Me and Magritte
Magritte, you've succeeded.
I was merely skimming you when I fell asleep,
and there in my lucidity you made your first incision
upon my heart. Your portability, my nightmare.
Inside the dream, a chair began to fold in on itself,
the front legs bent up and inwards, breaking its own abdomen.
It looked as though there existed more space behind it than in front of it.
Steel pin light rained down on me from a ceiling of smoke,
stabbing me in the eyes and in my pain I was a God,
reeling and gasping in the boredom of an eternity.
My mother walked by, shirtless and coughing blood,
weak and gurgling my name, her eyes cast downwards
looking at the missing square cut from the center of her chest.
My father stood beside her, seething with clenched fists,
panicking, the ghost of the last buffalo, hot ash white skinned
wide mouthed, broken horns and gargantuan tongue in full on rot,
panting, waiting for a drink of cool-water Hope, for the taste of ancient reverence,
-his face frozen like mine, the horror stricken jowls of the 'subjugated reader'.
I ran back and forth from her room to the bathroom,
wetting towels to soak up the blood that was marking a path
into her disappearance. My mother, she could not stop paling into death.
I cursed Magritte, with incomplete conviction, for attacking me, the reckless sleeper.
I knew that I should wake up, to sketch out the shadows of these images,
yet I seemed content, living out the terror of things that touch me.
I did panic, like my father.
I became angry and all the dream was suddenly swept away.
I felt for the missing piece, the square where once my heart had beat
and looking down through that hole in my chest, I saw myself,
my eight year old self, running away, giggling and clutching
the waning glow of the cut away meat and it looked, I think,
that there existed more space behind me than in front of me
and I woke up because I knew, surely this could not be true.
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