I don’t want to close my eyes

Because, for the past three nights,

When I do, I see the same thing

It’s not a dream.
I'm staring at a painting,
In a frame on some wall of some gallery
A landscape I guess, sort of fauvist, I think
Or maybe something older than that
To my eye beautiful and engaging, but also frightening
Because I just have a nagging aching feeling that something is wrong –

With me -- stuck as I am in one specific looping scene instead of
any kind of normal dream.

The Sea. There’s a cliff that leads down to the sea
a memory of the sea or maybe an imaginary sea,
And sometimes, as the frame shifts, something new emerges
But it’s so hard to describe
Even having seen it for three nights in a row now,
Just so hard, so I should sketch it, really,
But I can’t draw, which is a fact, but that doesn’t really make me sad
So much as frustrated, which is one of the main feelings
that I have while staring with some confusion
At the same fixed vista again and again... and again
That I am untethered and not fixed
But still really should be able to capture it all
And yet I just can’t, which is only just
My latest failure but then, you already know that about me.
And so without the ability to document, I am forced to watch and repeatedly to feel.

The Sand, some foam, something floating, also vibrating,

Glowing in the sway and roll, impermanent,
an unending loop that I cannot control
I know this for certain, that I am not in control

Of the same looping roll, as this discarded carapace, mottled and more vivid than in real life,
and it makes me increasingly sad with
each repetition, looking down at death,

so my eye drifts toward the vanishing point
but it’s obscured by a haze and isn’t that the shape of... Of what? Of a mast? Or a blade? Or no, it’s just another big chunk of my flesh being consumed as I watch and
it’s heaving up rosy droplets that rise into
a kind of mist that blocks my view
and I am reminded that each of us, in turn,
will inevitably cease to feel the loop of our own breath too.

Maybe this scene was planted in my brain by the virus
Because I recently caught it, again, which makes me
Oh so angry because I am very sure that it’s just
wrecking my entire system, hidden and destructive and eating away at me,

And I am also sure that the bioengineers who created this secret chimera

wanted to be certain that it was

Oh so carefully designed to undermine any remaining thread
Tethering us to reality, so maybe, then, this scene, that I have nightly on repeat,

is some sort of Covid test pattern,
an ominous carrier from the microscopic world,
messenger of death by a thousand unseen wounds.
And suddenly it occurs to me that, at least I am not alone.

Perhaps each mind creates its own
Version of this vision, pulling out of time,
Suspended and vulnerable and living an illusion,
Each in its own, forever nocturnal and Isolated space
And so behind me rises, all at the top, a sluice of rolling scree that sings

With a virtuoso coloratura as it surely slips and slides downward,
My own mind emptying inexorably and numbed
In the smother of green and blue and white and blue and   white and red

Oh if only, if only I could be at peace with the memory of
Where this all once led, break this frame and shift the scene,
Move on and onward into some comforting vast stillness   deep and green

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