Somewhere in between

Somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, something calls me.  I don’t know what it is among the confusion of scenes and dreams and people who half exist in my living world.  Intimate asides I’ll soon have forgotten that were life and death.  It’s a beautiful place filled with hope, helplessness, joy and heartache.  I fight to stay with it, but super-confusion heralds capitulation to the day.

Victorian factory-walls.  Sweating boys manhandling tubs of hot liquid chocolate into hoists.  I know the rooms and the conversations, but the boys are new.

Hot sunshine and meaning. Away in a far-off land in someone else’s dream that suddenly is mine – delivered there by unconscious yearnings beyond my control.  Conscious effort – is that what makes us sick?  Sleep is surrender.  I find welcoming strangers and oddly familiar faces I can’t place.

Comfort in strange houses.  Toilets always feature.  Searching for them – using them – holding conversations in them.  My bowel will kill my living body if nothing else does first.  Listen to your dreams.

The comings and goings.  Everyone in flux – a natural state of being.  Buses filling with faces, some of which I recognise and we grin and speak as our hearts fill with the joy of sudden meeting.  Dreams within dreams being fulfilled.

Socialise or home?  Tired – getting changed, but following the spirit to some liaison in the city. It doesn’t matter where, which is just as well because all is confusion and runaway thoughts with nobody at the wheel.  Just go.

By the sea, arriving somewhere – or leaving.  I chuckle as I place faces and mannerisms.  Talking about boats.  Watching short swell whipped up by a breeze.  We agree you wouldn’t go out in this – not in our kind of boat.  Too small.  All in the past anyway – banter between ex-sailors outside work.

It’s all people – everything.  Workplaces, cities, queues for buses, temporary beds here or there – all people in the end.  And a yearning to be moving on – between stops.  The place that dreams run away to.  Open a window and set the spirit free.  Do this also for the dead.