I have suddenly exhausted my poetic steam, and the veritable train of inspiration I had barreling in me has hissed its last and come to a standstill. The people got off and wandered away, and I am sitting here trying to pretend it's still going....trying to pretend that there's nothing outside worth looking at. I have to write. I have to. If I can't write, then the boredom dissolves into mists of despair, and I have nothing to cling to. I have no anchor to keep me grounded if I wander away in that cloud. If the cloud wanders me away.

Odd dreams lately. I cannot escape them, I cannot always remember them perfectly, but my waking is filled with some dark, desperate memory from the nights before. I feel haunted by my subconscious and it's rather disconcerting.

It's the baby that threw me off. I keep getting lost in unfamiliar places...or familiar places that are suddenly old, decrepit. I panic, and wish, and often I can't make a noise, or I don't make a noise because I know there's no one there to hear it. I wander dark hallways and half-lit stairwells....searching for something, and after a while I notice that I've been cradling something in my arms. This small boy-child. It clings to me, as I rush faster, and faster through the house, unable to find the thing that I'm searching for. The thing that seems to be screaming my name in the silence, pleading with me to find it. The baby whimpers, and clutches me so tight around the neck that I'm gasping for breath. I fall. Down some dark pit....like a stairwell that's suddenly not a stairwell, and I step, but there's no step, and I fall. I land and make no noise. I land and don't remember that I was falling. I look for the baby, and there's no baby there anymore. A figure steps out of the darkness into the shaft of grey light sifting through the broken floorboards above us. He reaches for my hand...and I take it. Surprised that he wants to help, that he willingly touches me. I feel like I shouldn't be touched...even if I want to be. My hair hangs shroudingly over my eyes, which I have averted. I'm always averting my eyes, stealing glances sideways at his feet. He sweeps my hair out of my face with a warm hand and asks me to come with him into the dark. I refuse, half-heartedly. There's some reason, some pull that is keeping me in the grey light. It's become familiar, and I know it well. Something comforts me in the way it twists, in the way I can see the dust moving in it. Thunder in the distance. Cold creeps in, and a baby cries in the dark. He asks me to come with him again. It's the crucial moment. A second of wavering on the knife-blade of decision and all will come crashing down around me. I want the grey light. I want the baby in the dark. I want him to hold my hand. I feel pulled in so many directions, and I curl up on the floor and cry. He shakes me gently. I tell him to let me go. That I want him to let me go, and he says "He needs you." And I can't tell if it's him who needs me, or the baby who needs me, or both. I cram my fists into my eyesockets and rock back and forth, wanting the darkness to be over. Cold rainwater, murky, hard, pours through the floor above. I'm quickly drowning in a puddle, but I realize that the puddle was there before the rain came. That I've drowned in a tepid collection of my tears. He is gone. The baby is not crying. My loneliness breaks me, and I am full of regret. The grey light is gone. Something eats me in the dark.