amalgam

In this dream one of us is having, you are always almost there. The hour is upon me, and I can taste your kiss from around a corner, feel your flesh press from afar. This is the dream of us I keep having, the trick of the mirror, the narrative power of the editor's credit. Your name just there, slipping down my tongue. A breath and the clasp and huff of pronunciation, and every prayer comes due. Sleep is just lousy with these sorts of tricks.

There was no knowing either question or answer, the whole point seeming that certain straight ahead. There was no truth in telling what the world had already shown. From feather bed to fever dream, from over kill to after glow. Was it that moment from that other world of fitful glimpses and deep recall, or the shimmer of altered metals settling into that amalgam I know by heart? Was it the flicker of candles snuffed or the terror of wishes granted? The reason or the go-between.

The change is that much more astounding, from dream true to truth told. Waking on this pavement made of mistakes. Waking in the world the way it wore me, from music to the score as it scans. This faith a kind of satiation, finished by a bellyful of this same old world. Cold air and bare skin, the scramble for swaddling cloth. Candy canes and Christmas lighting lingering in the slow stretch of longing. The stark naked certainty of your arrival in this life we'll never know.