Crazy Gadget

Rhyme practice

These lyrics don’t mean anything. Just messin’ around with rhymes.

I think I’m having a pre-life crisis
Gotta set up shop and stop feelin’ lifeless
But I just can’t start healin’ like this
Try to be cunning and not cutting my wrist
The urge builds up to start raising my fist
This stress leads me to express that I’m pissed
When the world goes dark, gotta keep my light lit
Temptation: fight it, a nation indicted
Too many wrongs that were never righted
Paying attention? Yeah, now you’re excited
The schizophrenic dialectic sponsored by the guy I elected
It’s left me this affected and disconnected that I gotta admit
That I’m infected

(1) Recognition

Part 1 of a short story idea I came up with. Rough draft, yadda yadda.

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Suddenly I’m awake… I think. My entire body twitches involuntarily. My eyes feel dry, and crusty. I want to shout, but I can’t. I just can’t move my mouth. I can’t move my arms either, for that matter. Legs too. The ceiling is composed out of nine glossy square tiles. They’re all perfectly white. I can make out a vague shape in the reflection; me. I’m wearing a light gray button-up shirt. Same color slacks. No shoes, no hair.

I need to get out of here.

My left pointer finger begins weakly twitching. I’m controlling roughly half of its motor functions. My other fingers begin to follow suit. It’s only ever so slight, but I can feel the smooth sheets beneath my fingers. My hand has progressed to a tremor. I’m slowly, slowly gaining control back. Soon enough, I’m able to grasp the sheets beneath my left hand. I give myself the thumps up. I deserve it.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

My right hand isn’t too far behind. It was painful at first, but now I’m able move my shoulders and forearms. A thick, rich “crack” booms out of my shoulder bones as I start to initiate a basic clap. My hands are closing in on each other. The sound of a clap sounds so beautiful in my head right now. That satisfying “puck”. And I’m so close. Ah, yes. There it is. A simple little clap. Oh man. My skin. It’s so soft, and mushy. All the little creases on my palms, the tiny little points on the tip of your fingers, the brief warmth from the friction. That was a clap. And it was all me.

Piece of cake.

I reach up and feel my head. Smooth, but thick. Colder than my palms too. Did I used to have hair? I can’t recall. A bit more motor control has been restored, enough to the point where I can sit up. I can feel my legs, but can’t quite figure out how to move them. I start to massage my thighs, hoping it will kick-start my muscles. Though my pants partially obstruct it, I definitely feel the familiar flab of my legs. My right foot is the first to make a motion; my toes curl up. Soon afterward, I’ve got control of my ankle. Ah, there goes my left foot. I carefully roll over and prop myself up, kneeling on top of my bed. The walls are the same as the ceiling. Spotless, reflective white panels; probably three square feet each. The entire room is wrapped around my bed. There is literally no floor. Claustrophobic doesn’t even begin to cover it.

This is so weird.

The panel directly behind me isn’t really a panel at all. It’s not white or glossy, it’s perfectly transparent. A glass window. I peer through the square window, looking for an exit. It’s a huge white room, decorated in the same panels as my room. Except there’s an elevator right in the center of the wall, and a body lying motionless on the floor. He’s also bald, and has the same clothing as me. But he has something I don’t have: a nightstick.

It’s worth a shot.

“Hey! Hey!” I shout. The glass fogs up. “Please, I need to get out of here!”

The man doesn’t budge at all. He’s either asleep or dead. I’m betting on the latter. I don’t think too many people sleep face-down.

“Please, anyone!”

Nah, there’s nobody that can hear me. I turn around and inspect my room again. There has to be something here. I had to get in here, right? So there has to be a way out. I press up against all the panels, hoping one of them, I don’t know, reveals a secret door, or something. No dice. I even start jumping on my bed, trying to reach the ceiling. I sit back down in frustration. How did I even get here? Where am I, exactly? Whatever, I can figure that out later. If I even make it out of here.

Maybe it’s me.

Yeah, yeah. The room isn’t what I need to be searching. I need to search myself. I quickly feel my torso, hips, legs, everything. And that’s when I realize there’s a pocket on my left breast. Even better, there’s something in the pocket. I pull out a single pill, encased in a zip-lock bag.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I whisper to myself.

I place the pill in the center of my palm. Predictably white, just like everything else in wherever-the-hell-I-am. I shove my palm to my mouth, quickly swallowing the little pill. What’s the worst that could happen? I’m gonna die in here if I can’t find a way out. Maybe it’s a suicide pill or something. Cyanide, perhaps. As soon as the somewhat minty aftertaste dissipates, I get an awful migraine. Debilitating. A faint ringing whine shoots into my ears, and I can feel my face get a lot hotter.

“Augh! Aaaargh!”

