Before the Dream Fades
I wake with sudden urgency
half-snatched from that velvet drift,
where meaning wore no mask
and shadows told the truth.
My fingers ***** for pen,
still soaked in dreamsoil delight,
soul dragging through sheets
like it wants to stay lost in night
in that lucid elsewhere
where these eyes were a doorway
and the stairwell never ended.
The dream clings
not like memory,
but like smoke that remembers
the shape of fire.
If I move too quick, it breaks.
If I breathe too loud, it scatters.
Sometimes it’s better to stay,
to sink back
where time is syrup
and the mind writes without the hand.
Where the world is not like a poem
it is the poem.
Every rusted lock,
a metaphor.
Every kiss,
a prophecy.
Before lost meaning comes.
But the ink calls.
Gall-ink, ghost-thick,
spills black arteries
across the parchment
as the flame in the lamp shivers,
uncertain as me.
Timbers creak like old voices
beneath a ceiling of dreams not yet spoken.
The black river outside
is lined with meaning
not the kind you seek,
but the kind that finds you
when the page is ready.
So I write,
half-asleep still,
trying to make a cage
for the bird that flew
inside my head
and left feathers
on the pillow.
And when I read it back
it lives again.
Clearer than dreams.
Sharper than any thought.
A second life
for something
that should’ve drowned
at dawn
and left only a cage of feathers.
07 August 2025
Cage of feathers
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
