Elementary Familiarity

Overstimulated and astigmatic

Reincarnated as a paranoid killjoy

Since my memory has become episodic

I was meant to stargaze and make noise

Endorphins got me in a headlock

Like a protoform frozen in stasis

Red algae sea foam at my smile line

In a padded cell like I got zoochosis

My dream-visions depict trace fossils

And some elementary familiarity

As the landscape twists and contorts

I become lost in an ancient wet bog 

Through a refusal to engage and enact conflict

An old but new canopy gradually emerges

King ferns and fan palms symphonically whistle  

And venerable mahoganies and wise oaks creak

With tree-hollows sheltering forest dragons

Perched like Romanesque gargoyles

Pining for a change in scenery 

As sentinels made of stone, grass, and moss 

Catching glimpses in my verdant peripheral

Avoidant will-o’-the-wisps coerce 

Due to the ingestion of ribbonwood fruit

All this anger that was once love haunts

Despite this, through Mesozoic trials and tribulations

I anxiously wade through an impassable marsh

And since I am stuck in my head geologically 

I look and search endlessly only for no one to be found

As I call upon my proto-deity of fertility

I vomit word salad til my flesh crawls

Since my vital organs age exponentially 

In relation to my worsening fern fever

I yearn for an era of hunting and gathering 

To walk pristine landscapes amicably

To be pure but remain undoubtedly a savage

Through the cultural depths of my ancestry

© Niklen 3/19/25