I am the nautilus of dreams.
I dive deep into the minds of the
Sleeping.

I pull myself through this
Primordial Sea with
Hook and Chain.
I carve my way through the miasma,
through this cosmic wasteland
of timelessness
and solitude.

I can peer into the deepest
Vistas of Dreams
and
Reality.
I can see the infinite,
the hyperreal,
the manifestation of a heavenly history
for a world that will never be realized.
I can feel the grandiose disappointment
of hopes too big to ever become real.

I am simultaneously sustained
and destroyed
by them.

***

I am caught on a burning ship.
It will extinguish
only after it has already sunk.
Its carcass will descend,
rib cage of wood
and teeth of iron,
its tattered sails slowly drift
through the water
like embers on the wind.

The ocean accepts this death offering with an open embrace.
It welcomes its child of a billion years
as if not a single moment had passed
since their parting ways.

I can almost hear the deep
thrumming
of its heartbeat.
The gentle whooshing of its breath
lulling me into a phantasm.

The transformation from
living to dead
is underway.

Sinking…
Sinking so quickly that the air bubbles
race away from me
at the speed of light.
Gone forever,
in a dream.

But the dream never ends.
All who sink will continue to do so for as long as the
water has weight,
and dimension,
and an ever-expanding sense of being.

There is no light at the bottom of the sea,
only darkness, and a crushing presence of
lifelessness.

But when one settles among the dead,
the billions of ghosts that litter the dark nightscape of the
Underworld
will show you who they are,
from where they come,
and from when they formed.

For when you become one of them,
they become one with you,
and the dream continues.

But I sink,
sink into a darkness so deep
the very substance of the cosmic water
gives way to nothingness.
I float down gently,
locked within the
dizzying spin of gravity.
Pulled quicker
and
quicker
to that oblivious place of
night and dreams.

The primordial sea.

The void and the everlasting.
The place from which the spark of the ordered universe came to be.
Where nothing
became something
that could know itself, at least to some degree.

I have laid upon the surface of this nothing space, but never entered.

Not yet.