Your demons and my demons

January 22, 2015 Jodi Sharp

My dreams are exhausting these days. Nights and nights full of inexhaustible tasks, repetitive actions over and over. Fighting and killing small sharks, bringing them into shore, piling them up over and over. Climbing small trees that are too skinny to climb, crossing suspension bridges I am unable to cross. Cartwheels and body failing and people I'm supposed to know but don't. Digging out wounds over and over so they will not heal. Blood. Patterns and feelings and layers and layers of things that are just too difficult to do. And when I wake up I feel more tired than when I went to sleep.

They reminds me of a feeling I had when I wrote this poem years ago-

I'm saying shut me up but what I really mean is wake me up.

they've been kind of depressing

my dreams these days

about water and balloons floating on rafts out a sea

people drowning

severed heads being pulled around on carts

and all of those things and colors

i just can't quite remember

i woke up in an apartment.

my apartment, but backwards.

holes in the roof

climbing through to get into the windows above me

looking out onto concrete

painting the walls

over and over again

it never covers

you can't cover grease

the texture always

soaks through

i know these are figments of my imagination

but I can't help being mad at people when i wake up

reality does not come as a breath of air

unless it was stale old air

less alive, less colorful

the dead don't resurrect here

and even though you hurt me in my sleep

at least i got to see you

and we laughed once

even though i was sad in my dream

at least i felt you

then i could cry in the morning

even though i forgot you had been there

on sunday morning i woke up and i couldn't remember anything

my mind was blank from 1 o'clock on saturday

until i woke up to my headache.

it was a relief.

-Jodi Sharp

(2007)