The Dreamer

I was conceived in
A flurry of paper and ink
A whisper in a room stained with screams
I was born in
A time of feather and fin
Or a time where man makes man
I was raised in
The arms of nothing itself or,
A mountain where an angel summoned storms.

He said to call him master and I never understood.
One day when I was playing with a runaway cloud
And heard a noise.

(I never looked back.)

When I was a child I ran with birds
With wings the size of my hand, and the colour of living,
I called them my family but they didn't understand
Just ran across the surface of forever.

Once I sailed over blood red seas
On a ship without a name
Whose boards were ebony,
I slept, a young man, curled in hammocks woven from the thoughts of dead men
He whispered to me at night
and taught me guilt
When I left to learn lessons from dusk.

Others say that my old friend was the ship of time itself but
Everyone knows that time walks alone
On a path he wound around his slender finger
And the sea is not his child, nor friend,
So I learned what 'lie' meant.

I was there when the sea was just an egg,
That came from the Earth's womb in a nest of kelp,
Was it me who cracked open that shell and watched
As the newborn ocean explored her world?

Aeons ago when the sea was young,
I crossed from hatchling shore to hatchling shore,
Aeons ago when I was young,
I roved as a free man.
Aeons from now I will still not regret that freedom still likes to change.

Ages have passed since I reached up high,
Plucked out jewels from the darkening sky,
Mother didn't exist so mo one told me
The little fledgling in my palms was called a 'star',
But she was red as the sun when he crawls back home.

I was there the first day he came to us
I shook his burning hand and said
'Sun, this is Ocean. You will be friends'.
Maybe they were but I can't be sure,
Since Ocean hasn't rested for a day since then.

At home I fed the star I found
With lettuce, but that didn't work.

We didn't believe in names,
Though I put her in my pocket near to my heart,
But she soon went away,
Fled from me when she was hidden by day.

They say I could reach the skies again if I could just see the wings,
The mirror says I have-
But they always hide
And I could never fly, since I wasn't taught how.

Since everyone knows that time walks alone, and
The dusk loves as a feather's breath, but I never learned.
Stars can't feel but I never learned.

Life is a toy for some and that some's name is time,
Life is real for some, but 'real' never healed a wound.
Life is a blink, life is a test, life is a chore,
But death is a rest.

It was aeons ago that I picked up my pen,
And discovered that words had not yet found me,
It was aeons ago when time guided my hand
And said, in a voice that was almost there:
'You will do this for me'.

He gave me ink from the seed of unknown,
And took me
with him.

Everyone knows that time walks alone, nowhere at once.
Time walks the endless path heedless, with me, and I will never learn.

I tread a thousand ways and back again,
I am everywhere, nowhere, and in no time at all,
I am many,
But only one was gifted a name.

Only one of me writes because only one of me knows,
And only one of me walks the path where the wind from the mountain blows.