she wanted to know about that tiny stuff
in the middle of the atom and she started to cry
again and I had to tell her that when that stuff
was a wave of potentiality it wasn’t there any
more than she was and she said, ‘Really?’ and
I had to think because I didn’t want to lie to
her and I didn’t want her to start crying again
and as far as I could tell she was more real
than any old atom was and so I said ‘Sure’.

Chance

I told myself that I should be about 170 pounds
and sometimes I check in the morning to see if
my body got the message and usually it didn’t,
but it turned out today that the scale showed 167
pounds which kind of surprised me and made
me wonder if there was something wrong with
the scale or if I needed to tell my eyes to see
more clearly but it looks like my body finally came
through and then I wondered what if I could
levitate and then Alice appeared and she wanted
to know what I was doing and I told her that my
body finally did what I told it to do and she wasn’t
impressed and she wanted to know about that
levitating nonsense I was jabbering about and I
told her I thought it would be cool to become
weightless for a while and she told me that would
mess up my ideas about gravity and did I really want
another cognitive dissonance experience so soon
and then she mumbled something I deliberately
ignored about needing to appreciate whatever
experiences I might have while I had the chance.

A second link to dVerse Meeting the Bar. Amaya is hosting and hopefully this poem is more in line with the prompt. By the way, I now weight about 160 pounds and we have upgraded our technology since those dark ages to a digital scale.