I have often had the dream
of falling and the startling snap
of finding myself awake, 
panting, just before
hitting the ground.

There are those who say
falling in a dream
is only fatal if you 
hit the ground in the dream,

which must mean you’ll be dead
when you wake up after impact
and not before,

which only makes sense
if you don’t think about
how anyone knows all this

if those who struck bottom
died and did not come back to tell
the rest of us.

Sleep disorder researchers
claim that instead
of it being a just-missed death
that jerks you awake 

it is instead
a sudden oxygen deprivation 
in random muscles
causing a sleep twitch
called a hypnic jerk

and that is how the startled waking
at the bottom of the fall
is created.

Hypnic jerk or narrow escape:
either way, in the aftermath
of the dream I find myself 
awake with fading memory:
rushing air around my ears.
Face up, falling from a great height.
Anticipation dashed. A longing
to slip back into sleep, just to see
where I might have landed,
what that country 
would have been like.

Perhaps the myth of it being fatal 
not to wake up from the falling dream
was created and spread by those
who feared the masses’ discovery

of solid ground waiting
to catch and cradle and exalt 
those who fly in dreams
in spite of the fear of falling;
after all, who could say 
what might come from people
with no fear of their own dreams.

They will blow me up
because to them, I don’t matter.

They will cut me up and down,
and to them it won’t matter.

They — who are they?
If I name them, will it matter?

Abbreviations, nicknames, designations —
none of that will matter.

This is old, bedrock-old, and so cold;
glacial ice at the heart of this matter.

They showed up here as ground-down losers.
Where they’re from, they didn’t matter.

One by one, those lost boys and girls
grew up to think they are all of matter.

The rest of us — the rest of me — insubstantial
to them; that’s the core of this matter.

To them I am a crude ghost from past conquest.
To them, I am anti-matter.

To me, I am solid and they are smoke.
To me, to us? None of them matter.

Their world will burn as ours once did.
Nothing left but the hardest matter.

I have proved, we have proved how hard we are.
In the end, what will last is all that will matter.

I did not ask for this fight.
I did not ask to be born to this war.

Would rather have been born 
on a far mountain, living life

with my loved ones in quiet
and peace from my start to my finish.

But it seems that I am a dagger of light.
It seems that I am a dagger of light.

The night we saw the darkness start
was the night I felt my edge.

Saw that thin line of glow and knew
it was more than fire and steel.

The night the darkness closed upon us
was the night I first raised my self and said:

it seems I am a dagger of light,
I have become a dagger of light.

I did not ask for the war, the fight, the fear.
I did not ask to be born now, born here.

You find yourself
in the places you did not ask to be

and here I am shining, scarlet ivory,
one small blinding blade among many

who may live or may die, who are terrified
but cannot turn away — 

we burning, we trembling, we daggers of light;
we doomed but splendid, we daggers of light.

Random atoms
brought me here this morning
last night tumbled me into a phone call
with someone I never met
who was sobbing on the other end
and thanking me for making a phone call
about something that made them think 
and feel their way past where they were at
into a space for holding others up
and there I was with random atoms
on my cheeks 
humbled for I felt I’d done so little
yet somehow it was a huge thing
and I hung up and took a breath
then made another phone call
random atoms aligning 
pulsing out
a maybe
a yes
a no
a no one’s home
I keep at it
thinking maybe 
we’re going to be OK

Indeed, I am sorry 
to have been 
what I refuse to name,

but then again, without that name,
I can refuse to admit
what I am

and if what I am
can remain unnamed
long enough

it can disappear as if
it never existed;
if it never existed

I may be something
else again and I will take
that name and become

that man, so I refuse
the name I do not want
and it floats away

to land on another man,
one I can safely abhor
because he could not refuse it

when it was hung upon him.
Somehow
my refusal endured

and stood up
and was honored and
buttressed and coddled

and my preferred name
became my own. I became
a man who refused

his true name and 
when they call it after me
in the streets or the courts

or the legislature, I can turn
and say again
that’s not me, I would never.

Secure in saying
whatever I want
to my accusers, 

even to the point
of scolding myself
when I recall what I was

in dead night while staring 
at the red movie behind
my eyes, scolding, saying

no, 
I never, no,
I am not.