Poetry cloistered in the abyss of dreams ((The old vagabond) (Poetic prose))

He, the old wanderer, had found a lost continent.
I dreamed of a new world.
And she had entered it, gone so long ago that she had forgotten who she had been.
But he often muttered, to whoever might have been listening: “Too many people around, too indifferent, self-absorbed.”

And so I write about this old man, however brief, a homeless man I knew, and I will fill in the gaps in his life, which was more his dream world than what we consider reality.

For the old wanderer, his dream came true for him.
The more he dreamed, the more he took on an enraged realism.
Outside of this dream world, the world to him was ugly and disgusting.
“Where the truth was, it was what people wanted it to be at any given time, and it was never fully revealed,” he muttered.
“And pretense was worshipped, like Baal,” he murmured.

Consequently, in this misty kind of dream life he found a new world in which he could live, day and night.
Disassociated with earthly existence, his fight for survival continued, while his other world became more real, deeper and deeper.

When he was awake, what he ate was for the most part, what he found rarely, during those last well-intentioned and forgotten days: that was it: garbage thrown from the open windows of the city’s apartment buildings!

His mind was made up of thoughts and fantasies.
His waking life was a life of images in the brain, he preferred the inner dream.
It was as if something was chaining him.
…

In her alternate world there were enchanted hills, gardens growing flowers that looked as red and bright as the sun, blinding sapphires, mountains that sang to the moon, whispering seas, cottages roofed with bronze and gold.
And he himself, mounted on a white-shelled horse, crossed sculpted bridges, white roads, watching the birds, bees and butterflies swarm the fields around him, in a placid way.
Through the cedar forests, he bounded his horse past the ivory gates of handsome cottages and town halls with high-vaulted towers.

Always trying not to wake up, or if he did, to drink more wine or his choice of drug – whatever he could find – to supplement his habit of slipping back into REM sleep, and delve deeper into the world of hashish, for a most eloquent episode, one he was born for, and to get out of the other he was thrown into.
One in which he preferred to exist was not the one in which he was born.

Had he been woken, all he saw was a terrible dawn of a city stagnant in ruins, a muddy, trash-filled stream full of reeds and vermin!
People stared at him through their windows, choking on the carbon dioxide from the passing cars and trucks.
Besides, he knew that he would quickly tire of the rawness of emotions and the monotony of people, and they would never understand the meaning of his life.
And then, once in reality, in full, clean and sober reality, where would satisfaction or fulfillment come from?
What he had left in the past, there in his gallant land of dreams.
Wasn’t this itself the antidote?
Old popular doctrines, inflexible priests, most of the priests were confused thoughts.
He wanted to escape, or find his equal, like Gilgamesh who sought out Enkidu, out of boredom.
No one took the time to find out the secret wells of his life, the ones that described him, he had a room for each, hung in aspirated colors.

And then one day, out of nowhere, a crack appeared, an abyss appeared, a fissure opened, like an earthquake, in the deep hollows of his dreams!
He fell down, down, way, way down into his abyss.
And there was his greatest achievement, he found it, the Radiant City of Crystals and Pearls. “This,” she whispered, “is where I will stay and live, this is where I belong!”

This magical world so vivid, once in fragments now all together, the associations of her mind falling into a sight, a breathless anticipation, one that was insatiable.
…

He felt a tug on his shoulder, it resembled a python trying to get him out of the city.
“No, no,” he yelled, but no one heard him.
The old woman tried with all her effort to wake up the Old Tramp, lying on a damp mattress thrown away like garbage, and full of ants, ticks and bedbugs, and white worms, in a vacant lot, inside the big city, a metropolis.
Lo, then a policeman approached, took his pulse, he wasn’t sure.
It took a long, long ice to move, on the old tramp lying!
She even patted his face to wake him up.

But the old man was warm, feeling the sea breeze lull, watching the clouds drift over a village cliff (in fantasy land).

One of several curious strangers who had crowded around this limp body, said in a loud cry, “Someone please get him to a hospital!” although he reserved the right to back off.
Then the police officer announced that he was dead.
Telling the old woman who had beckoned him, “I’ve seen him here before, he was a dreamer, a drunk, a drug addict; though he found something in all this,” and he hesitated to say what. she thought to herself, as the old woman waited patiently to hear her final comments, “calm and enduring beauty, only comes in dreams… what the real world threw away long ago!”

For those seductive moments, the old wanderer watched the region where the sea meets the sky.
He refused to allow the python to wake him or the insects to slap him across the face.
And all those who in the present knew what had happened, wherever, they also continued on their way, wherever.

#5286/6-18-2016