Indexing Identity

I’m sitting on a white bench wondering

could you still see the mountain if the grass didn’t move? and it seems that without motion we are blind, our eyes glass orbs filling the holes to our minds, like bookends

(except not really, right, because that would mean, well, that that thing    between    held meaning,

except, what is meaning but seeing things move and wondering why and how come and wherefore [archaic, yes but you’re proving my point: this is timeless and persists with each new player, challenge, or still-point];

except are there actually still-points because each person lives with a rhythm inside them that can’t be stopped, so what, then, is a still-point in experience,

Is it a time of low emotion, where if the world stopped spinning, you’d be the only one to feel it, or is it more like sleep-paralysis when that creep you saw once ten years ago looms over your bed with you in it and not even your breath can gasp at the shocking sight, but, like, your heart is still beating, racing, about to explode

And it’s not really a still-point, then, so what is a still-point and maybe that’s the point?

But wow this is all very philosophical, isn’t it, and I’m ranting like a raving mad a stark stark mad woman, and you’re probably thinking, “what the hell do still-points matter” but I can’t just        turn off my brain, you know?

Oh, if you could see me as I write this, rocking back and forth on a too-hard white bench in the art building, a huddled mass constantly moving (but that’s the question, isn’t it, what do I mean with this meaningless poem,

or is it a poem or more like a spilling of guts through questionable line lengths and blocky text andandand lots of and’s and like’s and of’s-and-or’s-and-can’s) —

And here I am, mad as marbles or spilt milk, sitting here vigorously scrubbing my mind of these musings and all I can think is: Is this what it feels like to have an identity crisis?

A/N: If this sounds familiar to one or two of you, it's because I was digging for this poem in my Drive and found the first draft. The finished draft is here on Vocal, one of the first pieces I published. It's called "Chronicling Consciousness From the Bottom of Green Mountain."

I wrote this back in college for a poetry course where we were tasked with writing a long-line poem and I decided to try stream-of-consciousness. It fit with the prompt; our thoughts don't use punctuation or breaks.

As to the subject...I was contemplating motion after I'd learned that our eyeballs are constantly moving. That if they didn't, we couldn't focus on anything we saw...and that made me wonder about the micro-motion in and on everything else on the planet. Somehow that lead me to thinking about identity and how it ties in to motion. Because if we can't focus on anything, who are we?

Don't know if this is a good entry into the challenge, but the finished one is, I think (I hope)...and I just liked this version too much not to post it. Like the truer-form of a stream-of-consciousness.