There is an eye that meets the eye that meets the eye that meets the eye of a crystal skull that is rotating endlessly on a wheel that turns internally — apologies, eternally, its multi-dimensional faces linked together like Brahma.

Prismatic death, I decry! Give me time. Pull the switch that first cast the dream of life, weaving first the web before the spider; let me wake up again to my mother, just there at the foot of my bed, on the crest of a cool spring morning, darning wormholes in my socks. I try to hold, I try to stay, I put my arms around her, but she collapses like a star in the blue morning light.

So the seasons pass, withering the fruit of all we love; the berry each life unchosen drops the vine. The time-traveler, his penchant for sorrow, kneels to taste the soured flesh, reaching for places unmapped within himself, within memory.

But, we have no need for the time machine, when from our beds we can vanish into a chrysalis of blankets, finding a wilderness where we have lain in the shape of all we have been; and peel open the spell of language, where every name is a glamour, veil of forgetting that, once swaddled, tangles every newborn heart in a caul of illusion.

When the dreamer, by night, rests on the hill of eternity, only then can he look rightly at a life never-ending. Oh, pillows, oh, beds—ships of no-time, with your tufted sails of warmth: unstitch the blindness that comes by day!

Let us smash the clocks and be the first to call the world into being. We can be time-travelers, you and I, jumping the breath of eternity to press our feet into an earth, freshly-fired, and lands never known.

[Silvatiicus Riddle (He/They) is a 7x Rhysling Award-nominated Dark Fantasy/Speculative Fiction Writer & Poet haunting the bones of an old amusement park on the edge of New York City. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Enchanted Living, Eternal Haunted Summer, Spectral Realms, and Creepy Podcast, among others. He combats despair and entropy with his newsletter, The Goblin’s Reliquary. For all available works, please visit: http://linktr.ee/silvatiicusriddle.]