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.