1978 What I Wanted

What I wanted was to rewind the film and cut the sequence in which I ate a handful of blotter, to not have been drinking in a Pizza Hut and then at a party on the second floor of a tall narrow silhouette house that was tacked to the edge of a very steep hill in the imploded mill town where I grew up.

What I wanted was something other than the feeling that my brain was an exploded glass sphere, something other than being unable to reach the far side of a footbridge because its surface had lost its solidity and bowed beneath my weight, something other than the diaphanous network of green and yellow sounds that converged on me like perspective lines in someone else's picture and drifted with air movements over the multi-colored river downstream from a paint factory.

What I wanted was the interior voice that sings the world into being to start again.