I
dream in languages I don’t recognize.
Sounds
clashing against each other, vowels
sound
like consonants and a tender compliment,
like
the vilest insult
I
feel blood on my earlobes, my eardrums
have
exploded, my brain has exploded, the
world
I know has exploded, but it is just
a
dream and because it is a dream, blood
suddenly
turns into wine, explosions into
fluttering
flower petals and the sky is green,
and
I am confused. I do not understand.
The
way I don’t understand avant-garde
films,
the way I don’t understand the
language
of desire and despair unless
they
are translated into bursts of tears and
deep
kisses that suck my soul dry to the
point
of desolation—wholly deprived,
here,
in this desert of existence.
Sleep
absolves the tragedy of speech
turns
misunderstandings into one, long,
surreal
play acted on a floating stage
where
a faceless crowd applauds and never
stops
applauding, never stops speaking in
strange
languages that make me want to
stuff
rocks into my ears.
I
do not understand, not now, never.
Forever
is a long time to not understand
something
as useless as a dream
but
forever is possible in dreams and
it
happens every night, even if we stupidly
say
that we do not dream, that we do not
remember.
Admitting that we do not
understand
our minds is petrifying, but
admitting
it can’t seem to abolish the fear
either
for I am trembling right now
as
I always tremble in my dreams
where
languages are always being invented
languages
that lead to dead ends
that
lead to nothing but the place where
the
thing is not, where no thing will
ever
be, the thing that might
tell
me something, show me something that
this
shithole of a world, with its vulgar realness,
in
which I breathe and eat and earn and
spend
and love and loathe and lie and
confess,
and write and write and write
cannot.
Will not. What, I should ask, have we
been
saying all along?