A Hare's Breath - it's all that lies between death and salvation.

What do you do with your dream, such a dream
as an everynight dream
which you know without fail
you will dream, and you know
as you dream it, you're dreaming?

It's easy to think it more than a dream,
to call it prophetic, believe
that it's coded perhaps, so perhaps
there's a force, a power in the world,
abroad in the world, that would want you to crack it.

Or perhaps you can change it... well,
so much the better
for you - for you know at each point, what's to come.
Perhaps you can change what you'll do -
or, better yet, break it:
decide at some point to wake up.

You are stranded, you see
on a bridge that's too long
for the dream, that goes on,
that you know will go on -
will be going on - when you wake.

But you're wrong. When you wake
it has gone - though it's still going on
in your mind. You walk through it.
The notions, emotions and thoughts are the same;
the atmosphere, feelings and fearings are there,
they go with you into the day.
They'll all have their say
in the way that the day will pan out.

But back in the dream,
on the bridge that's too long for the dream to contain it,
the bridge that's so long you never can walk to the end,
at first there are people.
You're one of a crowd,
but each step you take takes one from the dream,
one from the bridge - for the sake of the dream -
out of the picture. Vamooshed.
Disappeared.

One has gone off in a puff of white smoke,
one in the beak of a bird,
then the parapet beckons and one will have jumped.
Another has gone in a great gust of wind
and one has just melted away.

And at last you're alone on the bridge that has run
like a ridge through the hills of the night.
Look over the edge where a wild sea churns,
then over again where the cold earth burns,
but wherever you look and whatever is there,
good and evil fly like a hare
configured for you at the time of your birth -
the good and the evil of you on the earth.

And there in the sighs of your personal hare
is all that remains of the fine arts and verse,
so follow the hare to the end of the dream -
but when you awake, the roles will reverse:
the hare will shadow you back to your birth.