1.
I think my life is bigger in their dreams
In their stale images of grandeur
behind their fading eyelids
fluttering with what still passes as hope.
And down the hall, my eyes like the
scorching blue beginnings
of gasping flames
quietly burning me up from inside,
my own dreams not yet formed.

Years ago the winds of their dreams
reached me in my angelic slumber.
I know those vivid hopes, nay, prayers
made me grow more than the
spinach I joyously bemoaned.
But tonight my heart is shrunken
with the knowledge that the stars
are mere reflections of what is already
gone.

They, curled together, their own dreams of reaching
those pale stars
shattered with neglect,
send new ones my way,
unaware that I’ve searched for my
place under the feeble moon
and cannot find it behind these naked
blue flames.

2.
I am the same girl with blue flames for eyes
but stretched, molded like clay, hardened and
glazed after being thrown on the potter’s
wheel that was my childhood.
As they lie in their dreams,
I walk into a dark house under the burden
of their dreams combined with my own.

Mingled together, I cannot distinguish my hopes
from theirs, the clay has been baked to
the same white crust around my breath,
my heart, the place where the flames
are lit.

I still haven’t reached that yet – not reached,
but maybe touched, glimpsed, grazed my toes
against it. Before me, these blue flames form
into something less dangerous,
less new, the yellow-orange blaze warm,
bursting, sending off sparks –

And I know I can light my own fires
under this feeble moon and make it glow
brighter than they did, brighter than even
their womb-sent dreams made their hearts
glow.