Dopa-mine

I am sitting on, or rather in, my very deep and cushy couch, slowly, molecularly sinking into it's nappy warmth. My back is facing to the west and the towering mountains that cuff this city like a fathers stern and protecting hand, jagged, strong and dusted white. It's raining quite steadily and I think, that even here in this modern, sterile loft which is so far removed from sentimentality, hearth or home, that the sound is still so soothing. A syncopated rat-tat-tat drawing my thoughts away while someone else begins to write.

I am listening to Erik Satie and the evanescent rise and fall of such beautiful melody makes me wonder what it must have been like to experience the dark delirium of an Asian opium den–a cave of the primeval mind so far removed from care or even conscience, patrons reclining like the enlightened Buddha under the nightshade of a great tree. Awake, asleep and yet aware of the imperceptibly low murmur of voices and one's own biological music. An attendant enters the chamber surreptitiously and wipes fevered sweat from my brow. Outside there is thick tropical heat, but inside it is only perceived as a tingletravelling a snake path of tiny glistening rivulets.

I try to imagine a smell like burnt rose petals and nutmeg, acrid and exotic yet somehow wholesome. The smoke, a swaying, sultry tendril of vascular blue and milky white, it dances with every breath.

Pattern without depth, motion without effort, effort without action–frozen in joy.

It's dark here but even the light of a single flickering candle or the explosion of the attendants match as he re-lights my pipe, sets off fireworks and cascades of impossible color.

Normally it would be overwhelming to have this many senses so suddenly acute, everything ballet and potency, ancient archetypes of semi-permanence, profound–each second a journey into unmeasured black. And yet, there is no apprehension or fear. It's as if a group of clamoring, conspiring courtiers had been sent away so that the king might enjoy the buffoonery of a cartwheeling fool.