I saw you and I felt your face
Your curves
Your life,
Just in front of me.
You smiled at me,
A smile I had almost forgotten,
And the past melted.
I forgot the fights,
The hatred
And the ending,
Left only with the good times.
We said we were sorry and
We were playful, composed and in love.
You were never more you than these moments,
And then I woke up.
Life had a way of making the completely mundane
A big deal.
The pits of depression,
Like the drags of boredom,
were common and impotent after a time.
It came to be that only the truly dark
And morbid,
Would leave any impression at all.
I’d like to think I grew stronger than my depression
Or that boredom was now positive reinforcement
But I knew never to count personal demons out
Lest you wake up in hell.
I lived without fear of what they could do to me
Now
as I found myself unconcerned,
Budden said the thing about depression
Is that you can’t do worse than what
We had already thought about doing
To ourselves,
And he was right.
The fear left me years ago,
and had only popped up in glimpses
Almost as if it was a bad dream,
And fear is a bad dream,
The worst nightmare,
Because it can choke your heart and end you fast.
The dreams never stopped
But were usually always forgotten.
The worst were the wish-fulfillment dreams,
When I would wake up thinking we talked,
You never died
Or I had already finished my appointments for the day.
In reality I would wake up late
Sometime in the afternoon
Without accomplishing a thing.
Wasted potential,
Or that’s what you said to your friend
That I overheard,
It wasnt true of course
As time is spent up all the same
But I thought it was for awhile.
Some abuses were slights but
They still felt like being punched in the face.
There’s a grand difference between being awake
And getting out of bed.
There was some major fault line to cross
That occasionally could shake your reality apart.
Being awake did not mean you were fully out
Of the realm of dreaming
or fully conscious
it just meant you were perceiving some of
The ‘real world.’
By contrast,
Getting out of bed made you exist in the world,
Or you were being-in-the-world,
As opposed to the sort of unbeing of bed.
I could laze around in bed for hours
Firing off text messages to friends and lovers
Entertaining ridiculous thoughts
And occasionally letting myself slip into a dream,
It was the easiest way to exist
At least when the dreams were kind,
Which they weren’t always prone to be,
But they mostly behaved themselves lately.
Tiny dancer from my dreams,
Just out of reach
And outside of my present reality.
Where do you go during the long
Hard
Nights?
Whose dreams do you dance through
When not dancing for me,
and how can I keep you?
The silence seems to grow with the black of night
And it only drives the splinters of loneliness deeper,
But there is hope in that smile.
There is a new writing that happens
that I WILL TO BE
when there are not consequences.
My art will not choke,
surely will not drown,
in this free space.
You could not stop the word,
not by ending the site,
because there is paper,
or destroying paper,
because there is voice and signals,
and not by endings my movements,
because of the mind,
or of ending my life,
as there may somehow be dreams.
Maybe,
somehow.
I used to walk,
calmly,
on wires,
formed of the sharpest,
and strongest toxic metals;
brilliant.
I used to charge,
unprovoked,
through walls,
made of powdery,
bone-dry concrete;
unstoppable.
I used to stumble,
drunkenly,
through life,
weaved from broken,
and shattered dreams;
failing.
I used to be somebody,
you’d remember,
when the chips were down;
the house never wins anymore.
A divine comedy dances,
on lines etched into flesh,
long ago by the crimson beauty.
A foggy mirror reflects,
beams of radiant moonlight,
through the evaporating tea and milk,
we used to drown all of our problems.
There's no cycle here,
no spinning wheel to,
repeat the same story.
There's nothing to reinvent,
no foundation for this to ride on,
and no carriage pulled by wild horses,
symbolic of our deepest desires and dreams,
now withering and dying in the cracks of love's floor.
No heart beats,
beneath floor-boards,
of cryptic, rotting elegance,
to alert the proper authorities.
Something is screaming,
deep within my soul however,
and I'm begging for an outlet;
It will die between these lines.
I met her somewhere,
when life was happening,
and she was in between the lines,
the only place where I knew how to read.
There's a broken piece of the past,
floating around in your distant future
awkwardly lodged into your present;
it brings with it a series of,
ridiculous notions,
a time for,
rebirth brought on by,
death,
a new chance.
An old life,
breathes again,
stronger,
fiercer than before,
it's hollowed out,
and the holes feed the fire.
Andy Veilleux 