While I Was Sleeping.

The midnight muse.

The dreams, the dreams,

The midnight dreams,

The ones that fly in

through the window

on the soft sound of

stilled screams--

on the faint breath of 

of summer winds and 

winter fogs. The dreams

that search for you at night

That find you in any room

Underground or floating

through the air.

Floating in through my window

Accompanied by the exhalations

Of the dead. The last breath

of the Tortured, the last gasp

of the dearly departed. They

fly in through the windows like

ghosts. Like sheets of smoke

uncoiling from the cold clay ground;

like vaporous mists pouring in through 

the cracks of your house from

an overflowing underworld above--

brimming with un-tethered souls and

lost dreams chained to the dead,

weighing them down and imprisoning

them forever to Earth. Like

fallen ship's anchors sinking to

deep ocean's black bowels, the jaws

of Time and Hell itself, the very

Maw of the Forgotten, swallowing

the abandoned bones of the world

above. Dearly beloved, dearly born,

dearly betrothed, dearly blessed, beloved

dead and all the sins of our lips.

They sink like tunneling worms seeking

the raw warm coffins, burrowing

through earthen flesh to mortal tissue--

and the only difference between ours

and Mother Earth's, is the stain our

lips and our blood 

make upon the other.  And sunken legions

of those who came before and fell, locked

away in teeth none dare loosen--those hordes

beneath our very feet do stain our

gardens and steps incessantly. each

footprint filling with mingled blood and 

tears the way the ocean fills 

our steps in the sand of the beaches. I can hear

the glowing heart of the Earth--

emboldened by the sanguine floods that feed its veins

and fill its chambers with restless, stifled

frenzied anger.  All boiling--all festering--All bubbling

and foaming into vigorous throes, and powering

the deafening throb that resounds throughout Mother

Earth and echoes in your ears while you sleep,

when all the world is dead and 

human flesh is at its quietest. The distant drums

you hear as you lay awake at night, begging for 

leaden eyes and stuffed ears (not knowing that

such things are decried and lamented by all those

sleeping beneath you--afflicted--those that wish nothing

but for a momentary respite from the absolute

fissure of mortality--whose slopes are sheer 

and bottom unknown, where the wrath

and rake of a hundred million claws decorate

the cliff-walls, and fresh blood dabbles the rock

and glints lovely in the morning sun). And here

they come: the dreams, the dreams, dripping

into my ears, the last lies of the dead, the

last whispers of what Gods or mortals none 

no longer know, and whose names are the greatest

mystery of all--so utterly forgotten, not even

Death itself remembers calling to them.  Swept

away by the tides of Time and into the

nethermost gulf, darkened by ages of willful ignorance

and accidental neglect. And the forgotten seek the 

fallen, and the fallen plunge deeper into the 

forgotten arms, and their embrace is the most

sacred, most honest, most celebrated, most stark truth that has

ever been glimpsed by mortal eyes.  Even if

it was only a flicker...

even though we closed our eyes.