Cloistered Poetry
In the Abyss of Dreams
((The Old Tramp) (poetic prose))
He, the old tramp, had found a lost
continent.
He dreamed a new world.
And he had stepped into it, —so long now had he
drifted back and forth from it, he had forgotten who he had been.
But he mumbled often—to whom might have been
listening—“Too many people around, too indifferent, self-absorbed.”
And so I write of this old man, brief as it is, a
tramp I met, and I shall fill in the gaps of his life, which was more his dream
world than, what we consider reality.
For the old tramp, his dream became reality for
him.
The more he dreamed, the more it took on an enraged
realism.
Outside of this dream world, the world to him was
ugliness, and foul.
“Where truth was, was what people wanted it to be
at any given time, and never revealed fully,” so he’d mumble.
“And pretense was worshiped, like Baal,” so he muttered.
Consequently, in this nebulous sort of dream life
he found a new world that he could live in, day and night.
Disassociated with earthly existence, its struggle
for survival, continuation, while his other world became more real, deeper, and
more profound.
When he was awake, what he ate was for the most
part, what he found which was seldom, during those last well-meaning forgotten
days: that being: garbage thrown from opened windows of apartment buildings of
the city!
His mind was shaped by thoughts and fantasies.
His awake life, was a life of pictures in the
brain, he preferred the inward dreaming.
It was as if something was chaining him down.
. . .
In his alternate world there were enchanted hills,
gardens that grew flowers that looked as red and glowing, as the sun, blinding
sapphires, mountains that sang to the moon, whispering seas, bronze and gold
roofed cottages—
And he himself, rode a caparison white horse,
across carven bridges, white paths, watching the birds, bees and butterflies
swarm the fields around him, in a placid manner.
Throughout the cedar forests, he leaped with his
horse past the ivory gates of fetching cottages, and townships with tall
steeple domed towers.
Always trying not to wake up, or if to, to drink
more wine or his choice of drug—whatever he could find—to supply his habit to
fall back into REM sleep, and deeper into the hashish world, for one more
eloquent episode, one he was born for, and to get out of other one that he was
thrown into.
One he preferred to exist in was not the one he was
born into.
Should he have been awakened, all he saw was a
fearful aurora of a ruined stagnated city, a reedy muddy garbage filled and
verminous stream!
People staring out their windows at him, chocking
on carbon dioxide of the passing cars, trucks.
Too, he knew he’d grow weary fast of the crudeness
of the people’s emotions, and sameness, and they’d never understand his meaning
of life.
And then once in reality, full reality, clean and
sober, where would come the satisfaction or fulfillment?
That which he had left in yore, way back in his
gallant dreamland.
Was this not in itself the antidote?
Old popular doctrines, inflexible cures, most cures
were muddled thinking.
He wanted to escape, or find its equal, like
Gilgamesh who sought out Enkidu, because of boredom.
No one took the time to find out the secret pits in
his life, those that described him, he had a room for each, hung in aspirated
colors.
And then one day, out of the blue, a rift came, a
chasm appeared, a fissure opened up—like an earthquake, in the deep hollows of
his dreams!
He fell down, down, way-way down into its abyss.
And there was his biggest achievement, he found it,
the Radiant City of Crystals and Pearls— “This,” he whispered, “is where I’ll stay and live, it’s where I belong!”
This magical world so vivid, once in fragments now
all together, associations of his mind fell into one vista, a breathless
expectancy, one that was unquenchable.
. . .
He felt a tugging on his shoulder, it was likened
to python was trying to pull him out of the city.
“No, no” he cried, but nobody heard him.
The old lady tried with all her effort to wake the
Old Tramp, laying on a damp mattress thrown away as garbage, and full of ants,
ticks and bedbugs, and white worms, in an empty lot, within the greater city, a
metropolis.
Lo, a police officer then approached, felt his
pulse, he wasn’t sure.
He took a long, long glace for movement, at the
laying old tramp!
Even tapped him lightly in the face to wake him.
But the old man was warm, feeling the breezy sea
lull, watching the clouds drift over a village cliff (in the land of
make believe).
One of the several curious strangers that had
crowded around this limp body, said in a loud cry: “Someone please
take him to a hospital!” although he reserved the right to back off.
Then the police officer announced that he was dead.
Saying to the old lady that had waved him on: “I’ve seen him here before—he was a dreamer, a
drunk, a user of drugs; although he did find something out of all this,” and he hesitated
to say what he thought, as the old lady waited patiently to hear his closing
remarks, “calm, lasting beauty, only comes in a dreams…what the real world threw
away long ago!”
For those alluring moments, the old tramp was
observing the region where the sea meets the sky.
He refused to allow the python to wake him, or the
bugs slapping his face.
And all those who at the present knew he had passed
on, to wherever, they too, went on their way, to wherever.
#5286/6-18-2016
