a strange dream

I had a strange dream and thought of sharing it:

In this dream, I was reading about a young girl who was on trial for witchcraft. There was a fine line between the reading of and the witnessing of this trail; because the dream did seem to come alive and the girl did spring between the pages to stand before my eyes. Perhaps, it’s my current imagination that is shaping my dream, and embellishing on this lost reality.

She was on trial for raising the dead— she lived by a graveyard, which made the dead quite accessible to her. The judge was faceless; he merely had a voice that admonished the young girl.
She was a dressed in white, curly hair tossed about her shoulders, exuding supernatural confidence as she spoke. She did not try to deny this accusation, but rather to justify it, and it is her justification that I found most intriguing. She responded that she only wanted to play with them, and that by raising the dead someone in the future will raise her from the dead.

Her innocent rejoinder got me thinking. There was something about her desire for immortality that struck a chord within me. Perhaps it is I who has an unconscious drive for immortality that has yet to surface fully, or it may be a romantic notion that all humans desire. If there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s my mortality; yet, a part of me seems to want to romanticize eternity—that the sun will continue to rise and set beyond the pale sky, forlorn mountains, for a time that knows no end. But my words will end, and maybe I want to leave a mark, or a word, even after the sunsets, and the evening becomes my shroud.

Maybe I'm just uncomfortable with the looming implications of death. Or, it was just a dream, and nothing else.

empty moments

Have you ever experienced those brief moments, or perhaps not so brief, when you are confronted with complete emptiness: a deep dry well with an inaudible, tautologous echo menacing against your ears. Nothing can assuage your anxiety, comfort your obscurity or fill in this unwholesome gap. Indeed, all that you are offered is blank space. A place to write of your new life, your old death; your perpetual death, and unborn life; your sunken chest or your sunken eyes. Then you exhale and exhale, but nothing emerges—the sky suffocates. This feeling, both physical and metaphysical, burns in all directions, which doesn't really matter, because you lack any sense of direction. It's all fallen cities, people without emotion walking against one another.

You’ve developed such a fixation with nothingness that it has painted over everything—one colour, one large brush stroke, one large gap. Memories in a tattered sack splash across the canvas, leaving nothing, not even the dead fly at the bottom of the well.

You yearn for it to end, but yet it continues to spread like dark wine on fine cloth.

clarity

I think of how to fling my arms around the painted sun,
long enough to dry the rain drops covering the seas,
find referents for the signifiers divorced from their signifieds,
rock the world to sleep with a single lullaby,
plant lilies on the moon

but in time for me to slip onto the isolated cloud
who moves with prosthetic wings
into another world--a better world
between the hills
and the invisible souls of dead soldiers,
without wooden boxes.

A quietus clear as a rain drop.

...

A petal amid the ash-stricken leaves may spawn a different memory.