Christmas dreams.

I had dreams, yawning wide open, of old gods that sat heavy upon the world, great engines that hummed with the om of life and death, ominous hulks whose ancient bodies obscured the horizon. They sprawled eternally like sphinx, frozen in the sand of a timeless earth, on treacherously lazy paws, morose landscapes in and of themselves, seething with atomic intelligence.

Followed angels behind bars into the secret shadows of my mind's alleys, realistic and painful sweet moments with angels reaching realistic and painful sweet conclusions. The sun burned blonde behind my eyelids, I drank a thick nostalgia, golden sand wet with sweat.

I had ponderous, crawling epic dreams of racism and social inequality, unexpected chilling visions of a great tree, rotten in trunk and leaf, rotten roots deep in rotten soil, and I had difficulty leaving the scene without feeling like a rapist.

I watched reality twist itself into a dervish, vibrate into a mirage suspended on the fragile shining spiderweb of a single song.

I saw a giant ruddy beast made of mud and crumbling masonry, with gasping slot machine mouths, and the jackpot vomited torrents of rusty water and mud dotted with muddy human bodies, the living and the dead, and even the to-be-born. I knew then as I know now that this was nothing to fear, lest we admit that we've been living in that same fear our entire lives. I knew then as I know now that the rivers of blood and mud and rust run freely with those of Spring and sweat and wine and light, and that when all these nebular rivers freely intermingle upon their absolution in the final ocean, light will shine through to its deepest depths, and it will remain clear as virgin water untouched by the sin of time.