in dreams

I told him I felt the urge to write creeping over
my silent horizon like a storm sure to sweep
around me by nightfall. But then a real storm broke.
And then I thought perhaps the only world is the one
our minds and dreams create.

In dreams she dies twice - or at least he knew he'd
seen her die before, exactly this way. Or maybe she
hadn't died yet, she couldn't tell, everything being
so familiar. And if she had already died, then why
was she here, and who was dreaming her dream for her,
calling her back? He told her that we all dream other
people into existence when we need them, and he was
tired of dreaming of locked doors and hallways and
ghosts asking him "which way?" who looked too much
like himself. Needing her and calling her again.
But perhaps it was her dreaming them both after all,
even after death - perhaps it is death that creates
us, in their dreaming, and all such tenuous spaces.
Our worlds, our dreams, voluntary minds against
involuntary bodies.

In dreams she dies again. She cries this time, or
writes a letter - a letter she meant to write,
she tells me, which I'll never get to read.
If I stayed long enough with her, I'd ask her
to read it out loud, instead, wondering how it
would sound to hear her voice again.

Perhaps it sounds like the storm breaking outside
my apartment - the pelting of the rain on my roof
typing a message to his soul, my journal, the existence inside
death inside of dreams. perhaps I'll transcribe it,
word for word, or perhaps I'll ascribe it some
higher meaning only because it makes my words
that much bolder - words taking images and
thunderstorms and dying dreams
and fixing them to pages, like a madman,
seeing them as reflections in a mirror,
through clouded lenses - my creation.

Looking at these words is like
looking at my mother's face as I see her
in dreams, dying over and over
and over again.

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