glimmer

Two in the morning it’s all train wails and tv light, the movie moon so full and spooky, the simple spell of black and white. The room a dance of shadows, the only sound the recitations of the dead. All the time and what it takes right there with you in the wide awake. A turning of the pillow, a shifting of the bones. The ceiling always swimming, the window given to gossip. Night after night, the switch and the light.

You drift around the details, you float around the plot. The things you said to the ones you love, worn razor thin in the replay, unmitigatedly cruel and serpent’s tooth sharp awake in the dark parts of your heart. The things you always hear, the things you’ve always known, pacing the floor across the ceiling. The dialogue drifts in and out, something in the story too close for comfort, a line left hanging. The words alone, and the word alone, and somehow everything is said. 

It isn’t always train wails, it isn’t only two. The clock doesn’t care what time it is. The clock doesn’t care about the looming alarm. I wake from dreams full of friends and strangers, walking around nonexistent streets, traveling with the dead. I wake from dreams so fragile that they escape recollection. Only some mote almost coming into focus. Only the glimmer of something that was almost, the ache unto the isn’t. Waking in the dead dark quiet or to the riotous reports of the dogs. I wake as the same disappointment, the same emptied vessel in the nation of dreams denied.