Only When I Sleep

It happens only when I sleep,
this continual visit,
persistent natal-hex,
but who?
who?

How blurred the window,
where beyond exists but penciled outlines,
where wings fold into scabbards,
a believed blessing turns to derision,
an ethereal voice ruptures.

My own faceless Venus of Willendorf,
peering down one last time,
this empty picture above my milk home,
such delicate whispers from infinity's shadows.

Darkness follows…

Like a hex upon this desire,
an innate need to connect with the maternal essence of one,
finding all too often delusion's solace,
union seduced with rings becoming but melted gold
beneath battlefield's delirium.

I close my eyes to wonder.

Why this requited desolation?

Why am I pleading for tonight's slumber to bring peace,
to deliver redemption's sweet breath,
to find deeper excavations beneath this darkness unknown?

When I try to pry open the hands of my own suppressed scream

 pressed tight into curated nightmares,

 echo continues,
rejection following behind like a looming prescient shadow,
a gas chamber's taunting,
poisoning further my once swaddling rebuff of long ago.

The ever-present blurred window persists,
allowing my adoptive mother to hold tight the rejected bundle
peering up suckling my bottled containment,
my home of another kind,
providing survival's meaning.

How soft the vanishing repose.

How brief this embracing heart.

It happens only when I sleep.