Once asleep, but now I stand (poetic prose)

Once asleep, but now I stand*

I am asleep.

The sun is out and I am in her lair. She attacks me with her glowering yawns; big, wide, stretches of light, which stain my eyes red and leave my head stamped upon. But then I’m stirred by a thin, papery rustling; a crackling in the air that causes my head to clear a little.

I open my eyes.

The sun has retreated. She’s dimmed her yellow glare to a golden glow, and is settled at a safe distance behind the trees; trees whose leaves are rusting, and falling to the ground.

Then a bunch of clouds start to loom. Though they prove no tormentor. Merging together, thick and cottony, they form another pillow for my head. They hold still. The riffs of anxiety that have been playing out in me slow down. Then the rain comes, and clearer chords start to sound.

I catch a draught of the cool, crisp air coming in through the window. Swirls of wood smoke and dashes of sweet damp earth waft in gently. But there’s no denying that charge in the air, that charge that ignites my synapses with each breath I take. The weight of my sleep lifts. Its aches and pains are blown away. And then, with one more inhalation, the haziness is shaken, and my energy returns.

I sit up.                                           

Blood starts pouring through my veins. It surges through in waves. The rain subsides. The sky goes quiet.  The blood swells out beneath my skin. Then I arrive back on the shore of my own body. My slumber now seems to have been nothing more than a dream; my sleeping self a mere ghost. I was a ghost.

The sun begins to set, turning the air tender. An innumerable number of quiet little deaths seem to gather on the ether. The dream dissolves.

Then I’m in blackness. One by one the embers of my real self begin to burn again; warmth generated by the blanket of solitude I’m tucked up in fans their flames.  And then it emerges: my core; my self; my soul, in a pool of orange glow.

Night takes up her tools and sets to work around me. Knocking down walls, digging out fear, dismantling the clock, she creates a swathe of infinity that sets me free. And so I start stretching back into my skin; heart beat pounding; rock ‘n’ rollin’. I begin to form new visions; think of revolutions; there are no inhibitions…

I stand.

* title taken from the lyrics of 4th of July, by Soundgarden

By Michelle Wright

(September 2011)