by Thomas Davis
They came to see him as his body failed,
the morphine shredding boundaries between
the world we know and dream worlds where the seam
of time and substance is at last unveiled
and all the phantoms that have ever sailed
into our consciousness become a stream
of concrete beings shed of cloaking dreams,
the boundaries that held them prisoners curtailed.
He asked us if we saw them in the room.
We didn’t look, but looked at him instead,
resisting how we felt inside the gloom
that haunted us inside our haunted heads.
When, at long last, he spent his days asleep,
his spirit was the one we wished to keep.
fourwindowspress 