“The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person’s dreams have a temporal scope of ten, thirty, sometimes sixty years or even surpass all limits of man’s ability to experience time-dreams, that is, with images thronging past so swiftly that, as one hashish-smoker puts it, the intoxicated user’s brain seems “to have had something removed, like the mainspring from a watch.”
-Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)
Should I have sweat through those provocative dreams
Since time is running out
And shall I have watched, disturbed and overcome with infatuation,
Pleasure, intent on the scene, all its folded lines hung out,
The mosaic scene, the spackled tiles of moments to keep
Float over the surface of settled matters.
Transience penetrates us to move on and on.
This minuscule thought that writhes its way under
Eyelids-between us, selves. We are
Something small, private, intrusive, edgy and loose.
The Splinter severed from the smooth grain
Pierces its way deeper into our softness,
past the seventh gate, writhing in quicksand
Only to break off the relationship,
Leaving a white fleshy hole with dead skin
light floods inside singing delicate motors
Before it can draw an arc, or a
furrow atop the brow with vapor and sweat
and feel the tickle from
blood running down wrists and pouring out nostrils.
Resilience needs rest and a sense, a little air and darkness,
solitude in a moment to hold on despite the vertiginous spin
We are in this together, that you remember
That this horrific nightmare
Has occurred to me before, many times, before
I woke.
Painting by Ivan Aivazovsky, 'Pushkin at Ai-Petri during sunrise' 1899 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
