Under the Bed

By Gildae

Under the bed used to be a place where I could hide.
A place where I could keep secrets.
A place where imaginary narratives could play themselves out,
Tiny plastic figurines, transmogrifying reality and enacting whimsical fantasies.
Or where I could keep songs and stories hidden from the world.
Stories about birds that always smiled,
Or little men that saved the world,
Stories that passed from my mind into my hands,
Using my veins as causeways, and then back into my brain
To wait for a new day.
And there were mystical tales that involved great wars
And battles were enacted and their din drowned out
All the sounds of the world,
Everything, except my own ecstasy.
But as time passed, cynicism chased the magic away,
And a vague notion of what it means to be an adult
Let the stories go without endings,
And so pass into memory where they were forgotten.
So now Santa Claus maybe sits on a beach somewhere,
Because he doesn’t like his Lego house.
Surrounded by mermaids, Seraphim, a Valkyrie and a Wendigo
Named Steve, who can be kind of an asshole sometimes.
I guess that’s where they are,
Because they don’t live under the bed anymore,
They left a long time ago.
And a myriad of phantasms came to live there, always watching,
Creatures who had no time for freedom.
Now, I use the space under my bed to store boxes and luggage.
My sense of wonder, like my heart, suffers from atrophy.
My innocence has coagulated in my veins, suffocating me.
My imagination, is still alive but forced to labour in the fields of interaction,
Contemplating sundry eroticisms and compelling post-apocalyptic war scenarios,
That always betray our most fatal pathologies.
The nature of the human condition is such that we wonder about what we lost.
We look back with nostalgia, and the things we’ve gained seem irrelevant.
So my dreams will continue to hide me under my bed, hoping against all hope
That I might find myself there.