You appeared to me during the mind's violence
That presents itself as the diving board of sleep in witching hours
More a hologram outside the boundaries of life's time than any dream
First an oversized playing card
Dappled in dripping black ink
Showing a landscape of Auschwitz, or
Perhaps, in another interpretation,
A spillage of flavoured stout
Then diluting, white light through the macabre, unmistakably into you
With those analysing , innocent eyes
And that lopsided smirk
Standing as if to guard yourself against the approaches of some other beyond me
While fixing back your gaze to say you find me here, aligned, knowing, persevering with you
and the image distorted
a strange throb of silence shrieked through your body,
dream-plunging severely
alert to the oracle assuming your intrusion
and the spokes in my head an accelerated
Fluth Fluth Fluth Fluth
Even in mid-dreaming I dreaded for you
Expected you dead or in unstable danger
What else could this mean?
Some obvious code communication relatable
to the Gothic novels you wrote about?
Sensitive as you were, now their subterfuge a warning collision provoking a Countess of undistracted night,
A sage of burning, mottled thought
Hair ravaged black where before its black spoke of a sylvan birthright
Now gorged, destabalized somewhere in memory
I can't know why I half dream a scene like this, but it has happened somewhere else
II
In a different bedroom. Possibly overmedicated.
My 15 year-old self, thinking I should try attempt writing in the voices of the dead.
Then later, when finally to succumbing to the yellowing fog of a dream
I appeared to see two girls, roughly my age if not a little older
Seated backlit on a black couch different to the one in that room
One's hair streaked blond & the other Auburn, I think,
both in tights & skirts darkened as their leather seats
And the blond was saying "he thinks he can hear us now.
He must think he's brave."
Before I was ripped into a deeper haze, the image evaporating, but this one's fade more of a silent
sSuuUuSHhh...
As if they needed me to be quiet.
...
I'm not sure why I have been placed in the midst of these disappeared
& disappearing women
Taken to drowning or crude burial or just forgetfulness
distance perhaps the key distinction. Years, eras.
Sometimes it's the work that finds you, rather than you finding the work.
I extrapolate, not lightly. I bore into what was thought dust.
Glass filaments, old rumours mistaken on the wind, burnt tables discounted elements.
These are what I seek, after being intruded in dreams.
The perfume smell embedded in a boxed up scarf, motive.