The dreamers

They burned the witches for the day and tried to clean the air. But the air’s never clean where their breaths have been. The smoke of ideas just circle around and infect. Once infected the symptoms are clear. Your laughter grows too loud, your songs become too free, your eyes see too much. Don’t fret, simply wait to die. Some are ashes. You now are the smoke.

They escaped each night.
None were noticed first—
these rained-upon minds
leaving burnt cities, lunging
towards dreamlit waters,
learning, each night,
to play the lights.

The bodies have turned the crows to vultures. The smell grows stronger every day. It’s all wrong. Strong is wrong. So wrong, so rotten, the vultures can’t stop feeding on it. They keep pecking till even the bodies want to crawl away.

And every day they turned, returned,
each to their tailored mornings
perfect as a picture-
may be a Cezanne room where fruits
are eternally escaping baskets.
One only worries about
noisy neighbours
or the children’s lunch
while a tidy tea is brewing.

A dog passes by sniffing the air. It’s a country of stray dogs. Pets are a pretty peculiarity. One may pet a conspiring, corrupted mind— not dogs. The stray ones no longer know to bite. Weak knees wobbling, they just pass by.

Nights are for the creatures of dreams—
lost in day when newspapers scream and
frantic faiths sell faster than fashion
and folly spreads faster than pollution.
The moon might make a poet of you,
the sun sees only sin.

Love is a luxury, but still mothers cry. Bodies become faces that once smiled. The smiles now are the smoke.

Here now is the dream,
the sin of dreaming,
and a land of labyrinths—
here where the mind
splits: two birds—
one lost in the beauty of beyond,
one bound in the burden of between.

I'm not sure why nobody commented on this wonderful piece, I think it's brilliant. That doesn't mean I understand it all, but then again, I think some of Bowie's songs are brilliant, and I don't understand them fully either.
I really love the language in both the normal text and the italics. Those two last lines alone: ‘One lost in the beauty of beyond, one bound in the burden of between’ alone probably make me want to come back. There’s some great alliteration through the whole thing.
I see the italics as the dream, in the final line 'one lost in the the beauty of beyond', the 'burden of between' is the other perspective, in normal text. The other perspective is a lot darker to me, it seems to me to be the day,
'when newspapers scream and
frantic faiths sell faster than fashion
and folly spreads faster than pollution.'
I then think to myself: is this the sun, thoroughly practical and fearing death and continual loss? I think to myself that the dreamers, though damned by the world and thought mad and polluted, may have some hope of saving the transient corrupt world, but then I think that the creaters of folly are probably just the dreamers too, and as you’ve said that the folly spreads faster than the pollution...

Well, confused by it, admittedly. But I still love pondering over it. And the mystery and the wild smoky prophetic poetry of it make me want to think more.

I'm so glad you found it worth coming back to. From the lack of comments I thought it's just too vague and abstract to appreciate. There were such sharp feelings behind this that it was hard to keep it all real.
This was primarily based on several disturbing events and their turns in a small country (that I come from) called Bangladesh, where atheists were being slaughtered then arrested for as much as blogging and huge factories were tumbling down for ignorance and corruption and people were dying left and right like bugs under insecticide... Still, life in this little country goes on where it dares. As dreams are the only place one can be free, the dreamers dream.
Regardless of all that, I was hoping the readers would take their own stance and enjoy it their own way. Your interpretation, Silas, was one way that I thought of writing it in as well.