science of dreams

watching you sleep watching you speak your mouth opening but like your lips were wax and had to be moulded apart. seeing one tooth as you spoke to me or someone else from behind your translucent eyelids. a layer of skin cannot be the border of bodily experience. wake up to your new life. unleash the giant within. may all of your dreams come true. the line between here and there is crossed.

 

‘nam

we were in vietnam. the jungle swayed in the wind and we swayed within it. there were great big flowers in spun-out star shapes. people were being criticised that the footage that they were taking, which should have been strictly documentary, was too artistic. the faces were lost against the orange of that huge flower.  this made it tough to be a war photographer because the landscape and the flora really were stunning, and the flying guerrilla units were streaked to blend in. anyway, problems of representation aside, i was fairly exposed. people were shooting at me, but i had slid down below some trench-like ledge. but the real problem was that there were bombs or missiles being launched. we were being shelled, i guess. i heard the things being launched, and then, somewhere nearby, i would hear them explode. each explosion began to form part of something. a narrative force, a momentum. each explosion was a return, a refrain. in the silence between launch and explosion, i knew that i could die, but repetition seemed to suggest that i wouldn’t. the thing went up and the thing came down. and it happened again and again. the replication of this rhythm seemed logical. and if i were to be blown up, the rhythm would be broken. and then i realised that the refrain could end at any point. rhythm was something external to individual explosions. and i only needed one explosion to die. at the moment of explosion i was alive. in the silence between launch and impact, i was dead, but suspended. having realised this, a bomb was thrown up real high. it hung up there and the silence went on and on. but in that silence, i was dead. the bomb never came down.