dream land

You separate the ashes from the embers. You sweep the shadows from side to side. The little room, the tiny light, the low growl from behind the wall. Moth wings and the accumulated crane flies battering the bare porch bulb. Time is a hanging tangle, taken for the weather and the cobwebs clinging to the eaves. Time is a fraying knot, the bind and the unwinding. Sleep is here, or near enough to there abouts. Sleep is here in the boots tromping around inside your skull. The clock in your phone, the clothes on your floor.

The night is long along about now. The moon has slipped her tail, the clot and stretch of star and cloud, the imagined impromptu somehow evasive and askew. Not the tune you had taken to as the night sped past the window all those years ago, the sea between the hills tangled in the freeway, the foam and thunder as the tide cudgeled the sprawling sharpened shores. Not the song you had learned when love first burned you and the magic let you down. Instead a separate melody swings and sways here at the end of days. The wind in the pines, your heart on the ropes. The immensity spent on engines and electronics, this strange turn of sand and skin, this map of the land without. 

Sometime later, you’re awake in the dark. You don’t remember the moment before, the dozing up to this awareness, the dreams you might have slipped. You are awake in the dark, and it feels like there’s a reason. The silence rings, the little light left on or slipping in pressed against edges and dimensions, the scene filling out between each breath. The sound of your breathing, that sense of somewhere other just outside your ken, the stranger lost behind your eyes a silence in your skin. Here you are, between the day and the dreaming. Here you are, far away and cleaving close. Your eyes are open wide, letting in anything that shines.