Prose Poem: You're Not A Bird
In the dream you are at the top of a tall building. Sitting on a wet ledge. Not exactly perched. You’re no bird. Birds don’t read. And there you are, on a ledge at the top of a tall building, reading a book. You hold the ledge tightly with one hand. Birds aren’t afraid of falling. But you’re no bird. Wind doesn’t lift your wings. It pushes your heavy body. Your solid bones. It catches at your book. You need to hang onto the ledge with both hands, you think inside your brain. The one that’s bigger than a bird’s. But the book. You treasure books. Even in dreams. You can’t surrender it to the wind and gravity. The ground so far below is wet with yesterday’s rain. How you see that from this high up, you don’t know. Neither do the birds. The wind gusts again. Maybe it makes a sound, but your dream is silent. You only feel the wind and your hand slipping from the ledge. You will fall. Even when you let the book go and your reading hand clutches the ledge it’s no good. That wind. It flings you from the top of a tall building, from a wet ledge on which you werne’t exactly perched. You soar through the air. Not like a bird. Like a stone. You’re overtaking the book, its pages flapping like wings, letters and punctuation black against the off-white pages and come down at the end of a sentence on the bottom of a paragraph that ends a chapter. You come to rest wondering if the book can fly with you inside. Like a bird in a dream coming rising into morning’s first light.