A Return to The Old Form...

Life Is A Dying Dream

Life is a dying dream

Filled with empty promise,

Dragged along by a waning hope

And thrown away by chance.

Taken away by death,

Leaving nothing but memory

I watched as his memory

Faded.  I watched as his dream

Suffered a wretched and complicated death.

It was, after all, a single promise.

I took a chance.

On a corner, something beckoned, hope.

And with so many good intentions, hope

Began to collect my memory.

It rid me of anything he called chance,

And made fate, a longing. A dream

Worth the wildest promise

And bringing about a cold death.

This is when we explode, and death

Couldn't be happier. Hope

Has made itself less than a promise;

A simple one, a single memory

That slowly fades to a dream

That never had a chance.

And, when you think about the word chance

You begin to consider the possibility of death.

It is after all like a warm dream

That reeks of some sort of desperate hope;

Like a lighthouse long abandoned, memory

Of it flickers out, and we are left with a promise.

So now let me speak, and I will make you a promise.

Listen, because words have power, take a chance

Because, though it is fickle and strange, memory,

Though we would like to think it, has no death.

There are things that will fade: hope.

But only if we let go of the dream.

I promise, in the end, this will be no real death,

And you will not confuse chance with that faint hope.

I swear, the memory is stronger than the dream.

A Continuation of sorts...

Maybe it was the cold quiet of the morning.  You know how it was in the past.  Coffee, sunrise, talk radio, and an interstate dipping and weaving through the corn fields and strange animals in their desperate search for oil, dipping their necks towards the earth in some faithful search for life.  You could walk to your car in the midst of leaves gasping under your feet before they were carried off to some tomorrow.  They carried whispers of a different world that was soon to come.  Their veins forming vermiculate patterns that could only be described as forgotten.  They were the lucky ones.  At least now it seems that way.

If they could, they would have written poems.  Dark and lonely poems that spoke out vehemently against the wind, and the lacerations of the cold.  Bitter poems that forewarned of the season to come.  They would have gathered to read them to each other and spit on the ground in disgust.  Wait for it to freeze.  They would have said this season will never end. And you will be cold.

Even if they could speak.  Would you have listened?  Would you have taken a step back and put your ear to the ground?  Just to hear the Earth tremble and shift one last time before going silent.

           

You do it now, now in the strange landscape stretched before your eyes. Those animals, now strange statues, long given up to the earth run dry.  Right ear pressed to the dirt, watching the sun in its interminable wasteland eclipse. Round the earth. Round the Earth, and it is only a dim shadow. All is only a dim shadow.

Silence.