PREMONITION DREAM

PREMONITION DREAM

27 April, 2013

Dream—after years of desperate sinking feeling, nailed to paralysis on the couch, watching passersby outside the window, one day finally the countless unhinged fragments are complete.

There, in the middle of the living room, obscured before perhaps by the flickering television, but now emergent, emitting ghosts of swirling, incorporeal wind in centrifugal arcs of light that pass through, without disturbing, the surrounding room—curtains, table, armchair, fan: a giant book, bound in sumptuous red leather, somehow both a man-sized book and a human body, the images superimposed upon each other in flickering, holographic interplay—The Crimson Hexagon. 

Struck by childlike awe, lips parting, fingers hover reverently just centimeters above the glowing red composite, overcome by hiccupping realization, dawning on me over and over, “This is what I meant, this is the life I wrote in pages.”

On the book’s cover I read the sentence that will end my life, the serpentine syntax that, I know, will insinuate itself in the diagonal crannies of my skullcase, flexing its muscles there, exploding me, leaving all life’s fragments unfinished, my gambit finalized in total, irredeemable washout,

even as I know this death happens only partway through the book, the book I now see before me, complete, and I am opening and climbing inside the book to wear like a new body. The snake or sentence fits me, syntax curled around my rice paper pages, meant for them, having shucked off the mortal coil, and I am beginning to change, awareness of former body absorbed in ecstasy of letters, limbs of print, corridors of limitless font, stretching outwards and in, piercing me, my arms lifted up as branches, becoming stationary, rooted, a tree of life, uplifted, leafing out to offer myself as succor, bright hands reaching out to touch and clasp, gently tearing, rend fruit from branch, bark from limbs, peeling back to reveal an oily residue, aroma of heaven, twining up to fill my nostrils with an acceptable savor—

My eyes close, further—already closed they stretch to a full revolution, and in the moment of soul-deep darkness: I wake, eyes squint, slowly open to electric flicker—fell asleep with the lights on again—groggy, climbing cold and limb-wet, childlike, aching-necked, out of bed, thick rot coating my tongue and throat—

Morning. Bedroom. Light to type this prophecy by.