#3
This blank slate
here inside my skull is frustrating me. In dreamland this place is
dark and close, a nursery rhyme of candle and nimble, quick and I
hope it sticks. It's an old chalkboard, this expanse of darkboard.
Old, old, old. I can see the scratchmarks and indentations, the pockmarks
of time passing over its surface. There are D'Nealian guide lines
permanently etched into the slate -- these are my patterns and my
habits, my beliefs and my love, from age of sunshine and sticky hands
to age of checkbooks and reality television.
I feel like I need
to go on about this place, this darkness. It haunts me like no other
place, either in my head or my songs, or out there in the real world.
There is a mystery here, a sonorous thrum beneath it all, a white noise
drowning out the something more that must be there.
Past lives, ahoy!
That must be what it is!
OK, so. There's scratching
and remnants, chalk powder memories, and right before I can pick them
all up in my head, they disperse. Tonight, a little something caught
my eye. The neatness of a man's profile. He's impossibly perfect, you
see. His profile, set, assured. He's got starched collar and expensive
shoes. They were made for show, they were made for running. His cuffs
come out from his sleeves just so, the suit fitted within millimeters
of his body, draping in dark material, black on white, trim and tidy
and logical. He's got that blankness that matches my slate, but he's
got no ghosts, no nothing to indicate kickball and four square and passing
notes in class and first cars and curfews. He is so clean. This
I don't get.
I'm not too good with
the lucid dreaming - I think I enjoy my subconscious far too much to
try and manipulate it, but tonight I told myself to relax, to listen,
and listen hard. The profile's still perfect, right, and the tie is
perfectly knotted, but oh, there's something else there. Anxiousness.
He doesn't want me looking. He feels impatient. Impatient! A man who
seems to have it all, held tightly between fingers, the set of his lips,
the sweep of hair apparently cut and styled this morning. With the whole
world before him (I see this now - he encompasses, he controls, he sees
more than me, but he doesn't want to, sometimes), he is waiting, he
is pursuing.
This is only a moment
of dreamtime, mind you. This is his profile, in brighter than normal
light, for one instant.
I have never seen
this man before, but now he's become another chalk ghost, a remembrance.
He's holding on too tightly. He doesn't see the sand slipping through
his fingers.
This pleases me. Why?