Between

You place your hand upon the dark bark; you press your hand into the grooves and ridges, feeling the rough texture of the tree. How little you grasp. Under your feet the leaves crumble and the moss, like a sponge, oozes. At the edge of the forest you stand, and in the light cannot fathom the endless darkness before you, an abyss with no stars populated by unseen terrors. Yet dreams await therein.

I know nothing beyond this borderland, this half-awake place between internal lobes, between eternity and time, between silence and thought, this moment touching the beyond. But now I only touch, am stretched, the soul of my foot in a world I’m detached from while my soul is in a world I don’t belong to. Neither the forest nor reality are mine; touching both I have neither.

He walks alone, for no one sees the world. His sight makes him blind, to see within all the emerging dream. Unreal the waking world becomes to him, and sleep no harbor holds. He’s cast from either place, longing always—little mattering where he stands—for his vision to be shared, to break from his madness with a shout.