Wandering Soul
Coming Out of a Coma
(and all the subsequent questions
a sleepless girl named Voo might ask)
🦋
What is it about dying
That makes you want to live?
To hold onto life with all your might?
To capture it in a locked cage
And destroy the key?
Even if you never really wanted to live
In the first place?
What is it about love
That makes you want to believe it's real?
And desire to hold it in your arms
And look into it's eyes
Even if you never really believed before
That anything as lovely as love
Could possibly be real?
What is it about a man
That you've never even touched...
Never even kissed...
Never even knew existed
Outside of a dream.....
But just the very thought of that man
Can make your heart beat
Like a thousand warring drums?
What is it about a woman
A woman who is all woman
And yet a child with a million questions
Written on the pages of her heart
A woman who knew she was a woman
Before she was born.....
And spent the rest of her life
Trying to find that child inside herself
Because she knew that child
Knows all the answers?
What is it? All of this?
The irrational, illogical, unreal reality
Of all of this?
The longing to live in the midst of dying?
The yearning for love in the fear of the trying?
The needing to smile in the downpour of crying?
Lucid dreamscapes you walk into
Though you've never known sleep?
Scriptwriters say
That none of this is real
That we are all asleep somewhere
Plugged into some creator's machine
Just dreaming preprogrammed manufactured lives
As He watches to see how we'll react to stimuli.
There's no such thing as crying
No such thing as love
No such thing as living or dying
No hell below or heaven above
No dream to wake up from
No arms to run into
No memories of people
Or places we've been to.
It takes a lot of faith to believe that
Much less faith to believe it's a lie
Like it took no faith at all
To let go of living
But a whole lot of faith
To decide not to die.
Coming out of a coma
Is like being reborn
The world seems strange
And yet oddly familiar
You feel as though you're a newborn baby
Entering into a body that is a thousand years old.
And it's frightening
And exhilarating
And wonderful
And awful
And awful.....
And awful
Because you can't be sure
For a very long time
If anything is real.
You're still in that place you were
Before you came back
To this place
This strange, familiar place
Where people in white uniforms smile
And take your temperature
And check to see if your heart's beating normally
When in that other place
It wasn't even beating at all.
And yet you felt more alive there
Than you ever have here
And you could do a multitude of things
That you have never attempted to do here
You could fly.............you could fly!!!
And every cloud in every silver sky scene
Was so saturated with love
That it rained sometimes for years
And no one ever drowned in it's deluge.
It was wonderful there
And yet it was lonely
Even with it's beauty and majesty
And the ever present perfume
Of fresh cut roses
And newly mown grass
A sun that stayed
Precisely the same temperature
And nothing ever died there
Not even a dream.
It was lonely there
Because I could not find you
You, the man I have yet to find here
And yet to touch and yet to kiss
And yet to forget
Even though your memory
Covers me like a warm shawl
And follows me everywhere I go
I could not find you there
And I was afraid.
Part of me knows you're not real
But part of me knows that you are
And it's up to me to decide
What part to listen to, what part to believe
But I don't want to make that decision
Because I know that part of me
Will no longer be alive if I do.
For part of me only lives in you,
In your eyes and in your heart
And in the world we have created in our dreams
Dreams made of poetry,
Built of magic and light
In a paradise cradled in an angel's hand
And watched over by every wounded writer
That ever wrote a love song or a fairytale.
You see what I mean?
Only a child knows the answers to these questions
They don't make sense to grown-ups
Those who were born old and will die older
Who never rode a horse of fire
Or danced on thunder or kissed the dead back to life
Like you and I have
We, who have waited eons to find one another
Only to lose ourselves again
When they told us we didn't exist.
We couldn't exist because people like us
Only lived in works of fiction
Pages of prose or long Celtic sagas of lost love
And star crossed songs sung by Sirens of the Sea
Who don't exist either.
You see, we don't exist, you and I
That's why I couldn't find you there
In that other place
And that's why I can't find you here
In this one
Because that place where you and I do exist
And love and laugh and live, my love
Is in a love story in a book, in a library, in a dream
In a fantasy, in a myth, in a fable, in a fairytale
In the minds of people who do not live in this world,
On this planet, in this universe
People who do not know each other and have never met
But who have shared the same dreams for hundreds of ages
Dreaming such magnificent dreams of love and valor
And relentless searching and finding
And going through the cycle again and again and again.
And how do I know that, you ask
With that twinkle in your eye?
Come now, little boy with your mischievous grin,
You tell me!
And you take my girlish hand, fresh with youth
And we laugh and scream into the break of yet another dawn
In voices so loud they will wake the dreamers on other worlds:
Because they are Us!!! We scream, And We are Them!!!
And as long as they exist, so shall we
And as long as we exist, so shall they.
Coming out of a coma
Is like being reborn
The world seems strange
And yet oddly familiar
You feel as though you're a newborn baby
Entering into a body that is a thousand years old.
And it's frightening
And exhilarating
And wonderful
And awful
And awful.....
And awful
Because you can't be sure
For a very long time
If anything is real.
©By Voo
