By SHELIA BLAND
Anonymous, wherever she is.
Titles and roles fit only haphazardly.
Sliding out of place,
Occasionally slipping off altogether.
Sites within contain shifting landscapes.
Fear, loneliness, occasional joy.
Spaces behind the face often contain bafflement. Wonder.
A maze of amazement.
Spaces behind the navel, host anxiety, turbulence,
Sometimes electrical jolts.
Spaces behind the left breast ache. Long.
Sometimes pound.
She has been searching – for she knows not what.
Change. Something different. She needs to be released.
Perhaps even transformed.
No space seems to fit – No place feels like home.
She touches people lightly
While they slam into her
Movement.
She needs constantly to move.
Years of moving –once exhilarating,
leaves her longing for a resting place.
She rides buses.
They are flexible.
Available without reservation.
The countryside flashes by in non-stop Kodak moments.
Nights are nice because they bring silence.
She sits in the night silence with a silent mind.
Something opens up inside her in these silences.
Vision transforms.
Embedded in the Kodak moments, other images appear.
Images that are not often perceived.
These images follow the bus now,
Though the bus continues to move
and the Kodak-moment images
are continually left behind.
These images following her
taking a keen interest in her.
Yet she remains still.
Apparently not engaging with
or reacting to
what she sees.
She has seen these images before.
Just now,
some of them are quite compelling.
Engaging touch and sound, as well as sight.
The hum of the bus motor fades.
The sounds from this new dimension get louder.
Falling inside the drum beat
A new orientation
Something shifts
Inside
In the internal space
She is suddenly jolted up from her seat.
She moves to the front of the bus.
She signals she wants to get off.
The bus will not stop.
The drums beat louder.
She paces the aisle.
The bus warns her she will be kicked off.
The drums beat louder still.
She paces even faster.
The bus stops.
She gets off.
The bus pulls off.
The drums still.
She glides along in the silence,
The music of the spheres plays at her ears.
Her eyes watch multiple realities.
She dances the rotation of the earth.
Images all around her
Shimmering, glowing, glittering, black holes
Faces without features
With penetrating stares
Blacker than black
Brighter than bright
Figures, shapes
Animated, vibrating….
Moving with her movement
Energizing,
Dancing her dance
The earth
Moon
Stars
Universe
Are in sync…
She falls onto the ground,
Images dance around her, levitating in excitement.
Encircling her.
She rises above the ground,
floats with the images,
reclining in midair.
She is held up by moon beams,
Felled by breath
A floating.
Occupying two spaces at once.
The moon shines lovely in the sky above her.
The winds cradle her, rocking her gently back and forth.
She can hear the earth singing to her.
She smiles and the images smile with her.
The bus reports the incident.
Though she was never found,
She was never missed.
Shelia Bland lives in Midtown Phillips. She has been writing most of her life to help herself understand the experiences and people in her shared world.
