Lord Dream from the Sandman Chronicles

Following you from dreamscape to dreamscape, I
cannot help but notice the taunt of
a quickly turned head,
an averted glance,
or a frozen neck refusing to turn on axis
to bring your eyes in contact with mine. I have chased you
from the steps of every illusion woven and constructed
from the vagaries of an attic stuffed with photographs
by a lizard brain that demands a coherent storyline.

Lord Dream, I keep praying
that your steps with stop and that we will touch
hands, hair, and breath. We are only echoes of each other,
both lanky columns of men crowned with hair like raven feathers
and wrapped in sable. I am cast
in the palest fawn that miscegenation can create:
you are fantastic, immortal, and bloodless.
When this chase began, I shoved past Oscar Wilde
in a maddening tea room stuffed with men,
lit just a little brighter than dusk,
and slapped with brazen purple like aphrodisia
yet still manly enough to slam a fist into the eye. He
turned his attention away from his objet d’art – a young man
carved out of pale flesh and crowned with a mantle
of Dionysian black curls – just long enough to give me
a vertical glance. But before he could change his mind,
I exited the room from the opposite door, following
the last whisper of your black cloak as it exited.

The pictures reassembled as I moved through them.
The doorway parted lips to reveal the next scene:
a room in the Hotel Liège.
Two men stand crosswise near an overstuffed, insanely gilded bed.
The elder man, hairline receding like an army of golden grain
marching to its shore, aimed a revolver and shot lead into the
younger man’s wrist. The younger man, dark blond hair like a curly riot
and his wrist weeping blood, was Rimbaud: he
stumbles backward, turns, and runs for the door. I turn my back
to Verlaine, the elder steeped in lunacy and drink, and follow
Rimbaud out of the door: and I see
you, again, fleeing the scene just ahead of him through that
open door. My apertures seize from you a few frames:
your ragged black hair rising into the air as if in fanfare,
ashen, lithe fingers clutched around a small black pouch.

Lord Dream, how long did you make me
chase you? I even saw you, back pressed against the curtains
of a Paris Left Bank apartment where James Baldwin,
slender and brown, pulled his lover close
for a kiss behind closed doors. I made the rude mistake
of shoving past him to try to touch you, educing
a glare of annoyance from the expatriate son of
pink triangles and night: but again, you disappeared,
ducking behind the curtain. Even so, I followed you
there.

Right before this exit, I finally saw your eyes
in full glory: twin windows of black revealing blue raging fire
behind them. I would gladly raise up my wrists to be swallowed with chains
so that my unwrapped soul may hang, dangling in those blue flames,
dying and thrashing in a rivalry with Rimbaud’s own torment. And now,
here I am: every blue flame finger rises to meet my skin and
tear up my hide. But instead of searing pain, I find
the slow burn of pleasure being pulled up to the surface of my skin.
Across the dungeon, I see you smile sardonically
and gleam those blue diamond eyes that burn like the birth of stars:
but then you turn and walk away, cape whirling behind you in a
a hushed goodbye. And still I hang,
with nothing but my desire
resting its miserable, tumid plum head on my stomach,
just below my navel. I wait
to wake up, to expire from this feverish dream;
I wait for le petit mort to claim me.

Written 9/12 and 9/13/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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Meet Nick. He’s 6’3″ and weighs about 160 pounds. He’s multiracial. He has shoulder-length black hair, brown eyes, and is a bit of a recluse with penchant for black clothing. He mostly goes out at night. Oh yeah — and he’s an Aspie, too.

Barbara’s We Write Poems prompt this week, B1, suggested that we reinvent ourselves and then send our reinvented selves “into some well known story, song, poem, fairy tale, TV series; pick some place that has already been realized and populated”. I already had a ready-made alter ego, Nick, who I dropped into the world of the Sandman Chronicles. He pursues Lord Dream through The Dreaming realm — to his own detriment.

-Nicole
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