Adults told me to dream when I was little. That’s why I am still growing up in a dream.
Where am I? Am I asleep? How much more do I have to grow up? Why isn’t anyone waking me?
Trying to run away from my wild dreams, I used up all my breath.
I waved my arms, wandering around inside sleep.
I was nowhere to be found in the night.
Find me.
Beyond a window like the inside of water
the moon divides my body in half and opens me like a map. It quietly looks inside me. Because the only thing I can hand over to myself from the inside to the outside of the dream is my body, I wonder if I can predict my life’s future by plucking the days that hang inside the map like flower petals.
Nope. My ancestors weren’t executioners.
They were labourers.
Life is that night when you carry a sharp pickaxe and cover your face with the black coal that you dug from your overgrown heart.
Under a yellow lamp, the spoon’s clack clacking carries steaming rice and overripe kimchi into the body’s cave, but every dream life shatters together with the morning
and
the season of striking arrives and within the lusciously leafed valley, a snowplow’s red blinking lights.
Like how
you light up this cheek to erase the other cheek
it’s time we confess. I am a person who lives in a dead person’s house and uses a dead person’s stuff like a person who was using my stuff in my house while I was sleeping. I am a person living through the body of a dead person in a dead person’s life.
However
this is a nightmare, and a nightmare has to be in a dream
so how can I be here
if I’ve never been to sleep?
