and you and you and you
too soon, too soon, the eagle flew while you were busy drawing down the moon into your icy hands, purchasing one-eyed wisdom to crowd your poppied mind, until you could no longer stand but gently tumbled tousled thoughts to fall asleep in twilight lands - asleep in the laps of legends.
and as you dreamt, a river of woe washed over you and carried you down to those blasted banks, where the rocking stone could be toppled by the gentlest touch: you stroked the smooth-skinned serpent's egg and, though asleep, you cried real tears for emotions that somehow eluded you and for the names of the faces you seemed to remember with a distant and palsied anxiety.
and you dreamt you wrote a mystic piece where vague and shuffling demons danced; where Odin cast aside his mask and settled on your shoulders round a mammoth task... a burden irredeemable -- a lance: a lance to bear in diamond jousts, advancing through the teeth of fear to seize that chance to win the soured prize.
Methusulah, with his long grey beard, whispered in your sleeping ear of fools and wise men, sons and daughters; of the Devil's love for holy water; of a single, human footprint in the sand; of the perils of duplicity, the rigours of respectibility, of such passions as can tear apart a man.
and on the sharp infliction of such sorrows' textured wounds, you woke with knotted hair and eyes still chasing phantoms... and even though the darkstream coursed still dully in your veins, you spoke of fields of blood and lonely death's cold tantrums; and lifelong cravings threatening to choke -- to strain and break the slenderest of throats: with that distempered mind you reached for lightless needles littering the floor; and as a stray dog to its vomit, warm, to poisoned dreams did you return, once more.
{published in Epiphanies and Other Absurdities 2005 and also in Cold Eels 2005}
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