only dreaming

Time doesn’t listen to your demands. Time isn’t in it for prayers and praise, no paper god to weep and mutter at, no checklist to pause and consider. It speaks, cogs and gears spilling from its mouth, and your bones are winnowed and you go gray. It speaks and your parents are buried. It speaks and everything you loved or knew is dead and gone. Wheels within wheels, thoughts composed of countless thieves ideas and half baked salvations grind out your daily grift. High flung ideas that endure, empty for centuries of anything save that it’d be pretty cool if they were true. Our heavens full of sweetness and grace, the dearly departed and lone gone dogs all saving you a place at the table. Thrones filled with mercy, instead of villainous treachery like all the ones you’ve known. Like clockwork, they turn and they turn.

Dreamt of the dead, dreamt of the lost, dreamt of the heart’s apostates in fits and starts. Winding roads and staring houses,  forests and mountains that do not exist, unknown room after unknown room full of faces and names that blur and meld. The hard cost of all this being and breathing, the ledger full of figures all in red, the residue of want and fear and experience. The doors held open now slammed shut, conversations that only occur while sleeping. The mind a sieve, the heart a labyrinth, the soul a bedtime story. We’re always on the clock, the count never ending in our favor. The night’s soft tread and the day’s bled blue visage. The empty always rushing in.

The pestilence consumes the flesh, the madness fills the discourse. Tick tock says the clock, the dissolution of the swirling words and the stunning derelictions become the law of the land, dreams only grist for the grinding. The crow checks the sewer grate as the baseline thumps along the gutter, children squawk and squeal out their whole deal while time is still almost endless. The untouched and reviled sleep to feel the love that eludes, the failed and rejected to relive all that they lost. I dream along the same, sad lines, hiding from my heart and my head. Asleep or awake, comes this oblivion, watching the last ones die, talking with the ones already gone. No more revelations down the line, no more comforts of portents of things to be or paradise to come. Driven from home by being there, torn from truth by the foresworn honest, comfort kept close to the bones. All the work left to this world only dreaming.