I wake up and it's nothing at all

[lizblackdog]

There was a poem I was going to stick in the last entry that I forgot to put in! Here it is:

Warning to Children

Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel -
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
he lives - he then unties the string.

-- Robert Graves

The bad recurring dreams. These are the two that make me wake up sweating, cold and weeping.

The first is fairly common to people with animals, I've discovered. In the dream, I am going about my life when I suddenly recall another seven hawks or ten or eleven ferrets that I'm keeping in a garage or an aviary somewhere out of the way, and I recall that I haven't fed them or checked on them for weeks. The dreams are always generous with gruesome imagery of creatures starved, filthy and occasionally eating each other because of my negligence.

The other involves my husband. Not everyone on my friends list knows that he died in 1999. Now, I know he's dead. I held him on my lap as the warmth receded from his flesh. I know exactly what death looks and feels like.

In the dream, I learn that he faked his death, that he's been alive all this time. But he hasn't contacted me, and he's left no channel open by which I can tell him I know he's alive. I try and call his family, and they deny all knowledge and hang up on me. His friends have disappeared. Every avenue of communication ends in a blank brick wall. The only one who can communicate is John, but he doesn't want to. I have no idea why.

Comments

[lizblackdog.livejournal.com]

I can't stand it in fiction either. I threw away a book by Irvine Welsh once after reading a horrible scene about someone torturing his father's dog to death, and never read anything of his again - which was no great loss IMO.