I am conscious, and so the dream stops.
No moving pictures, shapes, color, or sound.
A blank rectangle like an old turned off television set.
My eyes are stitched I cannot open them.
A little hand inside my mind is pressing the wakeup button.
I am still sleeping and yet aware!
The world is already made, a used, reiterated, exhausted
world.
Everything has been said before, chewed on and spat,
like a popular book that’s been borrowed a thousand times
put back on the shelve for another pair of hands.
In this magnificent crack between what is and the tenuous,
I can go back as far as my imagination allows, the before
is endlessly vast.
A fetus in a dark womb, with fins for hands, before the
split of fingers.
I learned to use them, on and on. Opening and unwrapping, to
reach
an understanding, which again and again, slips through split
fingers.
When people gave me words and told me to be grateful. Words,
like onions
I peeled and peeled on them, tearful.
