nightmare chronicles

Bless me father, for I have slept.
It has been two days since my last trial,
And these are our confessions—

1.
she walked deep into a room,
hands feeling around in the air
though she knows there is nothing there but
stagnant life. She moved without looking around,
Only noticing the boy, her boy, so concerned
With looking down that he could not see
That she combed her hair, or the care she
Took putting picking her clothes out of vogue,
he did not look up!

The light trickled away from the sky,
The angels reeled the sun back up,
And she took careful steps on the dark floor,
Trying to catch his eyes, but he kept playing,
Playing, playing, and would not catch her eye.

Such portrayal, he said.
Exhausting, she said.

2.
He saw no room. He was in a parade down main street,
A thousand feet in a thousand rhythms on the dirty
Concrete where chalk and spit and oil and water drops
Culminated in cracks that were too numerous and
Smooth squares so few. Yet peace lasted only
A second or two before something rose up from that
Dirty rock and waved it’s large arms loudly,
Making even the horn players crumble like paper planes,

He had a gun that wouldn’t shoot,
He had legs that wouldn’t stand,
He had a heart that didn’t take on demons,
He had no Vegas hand,
He had double sixes, no aces.

Did It end, she said
Could you end it, he said

3. Interlude


She tried not to speak of what happened next, and
He kept rotating in his bed to get the images out of his
Head and she wished to peer behind the sun to see if
Angels were really there then there were the things in between that no one
said, when she closed her eyes she again saw the shadow
moving, moving, moving
over her out of sync, her voice fading faster than she
could blink, but the shadow hard lined—these things that were in between
they did not talk about. He remembers moving through people,
breathing, breathing, breathing,
demons finally down but so are the people they
dragged all the way from the town hall to the grocery store,
and all he was looking for was a little hand to connect to
the human puzzle that he— she remembered almost tasting
the struggle—and these things in between their dreams bits they
could not maintain and so they took reign.
Killing them, killing them, killingly them,
Steadily—
So what to do, she said.
Check under the bed and in the closet, he said.

They checked nightly,
religiously, and they prayed:

Our father,
Who art up there, somewhere,
Hallowed was thy voice when I dreamed a dream,
Thou kingdom was dark,
And thy house was stark,
Thy angles craved liquor.

she prayed:

give me this night,
a dreamless sleep,
and forgive my laviciousness,
I asked my shadow no favors,

He prayed:

So lead us not into our nightmares,
But deliver us from evil,
This we pray again,


Amen.