Future Consciousness

Droning sound and dancing lights. Images melt together; electromagnetic vomit. Waste. Wasting. Wasted.
Legs splayed over the arm rest. Neck propped on a cushion. Bad angle, pinching back pain. This ain’t good but fuck it, and its pain. I can die.
Detestable. Such a draining lack of significance. Incapability; force, action, motion. Projects aimed at the future. A literal projection, out of and into something.

The future project. Some value. A little meaning. Something else.
The putrid idiot on the box could be a cgi animation. Blah blah blah, does what that head says matter to anyone, anywhere? Yeah, just so. Right on. The case, the point in fact. Well stated.
But I don’t mind admitting that there was once a thing out there; my halo, my heaven, my sky, my potential. Once. Vibrating and shimmering. A mirage, distance bound, to sight’s horizon. Cajoling and calling, promising. It infused and enlivened. It did, I recall it so. Maybe you need small hands and feet? Little shoes and tiny pants. Perhaps when your skull grows a void opens and invites in strange insects from other dimensions? Stolen lives.
When you fish off an aged wooden dock, planks warmed by the sun, body warmed by the planks, you can dangle your feet over the edge. Waiting, glorious in so waiting. Funny ragged straw hat, long grass blade tooth lodged. Huck Finn. A bobbing bob, half red and white. Gently up and down. Sun glistens off wind driven water ridges.
I must raise my stickman neck and swing my stickman limbs. Motivate. Putter, lamely put. Part the atmosphere and projectile motion my molecules through space. I am a cosmonaut. Yuri whatever. The engines fail. I burn on re-entry. Or: At the end of my successful and dangerous space mission the joint commission of international big shots gathers before the two-way video feed to offer congratulations on a job well done; and I am naked with the foreign female agent. Or I am James Bond.
There are things, unknown agencies and complexes, which tap my shoulder still: Hey, come on Governor. They remind. These reminders fade into an inevitable forebrain squeeze. A minimalist life. Yoko Ono. A water slide, lie back and whoosh: Big splash at the bottom. Flavoured ices in the summer.
I turn on my side and search for better content.

Oliver Cato was born in Southport on Australia’s Gold Coast. He grew up a surfer on the beaches of Greenmount and Kirra. Having lived in Europe, especially Berlin, most of his adult life after graduating with a degree in philosophy, he currently resides in London with his wife and three children. His short pieces and poetry have been published in Here Comes Everyone, Sein und Werden, Coffeehouse Poetry and Obsessed with Pipework among others. Oliver tweets here: @oocato. More information can be found at www.oocato.com

featured image: Bob Modem