The Dream Deflator - JLG Clift

You thought you’d live

You thought you’d live

You thought that fortune

Or father

Would give you a break

When he took the prayers you gave

And made you feel young

Destined for everywhere but the grave

But he’s not saving you

And now you realise

As I arrive with my crew in tow

Before your leaking eyes:

Nothing you say will change the fact

That you are going to die today

Because your way is not his way

And his say outweighs yours

What he says goes

 

You’re starting to know that now

It’s just too late because the gates are coming

And the tears are running from your vision

But you cannot follow them

No you go down with the flem and the lump you’ve finally swallowed

You sink to the pits of your stomach

Trying to reach the warmth of your core

But the core is cold by the time you get there

You just missed it, you knew you would

But you couldn’t resist

The hope that the rope would break

But it didn’t and now on your dying bed

You shake an old man

Soon to belong

To the wailing lands

As your twin pupils

Learning too much too fast

Swell and expand into black

And fail to retract again

 

You thought you felt humanity calling

For an eternal encore

Well you were wrong

No one liked the score you wrote

And now you’re floating

On the ferry man’s boat

Of brittle wood and broken bones

Made from the rubble of broken homes

Everyone on the boat

All the thousands on the decks serving as

Displays of damp dismay for all those who pass

All think they alone are being shipped

To atone for their sins their groans and moans

Rippling out like rotting ring tones from the mobile phones they used to wield

In the crackling concrete complexes that were tomb stones

for the fields that used to sway

In the breezes of a summers day

But their fate is sealed and there’s no signal to be found

In the dank black of the fatherland underground

Where the only sounds to hear

Are the claps of the ferry man’s oar scoring the surface of the river

And the wails of the dead drawing near

Coming home

Through the copper gates

Through the untiring strings

of neon fires their age untold their tongues scold

as they roll from waves into cones on the bay

where the original sinners pay for their displays

Broiling between the vinyl black of the larva frozen cold

To kneel in the sea of the scorched salvaged and savage

Before the Thinker’s throne

The clone of cleanliness with clipped wings

Crownless: the king of the things

That the other king rejected.

And I am one of those things

That he brought back

From the black around the throne

To roam the streets and the earth

To chart the believers in their weakest moments

When the bleakness bulges and bellows above all

I chart the mirth they always thought would stay

Leave their faces as they see that god never answered their calls

Or replied to their letters

And that there isn’t a place set at his banquet

For them

There’s just the pit and the black

And the racks of people just like them

Boiling in the cherry coloured flem

Of the lava in hell

Where the rejects swell and pop apart like champagne corks

Into sizzling shards

Repeatedly

Ceaselessly

 

 

Behold all still alive

I am the dream deflator

And this is my crew

And we thrive

On the crops that the Final Man’s scythe

Reaps

We capture you weeping

As you tire and close your eyes

And try to tell yourself that you’ll just be sleeping

I am the dream deflator

And you can watch me in action later

Channel 4

After the news but before Fresh Meat

I’ll taunt another man crying

Swaddled like Christ

in unwashed sheets

 

and you'll just watch