awaken

All at once your dreams scatter like minnows in the shallows and your shadow cluttered world awaits. You find your feet falling into step, these dark halls and scattered lights all around. The moon in the window has its say, casting spells and ghosts. Your haunted heart speeds beneath your steady breath. Your trying eyes sliding between sight and shade, between seeing and only seeming so. You awaken like any other collection of clockwork parts, lively as your springs and gears will make you, timely as any other suspect machine.

You move through the dark clutter of your life, uncertain but without bothering to find the light. It will all be clear soon enough, fingers clever and eyes learning to adjust to their limits. The light outside only reaching close enough to whisper its secrets, never shining loud enough to spill the beans. You meet a chair, you bump a table, the details of your travels told in scrapes and bruises, the price of knowing always paid in pain. It is too late or too early, yet you pace these traps and piles, feeling your way toward some reason. As if the act of waking alone told of some fated sign. As if the loss of dreams wasn't worry enough, you find your way through the dark. The door opens as it was bound to all along.

Outside the moon makes a marvel of the pines, tangled in the tall limbs, spilling cold fire through branch and needle. You clamber through the knots of root and shadow, stepping through the dust and dark. Your life all angles and bramble beside this breathless spread of light. The dreams you fled now find you, footfall and heartbeat, alive and awake in the early stirrings of the world. The slow drowned feel of the wind as it spills, the heat of your thoughts as they sprint and swarm. You open your hands and let the moon fill them. This life slipping through your fingers, this world with no use for walls. Your portion everything you can carry.