Inspired by The Dream, by Mohammad Malas.
This is a work of fiction.
To act at night, all of us in black
descend as a second dark upon the office.
The darkness of dreams is, like black clothing,
imitative of solitude. To act at night is funereal.
To act at night is to not know where you're going
until it's nearly time to be there.
To act at night is to be discomforted;
were we merely insomniacs we could
have stayed at home touching ourselves.
To act at night is to react.
It calls itself a bank. It had sculpted my money
into the shape of a bomb.
To act at night is to remember one's dream
by letting the world around remember it for us.
Roofing hammer passing through sticky hands;
Yelps as the glass shatters;
Brick sliding between my fingers like ice across the sky.
To act at night one forgets the names of figures in one's dreams,
though I will never trust anyone as much as them,
the shortest one who puts a tube of glue into the keyhole
as something comes alight ahead,
The tall one who hoists the first fire extinguisher
so red spills out looking black in the cold lamps.
To act at night is to see where daylight has been imprisoned
and released off-hours; money has no need for the
world to go round. But that money comes round.
Already the alarm sings to the cash abroad about paint,
cash left over from white phosphorus,
burning like garlic, comes running
to keep glyph from vandal, to make dreamless sleep.
To act at night is to be no one person
as people are often faceless in dreams, besides,
nobody is awake to identify us anyway.
When they call later we must swear we slept dreamlessly.
When acting at night, eras pass in seconds:
above our corrections, ants swarm each letter
of the office, the bodies black space and interruptions
so the symbol cannot be formed.
To act at night is to paralyze the symbol. Though
extension is not possible without the arm,
I hope they should dream of killing
and have no arms with which to kill.
I hope they sleep immobile in throes,
Not just the act be unprofitable.
But to act at night rarely is to profit.
Then, to act at night means waking suddenly.
I feel a rush of wind. Someone screams Marco.
N has the bikes.
We carry the last letter with us as the fire extinguisher
bleeds its last dregs of paint the honeycomb clattering.
In his dream the old man lines the linens for every child,
the walls of his dream painted with olive leaves and mountains
and orange skies crossing into purple seas.
Someone tells me that we won.
How could we have won so soon?
Often at night someone is chasing me.
Have I taken something from them?
Why else would I be chased?
So we grab the bikes and scatter like shrapnel
each orients towards the stations of the moon,
no need to look as I go alone,
a virus unto fecund air,
haven't we won?,
slipping under the rising sun,
G
and we are already gone.