Dream of Horses /// I've lost my voice.

I lost my voice this weekend in Brighton. Whiskey and cigarettes and Spaniards and sea breeze will do that. Take them away just like that. But I had to record this -- the text seemed too alone to post by itself.

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Dream of horses

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I had a dream the other night, about a circus in France. I was in a medium sized town, something like Magny-en-Vexin, near where my parents live. With a big wide open square in the middle of town, my dream town was surrounded by high stone walls with arches, with many assorted shops and cafes worked into the stone. The streets shot off in all directions, and it was a busy but provincial town.

When I first saw the circus in my dream, there were many pairs of miniature horses with big mauve plumes set into their bridals. Dozens of pairs were pulling the weight of the circus caravan, but as it progressed, my initial excitement rapidly faded. There were depressed looking llamas which followed the horses, then most horribly, a baby elephant, emaciated and crying, was walking slowly on a treadmill set into a splintered wooden cart. It was wearing a tattered cape of mauve, with a matching circlet of silver and mauve thread fraying on it's head.

Behind the crying baby elephant was a platform, on which was a deflated hippopotamus, sedated and hardly moving, paired with a sagging grey animal of indistinguishable species, moaned quietly, animal sounds as the parade moved by. More miniature horses with mauve plumes came by, their reins connecting them to the rest of the caravan. Patchy tigers, wheezing camels, a cracked and empty aquarium - and the worst, the ring leader and his wife.

They were posed at the end of the procession, standing upon a structure which was reminiscent of a sledge. Round and short, they wore tight smiles and leather jackets, with plumes and silks and finery in the same mauve as their horses. They sipped sparkling wine from cut glass flutes, and the ring leader lazily slapped the leather reins against the numbers of miniature horses, egging them on continuously, so sweat dampened their mauve plumes.

Underneath the feet of the ring leader and his wife, was the freshly cracked shell of an adult tortoise. Somewhere along the way, the procession had crushed the ancient shell of the ancient reptile, and now the ring leader and his wife were standing upon the now flattened dome of its shell. Dark red blood sitting sticky on green carapace and mauve satin shoes.

Within my dream I flew into a rage, upon seeing that crushed tortoise. I started to chase them through the streets of this dreamed French town, screaming obscenities and shaking my fists, stopping in attempts to wrench cobblestones free from the pavement, only to have to run again to take aim at the ring leader and his wife. Nobody could hear me, all my stones fell short, and I could never get close enough to the relentless, forced progression of the circus caravan.