FIRST VERSION OF "TRANSIT INTERNSHIP"

You're not going crazy, Carmen! And this isn't the beginning of another unbearable Beat poem. It was afternoon, and I was lying alone again in my little servant's room at the inn, staring as if through an oval mass of tenuous, translucent blue energy parked between the ceiling and my eyes. Faces of familiar people pass by and disappear, fragments of conversations slip through it and quickly become tatters, footsteps of farewells are lost in the psychic echoes of the blue surface, as in a still lake of floating ether. Carmen's baroque angel face is now like a Mona Lisa adapted into a blue frame. Gradually, the image gains movement, breaths of life, as a multitude of tiny details coalesce in every cubic centimeter of the room plunged into darkness. She spoke of strange people, in a strange time, in a strange city. Now I was paying close attention to everything, while she, spilling her coffee on the floor next to a boyfriend, WASN'T. On the beach, I don't remember exactly: she lay on the air mattress and stared directly at the sun, until her eyes watered. And she kept looking, until they became inflamed? Did she have to be forcibly removed from the float? She laughed hysterically, her eyes filling with tears. Blind, holding hands with a friend. Her tongue underneath was sweet and soft. At night, in the farmhouse. Her family gathered in the living room, watching the eight o'clock soap opera. She screamed HELP in her room, imagining green snakes circling the bed. But the maid was awake in the next bed, turning the light on and off at will. Pure exercise in controlled Toltec madness. Wasn't I at the kitchen table? No, but I was reading her thoughts and noticing everything? She wanted to talk. Didn't she? She also wrote poems just to say it was a waste of time! That she should burn all her poems in a bonfire! And throw herself into the bonfire right after, as she suggested: with an apple in her mouth! I was beside you in that car flying down the road between Ilhéus and Porto Seguro, when you said, quietly (so the other girls wouldn't hear), looking at yourself in the reflection in the glass: I LOOK LIKE A RAT. No, of course not... But tell me something I want to know: on the days you yell and exchange blows with your closest relatives, what do you really feel? Why don't you talk to them about your visions... But who am I to reprimand you? I've never tried anything like that with anyone. Changes in light and sound aren't exactly phenomena that occur outside of us, just shifts in perception. When we enter other states, we see these changes in light and hear different sounds and buzzing sounds. This is what you should keep in mind so you don't lose your sobriety all the time. For example, when we enter a state of ensonño, if I do it consciously from the waking state, I'll pass through various states or stratifications where I hear—buzzing, bells, the wind whistling, the treading of dry leaves, something like an electric current. And the perception of light is also different. But nothing is happening; you're simply changing states. It's what Don Juan called changing speed.