Ego Death

Dream Sequence Poem from Ego Death (2020)

When you wake up slipping into the deep pool you will discover three eyes on the back of your head and three broken clocks in my nightmares. In a drunken haze from the bags that drag my eyes down heavy with the second hand of a clock. When you are awake you feel like you’re wandering through a night terror, seeing old dreams while you sit awake in the illumination.

Life only exists in its purest form when you are asleep. Fighting falling deep into the dark haze of ghost images kept at bay by caffeine. These dreams have been feeling like gladiatorial coliseums, with a pounding heart and organs that hurt from acidic erosion. Sit here and play at the grim reapers slot machine like the human snowflake, you are forever living out self fulfilling prophecies in the white static.

Maybe it is too old for you to remember foolish magic things. “Why should you bring me around humans who will only hunt my gold? They will only eat it as all humans do” said the glinting blue dragon, angry in his smoke. “Look... I’m magnificent, no human should attempt to fight me for my forfeits.” You agree with him.
The monorail theater is what you must chase down when you are late for class. Vultures won’t let you go? Won’t let me go? This theater is haunted but keeps running along its track. You drive a semi truck to get back to a place you once knew in San Francisco. Jettison out to space to die and you wonder if you were tricked. Conjure up some blue flames to avoid the impending flood levels, the ditch far too deep to protect you now.

Poverty festers in a mansion with its untrustworthy medicine. Everything is broken, your brother is trying to stay positive, how can you be positive when you are in agony? Can’t they just anesthetize you? Blind and vampiric in the basement, sipping on soup made from lilacs. You see your old self, you wish to peel your skin off. The lilac soup is lovely compared to the fear and gout. A street full of great, cancerous maple trees, all this rain causes the trees to bleed into the wall paper. Too much suffering you can’t feel anything when the dark figure hunts you down in this house, if you don't look it cannot find you, do not look.

I saw a golden angle in a cage on a street corner and he was in pain. In Italy you will terrify your enemies for pleasuring your pain. Strangers kindness brings you home with a full belly and a head full of familiar wonder. Sunset will show you who you really love, then there will be nightmares about separation anxiety. Don’t let them die before you see them again. Blood poisoning, veins are turning dark blue while green lighting goes through them. You’re dying, why are they laughing at you? Now the electrical storm drowns you and Chicago floods with blood through the train grates, showers, and the eyes of friends. You see it all sitting in a colorful library as you try to eat with relatives using customers you don’t know sitting across from a lost love. Nothing tastes real alone now in this library of shame. They are posed by the old gods, like trusting people you’ve forgotten. If you eat the fruit, pomegranates will fill your blood with the gods, you belong to them.

Everywhere you look faces in mirrors and knives being thrown when you try to look. We are truthful but as long as you don’t look at the demons, they won’t hurt you. When the sun goes down you scream when you see yourself in the reflective screens. Then an uninvited brass band crashes an upscale garden party you did not want to be invited to. A church is now burning as you carelessly sleep inside. Like an angry score scorching you never settled. He’s wronged you, left you with die much anger for yourself, for others, and for him and who he could have been.

Held captive to manufacture continuity in a place you’ve never been before. Oh so very tired. Not yourself anymore. And you don’t know where you are anymore, existing in no place and no time. You have so much to do but you are so very tired on A clear November day where the ground has grown red with fallen leaves, trees freshly bare. You feel like you are being watched.

Could this be hell?