Dreams die as the sun rises.
They pile up like books in a bonfire, books
never finished.
To wake up is to stomp them into ash.
Perhaps some letters survive.
Isolated, they become strange markings.
Perhaps they escape into the sky.
As the good samaritan swallows his swan song,
makes a plunge, forgets the name,
as the guns are fired,
as someone screams for mercy
I’m standing here
in this labyrinth place
I’ve been burned down, punched out, enclosed,
body numb, throat raw
I forget things easily,
I forget where the ground is,
I feel every shoulder like a hatchet,
I never mind the rain
The spiral of a weathervane
the wind whistling through
a crack in the window,
that’s all it takes,
it doesn’t take long—
it’s motion now,
it’s laughter, the sunlight, something
to make the water taste like
poison.
The poison permeates the air,
the air penetrates the blood,
the old nag of my heart—
I am alone in this place,
I feel everything beneath a magnifying glass,
I am afraid, I am afraid, I am afraid.
O Oberon, you took my soul into your fortress,
O Poe, you hid my heart beneath the floorboards,
O God, you hid the truth in the fire.
O Morpheus you hid the poem in a nonsense dream,
buried under rubble,
under the buzz of fluorescent lights,
still above me,
out of sight, in there somewhere.
O frostbitten trees that tremble in the night,
beneath the bitter dark it’s hard to realize
the blur of things.
Every inch of my body is being touched
atoms I can’t see
atoms I can see
Here we move, only by the pull
of great invisible forces, we are
pulled
to the floor
to close our eyes,
feel the rumble, the soil,
and wait
and wait
and wait
for night to fall.
This could be the last night.
The rubble
will fall away,
the next flash of light will come raging
into the sky
I hope it’s blinding,
I hope it turns everything pitch black,
I hope this one’s loud
and takes us somewhere silent.
–Art by Milan Vopálenský & Esmahan Özkan