Who can really measure the length of a dream anyway?
One could particularly not theorise about dreams that don't belong to them,
those they never had. Yet I think somehow it's been decided
that dreams hold like a breath for a few seconds before waking.
But dreams and nightmares have purposes. What would their use be
if they threw up and pulled away the messages being sent
to you, head still on your pillow, from your unconscious mind
before you can say hippocampus.
ii.
Hippocampus is a word that originated at seahorse
and now I can't adapt my belief to anything but thinking
that dreams are manufactured in a corner of
our complex neurological architecture- an undiscovered region,
and one that is shaped like a seahorse.
iii.
Uncharted territory. Here be dragons.
iv. I dream up cities upon cities upon cities
until the city lights are so plentiful that our planet
glows when seen from the red plains of Mars
or whichever of the dark or bright side
of the craggy silvery moon has the right view.
v. Here be dragons, here be dreams and moons
and other-otherwordly things. There must be a god
of some sort. A higher power is far enough
out of this world to exist, certainly.
vi. Dear whatever is up there or wherever you are,
or whomever, I apologise for my ignorance.
I live a sheltered life but you probably know that already
if any of the rumours about you are true. Sorry
that we got carried away and called you omnipotent
if you're not, omniscient if you don't have to be anywhere at all,
and benevolent when you aren't even in the dangerous position
of playing God. Then I am sorry on behalf of the believers
who complain. Some people have a strange idea of faith,
I think. I have faith in few things right now, but
the faith others have in me is crucial to my existing.
Anyway, I have a request to ask of you. I am not
praying or seeking guidance. I am just tired of
waiting to become the someone that I am waiting to be.
Please, turn me into something else, something
that use could actually be made out of. Make me useful
but please above all make me unhurtful, inoffensive-
turn me into a white blank wall, for those never hurt anyone
who wasn't involved in it coming down. It's a harmless
blank slate and projectors can turn it into a screen
for you to see what you want to see on the blankness.
I want people to see what they want to see when they look at me,
not seeing the absences, the simplicity, and it will please
until the day I let my vigilance appear in my windows
and someone raises a fist and puts it right through
the wall you could have turned me into.
vii. I invent small mercies that don't exist elsewhere
but in the cities I build in dreaming. They wouldn't be
measured- it is just mercy and it invariably loses
its popularity contest against justice.
The monster who had good intentions but whose pathways
were limited, obstructed; who hung around with
other monstrosities, a bad crowd; bad advice; poor decisions;
maybe he just never had anyone to help him out
of that monster suit.
viii. I invent new words for the city dwellers to include
in their vernacular. The language would be the same as this
and also the grammatical structure, but a difference in dialect
makes apparent the speaker is from the place where
they have words for what we need to say.
ix. a word for the opposite of loneliness, and for the experience
and accompanying feeling that occur when one can hear sounds
through their wall. of people laughing and conversing, while
one is on the solitary side of the dividing wall.
a word for the opposite of becoming.
a word for the moment in time when you know that
the worst has happened and within seconds you will be told
formally, so you remain suspended where there are no wordss for either.
a word for the certainty that you have recently seen what you have lost.
a word for te inability to give up searching for a particular and
not even necessary item and leave the house, the frantic search
being often a cause for turning up late.
a word for the experience of seeing one's own hands
as a pair of gloves, for when you look in the mirror and the face
reflected back to you is not your own.
a new word entirely for the moments when people catch sight
of themselves in mirrror and are shocked to see
what they have become, to see their blindspots blinkered
their vision to obfulscate the visible process of physical change.
a word for when the skin wrapped around you feels
like a plastic casing or cling film or uncomfortable enough
to feel overwhelmed by the desire to claw it off.
a word for the way women open their mouths while applying
eye make-up, and for the way their faces change expressions
momentarily when they look at their reflections.
And then a host of new words for variants in these
expressions that only appear fleetingly for mirrors.
a word for blushing caused by the presence of blushing.
a word for when you have loudly said what you didn't mean
that will allow fewer sunsets to occur over arguments.
a word for what you have said quietly and you did mean.
a word for the precursor to the stage at which a person contemplates
the real possibility of their imminent, unpreventable death-
a stage prior to that when a person has to contemplate
whether or not this is the moment to start the real contemplation.
a word for a dead person who keeps their form present
in a compliation of f evidence that they ever existed.
a word for the jelly-like sensation of one's legs that
makes the oncoming of a common cold etc. seem probable.
a word for having empathy for several people in
several different positions with several sets of attention at one time.
a word used to describe why you are affected by a painting.
a word used to describe why a piece of art leaves you not ambivalent
but noticeably unaffected. a word used to describe the process of
painbrushes hardening with paint and softening in water.
a word for the feeling one gets during moments of questioning
whether they are a good person and not knowing the answer.
a word for the punchline of a joke that you don't understand.
a word for the sigh people exhale into a drink they are raising to sip.
a word for the expanse of knowledge you have that you wish you didn't.
a word for what can only be experienced by the individual
who finds they can see very clearly something very important
by means of confusing circumstances or as a result of that confusion.
a word for faces people pull for the benefit of strangers.
a word for either a poem that has no concrete point but much content
or for the anticipation of its ending.
x.
Finally I willl invent a new way of saying, 'I will love better next time',
'I will be better next time', and despite the uncertainty behind those words
there is a steel-cast conviction that the words said can predict
the future they describe. There will probably have to be a word for
the absence of a next time, and for promises made to reach
an end goal that exists only as a possibility, one of many.
