I am a small boy holding a soft, wooden blue block. I am a woman crying hard in the rain after heartbreak. I am a Spartan holding a sharp, bloodied spear. I am in the vacuum of outer space. I suffocate and enter a black hole, I disintegrate and am poured into a ceramic cup of pitch black, piping hot coffee. I am shared among friends having a nondescript conversation. I am set on fire and inhaled through the young oil worker's soot-soaked menthol cigarette. I become shavings of white oak wood as a man is finishing a fine piece of furniture. I am a pair of red-painted lips opening and closing while white ivory obelisks overlap one another. I am a black umbrella; I feel the rain drops waltz on my bladed back. I am a man lying supine in plush, rose-dyed velvet lining. I am the melody leaping from the bell of a mournful, moaning trumpet. I am the salt cube on the tongue of a stallion, dissolving into circular blood cells and sliding into a ruby red river bed. I am sitting on a pea-soup green sofa seat. I am centered in a cell-like room. The ceiling is low and constricting. The walls are bare and forgotten. There is darkness in front of me. There is a mirror in front of my bed. I fear waking in the night and seeing my face while the lights are out. I cannot rest without noises of the nightingale nursing me. I do not wish to hear your bewitched whispers. I do not want to enter your door. I will not raise my trembling hand to pull the brass handle. I fear the silver scalpel splicing my eye and opening it, tugging on the tangled cabling of my optic nerve, pulling it toward…? Unnerved, I dive back down into my dream. Do not disturb me.
Pictured: The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781
Reminds me a bit of the scene in 2001 space odyssey in the bed, especially the sofa. Which, is I think also the most frightening scene of that movie.
I enjoyed the whitmanesque collage, very sensual, and was very surprised how certain images became unexpectedly vivid among these, like the coffee or the pea soup!