The Backrooms
I genuinely feel and believe the place is real
I believe The Backrooms are the Collective Consciousness. It’s why we all have a sense of Deja Vu there. We enter them in sleep. We know those we’ve met there immediately in the “front rooms” (waking objective reality).
A recent poem about them- only just recently learned a movie is coming out about this urban legend liminal space. I know this place well. I have a good map of the city on stilts, and the ghost city of inhuman children you take the escalators up to. I’ve played hopscotch there.Afraid to roll the red ball back to them as they lined the graveyard at the rusty playgrounds edge at never-ending twilight. I know the couple by the canal, boated on the canals many times as they became deadly white water ink canals
Before and Again (Backrooms)
We’ve been there before.
We will be there again.
Each night, we sleep,
and slip sideways.
We travel the threshold alone but form our own communities in the sideways.
These Dreamtime near-familial units.
Sometimes when awake, we meet someone we seem to know.
They recognize us too. We feel familiar to each other.
We know each other from the slippages.
These are our fellow wanderers over there.
We know our own.
“I know you, we walked for days together once upon a nightmare”
We know all that’s important about them
though we forget most when awake,
only the kinship.
It bleeds though the infinite walls
from the backrooms of the collective consciousness to the frontrooms.
“Hey Angela, remember the house that tried to eat us?
How it tasted when we ate it.
We realized it was merely stale gingerbread.”
“Hey Lily, remember falling for days through the hole in the floor? You relived it skydiving.”
“Hey Sara, remember getting lost on the garden path until we
plucked the lavender roses on the count of three and woke up over a thousand miles apart?
The two of us can’t resist no clipping into art in the cozy gallery.”
“Laura, I found your books in the bookstore beside Jordan’s and enjoyed a cup of tea before the whispers unsettled me there.”
“ayana, you’re my favorite co-wanderer, and remember as much as I upon waking.
You have killed your Alternus and keep returning there to remove weaker iterations of yourself.
I love you for it and everything else you do/are.”
“David, we’re in the same place. I’ve said enough.”
We all dive into the same ocean of the collective unconscious.
We are the documenters.
What we write that defies logic is just a formal report.
Another level, another space between worlds.
Creatives live and work in the backrooms.
Our native habitat. We inhabit the liminal spaces.
Perhaps we were born there.
Maybe “consensus “reality is merely just a Euclidean space we all catch back up in.
Where we meet again and touch base.
“How are you doing?”,
“What have you been up to?”
“I’ve missed you”
Maybe this isn’t the frontrooms at all.
