liquid

dreams are like images colored on water's surface. each time you dip in to recall a detail, you distort the shape of the experience. when you are still sleeping and analysis is redundant, the picture is elastic, but clear. it expands, contracts, rises and falls, but holds onto its centre. when you sleep, you watch the picture from under, through leagues of murkiness, so its meaning is everchanging but irrefutable. like the rays that filter weakly past the initial depths.

but your waking breaks the image and you rise colored. on first surfacing, when the paint is fresh upon the skin, you understand the dream like you never will later. as the day wears on and the colors evaporate, you're not so sure. so you turn around and look at the water's surface to see a torn canvas, already fading in the sunlight.

and then each time you attempt to straighten an edge, patch pieces into coherence, you rob the picture of its color. they come off on your fingers and escape in a whiff of memories into the muddle of the day. sometimes they return, but by then they're so infused with smells of the city and punctured beyond recognition with darts of analysis, that they aren't free creatures of sleep anymore. just weary travellers trying to find their way home.

allow them a free pass through your brain, let them slide bumpily down the spine, permit a cautious circling of the navel, before they totter briefly on the tip of your tongue.