I asked politely to stop dreaming, please. I put rocks under my pillow, switching them out at intervals to se which ones might make it stop. They didn’t prevent my sleeping—in a new fairytale called The Prince and the Stone, he doesn’t feel it.
I dreamt of a precipice and a cliff dive, unequipped and thrown to the sea.
I dreamt of white serpents backwards breaching murky green water against a gray slate shore.
The books on my shelves were filled with a strange man’s annotations and the little pressed bodies of insects.
I dreamt an axe brought off my head from behind in my childhood driveway. I bled milk out of the unfinished wound.
I dreamt my father poisoned himself in front of me on his red leather sofa in the living room.
The ghost of a lady on fire haunted the top of my stairwell and pulled a veil down over my pleading face. I dreamt of alligators on the highway and eels in my swimming pool and scuttling creatures ripping out my womb.
I dreamt of a whalebone coffee table and discovered the matching spine upon the shore of Waking.
In the kitchen, I was pierced by the four of swords; blood barely pinks a finger rippled by life underwater.
On the path, I saw a frog broken by St. Catherine’s bicycle wheel, and failed to spare the suffering.
I went to beautiful places I didn’t belong.
During hours 17 through 22 of glowing purple flights over the Pacific, I wondered just how many fathoms it might take to see change.
With each arrow chipping bone I counted my martyrdoms. In the baroque and bloodied velvet tones of occult surgery theatres, I saw myself dismantled and cauterized.
My serenity’s saferoom took the form of an old eldritch waterpark: defunct, tunneling and brominated.
I taught myself the words for ‘submechanophobia’ and ‘phallic symbol’ and ‘sleep paralysis.’
If peace were possible, it would look like two clean quartz discs obscuring my second sight.
