Stuff of nightmares
A weird poem from a weird brain
I’ve been visited by stress dreams a lot lately. It’s something that seems to happen periodically, when I’m burned out but don’t realize it. Of course, this most recent bout of dreams emanates from the stressful state in which I’ve been living my life the last couple months, so I’m not surprised to be confronting them again.
My brain has always been the outlet for stress in this way. As a kid I’d spend the wee hours of most nights hunkered down inside the halo of light from my nightstand lamp, reading Garfield comics to purge the uneasy residue of nightmares. It’s a strange and anxious place to be, in my head at night. So many things collide in that space, vulnerabilities and fears and hopes. They mingle together, hard to untangle.
Times like this in my life—times of stress, anxiety, fatigue—seem to embody that in a strange way, reflecting my uncertainty, my desires, my dread and inadequacy back to me. There’s a kind of external pressure in it, a drive to swipe through the brambles looking for God. So in honor of the surreal and scary and sanctifying, here’s an odd little poem I wrote a little over a year ago, inspired by a common phrase Christians use to describe the rapture.
Caught up in the sky
At first glance it sounds a bit scary.
An image, maybe
inspired by some long-suppressed memory of a horror film
seen long ago:
a horde of bodies suddenly taking flight,
swept away like unsuspecting krill
on their way to school,
arms dangling and heads lolling
backward
all control snatched from their cobweb brains,
their destination: who-knows-where,
anywhere but here,
it might involve aliens but at this point
no theory holds water.
Will we see them again,
these unfortunate puppet-people,
or have they been lost forever,
will they return with faces at once
familiar and unfamiliar,
smiles gone cold, pupils erased.
They were caught up
says some old man
through the gaps where his teeth should be,
grimly implying
he’s seen too much.
Jesus, forgive me,
I’ve seen too much and
my compulsively horrorstruck brain
imagined you coming back as an alien
to strike the world dumb with terror.
My description is a bit off,
and thoughts of the end come out jumbled
because
you kind of are an alien—
in the way a candle would be alien
in the deepest
black-drenched depths of the ocean.
