When you meet a nightmare, slip hard into the cracks of the pavement and wait there for the rain. I've been told rain is cleansing, unless it's acid rain in which case (and anyway) you should keep your mouth shut. Don't let the nightmare hear you, even as the rain sloughs off your skin and you slowly drown in the rising torrent of your own blood. What's wrong? You are staying safe between the walls in the floors on the rooftop ledges where no nightmare ever asked you to stay alive it only said fly and you believed it but you were afraid to jump into the swelling darkness, into the black pillow of a screaming sky. Nightmares don't wait for jumpers. They push you. In the ink of midnight you learn to defy the gravity of any situation, wrest your mind from freefall and spring from your bedsheets. Wake up, child. Wake up, woman. Wake up, you. Life is waiting to be lived outside the world of dismal dreams and shattered slippers in which you walked for miles.
image from pixabay.com
