130. Sleeping/Waking

The weight of sleeping
The weight of waiting to sleep
The weight of waking after heavy sleep
And the weight

Of writing as a weight of words
The weight of words as a hefting
The weight of thought
The way a word sways in place

The heft of words as the weight of thought
The way a thought moves
And how it moves within an enclosed space
The run of words as a thought

The weight of words as an image
The sight of words as a page of birds
The flight of words caught as in a photograph
The way words move but only through stillness

The flight of pages of a book of words
The flight as a seeing but not as a reading
And how the flight changes when a flight of images
How a flight of images moves as if alive

Words as images of thoughts
And the way in which words as images of thoughts move
And the way in which they don’t
Silence in the early morning as the words don’t move

Silence in the early morning after dream
Of the third and middle astronaut who doesn’t want to fly
Her worry and her crying at the thought of it
How the other women sit silently and wait

The thought of mine that they shouldn’t make her fly
The thought of hers of explosion and of death
How I watch her from the roof of a house
How the house melts under me and away

How a dream is nothing but a movement of light across the eyelids
How the eyes are shut but they still see
How eyes don’t see but make a seeing possible
How ears don’t hear but make a hearing possible

How a dream is nothing but a movement of light across the eyelids
But I hear it in my ears
How a dream is a sense of living through something
Without the worries of living through it

How a giant behind me makes the building melt
How spectators stand beside the spaceship before it takes off
How the astronauts sit almost on the ground in their spaceship
How the spaceship never launches

What doesn’t happen in a dream but I know it happens
What doesn’t happen in my life but I know it happens
The sense of everything not known but real
The sense of everything forgotten but real

A dream about the opening for a car to a garage
A dream about walking through that opening
How I climb down into the hole the door sits within
The sense of the door as being in a lightwell

The idea that the door can open for a car
But the idea that a car cannot lower itself into the lightwell to do it
The sense of everything possible but not attempted
The sense of everything possible but never made real

Or the dream that a woman prepares everything for us beforehand
Or the sense that it was beforehead or beforefoot or beforeheart or beforeeyes
And that she was there before and I had seen her
But the sense that she is not there now

The sense that a dream is always happening even it if took place in the past
The idea that everything is ready for us but she is not there
The realization that she put everything together for us but then disappeared
The fear that she was never there or never wanted to be

The notion that the flowers were roses
But the sense that my nose couldn’t smell them
The idea that the flowers were roses and thus were pink
And carried little flèches up the stems of their spires

The idea of a thorn as a flèche
The idea of a flèche as an arrow
The idea of an arrow as a prick
The idea of a pricking as a cause for bleeding

The idea of bleeding as blood
The idea of blood as red
The idea of roses as red
The idea of read as something that has been seen

Or dreaming of the heart as a muscle
And dreaming of its blood as a pressure
And feeling the pressure in a head
And feeling a buzzing in an arm

Or dreaming while sleeping and dreaming of the heart as a symbol
And a symbol as an idea
And an idea as a desire
And a desire as a dream

Or dreaming of containing a desire
Dreaming of desire as an object to hold
And dreaming of the little glass bell jar desire is put within
And dreaming of my considering that desire from afar

And seeing all these words on a page
And understanding all these words as a message
But seeing that message as a shape
And calling the shape by its name

And feeling the weight of a name
As the weight of a word for a thing
As something heavy as the thing it’s become
As something heavy when you wake

And feeling the weight of waking after heavy sleep
And feeling the weight of water in that sleep
And feeling the weight of sunlight as a weight
And seeing the weight of waking as a wake

And lifting a head from a pillow
Feeling the headache in the head
Breathing the air into the lungs
Taking sunlight into the body

The weight of waking
The weight of waking
The weight of waiting to wake
The weight of water and its wake

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