A Clockwork Dream

4 1 0
                                    

A gentle breeze upon my face

Whispers to a silent fog shrouded forest

At the edge of my English meadow.

Sunlight from the too bright sky

Shines down on upon a man

In white undershirt and red

Suspenders walking into the woods.

I follow and the shrouded forest folds in around me.


Lost, I hear a low grumble in the ground.

A metallic shriek of the earth

Rumbles and beneath me the land rips,

Splitting and pulling away from itself

Revealing a clockwork skeleton underneath.

That man was one of many.

Below me in a chasm,

An abyss of gears and cogs,


Gang planks filled with foundry workers

Hammer and cut and wind and pull.

Steam billows up and obfuscates the sight.

Oil, grease, sweat and fresh-cut steel

Etches into my nostrils with acrid clarity.

Gears turn, cogs link and a spiral staircase

Winding up from below awaits my presence.

I descend as if on a steampunk carousel escalator.


Molten slag sparks and sizzles,

Adding to the steelworks' miasma,

The cogs and gears wind and click,

Turn and clack, pistons pump and whizz

The further down the clockwork world I go.

The forest above is but a faint shadow of white,

When suddenly all stops, deafening silence descends.

Workers mop their brows, a second stretches


Into an eternity. Then a clink and sizzle,

A thud and clang and the apparatus reverses and up I go.

From the bottom up I look and the chaos I saw from above

Flows like a Rube Goldberg contraption

Turning the world and stars about.

One level contorts and turns the next,

A klaxon bellows, warning I must leave.

The spiral stair spins faster and faster.


Sight is loud, smells are textures

tasting thickly sweet, bitter and rough.

I awaken to my alarms' screaming monotony.

Wishing to return to a dream filled with nonsense of understanding,

the clink of cutlery on stoneware,

a whistle of steam from the kettle,

the click of a toaster, a crack of eggshell,

a sizzle of pork fat in a hot skillet starts the day.




A/N:

Like the previous entry this one was from that same creative writing class, only this time i had to write something while listening to an instrumental piece of music. I had recently discovered the Gaslight Troubadours from my Other Half's friend giving her a CD of theirs. Twizzle is the name of the piece and, if i did it right, it was included on the top of the poem. This was fun to write and through that class I learned the value of editing, because this is so different from the way I'd originally wrote it. Just trust me, this version is better! Even if the effing formatting wont hold. if you are wondering what that means; everything except the last stanza was supposed to be right justified. but every time I've tried to fix it the save and preview removed the justification. Fine, whatever, I didn't want it to look that way, no really. (I clearly need a sarcasm font.)

A Whisper on the WindWhere stories live. Discover now