The Conscious Wake Walker
I'm so fucking tired this morning. I can feel the heaviness weighing down my eyelids.
I've already had a cup of coffee. Maybe I need another to keep me from wanting to hole up in the single bathroom and take a 15-minute snooze.
Once upon a time, that was my life. Snoozing here and there to make up for lost hours of a lost woman roaming the lonely streets of NYC.
Now, I'm tired from long nights of dancing, chatting with my love into the wee hours of dawn, and needing more than 24 hours to bounce back to myself.
I also feel my pre-period pains coming for me. Tight spasms in my womb, constricting, and fighting to expel gasesous fumes.
A smile here and there. Barely touches the dark maghonay pools of my dull eyes.
Why are we stuck in this bullshit day to day chaos.
People are being bombed, raped, wiped from the earth, and we sit in silence behind our tiny phone screens mourning the loss of a world that isn't our own.
I became unplugged. Aware of the atrocities that are outside of myself, but I feel hopeless.
What am I to do about the world outside of me?
How do I keep getting up every day to trudge outside of the safety of my home to come to a place that needs me to send countless emails, re-stock, stock, re-stock, clean, wipe down, manage calendars, etc.
We're in a mindless cathartic hypnosis.
Those of us who are awake lie in the in-between. Knowing, but unknowing of what to do, what to engage in. The perpetual, maddening hopelessness gnaws at the frayed memories of my past.
Blurred memories, scavenged by trauma and dumped into the ether of dying thoughts.
I want to awaken to a world that means more than me typing away on a lifeless keyboard.
Screens, screens, screens, everywhere I turn.
Billboards, news, sex, lust, and distractions from what we're made of at the core.
Love.
Desensitized by the chunks of human flesh that fly high in the night skies. Children's screams, women's cries, the dead lie amongst us unavenged.
Lifeless, scattered blood-dust, echoed cries that make it's way to our tiny plastic phones, but not into our hearts. Once captured by the nets of technology, lost to the world of feeling and humanized empathy.
We're lost. Asleep. Scared.
Fearful of what comes next? Fearful of knowing. Fearful of awakening to the depths of hell that await our every turn.
Humans bleed the same sanguinary liquid from the very veins that can be found in the smallest of leaves, the roots of trees, and the sap of honey's moist bosom.
Yeild in the name of the Lord? Who, God, where are you?
Is God a fabrication of our trauma?
A being made to become bigger than the Universe itself.
God, can you hear us?
Why must we suffer?
Free will to those that cannot be oppressed, but those who fall beneath the heel of man who must come first must suffer at the hands of the master.
Master of what?
Distruction, rage, war, and greed.
God, can you hear the children yelling, pleading, and crying for help?
God, can you see the children who have been buried by the bombs and crumbling rubble of cities that once stood tall?
God, can you hear the eradication of those who need you the most?
Free will comes at a cost.
The cost of lives that don't match those who have the power.
Power is for whom to claim?
The rich, the poor, black, white, capitalist, fascist, orange-rind puppet who stomps his callous feet, and the wretched tone deaf fools who think they will be saved by the hands of the rich.
Fools, we all are, fools to think we are not one collective breath.
One collective flesh, humankind. One in all. All in one.
Ego spares no life.
Ego engulfs us in a raged typhoon of wrath.
We will all burn.
We will all yearn for peace.
We will all be touched by the hell these people are facing.
We are all to blame for the mindless and complicit behaviors that are killing us slowly.
Lord knows we need help.
God, can you hear me?
I'm lost.
You've carried me many times, but God, why not the children who wail for their disfigured mothers?
What am I to do?
What are we to do?
Am I plugged in?
Or have I severed the ties to the host that is dangling me from the ether?
Will the consciousness develop into the awareness I need to escape this simulation?
This can't be real.
Am I who I am?
Are we who we are?
Are we specks of light traveling and hopping from planet to planet?
Being to being.
Will I come back to this world after I take my final breath?
Will I want to come back?
Do I have free will to decline a life that observes the suffering of others?
Is there such thing as free will, or are we all living illusions choosing the better of a few evils?
Welp, I'm awake.
Tensed jaw, rapid thoughts, numb fingers, mind scattered to the winds.
I suppose now is the time for me to turn my sights back to the tasks of today and leave the worries of the world to rest in the crevices of my shoulder blades.
Another coffee perhaps will do the trick?
Another meaningless conversation about the weather or how short the weekends are to keep the time ticking?
Perhaps I'll get lunch earlier today.
Perhaps I'll fantasize about walking out of this office for the last time.
Oh, but those "golden handcuffs," luxuriously padded and taut against my already bruised wrists.
I need these handcuffs to have the life that I've worked so hard to obtain.
Oh, but don't be a sheep, they say.
Who is they? The very own who say "Do say I say, and not as I do"
Oh, but how could I not, when the paychecks are needed to build the life we're striving to grasp and hold onto for a little while longer?
How lucky am I to be behind this monitor?
Free-writing the truth that comes from within.
How lucky am I to not wake up to bombs, rotting flesh, and screams of people being eradicated from the very earth we all call home?
How lucky am I to be awake and stuck within the in-between of simulation and "life"?
How lucky am I to feel the hopelessness and weight of responsibility to know anything outside of my being and social circles?
How lucky am I to be a black woman, "free" from a life of servitude and harsh realities.
Lord, where are you? Are you within my soul?
Are you whispering these thoughts into my head?
Are you speaking through me?
Are you there?
Who is within me?
My concisouness? All the me's that I am, who I once was, who I am yet to be?
How many lives have I lived within myself, and how many will I continue to experience?
I suppose I should begin my work day now.
I suppose I should shut off my brain and slip back into the mindless task chatter that is needed to hang from the "golden handcuffs" that separate me from a lesser way of life and the life that I have.
I suppose this is all I have to say at the moment.
I feel the conciseness slipping away.
I feel it falling from my fingertips.
I feel the clouds moving behind my eyes.
I see the tasks set forth for the day and the awareness packaging away into the small part of my brain that contains such thoughts.
I am lost within the programming of this game.
The game of "life", folks.
The game of blinded brain fog.
God, where are you?
Are you there?
Am I really here?
God, why must they suffer?
Why aren't we enraged and doing something to help the very flesh that is our own?
I have nothing more but exhausted fumes.
Coals and embers of extinguished fires.
I am but steam rising to the heavens.
Dissipated and dissolved by the barrier that keeps us here.
Bound by earth, plugged in by "them", rotting behind screens.
God, please wake us all.













