Alec in Wonderland

Sitting near the back of the class, listening to the lecturer speak above the drone of the AC,
My eyelids grow heavy.

As dark veils fall to cover scribbles
About cartesian coordinates and polar,
I step slowly through shadowy lands laced with lashes into the garden of my dreams.

Why are roses so red? Are they ever green?

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When hummingbirds aren’t sipping nectar,
Flitting from flower to flower,
Where else have they been?

A frog, when it wants to mate, inflates its throat.
Hm, if I poke it with a needle like a balloon, will it go pffffft or will it croak?

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Clouds falling from the sky are caught in the branches of a tree
Like pieces of spun cotton, held by bark adroitly,
In bolls that are prickly,
As prickly as thorns.

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If I grab too aggressively
My finger will be torn
And then I’ll bleed as red as a rose.

The lecturer drones on, but in my repose
I walk on air like Peter Pan.
I’ve escaped my shadow because I believe I can.

I shuffle through the leaves of my mind,
Leaves lifted by breeze
Like clothes, fresh washed, smelling of soap and sun.
I flit in and out, playing hide and seek with my thoughts, my imagination.

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I play hide and seek but some things I’m excited to find,
Some things I’m scared to see.
It’s nice to flit through nature,
But then not everything is warm and happy and sunny.
Some things are heavy,
5,000 times my weight, like the burden an ant can carry.

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And I love to explore, but
I’ll gladly escape the pain that I carry,
The stains that I carry,
The huge loss that I carry.

If only I could change my identity,
Take on anonymity,
Slip silently in and out of spaces
Where I won't have to cope with alarm on strangers' faces.
If only there were a way to walk all the way back to yesterday,
If only...

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Ugh, I’ve made a wrong turn.
Now my feet are sticky
And I’m stuck in the quicksand of my memory.
And I can feel my neck ache,
But I can’t open my eyes for my eyelids are weights.
And so, trapped in the shadowy corners of my mind,
I compulsively unpack all the sealed boxes I find
Until I’m surrounded by murky hurt and loss
That's icky and sticky and slippery like moss.

My throat fills with cobwebs, oh my god, I’m drowning!
But then there’s a sharp snap,
Or maybe a clap
That brings me back to the present, looking up at my lecturer frowning.

“Mr. Fontaine,” he said. “You were sleeping.”

Really, was I? I wipe my face and sit up. No kidding.

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Guys,

Have you ever been in a meeting or a lecture where you completely zoned out? Sometimes you might be able to survive with just glazed eyes, but then sometimes you might find yourselves nodding and drifting off to sleep. I toyed with that a bit here.

As far as Alec in Wonderland goes, I'm the type to overthink things, to daydream and then dig all the way down the rabbit hole, leaping from one thought to another like a little child skipping across stones that are absolutely unrelated and yet strangely connected somehow. And so, in this piece, I tried to bring together a string of unrelated thoughts the way they would be disjointed and yet flowing from one to the other in a dream.

I also tried to develop the idea of leaving reality to go to a place in one's mind as an escape and then feeling trapped there and actually finding relief in the present.

I hope you guys enjoyed it.