Now I lay me down to sleep
In the shadows of the deep, far underneath the surface of the breaking day. I live where you can't see - swimming above the shifting sand and skimming like a dragonfly among the sudden sparkle of a turning school of fish. On the shore, we left behind, a small white house filled with gauzy dust and lonely phantoms of who we used to be - but no more. And three hundred miles to the south of me, and four hundred more to the north of both of us, we are giving back our bad dreams every night.
The sunlight filters through the decrepit windows, touching now here and now there for capricious instants to reveal that the memories shrink from a real - a lie - and it smells like the sea breeze all throughout the seasons that pass. A faint wish of a staircase that once gently curved like the shells left scattered at low tide, led from the window graced by the entirety of a stretched horizon a long time ago, to the painted rooms that still sort of sing to me, but only when I half-close my eyes like this, and almost turn away.
A child, in a red cap and white shorts, plucked from the sand by the rolling surf.
A cloud, sailing through the blue, as slow and as solitary as the idyll it encompassed.
Faded glory of a briny Arcadia (et in somium ego), and soon that too will invade our sleep - only to leave as we awake - bitterness and melancholy, with a dash of milk in the morning coffee in hand as I traverse this gritty newspaper-cutout world. Except I - I rest beneath the ancient cadence of the rocking waves, waiting for a day that cannot happen.
Vain and proud, this wish that teases me with what I had not possessed - a kiss, a word - the face that does not fade with the death of another summer. And while it promises the sweet and unspoken, those are heavy hopes that will not unfurl from my shoulders, or alight from my wrist to succor the troubled bodies that turn and tumble restlessly through the unrelenting whispers of last year, the one past, and the furthest.
