❝ Ὄνειροι ❞

[litany]

Slept, walked, walked in my sleep
right into EXTERIOR – POOL – THE
NIGHT WHERE NOTHING IS RIGHT
sputtered something I don’t remember
though I remember the sputtering part
also the water, chlorinated aqua staple
of Floridian living. In New York the poor
have tablets. Florida it’s pools. Idaho is
what you would expect: potatoes, real
estate cheap enough to live if you don’t
mind isolation, surprising with its fists
and its teeth, the night creatures being
the worst company to keep, dream you
telling sleep walking you how to do it
next time, saying Or Else fill in the blank,
plaguing and chasing until you wake up.
I wake up not Florida not New York not
Idaho or Michigan. Not a wardrobe either.
But I wake up, unsleep walk myself
backward. The scale lies, because it leaves
things out. All the time, forgotten, all the
middle distance of eventlessness. Failure
never hurts less but even hurt can be a
monotony, stuck in a rut they say in some
places, places like this middle distance,
middle ground hated, from which I spot
mountains and trenches, from which I
think they do not look so different.
Skyscrapers too made of moonlight oh
I must still be sleeping after all. One of
those. Walking in my sleep, maybe not
sleeping while walking. Can’t be bothered
to wake up and find out which I am.
Wouldn’t recognize me anyway. Dreams
are pushcart lies. I prefer the moon, awake
and watching. The moon alone so I know
she knows
exactly what I mean is not exactly what
I say and though there’s science for every
thing, I want to know about science for the
nothing, for the negative space, the states as
of yet unoccupied by the footprint someone
leaves to remind those who follow they
will never be first. EXTERIOR – YOUR PLACE
NOT MINE – STILL NIGHT, STILL DARK I
can't sleep walk around you it turns out.
I don’t trust you far enough to dream a
better version. Instead we stay awake and we
talk and here is the nothing I wanted but it
doesn’t last. I wake up. A dream is a scene
it turns out. Sometimes I have the same one
glass bursting in like a flood, cold bay air
fogged over with ghosts and magic reserved
for book shaped people. Walk through there
to find faces recognizable by touch only under
a half moon. They require half the dark to see by,
the sea by the light faked from the tower that
says once I faced fear dead awake, spiral stairs
black with holes and the ability to look down and
see too much. That’s what height is. In a dream
it may vary, height as a freedom, height as a way
to say there is no love greater than the love that
won’t drag you down with it, will leave you in
remainder shadows, spaces where even the moon
won’t go, spaces I’ve slept through so deeply I
didn’t know it except by the narrowness of breath,
the almost idled state, more quietly dying than
I thought I would. Sleep walk enough, off the side
of your fire escape, your building, your curb into
rush hour traffic or a cyclist who must have been
quite the warlord in his past life. Go trawling for
other people’s wants homes families dead and
living. You’ll get what you want
for a while.
You’ll get things you don’t want too
probably for longer. But maybe it doesn’t matter
if you lower yourself far enough, crouch in the sea
bleed out your rapid eye movement because now sleep
isn’t sleep anymore. EXTERIOR - ? - NIGHT.
And the camera keeps rolling.