SUNDAY MORNING 1:36 AM

 

 

1

it’s like there’s a hole in my soul– 

my spirit 

keeps leaking out 

leaving a trail that i could follow back home 

if only i wanted to go there

it’s like i’ve forgotten who i am and 

the brief glimpses of remembrances that sometime surface

only remind me of how pale and anemic i have apparently become . . .

 

2

i have these dreams–and in these dreams there are sets of characters and plots and histories and memories, all of which only exist within the context of the dream. when i awake they are altered or gone. and i am forced to wonder whether i died in one dream only to awake in another.

 

i am convicted by the fact that if my dreams are so certain about the places, people and things that exist within them, how then can i ever hope to be certain of anything? 

 

maybe there is no dream and maybe there is no reality.

 

maybe there is only consciousness. maybe life is nothing but consciousness–a consciousness that floats from one dream to another like a butterfly flutters from one flower to another on a late-spring afternoon in an almost motionless, almost silent meadow, in such a way that only children and wise old men (or women if you are one) could ever hope to appreciate . . . 

 

what if there is no life, no death, no real existence, and therefore, no chance of existence ever being extinguished . . .

 

what if we are god dreaming? what if the universe, the whole history of the universe, every single atom, every single plant, every single breath, every single step of a centipede, every single scraping of one leg of a cricket against another of its legs is nothing more than the imaginings within the eternal slumberings of a napping god.

 

what if any one of us is god, dreaming about everyone else, but forgetting in the dream that whichever one of us is god is actually god? never knowing that when we awake, everyone and everything ceases to be–and giving it no second thought when we do awake because it was only a dream after all?

 

what if there is no god at all or what if all of us together are god? and what if life is nothing more than some cosmic children’s game–an existential “cowboys and indians”where before we are born, we set the rules and we choose the characters–and “god” is nothing more than the collective understanding of the rules that we’ve all agreed upon before we started playing. scripture is nothing more than the set of instructions written on the inside of the box cover of a monopoly box. 

 

3

what if each and every one of us is as alone as i feel right now in this moment?

what if that’s exactly how god feels–every second of every day throughout all eternity?

 

what if i’m not even me at all?

will i miss me when i’m gone

or 

will i simply laugh 

at how oddly i behaved 

in this particularly random sort of dream?

 

and will i still miss nikki? 

will she still be alive when i awake? 

did she ever really exist at all?

 

did she dream me or did I dream her?

 

4

i’m so looking forward 

to the stroke 

the senility

the alzheimer’s

that liberates me from this curse of thought

Reviews

[Fabian G. Franklin]

i liked this, the surrealism of the piece gives it a floating feeling like an out of body experience and it questions the philosophical meaning of life in a nice narrative form as well, nice work.