dream deep

I will make your shoulder blades into art. Carve etchings on your lower back so you never forget, make a painting on your left hip the size of a secret. You’ll stand at the window, like all the greatest muses, with your back-etching and hip-painting and shoulders like a Kandinsky from Die Blaue Reiter. I will paint you red, the reddest of reds, I will make you bleed from my hands and my fingers: I will cut you deep, deep, deeper than you’ve ever been before.

I will not know you or you I, but we will have met before in the city. And faugh! See how they despise us and our naysay, I will paint them over with black, the blackest of blacks. I never want to be one of those people who have to speak their thoughts into the minds of others: we will escape this city of fools and ride away pleasingly, you and I. Shall we go to Venice, Budapest, Genoa, Sicily, Bhutan-on-the-mountains? Away with you and your shoulder blades, so pleasing to the eye: and I with my glass pen and feather-pad, I will write you into these pages and paint you onto these walls, they will never forget you.

I shall say, leave me here, leave me here, leave me here in peace. This is a good thing, yes, the seeing of things, and the writing at six in the morning? I can never sleep anymore, this is a curse, like Snow White and her apple, and only this is not a poison so pretty, to bring everlasting sleep. I will make for myself a home in these tumbling red sheets, my only dawn the blinking of the glass, the words behind the screen, that appear on command, like the magic they intended it to be. My world is on edge, my time my own, my days like nights. The quiet I seek is intoxicating, the lull of the noise is a craving I run and run to fulfill. This is a problem, I wish I could say what I mean in words that actually make sense. I am doomed to never write a coherent sentence in my life.

The clock counts her ages, and there are two weeks left, fourteen days of waiting, working, unsleeping. And then what? I in my tumble-down red sheets and dark-of-the-night and brown paper and glass pen and sightless, made-up mind, and then what? This will be good, we will count the days and we will make the time, and we will come to pass these things for the better. The beach is too far away for me to touch, too far. I live too far away.