How I Live With 

What I Know

My morning begins

with extrication;

separating myself

from the dream

like a soldier

with PTSD

condemned to relive

the horrors of a war

no one else 

remembers.

Crawling out

of it’s freighted

plot line

as from

a cave opening

or a grave,

my waking

is both

arrival and departure.

My bed should

have it’s own

inscription:

"May I 

Rest 

in 

Peace"

Awake

I work to make

my life what it is;

to control the narrative,

to deserve my fate.

But the dreams

just happen

absent

of any conscious

expediency.

Maybe my morning

ritual of 

reconstitution is

a mistake.

Despite its canny

allusion to

 singularity,

any understanding

or lack thereof

is reached entirely 

through consensus...

a Greek chorus

of inner voices 

whose identities 

I thought

had long lost 

their hold

over me,

again

attempt their

cathartic coup.

Don’t crowd out

the little boy who

exists solely by feeling

pushing past their

billowing robes

and struggling

to be heard.

He will only be

left to

imaginary devices.

Meanwhile

the un-darling skeptic

sits staring

into space

sucking the teat

of his glasses

awaiting any chance

for contradiction.

Lurking behind him

the infamous

inner father;

an influence

acquired from nothing,

(being that

I had no father

and have no child).

Still, his voice

manages it's manly,

yet gentle instruction.

His missive:

overlook what

you think you know 

of other soldiers.

You are

your own

civil war.

My sleep 

is a sly intervention

absent of which I

might well

know everything

all at once.

Given to dreaming,

I've taken to counting

the hours between

my every

joy and sorrow.

Sometimes I see

my soul a cave

of shadows

whose echoes

are dreaming me

into a man

as unnaturally as a bird

attempting to fly.

It takes wings

to dream 

with such

a muscularity.

Yet without sleep

I'd grow sentimental,

and possibly

cruel.

What I've learned

(the take away)

is that

no dream's mirror 

can hold me,

being merely

the quicksilver version

of a ruin;

the battlefield

but not the war.

It's very incivility,

evidence

of no defeat.

And so

again

I return from

the front

struggling to retain

 this brutal information;

sole souvenir

of the unknowable.

Peter Valentyne

September 19 2019