Digging

My dreams keep coming, cloudy and verbose; they bite at me, spiders and ants, little legs scurrying beneath my eyelids, clothing, in my skin. I am becoming a self-conscious sleeper, navigating through the rubble with my eyes closed, constructing big labyrinth nations where my tongue is broken in half. There are so many trials to face.

4am—I sit up, squinting into the darkness for a creature with six legs I suspect is crawling across my pillow, but it is black, so I fall back heavily, into a field where you’re tugging off your shorts.

I am churning excitement from anxiety, and then laying in it, the mornings long and hot and grassy. I want to dissolve in summer heat, then maybe, I can become pliable and spread out, among the selves I’ve been, want to be, am destined for or expected of—then, maybe, I can settle into the cracks of yellowed paper, black ink. How contrived, the divides in land, and why can we not drift between them, wide-eyed nomads, why must we be bureaucratic, paper-bound, sludge through the fine print for month-long headaches.

Sometimes waking up is exactly like a sigh, like giving up, losing hold of some mystery place, losing grasp of the most important secrets. I wish I could write in my sleep, wake up and find the words in neat rows. When I wake up, I feel soggy around the edges, like my subconscious has been sweating from hard manual labor—digging. Digging for old clues, linguistic tricks; I’ve got to have something worthwhile buried down there, some faded map that will remind me how to find that self-certain part of my self, some calm self that’s ready for anything at all.