Dream Climber

All night he climbs his spinal cord, up and down he goes a worker ant gathering globules of memory. The bony spine itself offers handholds for his ghosts. At each spinal notch he enters the swim of sub-osseous neural bundles. Images are scooped up, mixed into an alphabet soup of alternative realities. He climbs upward only to pause stymied at the brains tightly packed folds listens as an outsider to the down-time humming of a million closed circuitry heartbeats. There is too much convoluted counting there, too much to harvest in one night, and so he travels back down the cord to a low-clouded complexity where shrouded stems burst open their dark flowers to engulf the embryonic mythologies of sleeping giants. In the morning he hears himself thinking: the thoughts are loud they beat upon the top of his skull like starving children trying to escape.