The Dreamer

Pity this arid moonscape,
Craterful and desolate
A recluse wrapped in the cloak of his own
Misery is said to wander here
He shaped the world from electrons and protons
And vague ideas of the heart
Out of void, kingdoms unpopulated,
Swelled with echoes that took shape
Imaginary friends imagined,
Imaginary neighbors, struggling to get by,
Befriended reflections and distortions,
And contortions, out of proportion
Yet all the echoes, ignorant,
Deified the voice that spoke them into existence
To be, to exist, was to be the figment
Of an imagination
To be trapped in the dream plane
Of a troubled God
The numbers, extrapolated from blackness
To infinity, swelled
And fortress walls stood mighty
Over the empty kingdoms
Guarding from the endless siege
From another world, equally unreal
It was turbulent chaos, among the desolated boulevards
As oversaturation scrambled the airwaves
Electrons abandoned their flight schedules,
Forgot timetables and perfunctory stoppings
Until the sky was so full of nothing
That where was no room to breathe
Once drowned, the dam collapsed, the flood released
The lake of sorrow emptied out
The villages of all the plastic army men
Who had taken residence there, washed away
Castles made of mud dissolved
In the orgasm of apocalypse
Walls, separating nothingness from nothingness, collapsed
And the nothing on both sides intermingled
The ground littered with corpses of the undead,
Unwished, in the middle of their purgatory,
By the mind that ceased to think them into being
For Atlas is not afforded a moment of distraction
The land, created on the wings of an afterthought
Imploded, with a resonating whimper
With the same ungrace as its making
Too late did the deified realize
That all necessary for the world to end
Was a slip of the tongue
Or a moment of lucidity
Too bright to recover from
The discerning eye can make out the faint shape of
His tracks in the sand
Gone in search of the water
That he has not the strength to speak into being
Nothing but a shadow
Betrays his muted presence
Yes, a recluse is said to wander here,
Among the sands and craters and ancient ruins of his own creation
And other mirages
That dissolve once he has moved onwards