The dreamers

I am suddenly awake.

The still air

is buttressed by shafts of light

descending from high windows,

infiltrating gaps

where curtains were drawn too hastily

the night before.

Dust circulates, and slips unseen

into the dark,

a traffic of shadows across the light,

and my dream lingers.

A secret defect,

involuntary testimony of fear and desire,

reflex unrestricted by conscious inhibitions,

residue of dreaming,

a trace of sand in the mind’s eye,

remains in my waking thoughts,

lies and lurks behind and beneath

the pristine surface of appearances and impressions

which my thoughts shuffle, rank, process, prioritise,

as I awaken and begin to impose order on the day ahead,

a piece of interstitial grit lodged between life's layers.

Laminations of obsession, slick with shame

shift and slide upon each other

spreading the rheumy secretions that gather around the defect,

like a leak, like a wound, like a pearl, like pus,

bleeding between the inert slabs of glass

that rest weightlessly upon us,

or stand insubstantially between us,

through which we see each other

as we emerge from the our own dreams,

sight smeared with flat blades of their invisible colour,

a transparency and refraction seen just by us,

a world within the world,

sitting between our eyes

and what everyone else can see,

and from these stained visions of each other

we can make the rose window of our interior cathedral,

the oculus and iris of our love,

hung above the threshold of the seclusion

where we finally find peace and respite,

where we can be together.

My thoughts of you re-assert themselves

in every moment free from interruption.

No ceremony or vows can sanction what we have,

or acknowledge what we are,

in our sanctuary of silence.

We are dreamers.

We are refugees.

We are a single self,

divided at the start of time,

and testify in our waking sleep to the light

cleaving our dreams of each other apart,

unleashing the gleaming river that lies between us,

the unfordable torrent across which we reach,

our fingertips one hair’s breadth apart.