Rapid eye movement

It was important to him that he remembered his dream 
so he could tell me-
He remembered his ‘idols’ there, men he looked up to 
from down in the trenches of the real world, 
They were all there,  welcoming, 
they treated him as one of the ‘boys’.

And one of the boys 
gave him a box, a puzzle box which he shook
And some pieces fell out, he felt terrible about it, 
He may have been apologizing to me.

He told me 
how frantically he scoured the floor
So he could solve the puzzle completely 
and please them greatly.

And he did but the pieces came out again and again and I was 
Certain the picture was starting to develop- 
he was dreaming of us.

His father and step-mother while visiting us once, told me about his 
childhood propensity to steal two jigsaw puzzle peices so 
at the end of the day, he could be the One
who finishes.

In the next scene, he was sitting in a room with a low table, 
on a shaggy rug, the puzzle in the box sat atop,
but  he was certain there were still pieces missing 

so he was hesitant to try to put it together
knowing it couldn't be completed.

I asked him if he wasn’t curious to know what the puzzle pictured,
He said it was just a silly dream,

And the missing pieces weren’t the thing about the dream,
it was the idols, he said.

I found it puzzling and pinched myself.  

Image credit By Mennonite Church USA Archives [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.