Sleep snap, 
In a vial named Nem. 

(by Martin Swabey)

An honourable oniric snooze, 
Vapours of Elyseum booze fields, 
Rice plateaus stacked with the smell of newly fed feud mills…
Like stale rancid arm smells, the napalm burnt jungle tripwire trails.
I walk on deeper, the heat drives-on as the hills get steeper.
A land lost in true tales, Salisbury Sasparilla soup,
Smurfschtroumphs and wigwam animal wails…
The taste of my breath lingers on these notes
As a freshly roast lizard lipping in your throat… 
Gripping nails, Digging deeper the sleep rolls over 
As my mind feels neater… how neat.
How neat? How neat? How neat? 
Jostling thoughts of chaos as I loose my feet…
Disintegrating floor boards how did I not expect it …
The oldest trick in the book yet I can’t escape it.
I feel the new threat, 
Falling through air, sounding whistling wind, I’m swept…
Crash.
A new path spread with traps is set.
Technicolour caverns and infrared lights ahead.
Is this what it feels like to be dead?

This last mindwave is harder to intercept, 
As echoes of my fall bounce through my cranium and chest…
Focus, breathe, no time to rest.
Inadequacy of feeling, moved, inept.
Ahhhhaaaannnhhnnn, I stand and take a first step
As reaching from quicksand in a pit chocked by its depth.
The hurt subsides as my sight digests…
I’m intravenous in a looming darkness
Like the arteries running through a petrified womb
Confessed time, giant fossilized tree…
Ripples of past, canals of history, 
Placid, silent and inevitable tomb.
Glittering lights catch my sight, 
I sigh at the thought of the power of sunlight 
But the drips of existence far in the veins
Of this dormant giant keep my memory sane..
I’m healthy and well, 
Well, other than the fact that I’m trapped in
The equivalent of hell.
In a sense my introspection makes me glad I fell
At least I’m not lying in a seedy hotel 
Beside a girl half man who’s smiling like a system
Calculating and feeding on my purpose and mission. 
“At the end, the ends the same” said a man
“That which differs is the way that it all began”.

“At the end, the ends the same” said a man…
Well if similars are opposite yet equivalent they stand.
So my courage boosts up to boast another plume 
I’m standing tall, hunched down in this clostrophobic gloom
Ecclectic smile, simile insects I feel small,
In this winding, sparkling, and endless thin hall..
I hear a call… stringent, sadistical and twisted, 
My hands mute it from all… eternal, internal walls barring the roar
My senses can’t bear the fright… acidity gnawing at the seems of my might..
I’m rooted to the ground, looted by this sound, 
Enchained and bound, no respite yet……… I’ve found
A gap in the soundwave… one to let me free 
A second I’m saved muted atrocity
I think to spin around and before I think it I’ve spun………. 
The chase begins as my feet start to run….
No time to dwell on pain, adrenalin pumped through my lungs…
I’m channelled through the tunnel like shot from a gun.
One left, one right then a few I forget
My brain catches up too late, body set on escape, 
Like a madman running away from guards in a cape… 
The vision of steps resonates round the corners,
On the air tepid it taps, boiling bubbles of breath, I run faster..
Then a wall, no more space, it’s the end, I’m effaced
So I scream louder than the beast and louder than the scream 
Louder than a deaf and louder than the fiend,
Invocation of elements as choler scrapes for some rest
Wilder than a chorus of storms clashing with tempest,
My sound reverberates the earth, its call responding to my zest
As the ground starts to shake the shackles of subsiding darkness. 
The glittering lights surround me in this dimension and time..
Where am I? Who am I? Rebirth cristalline…

There you are, the glittering gem… the eyes of my treasure
My life phial named Nem.




Other thoughts: (The bread’s stale…next to a new mixed bowl of mushroom ale
Snap, snakelike rattling smashes Chinese made China cups with a crack.
I wake up)

(© Martin Swabey, 2006)