Brahma’s Dream
(or, Last Night in Pokhara)
I.
Looking at the cars after rain
and the yellow signs of the bars,
I could be anywhere in the world.
All this architecture
remains consistent from land to land,
in the cities and in the remote deserts and mountain ranges.
Always a bar, it seems, always the edge of a machine
dancing off the rain.
Beyond that, the forest somewhere.
Looking at the string lights
after the storm,
I have the sense that I’m walking
inside of someone else’s dream.
A strange dream, blue-lit
and mad, with the cockroaches
and itch and sweat and disease all a part of it.
I am being dreamed into this body.
It’s real but not real.
For a moment I am being called back into the body of the dreamer.
For a moment I wake.
Then I am back in the dream
the blue lights blurry, the lights on the river
a mirror of the truth,
and I am nothing but
a hollowed-out vessel, wind rushing through.
II.
But what am I trying to get at,
all this talk of dreaming?
Years and years and I’m no closer to waking up,
years and years I haven’t moved an inch,
years and years and still I am
as alone as ever.
Alone alone,
by my own hand,
asleep and absurd,
Still not sleeping,
still writing about waking
without coming close to it.
I come close and I miss the point again.
I am so tired,
of this remembering and forgetting,
this fragmentation,
this separateness,
this decay,
but maybe I must just
accept it as it is:
that I am dreaming
and the dream is here,
and I am also awake
and it doesn’t matter,
and what matters is love
in the end, or so the poets say,
Allen with your long hair
perched in the tree and giving me
little keys into the infinite —
did you mean to leave me so stranded?
It’s not your fault,
I betrayed you, I betrayed myself
but all of that is in the past,
the portals and the disease,
all the nights I ached.
I am inside the dream
and the dream is me
my body, my flesh,
I want to burst through,
to know reality,
to puncture the boundaries —
but maybe I can’t know,
maybe I’m not meant to,
but still I want to scream,
wake up, Brahma,
I’m tired of this hallucination.
I no longer want to live in it,
I always just wanted
to return back
to you, to the real me,
to myself, to ourselves,
to the animal soup.
Yet here we are
separate fragmented
in decaying bodies and warped minds,
in a world of glittering ephemeral beauty.
Love everywhere,
and nowhere, and the lights of the bars
beckoning, and the cars
shining, neon-painted,
smelling as the earth always smells
after rain.
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"and what matters is love
in the end, or so the poets say,
Allen with your long hair
perched in the tree and giving me
little keys into the infinite —"
I love this! Is it a reference to Ginsberg by any chance?
Sweetie….