ZULU HOUR

You'll forget all this stuff in the morning. Another dawn on your myopic, orthogonal existence. Another tracing along the ruts inside the shell. Yet your slumbering soul dances unbounded and swallows the pomegranate seed to sprout hydroponically within a spiraling tornado. Swarms of will-o-wisps coalesce and guide you through vaginal caverns and excrete you newborn unto a marshmallow landscape of snowy down.

Then the alarm goes off and nine minutes of snooze is woefully inadequate to prepare you for the day's anti-climax. Another circuit with only left turns. Another stack of mail in the IN box on the desk in the cube farm on the second floor in the first building on the third avenue in this nowhere town. Twelve hours later, you're talking to a gnome inside your pillow. His hands are made of cork and his money is counterfeit. The bed is just a big bag of flour and the walls pulse rhythmically like the air inside a drum. The palace guards bow so low their foreheads nearly touch the carpet.

Then the alarm goes off and the coffee is stark and the traffic is brutal and you long for the good old days of recess on the blacktop. You look forward to the two days of the week when you don't have to tie a half Windsor knot and you can sit on some couch and listen to some guy describe why the Redskins traded their first run draft pick. And somewhere between the sportscaster and the Chevy commercial the goldfish jumps out of the bowl and hails a cab. It's Zulu hour on the ancestral plane and the wildebeests twitch their tails in unison. You hurl your first spear and it misses and the herd is startled into running and you're running along after them, laughing. This time, the alarm doesn't go off because the clock is lying in ruins, on the pavement outside your bedroom window.

By Mark Honeycutt