Sometimes I am overcome with the suspicion That I am a stranger on this earth Descended from a peripheral order of beings An alien on this planet come from a distant star, Faraway galaxy, parallax dimension Some shape of a castaway, convict or changeling Perhaps just a forgetful idler who slept passed their stop And shuffled off at the end of the line
But the trick is to be at ease
Of course I have on occasion demanded to see the manager But that was met with shrugs and sighs conveying Studied confusion, blank indifference or downright hostility Nobody seemed to know anything and cared even less Initially I thought well what is the point of them? But maybe they were feigning ignorance Covering their tracks, keeping secrets, hiding truths About myself however banal they turned out to be
Surely you realise that this is not the way to go about things I think we may have a situation You are clearly not at ease with yourself and your surroundings
Surrounded by screens bombarded by images and text Deluged with data indices statistics and factoids Which I passively absorbed hoping to later sift and sort Through the theories ideologies conspiracies and revelations Perhaps somewhere in this sewer of misinformation I can decipher a message from a distant dimension A faraway star, a parallex galaxy my lost Home that I fell from those forgotten aeons ago
You know we have ways of making you feel at ease And you have, despite our repeated warnings Persisted in persisting You leave us no choice so… You are at ease You are at ease in yourself and your surroundings You are at ease You are at ease in yourself You are at ease in your surroundings You are at ease You are at ease in yourself and your surroundings You are at ease in yourself You will be what we want you to be Feel what we want you to feel Say what we want you to say Think what we want you to think Be what we want you to be You are now at ease in yourself and your surroundings
As long as I do not remember certain moments Incidences or sensations that elicit strong reactions Then I will be alright, I will be at ease with myself I doubt it ever happened that I shot my cuffs, Lifted my finger signaling for you to come over, Bend over my knee and lift up your skirt That only happened in my non-existent home Vanished star, imploded galaxy, voided dimension
They have promised me that when I feel completely At ease in myself and my surroundings That I will be granted a vision of the birds of paradise Descending down from the vast unreachable heavens Onto these somnolent suburban streets and gardens Setting hearts and minds ablaze with motion and colour To carry us away toward a richer more vibrant realm A distant galaxy, faraway dimension, parallax star.