Threshold States

I hate that liminal moment

when I’m drifting into sleep

and thoughts, images, associations
begin rising

from beneath the surface of the self—

fragile, vivid,
unusually charged,
potentially revealing—

and I try to hold onto them
only to feel them
slowly dissolve

fragments from a dream
I haven’t yet entered,

sentences almost forming
but receding
before they can become language

as if from another room
of the psyche,

bringing an uncanny, elusive
sense of meaning.

real and fictive figures
appear alike;

the images at first
anchored in something familiar,
something almost tangible,

as though on the verge
of revealing
an important secret—

only to erupt
in phantasmagoric forms,

lingering at the fringes
of consciousness