delayed

your body i eject
invade a series of bodies
no longer mine

**

this morning i had a dream i'd had before, similar for all but my distinctively insane self-character. in place of fear there was empty fearlessness and laughter.

with my friend i had been on my way to find a beloved, on a train. the train goes underground, and the outer shell of the train car is stripped. in my best clothes i knelt and laid down in the cake pieces of dried animal feces littering the floor of the still-moving floor to avoid my own beheading against the low rusty ceiling, obstacle-course like.

rest break. my friend and i take our time and wait it out in a straw-filled room, not unlike an 18th- or 19th century prison room, but boringly spacious, and equipped with a large white two-door refrigerator.

an ominous feeling then, when you realize you have been in such a dream before. the two men who seek to kill me enter our cell. i find myself with them in their prison, my traveling companion left behind. i do not know if their motive is fueled by a conflict of love interests or for other reasons, but they are determined to stop my travels and to end me.

in their temporary territory i sought nonexistent shelter from their assault.

they have long rifles, old,  belonging to the time period of the prison cells. i have nothing. i open the refrigerator and begin to dump its contents on myself. milk, juice, ketchup. i laugh in a mixture of submission, defeat, and hopelessness. this is how insanity begins, when faced with no other choice.

they mock me, laughter is contagious. i make for a forgotten fun on the floor, i take sloppy aims, i shoot, i miss, they shoot at me, i hide. i realize there is more than one bullet left in the gun in my hand. i take a better but still awful aim and shoot, again, again, again.

it goes like that, like a merry go round, refrigerator insanity and poorman's shots with outdated guns and silly round bullets flying out to effect wounds that do not hurt much except to blast off bits of effervescent ego and confidence. in my hands another gun, i shoot, my bullet flies out. it is a combination of a cone-headed steel pipe and the tail of an arrow, bearing semblance to a monstrously fatal tampon. it hits straight through to my strong assassin's body. i shoot more and he is dead. i borner the weaker killer and, after a time now blurred to me, somehow he is dead too.

my friend is nowhere to be seen. i do not continue on my way to find my lover. sometime after, in the prison-like room, my sanity returns, but the emptiness remains. i do not seem to realize that i am covered by milk, juices, and ketchup, maybe blood.