When I was a kid
I used to have dreams
that I was falling.
I never landed,
just kept on falling.
It was the same place,
the same dream.
I was on a farm somewhere
and there was a tractor
and there were animals,
cows and sheep
and there probably would have been goats
but I wasn’t really familiar with goats
when I was a kid
so they would never graze
through my dreams.
I would walk up to this stone wall
and look down
and it looked like the edge
of a flat earth,
it just kept…
on…
going…
down and down
but there was grass growing
and those sheep and cows grazing
and I would lean over the stone wall
and look down
and start to fall
and continue to fall
until I woke up.
I never hit the bottom.
I never saw the bottom.
I’m not entirely sure
that there even was
a bottom
because, somewhere on the way down
after passing the grazing cows, and sheep
I would wake up.
My grandfather
who we called ‘Poppy’
was a roofer
and it was falling
off a roof
at sixty-eight years old
that killed him.
Well, the pneumonia killed him
but the fall a month earlier
landed him in the hospital
in a medical-indused coma,
and then he got pneumonia
and thats what killed him.
I’m sure that he would have preferred
dying from the fall.
I’m a farmer now
and the farm
is just a short walk away
from the edge of the earth
only, unlike in the dreams of my youth
now I can see the bottom.
A thousand or so feet
down a rocky cliff
is the pacific ocean.
There is no grass growing on the side
no cows or sheep,
but sometimes there are goats.
I have dreams now
where Poppy is falling
and I want to catch him
or at least break his fall
but my arms
and legs
won’t move.
I’m stuck
helplessly watching
him fall.
In the dreams I had as a kid,
the thing that I’m not sure about
is how I started falling in the first place.
I would be standing there at the stone wall
at the edge of the earth
and then,
all of a sudden
I’m passing sheep and cows
on my way down.
I wonder,
Did I
trip
or did I
jump?
soitgoes1984 