Instinctively, I cover my ears with my hands, which does nothing. I bury my head into my flawless ivory pillow. I can feel the veins in my forehead pressing through my skull. It’s just… burning. It’s overwhelming. I’m breathing heavily, but it doesn’t help. My body begins to freeze up again. It’s so bad I can’t even concen

And it’s all over.

I wake up again. My head feels… fantastic. It’s in a perfect stasis. I feel refreshed, rejuvenated. This little pill is a devious bastard. I have complete control over my body again, to a far greater degree than I had before taking the pill. I feel stronger, more capable.

“Piece of cake,” I congratulate myself.

I peer out the window again, but it’s still the same motionless body on the ground. But something’s off. Somehow I can feel the ground out there. It feels the same as the walls in my room do. Confused, I decide to test myself. I curl up in a fetal position in my bed, making sure none of my body touches any walls. But I can still feel the ground. And… the nightstick too. I can feel it in my grip, even though I’m not holding it.

It couldn’t be.

It had a thick rubber handle. It felt so sturdy; it had a satisfactory heft to it. I go up to the window again, and carefully observe the body that I’m somehow experiencing. That’s when the body’s foot moved. It shifted directions, from left to right. And I felt it too, the subtle motion. Then the body’s right foot did the same. It looked like it was trying to get up now, but it was clear that it wasn’t alive. As I pictured the body slowly standing on its own to feet, it started to. I could feel it stand up from inside, and I could see it stand up from my window.

Oh my god.

It went beyond feeling now. I saw the elevator… but from the body’s eyes, not my own. I had two distinct fields of vision. The body was now standing upright, looking at the elevator. And so was I, from my window. I turned the body’s head around, and I got a full panoramic view of the outside room, from its point of view. It defies description; I just know I could see the room twice, through two sets of eyes. I start to move the body. Right leg, left leg. I’m walking… inside this body. My arms sway back and forth. I jump up and down. I run in a circle. I’m literally two people.

“This is so weird!” I shout into the ceiling with the other body’s mouth.

I should name it. I mean, it isn’t really me. But sort of it. That begs the question though. What’s my name? I walk with the other body up to my window. It’s like looking at a real-life mirror. Unbelievable. There’s me, behind the glass. The sags under my eyes. My forehead wrinkles. That’s me all right, in flesh and blood. I press my right hand to the body’s left hand against the glass. That’s when I notice, with the body’s eyes, that my shirt has a name printed on it, underneath the pocket.

“Laramie”.

I can see the body’s name label too. Apparently he’s “Kepling”. Alright then, Kepling. That’s what I’ll call you.

Words (rough draft)

Words
Little pockets of sound skyrocketing around
As verbs, adjectives, or nouns
Words can leave me steaming or dreaming
And it leaves me silently screaming to see people consider words a weapon
Like they mean to cause harm
Well let me remind you I have the right to bear arms
Just because what’s on that page is mine
Doesn’t means it aligns with the ideals in my mind
Writing is expression, not a confession
So when I write about a character who is confused and depressed
Buys a used gun and a bulletproof vest
And shoots up his classmates in the middle of a test
Because everyone ignored the signs of his anger
Doesn’t mean there’s a trench coat on my hanger
But nevertheless, the school considered me a threat
Better yet, they focused on me instead of the sophomore addicted to cigarettes
They took my words out of context
Because they are con-text
Well I’m pro-text and I protest that they suggest that I’m hopeless
But I know this coldness only hones my focus on my magnum opus
My words evoke
Fear in these folks
With a few pen strokes
But where would we be without controversy?
The indirect side effect to freedom of speech
A beacon for speakin’ your mind without your rights being breached
It’s all in the name
When you write, you’re right
But when you advocate censorship, then you’re shit
My two cents are worth a million bucks
So who cares if they contain a million fucks?
F-words might be wayward but in a way they aren’t F-words, they’re A-words
Because all words are equal on surface
Well, until one strikes a nerve with a conservative
Who, without observing me, determined me to be
The next Nazi Germany
Because I wrote a story about a kid who became the victim
To the power that words had over him
So yeah, the kid pulled the trigger and said the word “nigger”
But what lies at the heart is something even bigger, something they missed
That’s what really got me pissed
I didn’t write a story about a school shooter
I wrote it about how one impressionable kid became a slave to the page
And lost himself in the rage as an unfortunate consequence
And it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense
That the school would let themselves fall victim to a nonexistent threat
Brought on by a few paragraphs on a pair of half ripped papers stapled and
Paper-clipped to the rest of my script
‘Cause that’s exactly what I wrote about
You want me to say it with my throat out loud?
You can place the blame but you became that same shameful shell
Hell, you can expel me, but you can’t compel me to stop yelling again with this paper and pen
Or a stage and a mic
Going without words is like an endless hunger strike
Being voiceless ain’t a choice for this
When I protest, I prefer to be heard
And to think it all started with a few simple
Words