PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

    I went to sleep with the sickening taste of cheese, preserved like canned meat in my mouth. Darkness crept, spread around me like the ink of the octopus. The taste remained constant. Images oh, so abstract, yet as concrete to my mind as reality. Surfaces, mere surfaces pressing me to them. One, a surface of cold, chaotic stones, rubbed to me like sandpaper.

    

     My mind switched like slides repositioning in a projector. Smooth. White. A surface of plenty and perfection. It was an off-white cream, as if I could dip my finger in, and produce a ripple. It was a perfect, unwrinkled, unscathed surface. Back to chaos. It was more intense than before, as if layered deeper.

      

     I was crunched down, pinched between the ground and the ceiling, within the dimensions of 1' by 1' by 1'. Searing pain in my head and neck, as I realized I was holding up what held me down, a concrete mass, a million times my size. My strength ran dry, and panic sped up my spine. There was only one escape. I woke.



     Sweat coated my cheeks as my body suddenly shuddered back into reality. Forty minutes had passed, as the dull, pale moon shone through my window, adding suttle shadow of random objects to the dense black of night. As fatigue slowly drugged me back to sleep, the taste remained. The ink spread. Primitive, surreal, creatures marched with abstract across a desert, as if a Salvador Dali painting animated itself inside me. The dream evolved, thickened like pudding, blending with the cold mood of the night. Blackness blinded me, as the sound of an airplane winded down, as if landing. Blurred feeling molded in my heart, moistening, blending with the third eye of thought like play-dough.



     Ruins like those of ancient Rome. I walked feeling the intense presence of others, many others. The feeling of an active city pressed to me. I walked, as the tall, half-destroyed buildings became taller, darker, becoming a vague contrast to the cold, gray fog that was the sky, and folded on to the black outline of the last frays of “reality.” I was here, and I was now, and I was reality. I saw the figures of people, completely excited, as if in exploration of this futuristic, elaborate, dark city. I felt the creeping hands of which I could not mistake, My love, Kaitlin, the one who was always there, and was here, now. She rubbed her nose to my neck, and said, “Can you carry me on your back?” Reluctantly I did. The thoughts of field trip sped to me like a freight train. The grip of control of the underlying, overbearing, five-sided fist-a-gon which was the school, now took presence. Rebellion in me crept out, creating more obvious contrast between me and what was, everything else.



     I walked with my love on my back, freely, through the windy, labyrinthine city which in my head, was Seattle. It was intricate, nocturnal like Batman’s infamous Gotham City. We all reached a long pool of water, as we gazed, the gray roof of some distant structure covered us.



     “This is like no other city I’ve been to. Seattle is beautiful, because you can’t tell the end from the beginning, or the difference between one building and the next. Everything is interconnected, like an architectural surreality of Dr. Seuss.”



     I said these words within the dream, why?  I’ll never ever know. But, through these lines, the personality of my human form cast through, temporarily pulsing aside the animal in me, the dreamer in me.



     We wandered, admiring the intricate, twining caverns of “Seattle,” as the plot watered down, winded down, and the thick blackness rolled over again, like hills over a horizon line. We sat, in a dark parking lot, cars scarcely littered. The familiarity of the people around me told me they were my friends. We exited the cars, Kaitlin on my back, and headed toward what looked like an amusement park, but were the same city as before, this “Seattle.” The city was in intense excitement and celebration, for what purpose did not matter. The mere idea that we would join them and celebrate alone, was all we needed to seduce us. It was now her and I, Kaitlin and me. I heard my friends complain in the distance, that she owned me, that …I wouldn’t be around… I felt embarrassment, I felt…loneliness…



     I ran ahead, feeling, savoring her tight grasp around my neck, her pressing her cheek to mine. I was out of breath when we got there, my friends already there, had left us…As I walked, I looked back at her, to see that she was younger now, at what age, I do not know. She did not seem younger than before to me, for within dreams, there is no before. There is no time, for there is no progressing memory, just me and now, as One. Dreams are a parallel plane to “reality,” and the deepest link between life and death.



     We felt abandoned, watching the tall building produce clamor and party favors, overflowing with fun. We walked the near vacant city, her and I, and entered a far, back alley, as dark as a cave. In it, sat several kids from our school, none very dangerous, but none that we favored. One girl made a whipping motion with her hand to me; others laughed and called me “bitch.” Consumed with disgust and longing for solitude, I sped my pace, her and I together. The alleyway enclosed, blended to become an unlighted hallway. We walked, or should I say, I walked, until we reached a doorway, an open space leading to a room, covered in dust. I entered, revealing a single platform, covered in videotapes of horror films.



     I gazed the surface at the many films: The Fly, Suspiria, The Evil Dead, Creepshow, Cujo, The Exorcist, The Shining. I had seen them all as I walked across as if walking on eggs. Kaitlin cried out. I put her to the floor. Her lips had black and red lipstick; her eyes had black eye shadow. I noticed now, she was younger even still, than the two other before’s. She stammered out indecipherable words. It was apparent to me that she was the girl she always was to me, just in the body of her past self, a mere infant. She went into an insane seizure state, as I panicked to find help. I got up, with her in my arms, and I slipped!

Black.

Suddenly we woke up in a bed, the most enormous bed, miles long. My love and I, in each other’s arms, in her youngest age, and the millions of Seattle partiers, all tucked away safely into this irrationally long bed, fit for a thousand kings. Morning stung like hornets to our eyes. The other people vanished to the light, like vampires faded into sand, clinging to their loves. I looked in her eyes; she was her normal age, her normal mind. I kissed her tenderly on the forehead, as the bright of the sun, molded to darkness once again, blending that same contrast, that annunciated the two, distinguished our existence. As the darkness thickened, so it thinned. The ink subsided, settled like a snow globe after a long storm.

“Matthew! Time for church!” my mother called into my room. I had woken, returned to “reality” once again. I rose out of my bed at 8:15 am, and dressed for mass in misery and amusement. Through my dream, I felt rejuvenated, I felt the infinite darkness inside me bloom, the everlasting nocturnality spread through my veins like blood. Ironically, I played a Marilyn Manson song, and went to mass.

There, it felt like one humongous joke, the punch line being, “Jesus saves.” It was not a joke to me, though, because, personally, I held no real opinions either way. I did not believe, I agreed with certain aspects, yet kept my neutral distance. It was their “reality,” and so be it. For that one hour of mass I joined their “reality,” and almost enjoyed it. Mass started and ended, and when I got home, I could still taste the sickening taste of cheese, preserved like canned meat in my mouth, as I began to write this story of my dream, to you all.