Anatomy of a Dream - 1

The dreams return. He senses it, it slowly fills whatever spaces he forgot to cram with useless, albeit, safer thoughts, before he lay down. Yet even in the wakeful approach to slumber, he realizes there's nothing, nothing he can do to fight those insidious images designed to decimate all memories of happier moments.

What of happiness? A state of mind that sacrifices itself on the altars of its birth, rising like the phoenix over and over...and dying, burning as many times.

In his dreams, he sees this: a moon, smiling, and then a tear falling into an empty desert. And the whispering wind gathers strength and builds sand columns around his inert body. He cannot move, he cannot scream, even if he could, where would he run, who would hear him? Fear rises. He knows this fear, knows it too well. Its color torments him, an orange-red formation, spreading on steel gray skies, stained tomato juice on sheets.

Watercolors appear in the wind, surrounds him, they burst into flame, again, orange-red fear. His memories ablaze, return to burn him in his sleep, this must be hell, this is what it is like to be consumed. The sun falls on water and breaks into a million suns, turning the waters to blood, to wine, and Moses who rose from the Nile now drowns in the red sea. There's no walking on this water.

In this liquid inferno, he sees words rising, sending smoke signals to his eyes straining in darkness...yes, darkness in fire. He reaches out to touch them, to know its nature. He always could tell by touch what is true and what is false, this is how he reads people too. Most people look at another's eyes for truth, trust, and love. But he runs his open palm on their faces, as if their true colors seep through to his fingertips and mesh with the myriad lines, his lines of heart, head and fate.

The rising words, he touches, and they enter him, weave a web of...he is not sure what, but it encompasses him in the flames. Now all he needs to do is to protect his hands. He needs to escape the flames. Else he will lose these words, his only rainbow.

Variations on the Word 'Sleep'

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

-- Margaret Atwood