A dream took shape, defined by the contours of the hole
you cut into the fog when you left that night.
You were walking on a dark cobbled street,
the drizzle coming down like sheets of silk,
the pale streetlight reflecting in the sheen
of the cobbles your gentle footfalls fell upon.
A man in a flatcap holding a skull-handled cane
smoking a cigarette with strong, yellow-tipped fingers,
watched as you ambled past his eyeline and down the hill.
He looked up to me, threw me a wink across the distance
and turned to follow you, his slippers sliding on the cobbles.
He disappeared from view and soon I heard the shrill
call for help come from your hastily muffled mouth,
but I just stood there and waited for the cries to die,
becoming drowned out by the drizzle pitter-pattering
upon the old cobbles and the stone wall lining the street.
The man came back up the hill, breathing heavily,
a line of blood trickling down from the corner of his mouth,
and he stood back under his solitary streetlight,
lit another cigarette and threw me another wink,
licking his lips and giving me a secret freemasonlike nod.
I picked up the shovel resting against my thigh…
When I woke, I thought of vampyres from the near east,
Transylvanian midnight hunters longing for the blood of virgins
to soothe the burning pain flowing in their centuries-old veins.
Still wearing my overcoat, I stood up and looked out the window,
overlooking the gaslighted cobble street enshrouded in fog,
the cemetery across the street, the stone wall doused in drizzle,
and I swear I could see the hole you left behind your body
as it vacated by world to find a new life to forage from.
I tapped out the dottle in my pipe, stuffed in fresh tobacco,
and lit the pipe, creating a large plume of smoke that quickly filled the room,
indistinguishable from the world-weary fog crawling beyond my window.
And then I saw the man in the flatcap, the cigarette hanging from his lips,
bent down from the rain, surely much too hard to gain anything from it,
but the smoke did indeed snake its way up into the air from the end,
like snakes of blue that decided gravity was far too cumbersome to believe in,
ready to escape the atmosphere and find a better way of living.
I began to feel empathetic for the smoke when I noticed the focus of the man’s gaze;
the window I was now standing at, where I too was smoking and gazing,
and he threw me a wink across the distance followed by an almost imperceptible nod.
I dropped my pipe, the wood splitting upwards along the shank,
almost shearing the tenon, but none of this I noticed as I stepped away from the window
that allowed the figment of a dream to gaze upon me and for I to gaze upon him.
I sat on my bed for an indescribable length of time, planning to stand up,
find the courage to step towards the window again to lay me hallucination to rest,
but the smoke must have still been stirring in my eyes because tears flowed,
and all I could think of was that figure of you disappearing into the fog
and how I let you disappear without saying but a word, without so much as a fight,
to try to convince you that I could change and that I was ready to change for you.
I may as well have picked up a shovel and started digging your grave,
or would that hole in the ground have my name upon the headstone?
Whatever recourse led me to this situation, I was surely now stuck
with no mode of transport available to allow me to venture to other pastures,
to view upon other cobbles, ones not lined by a cemetery,
ones not housing an hallucination that smokes snakes and winks and nods.
But here I am, wearing an overcoat in my bedchambers, dreaming of you,
because that is all you are now, walking away into the fog of a memory.
