Monday, April 4, 2016

The Awful Quiet of Dreaming


If I don’t get it out,
it will consume me,
chew through me like
a mountain of termites
burrowing through a tree stump.

It gnaws at me and if I don’t
pour it out onto this page it will
swallow me and down I shall tumble
to a bottomless pit of misery and
sad deconstruction.

The muted hell of indeterminate
silence confounded with meaninglessness
only to be amplified by dreams of
spinning purple and blue galaxies
outlined by shooting stars.

A dream in a dream of something that
never was, with a cast of characters
that never were, about misrepresentations
of who real people are and my subconscious
projections of them.

We were buying a house together,
she looked beautiful, I was smiling at her,
but always feeling on edge, like this good
feeling would shatter like sugar glass in a
movie special effect.

We were young, fit, and full of timidity.
In the dream I was nervous, but confident,
shy but knowing, that she was with me.
She was with me on it. We were doing
it together.

It was a summer day, she was wearing shorts,
which she never wore, we were at a real estate
agents office. At his desk, talking about buying a
house and we couldn’t agree on the neighborhood
in which to live.

She got up to get a coffee, I looked at
her as she did. It was habit to look,
a missed habit, I felt the dream me and his
feelings of loss, he was mourning. He felt
grief.

The view out the window was bright,
but swirling in a sea of colors and the
majesty of the electric universe, cloudy
gaseous tendrils swirled, reaching out
as comets streaked the night.

“I should make a wish,” I thought.
Should I wish for our house? Should I
wish for agreement? What should I
wish for? Something that could come true.
Something that could be possible.

“I wish she’d talk to me again,” I said.
That wish seemed possible in that moment.
A long comet’s tail sped across the dark sky.
Some unknown dream character pointed at it.
“See,” they said, “there it goes…”

When I woke up I was teary. The corners of
my eyes were damp and I felt like the wind
had been knocked out of me. The images, fresh in
my brain, her loveliness, the way I looked at her,
too fresh, too hard, too gone, too quiet.

It was so quiet, before the alarm clock, the streets
still sleeping, the city dreaming. No galaxy out my
window that I could see, no light breathing from
someone other than me.  The lonely quiet before the
dawn, after dreaming. 

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