Dream Logic / Reflecting Pool

"In a night of despair I dreamed I was with my first friend from my school days, whom I had not seen for decades and had scarcely remembered in that time, tempestuously renewing our friendship and brotherhood. But when I awoke it became clear that what despair had brought to light like a detonation was the corpse of that boy, who had been immured as a warning: that whoever one day lives here may in no respect resemble him." Walter Benjamin

A comfortable sense of place was provided by a few details; the lasting warmth of the oven filling a well ordered room, morning autumn sunlight that slants low through other rooms, animating and gilding in gold the flecks of dust, and the sounds from a piano somewhere. Such was the setting this morning.

  From where I stood I could see a memory, and I smiled at what was not there, or at the shadow and idea of what will not be. Such as it is, with this memory properly residing in the future tense, it awaits it's cue to parade through my welcome space on it's way to nothing.

  I smile at this phantom because I loved it. Since it is a phantom, and was perceived as memory it resides in the past, a projection of was. And so I am tricked by Time into a smile for one whom I adore, who properly resides in the past as memory, and in the future as a memory yet to find it's way back to my welcome space. This morning, as time dissolved, I was alone.

  In the fragmentation of Time it is the dreamer alone who remains intact. Thus I stood alone in a room, untouched, while the three aspects of Time became one, and the casualty of this merging was the object of my love, a victim of an evil alchemy in converting what is present into what is absent.

Dreaming of the sea. When the sun had descended far enough from the heavens as to touch the waters, it burst into blood and flame. In this manner it set fire to the sea. The flames then rode the tide toward the shore where they broke in burning waves. In this way did they set fire to the land. I began to run, but the earth split in two, exposing a wound of bleeding soil. A woman who stood on the edge of this crevice tossed to me her child, a boy, while looking at me as if this was long expected, as if it had been rehearsed. In her eyes I saw the night, and I cried out because in the night within her eyes I saw that there was no dawn. Nothing would ever be born again, her child was to be the last. Mercy was an angel (of sorts). She fled from where she hovered in the sky, and the bloody sun blinded all the population, who from then on made love with gunfire. The priests of all faiths began to pray, but it was to the emptiness that they had enthroned as God. I walk with the boy on a scorched and empty world, under a sky made of rags devoid of stars. Autumn leaves appear on his skin as he disintegrates in my bed, consumed by many sicknesses that race through his small body and blood, bringing him an endless sleep. All that matters is that he live. The ghosts of all the spirits of the dead breathe into him their memories as if to feed him, they know that should he die, so even does their memory of having once been. We now all exist in fear, suspended in the air, unable to see through the acidic smoke. We are cold, as the sun has committed suicide, and we cry for the boy whose eyes are futility. We are afraid of the nothing that awaits us with his absence. What he sees is only the memory of his mother's immolation and my descent into insanity. This madness is a burning hatred, and each moment is an ending, the End. What life remains of me flies across the galaxies in search of the emptiness called God, so that I may kill it. Murdered angels float in space, their wings shorn from divine bodies, and their crystallized blood pours from their wounds, flowing into blackness as rubies. Planets, moon and stars extinguish themselves, obliterating identity. The woman who once burned touched me, and I remembered leaving the boy alone. She instructs me to accompany him to his death, to place pillows under his feet.

I float in space, dreamless but conscious, and without the means to move. Above me is the specter of a naked woman, rotating the constellations as if she was the axle of a wheel. As the heavens move faster, the stars whirl around her head, becoming blurred, or looking like scores of comets.  She eclipses light with her orgasm.

My sleep this evening could best be described as transparent. Most often sleep takes the form of solidity only penetrated by an occasional claustrophobic or extreme nightmare that is rarely remembered. But there I was, for hours looking at the walls, my eyes having long since adjusted to the lack of light. I went over the day's events, thought about the coming day, and kept looking at the clock, when I noticed that I was in deep sleep. I felt as if I was dreaming. Closing my eyes, I could see the dreams clearly, and by opening them I could see the room through the colors and shapes of the dreams as through tinted transparencies. For some time then I enjoyed this dual state of consciousness.

Easter came and went without any fanfare. Jesus has become an amnesiac compulsively drawn to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathia, like someone who can't remember why they are standing in the kitchen or what they had come there for. The gates of the elect are closed. A car bomb tears apart the face of God, whose blood and tissue soak the damned. An invading colony of ants, the damned storm the termite mound of Heaven, disguised by the scent of God, or rather wearing his face, to make off with the larvae of angels. We prey to the Lord. Lord hear us prey. Or walled up in a box of cracked plaster, a delivery driver hurls muted prayers at the sky like cannonballs, so the sacred light of heaven might bleed over us while levitating buddahs smoke nerve gas from a hookah pipe. The feds write reports and shred them, secretly lamenting the demise of Koresh, whom MTV was very eager to unplug.

 "Since it was terror, and disturbance, and instability, and doubt, and division, there were many illusions at work. By means of these, and empty fictions, they were sunk in sleep, and found themselves in disturbing dreams. Either there is a place to which they are fleeing, or without strength they come from having chased after others, or they are involved in striking blows, or they are receiving blows themselves, or they have fallen from high places, or they take off into the air though they do not even have wings. Again sometimes it is if people were murdering them, though there is no one even pursuing them, or they themselves are killing their neighbors, for they have been stained with their blood. When they who are going through all of these things wake up, they see nothing, they who were in the midst of all these things, for they are nothing. This is the way that each one has acted, as though asleep at the time, when he was ignorant. Good is the man who will return and awaken, and blessed is he who has opened the eyes of the blind." Gnostic Text

Only the embers of a once joyous fire. A beast made of polished steel, broken glass, and knives claws it's way out of my head.

In a dream, a male at once ancient and boyish is in the tree outside my window, masturbating a cock with thick hair, yet hairless, enormous, yet the size of my index finger. I watch from behind the curtain, but he stares at me with his hand around his cock, his face feverish. Filled with grief, I run from room to room, finally hiding under a grimy desk where I sob. Back at the window, a beautiful Thai youth is diving from his third story window to a mattress on the sidewalk below. On the second attempt he lands head first on the hood of a car, his neck snapped. His body convulses into that of the old man. I run under the desk and resume my crying.

A clock frightens him into consciousness each morning where he sleeps in a bed that barely accomodates his body, let alone his dreams, and there are rusty stains on his pillow. The blood (or is it concrete?) stiffens on his knuckles. The morning is ushered in by trucks on the freeway whose tarps bring to ímind the wings of great celestial bats the way they rip the air. Wires tighten around his heart as the illusion that someone was near fades.

When bound to a stake in an open field, I see that the stones around me are pieces of the sky that have fallen, forsaken and cold. A building is constructed from these rejected fragments of the heavens and I am presented with an option.

Time will disperse, revealing a shadow. He went into a deep sleep.

Of the twins, only one has sight. His brother is laying on a red velvet couch, sightless, dead. They have been dressed the same. The boy with sight has his hand resting on the edge of the couch, just above his brother's head. His eyes have bored holes through the congealed time that is history at the insistence of the quality of his pain. This sorrow both demands and dares, and there can be no passivity in what the gaze rests upon. The two holes serve the function of the end of a double-barreled shotgun, and through time this is how he has held vigilance over death, though there is the possibility that the gaze may turn inwards, like a gun, to himself. The brother lays still, eyes closed, no gaze.

  Is it himself he stands guard over, is this pain that of his own death foretold? No, in death feeling is destroyed. Did his brother feel death? Only alive were they the same, one now is nothing while the other is the suffering of the absence that nothing cannot feel. Never more different.