What a dangerous thing a late night thought can be. A late night thought can torment like a leaky faucet, dripping endlessly. Our eyes widen to reality as it slips slowly away from us—our dreams slowly become the newer, richer world. It is stripped and stretched and mangled, the once calm thought. Thinking of an almost. All those almosts, so close. Spread out like a cadaver, the original intention dies, and taking its place comes a mangled Frankenstein idea. That Frankenstein thought, unlike the original, is misunderstood—fearful of a fire like truth. But what is the human mind but a warehouse of incomplete thoughts put together by some monkey while the big boys upstairs smoke their cigars and laugh about their success? We are slaves to the late night thought. Do you not believe me? If not, then you’ve never had your enchanted life bursted by love–or so we call it. A late night thought is like an itch, that, no matter how hard you scratch, will always be an incessant step mother to that infinitely small point on the back of your head, nagging at your closing eyes. Your eyes slowly become pebbles drifting to the bottom of a river—vision distorted, along with your thoughts. A cloud drifts by in the night sky and you believe it was sent to rain on you, but maybe you aren’t the only one that cloud is there for. As if there is a center to anything but ego. Shall we move away from this cardboard “big” picture and climb back into a smaller, more concrete understanding? I know we could, but the late night thought is stubborn; it won’t face facts; it just drowns it itself in a pool of imagination. In a weird way, that’s what makes us human: a late night thought strips away logic and replaces it with a stain glass sphere of emotions. It is the true nakedness of a sleepy driven drunken human spirit. No other being can feel the way we do with a late night thought. Let us at least admire for a moment the idea that our complexly trivial emotions are Gods, immortal in lieu of the bane harsh reality we view…So what do we do with a late night thought: let it run rampant through the streets, or silence it before it gets too cocky? Like a crackling fire, we must be careful with a late night thought: let it grow too fast and it will burn everything, but if left unfed, then there will be no splendor to keep you warm. The answer, I suppose, is lodged somewhere in our hearts between each gushingly boisterous beat: Buh boom, buh boom, buh boom.Late night thought, I envy and hate you; I admire and scorn you. I wish my mind could control you. But for now, I’ll let you wander about my mind and my heart….Buh Boom, Buh boom… buh…boom….
Colin Aslay is originally from Southern California and currently attends the University of North Texas. This is the first appearance of his poetry outside of social media.