Alien Houses

I am alienated from

my life as we are from

the houses we lived in as children.

It is silly to visit those houses as an adult

and to stand outside a house that is

not a house one lives in, not even really the

house one once lived in, just a house, really

someone else's home now, not our own.

One visits those houses in dreams most appropriately,

a space of consciousness where they are

not the houses they were in life at all

always changed but still one's own though

appropriately alien as everything in a dream

is and yet remains one's own like the dream itself.

My own life now is like that, a

set of rooms I once occupied but

not the same rooms I lived in at

all, more like the rooms in dreams of

all the houses I lived in while I was growing

up and then moved from entirely visiting

less frequently and then only vaguely

remembered remotely and, finally,

only in dreams where it is not my life but a

jumbled recreation of the life I moved through

even in waking mostly dreaming the stuff of dreams

as the houses now I lived in then now a

place outside those places in another life illusory

which once seemed so real, alive now only in dreams,

accessible to me now only in deepest sleep.

Awake I find myself

not anyone I recall having been

in the days before but knowing

who I am then and now as I

navigate the recognized spaces lived in

dreams of expectations familiar yet estranged.

I tell myself this space is my room and

know with the certainty of waking it is so

as surely as I know the houses in dreams I

left in sleep though no house

ever the same as in my life now is still

my own life shifting unfamiliar but fixed in that certainty.

I am not remotely who

I thought I was or would be

so alien in a skin of me in waking life

dreaming of that other

no longer quite so clear.

I know the difference, this

inverted contrast of distinctions

between the dream houses and the houses I visit

only in dreams and the spaces in which

my life occurs to me almost as a dream even as I feel the pinch.

KLK

3/30/12