Recumbent, we assign
our dreams to await our signal:
numinous qualities spun
into webs of strange myth
set to capture unwary mortals.
Our sleep disturbs the dust
of the dead and kindles
dreams in the living
no quenching draught can drown,
forbidden texts scribed
in the decaying flesh of fruit
or flung across the sky
by horsetail clouds, changed
or erased at the whim
of the air. Night wears us
like a gown made of tears
and half-healed wounds,
the taste of sea-scroll
unbidden on the tongue. Tides
roll like a slow pulse, a mystery
even to us, truth from a different
world, an unknown time. We keep
an unfamiliar calendar here,
glass forever half-spent
and dawn forever hesitating
below the horizon. Keep
your tales—we are everything
you fear, and more, our names
a superstition for waking dreamers.