Near Something

Mr. Epperson did not design
his own dreams, these silly shreds
of memory, the strange refuse
and smoke of incomplete days.

The black sky folds, the moon
and its hours watch this man
be enslaved again to a swarm
of nothing. But after 43 years,

he finally saw something inside
the nightly mist, the supercilious
circling of eyes from a friend
dead decades earlier. Words

hummed from the stars, neither
hostile nor peaceful, but present
beyond the trappings of dream
and art, but the window came,

and, in his room, the face withdrew
with the mist, and Mr. Epperson
became nothing too.

---

Written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge #262 – Random Dreams