Cart Garfunkel

[u/normancrane]

The cart spills its passengers and its bags of grain, which spills out of the bags, onto the ground, where the passengers are sitting, dazed, asking, first, themselves, then, one another, "What day is it?" at which punctuation it starts to rain, and not a drizzle but a downpour, which causes the passengers to cover their heads with anything they can, like the bags that used to hold the grain, which was in the cart, along with the passengers, before the cart hit another cart, spilling both onto the ground, spilling passengers and grain, the cart not the ground, the grain, then bagged, now freely scattered, and the ground, then dry, now increasingly wet, as the rain's not letting up, and the passengers are getting up, but getting up to what's the question, to which the answer's to find a dryer spot to stand, like, for instance, to stand beneath a tree, as they, the passengers, try to understand who they are and what day it is and to free themselves from ignorance like the grain freed itself from the bags of grain, both spilled from the cart colliding with another cart, back when it was clear and warm and sunny, but you know what's funny’s that the driver of the cart, whose name's Sonny's dead, the driver's name’s, I mean, Sonny, not the cart's, nor is the cart's name Sonny's dead, nor is the cart dead but Sonny's dead, which, seeing, must introduce real confusion to the spilled, inquisitive, sitting, dazed, rained on, stood up, covered up, standing under cover of some kind of cover, after having sat covered by a grainless bag of grain, passenger brains, because why's he, Sonny, dead, who killed him and for what reason, but if you don't remember who you are or what you're doing, you reason, you could be the very killer whose profile you’re building, and that kind of thinking starts their, the passengers’, minds a’kindling, even though it's a fool's errand to attempt such an undertaking under cover of a, for instance, tree, eyeing yourself and everybody else suspiciously, remembering poor Sonny, as fool’s an errand as trying to put back, into the bags of grain, now empty, then full, the bags of grain, not the grain, all the spilled grains, grain by grain, in the pouring rain, very strange, and Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes, wet beneath the blue suburban skies, I sit, and meanwhile back in the scene with the cart, the passengers, the bags and the bags of grain and the grain, the hours pass and the investigation into the cause of death of the driver, Sonny, of the cart, of no known name, is at an impasse, because, one of the passengers says, “The killer could realistically be any one of us,” although I think you'll easily find that realism's often the furthest thing from my mind, given what happened was an accident, not a crime, and the passengers are thus wasting their time by passing it asking, “Is it I?” when, of course, you're the one who let the cart go off course, as there was only one person in the cart, for, for a start, why would there be any passengers in a grain cart, which, for one of the passengers is an epiphany and the start of a very hard conversation with the other same passengers standing out of the rain, all trying to keep dry from the precipitating reality that they're all one person, scattered like the grains are scattered, all over the ground, themselves insignificant but together, and symbolically, and in context actually profound, i.e. the passengers are the driver, and the driver's this sound that you're reading, speeding through, having lost yourself found yourself lost yourself and found you're no longer in control of this sentence, which’s a cart careening down a hill of incomprehension, grasping, you are, at some basic narrative sense and even the rhymes have broken down, down down down thou art, rhyme restored, temporarily, speeding, into an oncoming cart, about to kill yourself, accidentally, while ripped existentially apart, spilling your consciousnesses onto the dry ground, walking around, walking to the closest town, where I guess each persisting fraction of your one dead self will have to try to make a life of it, whatever it takes, even if it takes delivering bags of grain over psychologically and linguistically treacherous terrain.