why I don't keep a dream journal: reason #1

my sleep was marked by the salty stains on my pillow. not to infer that it had been anything resembling restful. a more fitting residue would have been much darker. much more fucking red. something much more descriptive, in it’s vulgarity, to the dreams which spawned such a crude biological byproduct:

there were so many bodies. so many imagined lives ended horribly. myriad holocausts, both man-wrought & natural. and, I felt every single one. not as a participant, but a mere witness. a witness who, somehow, felt the pain of it all bereft of choice in the matter. as if I were a chronicler excluded from all physicality, save the anguish. 

there was a lone woman on a desolate plain, grieving a dead son, opening her arms to a small nuclear device that had been surgically implanted into her abdomen. I saw her touch her forehead ever-so-gently, before the whitest, hottest light known on this planet bloomed a millisecond before the mountains broke apart like forgotten castles made of sand. 

I saw families in their various automobiles, brought together in some primal version of solidarity, fall as one into a massive sinkhole of earth. and, just when they thought they’d survived this calamity & found some shelter - because the ground they’d been gathered upon didn’t break apart & consume them all, but held solid hundreds of feet underground, like a great disc of salvation - the earth opened it’s emotionless maw & spat out millions of gallons of magma so fucking hot that looking upon it was akin to staring at the sun about midday. it flowed, almost insidiously, as if it harbored some long-hidden murderous patience & was simply savoring the kill. like blinding deadly honey, it swallowed everyone, along with their screams…