Nightscape
I'm going out on the thinnest of limbs here. I have an entire moleskine full of things I've written as I try to process this life I've been given, and I've decided to publish them here first because they're not doing me any good sealed away in my nightstand.
I need to start by saying that I have extremely vivid dreams. In fact, they are so vivid, that they remain with me and sometimes even repeat with frightening detail. This one, which I've named Nightscape, arose from a recurring dream about two destroyed landscapes or to be more accurate a cityscape and a pastoral landscape, both stained with ash and black rain. I've named it Nightscape because this rhyme-less and meter-less collection of words arose from the landscape of my nightmares.
The dream terrified me because I always awoke with a dreadful feeling of entrapment. I can pinpoint the exact point in my life when this dream started occurring, and I cannot say the underlying circumstance which occasioned it has evaporated. However, I can say sometimes circumstances are not meant to change. Perhaps it's because God purposed the circumstances to change us.
Nightscape
It appears
A metropolis of madness
A pastoral symphony of perversion
Worn woodlands of wanton devastation
Is this me? Is it in my mind?
Or is it just a place
I create when
I shut out the light and
Open my mind to the darkness?
I
Bridges that apex
In dead space
Impossible angles pointing
Toward the improbable.
Its spires and spans making promises
That will not be kept
I always start here
Amidst the smog and twisted skyline
The jumble of twisted metal and concrete
Interlocked triangles
That threaten to break apart
Blow away like brittle reeds
II
Wandering alone on a silt path
Above a dead valley split by a dead jet river
Was there a calamity?
Or did Gaea become indifferent?
The long tall trees now lie flat
Bleached and brittle
Split between what once was and what is
There are no leaves upon which to create
Only the sweet spectral smell of decay
With heavy eyes, I face the sky
But it too, reflects a secret terror
There is no life here.
What remains is too dead to be buried.
The earth would spit it out
One cannot bury what is damned
No wind
Not even a rustling from the remains of the trees
There are no ghosts here
It is too haunted, even for them
Standing alone on the road
Between what was and what will
Never be again
I am caught
Unmovable, frozen with a fear
That lodges in my throat with a concrete scream
As I close my eyes
The thick Styx languidly crawls over the discarded life
Something more than death and
Less than living resides here
I know I cannot stay here
III
The dead hold nothing for the living.
Resentment breaks its promises to joy.
It is a warmth
All-consuming at first but
Then it hunger becomes a funeral pyre
Then it hunger becomes a funeral pyre
Sending its ignorant victim to ash
I cannot live
Here
I must crawl
Out
Break
Out
Freak
Out
Wake Up.
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