Dream of Vanquished Colonels, One Living and One Gone

I am standing before my regiment. They are red-sashed, chins jutting, straight-standing, still. Waiting for one signal to move, prove precision, underscore discipline.

Then a voice that speaks through this dream reveals a truth into my left ear – a secret that unfolds as the troops and I stand together on this flattened field – that they are a rabble without me and I am nothing in their absence. There exists this interface and beyond that, no other point against which I might know that I am real!

And even more is missing. My gut tightens when I remember that you are long gone. Not there to stand next to me, to see me before these three battalions. I can't show you, cannot exist in your witnessing, find substance through your half-grinned nod.

So then this is a nightmare! A threatening dream that repeats. The rip of it cuts as if for the first time– that no soil holds the print of your feet, no shadow falls from your raised arms, none of your spoken words echo outside of my memory. You exist as a hole within of me, – empty space – a nothingness as immense as ever you were fact - when you stood over my kneeling form, proud, conquering. I no more than a boy’s soul in my tough thin jacket of flesh.

I can’t reject this dream, these recessed facts. Emptiness can’t be chased from where its existence cannot be shown through taste or touch.