dream deep

Forgive me if I shout a little too loudly sometimes or leave too many messages in half-broken bottles for you to find. Perhaps we were meant for quieter things and better places, you and I, our mouths were shaped for quieter words with less pomp and more care. We will pack our bags and suitcases (well, yours, not mine) and tape all our brown boxes shut with a tape-wand. I can hear the screech of the plastic even now. I will put my life in a little cloth bag, everything else will just have to be left behind. There was a dead bird in the alley we passed, stone-eyed and half run over. It was a funny thing, the bird spilt all over the tar of the road: such a shock of red in all that grey and black and dust, like a nightmare, or a dream of a nightmare. I’d bundle it up like those Peruvian cats and Aztec babies they cast in fire-water and loved to death, till their faces went dust-dry with the weight of untouchedness and their hearts went hollow: full of haunted sound. I’d lay it down to sleep.

There was a woman, a woman who died. Tonight they came to her house by the thousands, carrying their roses (red and white) and bundles of paper and trays of food to feed millions and flash-memories with shadow-photographs of her life summed up in five minutes to an appropriate song. Her husband was a quaint little man with a quiet disposition and a sad face. Her daughter was not yet old enough to know how to miss her fully and her husband was too old to let it show. They kept themselves near in the crowd, afraid to lose more than they already had. Spice-smoke filled the house, it got into the roses the food the sofa our clothes my eyes your heart. Like something forgettable, it made a big impression.

We will run the entire length and breadth of the mountains we once read about in books, and perhaps we will discover what they all set out to seek and never came back for. The trees are too green, too green: I will die a death of greenness by your side in these forests of gold. We rage and roar and snow becomes a hurtful thing, white and sharp and loud, like words that never mean anything. My love, must we punish each other so?