Nightmare

The sleeping steel of nightmare grows but sharper when you wake,

in darkness there’s no rest there, yet the center will not break.

I dream of walls and prisons and of demons with their smiles,

and wake to see them lining up in ragged single files.

I wonder, stubborn body, why you rise at break of day,

and why insist on praying that you’ll ever find a way.

Why cling to hopes of happiness and blessedness and rest,

and dream that in your singing you’ll prove more than just a pest?

You find no joy in playing and you hope for no redemption,

your only sweet release you find in weaving so much fiction,

you have no soul within you and you lack a beating heart,

your single wretched joy is in your calculating art.

So void you are, and empty as the desert and as dry,

so like a red balloon, so much more hollow than the sky.

See, if you trace your lines of thought and turn them all outside,

you’re only playing so they’ll dream that someone must reside.

You spit your venom on the earth and strive to make it sweet,

you mask your face with smiles for the faces that you meet.

And though you pine for loving, I must doubt that you believe,

far too eager in your giving to be willing to receive.

How desolate you find your days, and wind your way to death,

how long the path before you lies, and how you curse your breath,

and how you crave forgetting and would melt into the mass,

absorption in this passing world and shards of solid glass.

You sense you’ve something missing and you search through fading light,

you ache to spread your spirit’s wings and take to soaring flight.

How did you lose yourself, so weighted down and so bereft of love,

you who so admire kindness and the cooing of the dove?

What is this worm that’s taken hold, what stirring of the brain,

what lack has grown within you so that pleasure turns to pain?

And is it only just your fault that life to you is hurt,

and your only little comfort that you’ll one day meet the dirt?

Oh, how to learn the sweetness and the loving and the joy,

and how recall the child’s pure delight in each new toy?

And how to be together yet not shrink from every touch,

and how to be alone and yet not hate yourself too much?

And if you hear me speaking through the far-enlacing dark,

I hope you know you’re not the only one who bears this mark.

Although I cannot hold you close, and cannot mend a bone,

I hope that seeing this will prove that you are not alone.