These Broken Days

"I watched with glee while your kings and queens fought for ten decades for the gods they made."

I couldn't face the world today. This lack of rest is making a coward of me. My dreams are so fragmented and so brief, haunting my brief forays into unconsciousness like so many unfinished tales. These broken days are a sensory overload for me sometimes. Like watching the first half of a film, then the last half of three others, then the next quarter of the first. And so on. Over and over.

I dreamed a girl I do not know last night. I dreamed her in fragments, starred and then shattered like glass. When consciousness defeated me again, I knew her name. Still, I shivered, outraged. Who is my dream-self to put faces to names like that? Such predictions can only ever be precursors to disappointment. Yet my sleep-phantom, in all his capering glory, smiles and dances at this knowledge, taunting me from places forever beyond my reach.

I dreamed her mouth on mine, her taste and her scent. I clothed her in fantasy and undressed her in same. She smiled, she spoke, she laughed. She came to me theatrically, as though she'd planned it forever.

In a room filled with smoke and music and conversation. Everything is background, nothing clarity. Rhythmic bass and cliched chatter. She's telling me something, and I take her meaning from the expression on her face and the way her hands draw pictures in the air. In a moment of respite, I glance around and notice that I've slept with everyone in the room, and that they're all smoking. She reclaims my attention and her clothes and hair have changed. I touch her face and she grins and then kisses my hand, her eyes telling my fortune in a promise.

I woke, briefly, warm and uncomfortable. My head was swollen and pulsing. The walls looked nicotine yellow in the almost-light of a grey afternoon expressing its frustration through curtains untidily drawn. I closed my eyes, hid behind maroon walls. Fade from grey. Fade to black.

Earlier, or later, or another time, we walk through the cold, dark streets of Soho. She looks paler, slimmer. There are dark circles beneath her eyes that might be make-up or a reflection of my own sleeplessness. She's unhappy, and she clutches my arm tightly with one hand while pointing out people she knows with the other. They are all film stars.

For a moment, I'm sitting in front of the computer typing. She walks into the room clad only in black stockings. She speaks the words of an old song without moving her lips. She straddles me. Her voice in my ear says, "Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints. As heads is tails, just call me lucifer, ’cause I’m in need of some restraint."

I woke up with her name on my tongue, with a tumour in my head and needles in my spine and a smile on my face. I woke up, but I'll sleep again.