Poetry and Visions

You’re never too old to die young. 

I filter through writing-thoughts, daydreams where I walk the shoes of the person I’m creating, the people I’m developing, where I eat their food and sleep their beds, and I have to fight living the dream. Literally, I guess. The dreams are so much better when you’re watching them, like movies, than they are when I read them on paper. They’re flat, in words, as if I’m living the life while blind. I can’t explain it, but writing isn’t the same as what I see, and it isn’t the thing that makes me dive.

Cygnus always says I should make movies. At least write them. She says I have a moviemaker’s eye. Not a writer’s. It’s difficult to write sometimes.

Nowadays, it’s difficult to write ever. I work a 50+ hour a week job. It’s demanding, intensive, active. I feel like, after a day, I’ve climbed a mountain and crawled through bramble thickets. I feel I’ve claimed barren land for my own country. While I do it I’m on top of the world.

But somewhere between getting the email to return to the garage for the day and driving to my house in my own vehicle, the drive dies. My mind outraces my body while I work. I hack stories out of nothing. I bloom and die and bloom again, seasons passing before lunch. But when I get home, all I want to do is smile at the television. All I want to do is drink Gatorade and play Minecraft.

Nothing wrong with that, I guess. I love spending all the time I can with my wife. She’s amazing.

I’ve also started seeing visions again. A long while ago, before I met my now-wife, I wrote a lot of poetry. Most of it had to do with my life and relationships and daydreams. It’s easy to write when you’re alone in life. It’s also hard, because you’re alone. Your ideal self grows a little differently when you’re pursuing inner growth instead of mutual growth.

Well those poems were windows, I think. They were aspects of something I don’t quite grasp but Cygnus understands through-and-through. We had a talk a few days ago, because she’s feeling it inside herself, too. A change. Changes. A return, maybe.

She told me I had two guides. Two people that assist and mold and teach–albeit not actively. She said one was a woman in a purple dress. Wavy dirty-blonde hair. I immediately said, Lilith she calls herself. I call her lilac because of the color. And she shows herself to me as a field of purple flowers. I wrote about her quite a bit around when I was pursuing someone else, before Cygnus. Lilac was a housekeeper of sorts. Cygnus says she wants to talk again. I didn’t divulge the odd irony of this: Lilac incorporated a kind-of relationship assistant role. She was the voice saying, "peace," in a thousand different, divergent conversations. She was a river, and she taught me how to listen to everyone while pouring emotions in my own direction. For Cygnus to tell me about her meant Lilac has relationship stuff to talk about.

The second person Cygnus referenced was a man in a suit, dapper, ’30’s feel to him. He carried a cane. He didn’t talk much.  He was straight-backed. The closest i knew of him was Michael, Mind Extraordinaire, the complicated man with wings tied down beneath his tux. The more I think about it, the more I don’t believe they’re the same person. She says he’s no hunchback, as I see him (wings, you know). She insinuated the man has no time for frivolities like wings or other fantasy elements.

But I’m having strange visions now. The other day I took a shower, and the moment the water touched my skin I fell into a daydream. It’s not something I’ve ever done often, or with control. I just stepped in, touched, boom. When next I opened my eyes it was a half hour later, after I talked to myself about things. One was, I’m supposed to collect walking sticks. Polished, old, used, loved, discarded. I’m supposed to assemble them. Somehow. A lifelong hobby I just, well, picked up out of nowhere. I followed other voices. A discussion of people-personalities, of pain and death. I don’t often have these visions without being shown the importance of death.

I don’t know why it’s a part of the vision. "She talked in her sleep again," I remember someone saying. "When the fever didn’t pull her down, and when her lungs were ready." It’s emotional and personal, as if I stood over a dying woman, not older than thirty, as she tossed and turned in a sheet soaked in sweat. It was a snapshot. She said, "Don’t forget me," like she would be forgotten. Like I was a friend who she wanted to be remembered by.

Living multiple lives would be a strange way to live. Some times I let it roll, burn through me like a prairie wildfire, and be gone so I can continue living my very normal, very unimpressive life. Sometimes I have to fight against it to keep it from ruining my job, ruining my everything. I’ve lost college, in part, to these dreams. I’ve lost many friends to it. Yet it’s such an abstract thing I can’t talk to people about it because they give me funny looks. This is the shit of crazypeople talk. This is the stuff of the Bible and Young Goodman Brown and Nietzsche and Jung.

But it simmers. Still. Today is a beautiful day, like the rest of this past week. I’m off to find movies and to hang out with my brother/family before my brother returns to college. 

I might return to poetry soon. My prose is a blind man telling a story. My poetry is a photograph, and a lesson. To me if no one else.