The Revelation

It’s the silence of a July morning,
it poured torrents the night before.
It’s thirty minutes past five,
It’s me, my racing thoughts,
a cup of hot instant coffee,
and my hands deftly slicing a pomfret.
 
The dead eyes of the fish
implore me for a final release:
Is this free will?
Is this a dream?
Is this buried trauma, revisited?
Is this programmed?
Is there a fly on the wall,
an elephant in the room,
or skeletons in the closet?
Amidst this noise,
I cut my finger.
Blood drips on the wooden cutting board.
The thick droplets
assemble into grisly patterns,
there are faces everywhere –
a screaming woman, a wide-eyed child,
an anthropomorphic bunny,
and long-haired demigods with hollow eyes.
 
I look outside the window at the heavy sky.
The clouds stare back at me–
fractals
of the same grisly faces.
This unholy unease,
I have felt in my bones before,
this striking sequence,
I have seen this before:
in a past life,
in another dream,
or in another level
of the same game.
 
The déjà vu
is the giveaway.