A Dream Half-Remembered

I keep having this dream of late where I move
Down the aisle of a crowded passenger plane
To either side of me sits a long lost love
Platonic, fraternal, familial, erotic
All of them in rows and looking at me
As the weary voice of the distant captain from above
Speaks these words: “The mountains and sea
Are coming to us – we remain still while the world
Rushes to meet our motionless frame.
It is not we that move, but the world around us.”

The words of the captain echo in the faces
Of silent, staring children who embrace me
Children who are but memories now
Lost as they were to the world of the aged
But here remain perfect in youth and grace.

Then the plain is gone, and I’m swinging on a star
Hung as it is beneath the belly of a cloud
And I can see – though from this height not far –
As the world rushes up to meet me there
There up above – there up in the air.

The dream never ends – it just kinda stops
As I fall like a sinking stone past mountaintops
And the world disappears in darkness again
But when I wake I feel this most clearly of all:
That the source of my fear is the same as my fall
And the same as that which will meet me in the end.

I don’t know what it means though I struggle to learn
It may mean nothing, or it might have to do with the turn
Of the Earth and the way that I live here; the way that I,
In the life given to me, have chosen to make my way.
But what depth I might feel at the close of the dream
Is ruined by the approach of another nihilist day
And the tearing of profundity at its very seam.

The tattered rags remain here, though, left behind
As I make coffee they find rest in the back of my mind
In the shadows of my memory where consciousness is blind.
Where the mice and the rats make coats out of them
And the roaches make napkins out of the hem

So it goes on, until I return at last to my bed
And the makeshift dream coats that swirl in my head.