REM is for remembering

At night, when the sun is extinguished and the world becomes unconscious, we inhale the dark wet vapors and sink into death-like sleep. Heraclitus ~ “Fragments”

I've studied sleep
watched waves on screen*
rock lullaby-like from alpha to theta.
Surfacing then, comes the turn
of a kaleidoscope

in snatches of colour, story patterns
settling into shape, recurring replays,
and ghosts mostly, resurrected...

You and I train travelling
never arriving, sun in my eyes,
tears in yours. A perverse reversal.
Just wish fulfilled in that small light
there where the tunnel ends.

I've walked a most beautiful bridge
fine and filigreed, high into clouds
stretching out a hand you could
not grasp. Ours an impossible love.
Or grounded and fleeing, impeded
with snakes underfoot, like hurdles
of intimacy, fatal to my Achilles heel.

Pursued once by a trinity of vampires
spurting for the crossroads, for salvation
with the name of Jesus stuck in my throat.
More often though, a diabolic elevator
hurtling up, or down to infinity
under its own power of entrapment.

And those long, narrow corridors
manifold doors and one I often choose
entering stage left. The footlights,
an audience, the actors in dialogue
and in between their words, expectancy
stretching to panic. A rummage for clues;
what play, what lines. what cue.
REM is for remembering
so I wake, and still to this day, not knowing
what part I am to play.