“Sleep in Safety” by 45 Grave was one of my favorite all-time songs between my fifteenth and thirty-fifth birthdays. I was born in 1973. Somewhere along the line between my thirty-fifth and fortieth birthdays, I forced people to endure waves of nostalgia, as happens to those of us who watch our children rise up around our feet, coiling mortality around our throats. “Remember when?” How dreadful the nostalgic! And then the all-time favorites were boxed and put away, not thrown out, but stored, to be laughed at as comic elements participating in a greater tale, a grander story than mere fond memory.

It’s an impulse to hang on to adolescence when manhood is necessary, to substitute the carelessness of adolescence for the freedom of manhood, a liberty which requires discipline, the rote, regimen, and pure, unadulterated liability. That is to say: a man is willing to fail at manhood in order to achieve that quality which allows one to be called a man. If he’s lucky, they might append it to him when he lies in state. Therefore, why grow up?

Overlapping that prolonged adolescence, between the fifteenth and thirty-fifth birthdays, is the uncoiling, prying open mortality to see what dreams might come alive. It is uncoiling before my eyes, and with the uncoiling, the realization that Poor Yorick, though he be unearthed, sleeps in perfect safety. Should he come back, he will not come back as a zombie, formed in perfect silliness and lots of foam rubber. No, he shall sleep in safety to awaken as though he were only resting to hear the next grand story, refreshed.

It is a deliberate act, uncoiling, to examine what is and what is not, what is imagined and what is unimagined. How does one distinguish? The sun shines, the shadows move, and then the sun is gone again for who knows how long. Who can distinguish? One holds the coil open, I suppose, even as it recoils around your throat, and, with a knife, one probes carefully and exactly, inasmuch as one can remember how it looked when the moving sun shone upon it. We’re fumbling around and using the wrong tools, aren’t we? Certainty comes and goes, and then they say some words, and you yourself are gone.

Military graveyards are set in perfect rows and columns, and they endure for a time, embodied as long as they do as belonging to the institutions of power. The helter-skelter arrangement of all the rest of us–mercy! After a much shorter time we are excluded.

Dreams do come to pass, and they come. They are embodied, and we live and eat and breathe among them.