Dream
Stephen Ellis
“Car Je est un autre.”
— Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871
The garment of light
Borne of the heat of
Absorbing into my own
Inner conduits the soul
Of my abuser, that his
Be mine, thus to
Reveal himself to me, I
Take off my own skin, now
Come to be this inherited
Shirt, the radiance
Of which has glued me
To myself through it, so I
Hear the tear and feel
The pain of separation,
Seeing below my chin
As it opens deeply at the neck,
The bare breastbone
First of Herakles,
And as it falls away from
My shoulders and slithers
Down my arms, the beautiful
Thinness at waist, and mild
Breasts of Athena, borne out
Beyond hindrance, as by
Incarnation I am
Paradoxically given myself
Birth and passage out of
A skin, inherited by act,
To a skin mine own, achieved
By the stillness of finally
And simply ceasing to avoid
Deserving and so having it.
Stephen Ellis’s date and place of birth are unknown. Editorial advisement and life distribution were, first, in the hands of his parents, and then developed individually as well as through The Mercy Seat Collective, which he co-founded with poet and community activist Kenneth Warren — a project funded by “you the listener” — and also through the Western Exile Society, a non-federated union of loose persons of typically carbon manufacture. Stephen Ellis is online at Toast.
