i.
there is a boy who visits my dreams sometimes, colt-like and all of seven years old. his eyes, pale blue as shadowed snow-fall, are unsettlingly, peacefully unfocused and half-lidded, peering through long lashes of ink that brush his baby cheeks with each slow blink. pale pink and gold flowers, five-petaled and sweet, are woven through his dark, ever-dripping hair like pin-point stars of gentle flame. his edges are blurred, softened, and he silently guides me through the pitfalls and the white-water’s undertow in my sleeping mind.

ii.
the human is a thousand half-truths framed as gospel. an example: the dead all smile, grinning at the setting sun as the wind whistles through their ribs in a mimicry of breath. the dead smile and smile, and are alive as our memories of them, as alive as they are in our dreams. (and oh, in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?)

iii.
do you want truth from me? look who you’re asking. were you expecting me to tell you anything you don’t already know? i am just as real as you, just as human as you, just as much of a fallacy. sometime, somewhere, an old, lonely god dreamed us up for company. dreamed us up and watched us grow and learn and stumble and fail and pick ourselves back up with band-aid wrapped hands and scratched knees and feral grins as we start climbing the same hill will fell down with renewed determination. we want to know what’s on the other side, can only imagine it, and so we try again. (our angel cousins watch with a thousand eyes and shield us with a thousand wings and a thousand rings of fire from the infinity we are not yet enlightened enough to understand).

iv.
he has never been alive, this snow-soft not-ghost, this ink-stained child, this dreamed-up boy of mine. never breathed, never spoken, never slept. (do dreams sleep?) but he is as real as anyone i have ever imagined, or remembered, or thought of. the world is in the mind, we all know this. and the mind, truly, is and can only ever be, a place of dreams.

h.f.m.