Something's Dead Here

Where do the ghosts of dead dreams go to?

Do they wander 

through the eerie silences 

of the claustrophobic rooms 

they were slowly drained of life in,

or are they buried 

beneath the skin 

of the soil of denial?

I was once a dream too, 

or so I thought.

Weren't all conceptions once dreams?

Don't all dreams begin at conception?

Are dreams not alive until they grow limbs?

Are nightmares not real until they can suckle at a mother's tenderness?

Are breathing cells not living enough to count as proof of life?

Between nothing and everything,

at what exact point does something become something?

Perhaps the question survives

because every dead something

hopes it died closer to everything than to nothing.

My death was never documented.

Dead somethings rarely bleed enough to inconvenience the living.

Because something is always closer to nothing than it is to everything.

Dreams are easy to abandon.

Dreams are easy to abandon once you discover you cannot afford them.

Dead mothers do not get to write memoirs of motherhood.

And for motherhood to survive, childhoods often die quietly in corners.

A dream at the cost of another is called negotiation.

A life at the cost of another is selective homicide.

But then,

something is always closer to nothing than it is to everything.

And just like that,

I was vacuumed clean.

Like dust mistaken for absence.

Where do the ghosts of dead somethings go to?