09/07/2009

The darkness tilts,
Turns and rolls
Drunkenly in overheated haze,
Caught in a box-room -
A lizard lolling
And I, on the Remington,
Wordlessly tapping.


He sits easy,
Unaware, alone,
Eating his lunch in the comfortable wilderness.
How can he know
That the painting on the wall
Is a secret window
And that I, as I fall past it,
Seasick and drowning,
Am slowly mapping him in mistyped prose?


It's better that no one knows.

When you wake and the same heat-haze rolls over that scorched the edges of your dream, you'd think you'd know you were still dreaming.

When you wake in a bed you have never slept in, a fake bed, the wrong bed, all out of proportion and drowning the room in a patchy eiderdown, you'd think you'd know.


When you can't breathe and your stumbling steps lead you somehow instantly from the patchwork bedroom to a kitchen plucked from your childhood, you'd think you'd realise and wake.

And yet, for all your bluster, you never managed lucidity, did you? Slave to your mind for a few more moments, you look down at your chest. Ribcage all twisted. Stupid, stupid, slept wrong in the night, slept on your front and now look at you, gone all wrong, hurt the baby inside you and all. Your. Fault.

Wake. Cry. Glass of water. Comfort the baby who knows nothing but floats, dreamless and unmade, in serene silence.

I remember it like it was only last night, oh my brothers, oh my sisters. The caravan had stopped and we all got off and blinked at the sun and rain and rainbows. The mud was good and solid and real under our feet. And it felt like the gods were healing us, though what needed healing was long forgotten. Then we stood and talked, all of us refugees come home, among the tents, in the late August sunlight. I was the oldest man among them, old as old, but with the sun on my bones and the mist of cool rain on my face, I felt like a child again. A little black boy spoke - said something so simple and so profound that I cried.





The words got lost. They ran like hourglass sand through my fingers. But the feeling remained.