Category Archives: dreams

Bedroom eyes

There’s a mirror on my dresser.
The kind that folds.

Each night,
as I sit on sleep’s edge,
I cast a covert glance
to a conscience that looks back at me.

On any night,
I might see
what age and regret have done.
Or, there may be the saving grace
of a wistful smile.
Remembrance of a fleeting love.

Dream birds of the night before
come to roost.
To set sleep’s mood.

Visions, often, of perilous depths.
Miles of mist,
bottomed by devilish waters calling.
A plummet, appalling and unredeemed.
A waking with hammering heart.

And next, divided by night or chapter,
a buoyant flight, away and up,
above the rolling green.
So simple.  So natural.
With one who has been, too.
We hover over clover,
and, in my stupid innocence,
I ask
Are my feet off the ground?

 

 

Twenty… this dream of anxiousness.

I turn around to an unfamiliar sound.
My strange neighbor stands in my yard.
He has a hose, and sprays casually,
glancing furtively in my direction.
The water is warm.
He turns his back to me, then quickly comes around.
Spraying now a fan of fine white sand.
I run for a broom, a shovel, a hope.
i return to backyard dunes,
as over the fence he floats, gone.
I slide open my back door,
admitting encroaching sands,
and run through my house to the front room.
Someone has laid a dead rodent on the white pile carpet.
It smells as i pick it up, and leaves a stain.
A face appears behind my front curtains, then flees.
An image of a long dead niece.
From behind the sofa, a giggle.
I bolt through the front door.
The street is dunes of white.
There is a plant pot placed in my driveway.
A single stick, bereft of foliage, sprouts from it.
And, hanging from a branch, a furniture tag.
It bears the word ICARUS.

number 19- the King of pain

On a wooden bench in a long darkened hallway I sit, in contrived cold dimness.
Shivering in shorts,I look down, dribbling on the bright dog tag hanging from my neck. Number 49. To my right and left, sibling sufferers, all in mourning.
Mourning for lives given over to pain. We, each of us, counting, enumerating, cataloguing its forms, its art. Moaning it out in sad violins, tubas of torture, oboes of woe. We, each of us, think we must be King. Flaunting, pointing inwards, saying see me, do you see me? We nod to one another, in fatuous fondling sympathy, waiting. Waiting to see who will be chosen from amongst the courtiers, and exalted to the royal standing. All at once, there is a hush. The house lights dim to darkness compete. A shuffling and a clanking is heard. A silvering light admits from above, coating a figure grotesque. In a gait at once jerking and shambling, he picks his noisome way, sparing all a proud burning glance, freshets of blood his tears. In fractures compound his bones protrude, splinted over with leg hold traps. The flayed flesh of his back dangles in ribbons. He makes not a vocal sound, but works meaty jaws to spit smoky pools upon the floor. He stops. We stand. Those eyes of his tilt upwards in seeming worship. Upon his head, a crown of Mercury. We bow, prostrate.

The listener

In the glove of twilight
Our man of twenty two
pads along the powder cow path road
to the last rise
above the grand grand valley below.
In a dreamt jacket of lizard skin,
shouldering a paunchy canvas backpack,
his threadbare desert boots with mended laces
make small dusty puffs
in time with his panting breaths.
Sits down, he does,
on an afterthought stump,
just at the lip.
His pearly whites illuminate.
Eyes are shining burning red.
Lips in taut crescent smile.
He twinkles above them,
they twinkle below.
The myriad thousands.
So silent through this slice of the airs.
They are here, he knows.
The seeds of stories.
Tragic, magic, triumphant, sad, comic,
Love, and Rage.
Tonight, he feeds.

 

A fight in the night

I had the darkest dream last night
It pinned me to my bed
A humming buzz of blackishness
was leaning o’er my head

Its eyes were but a sickly gleam
Its curtains brushed my chest
Its leathered hands upon my mouth
my heartbeat did arrest

My hands and feet were flailing fast
to break this evil dream
I shouted out, but only cast
a smother-muffled scream.

a squeezing of the throat it gave
I thought I would be killed.
but morning broke this devil’s cave,
this darkness, unfulfilled.

 

Eighteen. The rolling green. With my Gravity Queen.

On the last doorstep before green, I stand.
The mossy carpet rolls and ripples to the very jamb.
From away.  Away.

These three have seen me, shepherded me,
sung me, into their house of home.
How long I have slept the sleep I do not know.

We awaken, four, in muslin robes.
Hands, sleeves, embraces long.
And now, the morning vista seen,
I swell with desire for the rolling green.

Our woman, our Queen
encircles my waist
and we float.
She laughs a hearty laugh, and lets go.

I have been touched, and I move through the airs with her.
I anticipate.  I know…
every blade, every knoll, what comes next, what might be at the end.
Our muslins flapping, our hands entwined, we smile to each other.
Me and my Auntie Gravity.

18. A dream of subjugation

I stand, looking out,
on the highest rampart of the cantilevered castle.
All of the Members stand with me today, deck upon deck,
in honour of this coronation.
The crescent walls jut out below me, each further than the last.
They hold our numbers of today,
ten thousand and one.
I am filled with terrible power and intent.
My robe of eagle feathers encircles me.
All other Members are clothed as lesser birds,
and they remain still, heads bowed.
The crown is of the eagle’s head,
hooked beak and eyes of adamant.
It is set upon me in that moment of stillness.
I raise vast pinions and give a cry.
The lesser birds follow.
In the ten thousand, there are those who would not.
They are bound onto crosses of wood, set alight,
and cast into unfathomable mist.
Now is the time. The time is now.

Tenuous

I’ve started seeing faces
in the most unlikely things.
At random times and places
these thoughts, upon their wings
demand my close inspection,
their weirding eyes aglow;
their dark’ning introspection
like pee holes in the snow.

Upon my popcorn ceiling
at first, I count the stars.
Their constellations reeling-
There’s Jupiter and Mars!
But soon, they’re coalescing
The stew is boiling down
The planets effervescing
It brings to me a frown

The overture delightful
Is closed, and then a curtain
Opens on a scene that’s frightful
Disturbingly uncertain

The faces form but once again
Their gazes schizophrenic
My Google search shows one refrain-
I must be Apophenic.