Surreality = Between the Betweens

There is something
surreal, beyond
surreality really - a disconnect
between
the life that was,
and the life
that is.

As a child, more backwards
than a few in the eyes
of the many,
he had no
TV - still
has no TV; but in 1986
when most barely knew
the commodore
Bones
had been fluent
in machine speak
for four years.

That winter, this winter -
so far
apart
they must be from
different times, certainly different
lives.

They are not
though.

Not yet the mighty
four oh - close though -
the only connecting strand
between the times
is Bones
himself.

A February howling wrapped
a world in an ice glove
and a shattered family woke
to water spraying from a steel
tank - no valve to spin, pipe
to clamp, a thirteen year old
spastically crippled man-child
of bone clambered
atop the tank to flip the switch -
kill
the power.

Fighting
to live - ungrounded
electricity shot
through the soaked
bag of bone and into a tank
filled
with water.

And later? Power
terminated somewhere,
the boy and his backwards family
were powerless, melting
snow and cooking meals
on wood stoves for ten days
before the time-warp
ended, returning a world gone
archaic to modernity.

There were no
cell phones to call, texts
to answer, nor folks to lumber
collapsed vegetable giants - one
or twenty, a family
did what it did - and survived.

Today, feet propped on popping
hearth whilst contemplating
the ratio between snow
and water
to make coffee, flush
toilets, typing on a hand-held
computer with other computers
buried in a brain to combat,
to control spasticity,
that child become
middle-aged Bones sits
slowly siphoning cell phone
power from dwindling
battery backups, listening
to a fire laugh at chill
November airs, and is struck
by the surreality
of it all;

Was then
real, and the now,
the between, naught
but the fevered hallucinations
of one stuck
in a bad trip
on experimental medicines?
Is now real and
then, between, the result
of alien voltages pumped
into the brain; a fabricated
tale of his story which never
occurred? Something
between the betweens?

Or is life
really
so surreal one young
bag of Bones
could have lived
both lives?

Then - and now?

_{( Nov 23, 2010 11:17 )}